Barely a Crime

by Robert Ovies

  Stunned, he rose to his feet. Then he let out a cry, turned to Marie and lunged.

  But the doctor clutched him tightly around his lame leg. With a cry of his own, he twisted as Crawl tried to pull away and rolled with all the strength he had left toward the edge of the cliff, spinning Crawl to the ground and taking him with him.

  The flare sputtered and died, stealing the last of the terrible orange light.

  Crawl tried to stop the doctor’s momentum, groping frantically for a handhold in the rock. He cried out, cursing and shouting pain-filled sounds without words.

  The doctor shouted just as loudly as Crawl, “Leave her alone! Leave her alone!”

  The fingers of Crawl’s burned hand slipped into a sharp crevice just as he and the doctor rolled over the edge of the cliff.

  Marie screamed and scrambled toward them on her hands and knees.

  A horrifying pain exploded in Crawl’s hand and shot through his left arm and shoulder, but he held on, even with the weight of the doctor clinging to his legs and swinging like a pendulum and still kicking, trying to tear Crawl from the rock.

  Crawl closed his eyes and yelled a long, tortured, “Ahhh!”

  And then, with a single sharp moan, the doctor stopped struggling and slipped away into the rocks and the black water below.

  Only Marie, who had reached the edge of the cliff, was still screaming.

  Crawl’s one-handed grip was secure enough to hold him, but it wouldn’t be for long. He gasped and swung his right hand up and over the edge of the cliff, trying to find another handhold. “Help me!” he said as he rubbed his bleeding palm over the rock; but the rock was weather beaten and smooth, and he couldn’t find a hold.

  Marie rose to her feet, watching him in the dim moonlight. She said nothing, didn’t reach to take his hand. She simply hovered over him, silhouetted against the dark sky like a gargoyle. The rain, which had picked up again, peppered her face. The wind blew her hair wildly and flapped the sleeves of her shirt.

  “You can’t let me die, girl,” Crawl shouted breathlessly. “If you let me fall, it’s the same as murder.”

  “I’m not strong enough to pull you up,” she said fiercely. “My leg is bleeding. I’m shot.”

  “Just guide my hand, over here, just to get a good hold.” He was gasping. “I can do the rest. I just can’t pull myself up. Not with one hand. You burned my hand, girl!” When she didn’t move, he screamed at the top of his lungs, “You’re carryin’ Jesus in your belly! You can’t just murder me! For Christ’s sake, girl, help me!”

  She closed her eyes hard and opened them crying. Her head turned from side to side, slowly. She sank to her knees, wincing with pain and grabbing at her wounded leg. “I don’t know what to do!” she cried out as much to herself, or to her mother and father, or to God, as to Crawl.

  “Pull me up,” Crawl said sharply. “Even a few inches. Just guide me to a handhold. I’m slipping away here. Please!”

  “Everybody you’ve touched is dead.”

  “You’ll be no better than me if you don’t help me up,” Crawl said. Then, calling her by her name for the first time, he lowered his voice and pleaded, “Marie, don’t let me do that to you, girl.”

  She hesitated for several more seconds. Then she braced herself, planting the foot of her good leg just a dozen inches from the edge of the cliff, and she stretched to grab Crawl’s free wrist with both hands. Then she leaned back and pulled as hard as she dared.

  But her foot broke loose with explosive force, hurling both her feet past the edge of the cliff as she screamed and dropped hard on her back.

  Crawl cried out with pain and swayed backward, but held on. He grasped for Marie’s feet with his free hand as she twisted and rolled backward, out of reach.

  “Help me!” he said again, this time frantic with fear, waving his free hand in short bursts, begging her with his eyes and his voice and his fingers to grab hold. “You can do it, Marie.”

  She found his wrist again and held tight as she planted her foot one more time, this time recklessly close to the edge.

  Suddenly a light swept over her from behind.

  It was a clear light, not a flare, and there were the sounds of shuffling feet, and a voice behind the light was shouting, “Here!”

  “Help us!” she cried. “Help!”

  But Crawl spoke, too, as the flashlights bounced and two men in uniform rushed to help Marie. “No. I can’t do that, Marie,” he said, and she could feel him pulling back, trying to free his wrist from her grip.

