by Jon McGoran
Almost simultaneously, a terse knock sounded on the front door. Bam-bam-bam!
Even as stressed as I was, I smiled at the sound of Moose clearing his throat before he answered it.
“Hi, Chief Pruitt,” he said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”
“Where’s Carrick?”
“Doyle? I don’t know. Haven’t seen him in a while. What’s up?”
“Any idea where he is?”
“Not really. Might be at Branson’s.”
There was a pause, maybe Pruitt thinking about pushing it or asking to come inside for a look around. “All right,” he said finally. “You see Carrick, you give me a call.”
“I’ll tell him you were looking for him.”
“I didn’t say that, dumbass. I said you give me a call. Can you remember that?”
I could hear Moose turning sullen. “Yes, sir.”
When I heard the front door close, I cursed silently. It sounded like Pruitt was hoping to pin Bricker on me. He had probably checked her voice mail and heard my message saying I was coming to see her.
Creeping to the window at the end of the second floor hall, I watched Pruitt’s car back out the driveway and speed off down Bayberry. When I turned away from the window, I saw Moose at the top of the stairs.
“That was not cool,” he said, his voice shaking.
“Sorry. You did great.”
“Bullshit. Now tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“No, no, no. I just lied to a cop who already hates me. You tell me now.”
“You know Sydney Bricker?”
“The lawyer? I’ve met her.”
“She’s dead. And the guys who killed her are trying to set me up.”
“Oh my God! What? Why do you think that?”
“Because one of them told me so. Right before I killed him.”
Moose’s eyes were big again, and his mouth was open.
“Now, I need to get out of here so I can figure this out. You need to get out of here in case anyone comes to kill me and finds you here instead.”
Moose was on his heels. I felt bad throwing this news at him, but I needed him to move quickly and I didn’t have time to break it to him gently. I looked at my watch. “I need to go check on something. You got ten minutes to pack some clothes and anything you want to take with you. You could be gone a couple days.” He could be gone a lot longer, but I didn’t tell him that.
He nodded, a shocked, jittery movement that looked like it could easily go off the rails and turn into the shakes.
“Okay. I’ll be back in five or ten minutes. I’ll knock four times: two and then two. You don’t let anybody else in. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, you go.”
“Where?”
“Away. Anywhere. Go home to your folks’ house, read about whatever happens here in the news.”
He turned a shade paler, which was good. I wanted him to take this seriously.
Turning to go out the back door, I paused. “One last thing: Don’t go in the garage.”
60
I slipped out the back door and across the Christmas tree farm, running parallel to Bayberry Road for fifty yards before cutting across it and plunging into the thick screen of Siberian elm that lined the tall steel fence.
I paused inside the darkness of the brush. Then I jumped up onto the fence, climbing up and over and then halfway down before dropping to the ground on the other side. Keeping low to the ground, I took off at a fast, steady pace, over the rows of harvested corn. When I found the diagonal path I had followed before, I veered alongside it, losing it and finding it again several times as I rose and fell with the rolling hills.
When I came over a rise and saw the white tent, and two armed guards patrolling, I stopped and fell to the ground. They were thirty yards apart, and as soon as one of them disappeared around the corner of the tent, another appeared from around the other end. I’d seen all I needed to see. I had been hoping to pick an apple or two from over the fence and have them tested, but even from eighty yards away, I could see that the trees were gone. There weren’t even any stumps, just a broad swath of freshly overturned soil.
The corn was gone. The trees were gone. Whatever they were up to, it felt like they were almost finished.
Having seen the armed patrols, I kept even lower as I returned the same way I had come.
Back at the house, I gave the agreed-upon knock, two and then two, and Moose opened the door for me. He looked pale and sweaty and very glad to see me, like his imagination had been hard at work while I was gone.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded.
I clapped him on the shoulder and told him to go out front and pull the truck around back. When he did, I squeezed into the tiny space behind the driver’s seat and pulled a blanket over me.
Moose started up the truck and looked back over the seat at me. “Where are we going?”
“Shachterville.”
“Shachterville?”
“That’s where Nola is staying.”
We rolled down the driveway, and he pulled out onto Bayberry. Five minutes later, I pulled the blanket off me.
“Okay,” I said. “I got some questions for you.”
“You’ve got questions?”
“You said Squirrel made his moonshine from apples, right?”
“It wasn’t moonshine, it was squish. But yes, it was made from apples.”
“And he stole the apples, right?”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it, yes.”
“Did he ever take apples from the mystery farm next to Nola’s property?”
He thought for a moment. “I don’t know, but he definitely might have. He said it was a hassle to get to, but wherever he was getting that last batch, I think he went back a few times. He said there was something special about that last batch.”
“There was.”
“Was what?”
“Something special.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think the last batch had heroin in it.”
Moose shook his head. “What, you think Squirrel spiked his all-natural nature booze with smack? No way.”