  She grabbed tighter and shouted to him, “They’re here. Hang on.” She heard men’s voices giving hard orders beside her about the edge of the cliff and the man’s arm.

  Two lights swept in quick circles. Both of them found Crawl.

  “You have to let me go now, Marie,” he said, keeping his eyes on her face between the two hard lights.

  A pair of strong hands grabbed Marie’s shoulders. A man in a state police uniform said, “We’ll get him,” and reached to grab Crawl by the arm, just above Marie’s grip.

  Crawl shouted, “Marie!”

  She wailed, “What can I do?”

  They looked at each other for a brief moment in the beams of the flashlights, sadness to sadness, as Crawl twisted his wrist and Marie opened her grip.

  He said, “Say a prayer for Crawl.” Then he twisted again, this time hard enough to break the tenuous hold of a New Mexico state trooper, and pushed himself away from the cliff.

  20

  The police cruiser met an ambulance from Santa Fe fifteen miles northeast of the city. They transferred Marie from the cruiser to the ambulance in the entrance drive of a Sunoco station on U.S. 60. The ambulance took her the rest of the way with lights flashing but no sirens. She had lost blood and was being observed for possible shock, but the bullet had passed cleanly through the edge of her calf muscle. Her wound was not considered life threatening.

  The state police officer who joined her in the ambulance had four weeks to go before his retirement. He was a father of five, with sunbaked skin, gray hair and mustache, and smiling eyes. He knew her name before she told him. “We found your uncle’s car at the foot of the incline,” he told her, “and we’ve already been to your house.”

  “They told me that,” she said. “And you found the other man? That was shot, on the grass?”

  He nodded and placed his strong hand on hers, on the edge of the stretcher. “You really don’t have to talk about it now, Marie, unless you want to. We have it all, I think. And we can talk with you later.”

  “I know. They said the redheaded woman was still at the house. And she’s okay?”

  He nodded again. “She was still there, just sitting there in the rain, crying, next to a truck.”

  “She didn’t have the keys. Nowhere to go.”

  “She was not in good shape. In shock, to some degree, but she was lucid. We think she pretty much told us the whole thing.”

  Marie said, “About Aunt Leah, too.” It was not a question.

  “Everything, we think. Up until the time you left, anyway. So we know about your uncle and saw the one she called Crawl. And, as I said, we found the fellow named Kieran.”

  She closed her eyes and rested. She could feel the ambulance curving to the right. “He saved my life,” she said. “Kieran.”

  “We know.”

  “He said when he first saw me, no one would hurt me.”

  “And that will go well for him.”

  The siren sounded as they passed an area of lights, then it shut down again.

  She cocked her head and stared. “What did you just say?”

  “About what?”

  “Something about, ‘That will go well for Kieran?’ ”

  “That he tried to save your life. They’ll weigh that, I promise you.”

  She pulled herself up on her elbows. “Who’ll weigh it?”

  “The law. The court.”

  “He’s dead, right?”

  “Oh, no,
” the officer said. “He’s probably at the hospital by now. We got him out right away, even before we heard the shot and came up looking for you.”

  Marie said, “This is Kieran? On the lawn, in back of the house with the fire?”

  “The man on the lawn. Shot once in the midsection, but they told me he looked like he might make it. I’d guess he’s still critical, but I think he’s alive. It happens.”

  She was still shaking her head. “And this is Kieran? At the base of the hill where I was, only closer to the house? On the lawn?”

  “Do you want me to check?”

  “He was right in back of the house?”

  “Yes. I can call and get his status.”

  “But he was shot three times.”

  “No, actually. Did the other one fire at him three times? He was hit just once.”

  She lowered herself down again without answering. She reviewed what she had seen and what she was hearing. Then she raised herself up again. “Would you call and get somebody who’s actually with him? Get them to look at him, chest, stomach, all in front. I saw him shot three times from five feet away, I swear I did. And he was hit. Three times. Not once.”

  The officer shrugged his shoulders slightly, then nodded to the paramedic that was with them, seated up front, near the ambulance’s cab. “Have him radio ahead,” he said. “You heard what she saw. Ask them to check it out. Possible three bullet wounds. Front, close-range.”

  The paramedic said, “I’ll do it,” and got up to use the radio. Marie settled down again on the thin pillow, but she didn’t close her eyes.