“No. I think the apples he used already had the heroin inside.” I told him about my experiences that afternoon.
“Jesus. But, why would they put heroin in the apples?”
“I don’t think they put it there, I think they grew it there. Remember you were going on about genetically modified crops, and pharmaceuticals?”
“Whoa.” He was quiet for a moment. “So that’s how I ODed.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
A sly smile spread across his lips. “Then I guess you owe me an apology.”
I looked out the window. “I guess so.” That was as much as he was going to get.
61
The house was dark when we pulled up, and I felt a brief panic that the bad guys had found Nola until I saw the dim blue flicker of television through the windows. On a sick day, even Miss Organic liked to veg out in front of the TV. Before we went up onto the porch, I grabbed Moose by the elbow. “I’m pretty sure she’s feeling like crap, and I’m going to hit her with the whole Sydney Bricker thing,” I told him. “So let’s try to keep things as light as we can. I haven’t told her about your overdose, so lets not mention that now.”
“Okay.”
I rapped twice on the front door, and then twice again.
Moose smirked. “What, you only know one secret knock?”
I waited a full minute, trying to keep my own imagination at bay. Then I repeated the knock.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” croaked a faint voice that sounded vaguely like my grandmother. Moose and I looked at each other as the keys scraped the other side of the door.
The figure that opened the door looked like my grandmother as well, right at the end. It was Nola, wrapped in a bathrobe. Her skin was a greenish gray, except her lips, which were white, and her eyelids a
nd nose, which were bright red.
“You look like shit!” Moose blurted out. He gave me a look, like he thought it was my fault.
“What are you doing here?” she asked Moose.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m just doing what I’m told.”
She turned to me. “Doyle, what the hell is going on?”
“I’m still figuring it out. But something definitely is.”
She gave me a dubious look, then turned to go back inside. “Take off your shoes before you come in.”
Moose and I complied, then followed her inside.
The television cast a bluish light over the small living room. Nola coughed as she shuffled back to the armchair. She had a water glass and a couple of mugs of tea on the table next to her, a circle of crumpled up Kleenex surrounding the wastebasket on the floor. The chair faced the television, which was showing an infomercial with the sound off.
Moose fluffed her pillow and pulled the blanket over her, then headed into the kitchen and started tidying up. Nola looked up at me expectantly.
“Remember you told me the parcels behind your land kept changing hands? Well, a bunch of different companies owned the parcels, but Sydney Bricker was the agent for all of them. She, or whoever she was working for, bought each plot from the original owners at a premium price and sold them to Rothe, the developer, for a lot less.”
“For less?”
I nodded. “Rothe told me other developers were trying to make a go of it, but they bailed and sold to him at a loss. It was a complicated deal, or a bunch of complicated deals. And there were lease-backs, so Rothe doesn’t actually take possession for another month, even though he owns the land now. They completed the sales yesterday.”
She looked at me, confused and bored, the way you would look if you felt like crap and someone was doing a bad job of explaining a complicated real-estate deal. Her eyes said one word: “So?”
“Today Sydney Bricker was murdered.”
Her eyes widened.
I nodded. “Pruitt seems to think I did it, and I think it was set up to look that way.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Mostly because some crazy Russian jumped me and told me so. Then he told me he was going to kill me and make it look like a suicide.”
Nola’s red eyes narrowed, and her faced pinched in anticipation. She seemed to be bracing herself for what was coming next. “Then what happened?” she whispered.
“I killed him.”
Her eyes closed, and she exhaled quietly. She reached forward and squeezed my knee, then started coughing uncontrollably. The coughing went on and on, a deep, ragged, violent cough.
Moose came into the room, and we looked at each other.
“Sorry,” she said when the coughing fit was finally over. “I feel like I’m dying from the inside out. I need to get home.”
“Sorry,” I said, squeezing her knee back. “You need to get to a hospital.”
62
“No, Doyle,” Nola said firmly. “I told you. No hospitals.”
She said it with absolute conviction, and her jaw clenched, seemingly against any argument. But as her eyes bulged slightly and her face reddened, I realized she was clenching against the cough that was struggling to come out. When it erupted, it consumed her. She was doubled over and gagging. When she finally stopped, eyes streaming, she nodded and said, “Okay.”
While she was getting ready, her fever seemed to spike, sweat dripping down her face even as she started to shiver. We wrapped her in a quilt and put her in the backseat of her car. Moose drove the car, and I followed in Frank’s truck. He did better this time.
When we got to the hospital, Moose ran to get a wheelchair, but there were none available. As we helped Nola walk, she grabbed my sleeve and looked up at me, her eyes swimming with fear and anxiety. “I hate hospitals.”
I squeezed her shoulder as I helped her along, and she reached up and held my hand.
“This is even worse than last time,” she said in a strained voice. “I can’t go through that again.”