  It was eight minutes before the hospital emergency unit radioed back: “One bullet wound. And he’s doing okay,” the officer told Marie.

  She rose to a sitting position, propping herself up with her arms straight behind her, her eyes wide and unblinking, her lips opened slightly, not moving.

  “Lower left abdomen. And very lucky, actually. Nine millimeters is a good-sized weapon. He’s received blood and he’s stable. Still critical, but they’re pretty sure they have him in a good place, medically.”

  Marie didn’t answer.

  “In my experience, when they say ‘pretty sure’, it means they’re sure. They hedge for legal reasons.”

  She blinked several times as he was speaking, then lay back down on the pillow. She said, “Thank you,” softly. Then she stared at the roof of the ambulance for a long time. Thinking about Kieran. Thinking about the doctor. Thinking about her mother and father.

  Of all the things in the house, all she would take would be their picture; her mother and father holding her and smiling at her from their silver frame.

  The siren whooped to life again, dying out after ten seconds.

  “Are we close?” she asked. Her voice was dreamy, her gaze still locked on the roof over her head.

  “Getting close. How are you feeling?”

  “Tell them no weird drugs when I get there, okay?”

  “I can do that. I doubt if you need anything too exotic.”

  “Seriously,” she said.

  “Okay. Seriously.”

  “Nothing that would hurt a baby. I think I may be pregnant.”

  “You’re pregnant?”

  She nodded. “I may be. A doctor told me I was.”

  He smiled at her and shrugged. “Well, a doctor should know.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly, “a doctor should know.”

  She turned her head to stare out the window, but it was too dark to see anything but distant streetlights. The image of the cliff came back to her; the cliff, the wind, the trees, the orange heat of Crawl’s flare, the sound of his terrible song which was inside of her now like a scar and would stay with her, she knew, for all of her life.

  Why, she wondered, was he after her and the baby? Was it just revenge? His blaming her uncle for his brother’s death so much that he didn’t want anybody her uncle cared about to survive?

  Or, she thought, maybe Crawl believed more than he admitted that the baby could be a healthy clone of Jesus. Maybe Jesus seemed to him, or God did, to be the biggest traitor of all, the way life played itself out sometimes. She had felt that herself, more than once.

  Maybe killing her and the baby seemed like the only way Crawl could swing back.

  She was too tired to figure all of that out, though. Crawl had asked her to say a prayer for him, and she would. For Crawl, for the others, for herself, too. God only knew what would happen to her now.

  She turned to look again at the officer. He was smiling at her the way her own father was smiling at her in the photo.

  She felt so tired.

  She closed her eyes.

  Her thoughts found Terry, and she wondered what he was doing as she was racing to a hospital after so many people had died. She hoped he would be able to smile at her too, someday. It wouldn’t be right away, she knew that. What could he say when he heard about everything that had happened? What would anyone at school say?

  She hoped he would still care.

  She blinked twice to hold back fresh tears and whispered to the officer, “I think the doctor figured it might be a Christmas baby.”

  “Well, this is a good hospital,” the officer said, smiling again. “They’ll take care of you just fine. I promise.”

  The ambulance slowed. The siren wailed again. This time it stayed on. They turned left around another corner, then turned once more, this time to the right.

  The officer peered out the window. “We’re here,” he said calmly. “ER. I’ll see you inside, and then let you get some rest. We’ll tell them about the pregnancy, too. Then I’ll come back tomorrow and we can talk some more. Is that okay with you?”

  “We can talk with Kieran, too,” she said quietly. “He’ll be well enough to talk with me, right?”

  “I’m sure we’ll both be talking to him,” the officer said. “That should be interesting.”

  “Yeah, it will.” She paused, then said it again. “Yeah. That’ll be really interesting.”

  “Do you have a name picked out for your Christmas baby?”

  “I’ll know it when the time comes.”

  “We always do.”

  The paramedic stepped forward, releasing the clamps holding Marie’s stretcher in place, front and rear, as the ambulance slowed to a stop.

  “I think it might be a boy,” she said.

  The officer squeezed her hand. “Well,” he said, “I’m sure he’ll be something really special.”

  She squeezed his hand in return, and even shook it lightly, nodding once as the doors of the ambulance swung open. For the first time in a long time, her pale lips showed the beginning of a smile.