“You’re going to be okay,” I told her. I knew I had absolutely nothing to base that hope on, but it wasn’t until the doors opened to let us in that the true hollowness of my words became apparent. The place was packed, more than before, with the sick and the injured milling around like a scene from a third-world country. But none of them looked as rough as Nola.
Moose looked around the room slowly. “What the hell is going on?”
“I don’t know.”
At least thirty people were between us and the admissions desk. I was trying to figure out how many of them were in line when I saw Janie Walters weaving through the crowd.
I called her name and she looked around, distracted. When she saw us, she came over.
“Hi, guys.” She looked at us, concerned. “Are you two all right?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
“Okay, well, I’m very busy,” she said, backing away. “The CDC is due any minute.…”
“This is Nola,” I said, putting my hand on Nola’s shoulder. “She’s pretty sick.”
Janie looked down as if noticing Nola for the first time. She had a dubious expression on her face, and I got the impression she was about to explain that “pretty sick” didn’t buy you as much as usual on a day like this. But when she saw Nola, she stopped and looked closer. “Hi, Nola,” she murmured, looking into Nola’s eye, then taking out a little flashlight and looking again. “How long have you been feeling sick?”
Nola’s red eyes looked sideways at us, questioning. “A couple of days, I guess.”
“She thinks she might—” I started, but Moose and Nola both looked over at me. Moose gave his head a little shake.
Janie paused, waiting for me to finish.
“… need a doctor,” I said.
“Right,” Janie said. Then she barked at Wanda to call Doctor McGee. “We’ve got her now,” Janie said as she steered Nola through the swinging doors. As the doors closed, Janie looked back over her shoulder and held up a finger, asking me to wait.
I nodded, but I didn’t like it. I had eluded Pruitt once here, and I felt like I was pushing my luck trying it again. I nudged Moose toward a spot in the corner, behind the soda machine, just in case.
“What was that about?” I asked Moose.
“Sorry. I thought you were going to say something about the multiple chemical sensitivity.”
“I was.”
He shook his head. “Not a good idea. A lot of doctors don’t think it’s real, and a lot of insurance companies won’t pay for treatment of it, so it’s best to be careful. Nola will tell them once they have her in the system for something else.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
“She’s scared,” Moose said, and I nodded again. “You never met her friend Cheryl. Nice lady, but really high maintenance. They met in a treatment facility, after Nola’s second incident. Some kind of biodetoxification program or something.”
“What’s that, like, some kind of cure?”
“That was the plan, I guess.”
“It didn’t work?”
He shook his head. “Not for Cheryl. Couple months after they got out she had another attack, her third, and it was a bad one. Now Cheryl spends her life terrified she’s going to have a reaction to this or that. The MCS, it controls her life, every part of it.”
“What about Nola?”
He shrugged. “She’s been lucky so far, but she’s careful.” He sighed and shook his head. “Nola’s one of the strongest people I know, and there’s not much she’s afraid of, but she’s afraid of that. Afraid she might lose her normal life and end up like Cheryl. Crazy stuff.”
We were quiet for a moment after that, then I leaned my head close to his. “Speaking of crazy stuff, that crop duster the other night? Turns out it was spraying flour.”
“Flour? What are you talking about?”
“Had it tested.”
“What’s
up with that?”
I shrugged, and we were both quiet again.
Looking around the room, I spotted a face I recognized. Our eyes met and then he looked away. It was the guy who had been loading his U-Haul, the guy who’d seemed so bitter and desperate to get the hell out of Dunston. He looked like hell. Not as bad as Nola, maybe, but not far off. He looked scared, too, and I felt for him. I don’t think a lot of breaks had gone his way, and it didn’t look like his luck was getting any better. I saw the same expression in a lot of the faces around the room, as if the fear and desperation was as contagious as the mystery flu.
I turned back to look at Moose, hoping to avoid it. “So … Bruce, huh?”
He gave me the same withering look he had given Janie. “Don’t call me that.”
“You prefer Moose?”
“Anything is better than Bruce.”
“Okay, then, I have to ask: Moose? How did that happen?”
He looked like he’d known this was coming and he’d been dreading it. “If I tell you, you never bring it up again. You swear?”
That little setup stoked my curiosity big time. I held up my hand. “I swear.”
He sagged a little more after that, like he had been hoping I wouldn’t go along.
“When I was younger, a few years ago, I used to be in a band. The girl I was seeing decided I needed to make more of an effort when I was onstage. You know how it is. She took me shopping and made me buy stuff I’d never buy—mesh shirts and leather pants, awful stuff.”
He hadn’t made me promise not to laugh, but I figured it would be a good idea to resist. “Go on,” I said.
He sighed deeply. “She decided my hair was boring. So she got all this … product.”
“Product.”
“The other guys in the band thought it was hilarious. I’m not saying she was like Yoko or anything, but the band did break up a few months later.”
“I don’t get it.”
“That’s how I got the nickname.” He closed his eyes. “Mousse, as in M-O-U-S-S-E. Or, more accurately, Bruce Mousse.”