“I don’t understand why we’re holding him anyway.”
“He’s the only witness we got.”
“He’s a witness who didn’t see a thing. Didn’t hear a thing. Doesn’t know a thing. A witness who admits he was stoned out of his mind. What kind of a witness is that?”
“The only one we got. And whoever lost him better find him.”
“I slogged through that creek an hour already.”
“Best be ready to slog some more. Because you have two hours to bring me back that boy or your badge.”
* * *
I SHOULD of took the ride, Maggie thought.
The moon was still high, but the lane quickly dipped into shadow. Her eyes had gotten used to the multiple lights of the ambulances and the squad cars, so for the first few yards, she found herself folded into a darkness alive with threat. An owl whooped in the distance. A dog barked in a yard down the road. A whip-poor-will alarmed her from the branches of a nearby tree. Some small animal thrashed through the grass.
Each sound, each motion chilled her like a cold hand. She was not about to go back, so she step-stumbled down the lane until her eyes adjusted and the lane came out of shadow.
She had come to the bottom of the hill and was almost to the foot of the bridge when a silvery glint of spangles and a sigh caught her eye and her ear and she froze in her footsteps. The glint and the sigh had come from a patch of tall Johnson grass just a few feet off the lane. Maggie did not want to look, but she stepped closer and she looked. There lay a woman, her purse spangled in the moonlight, lying in the grass, curled up like a baby gone to sleep.
Somebody else they killed, she thought.
In spite of her fear, Maggie stepped closer, parted the Johnson grass, and saw the purse and saw the face.
Oh Jesus, oh fuck, she thought. It’s that lying little bitch, Sheila Hacker.
Immediately, she felt a stab of guilt. For Maggie had cursed Sheila Hacker so thoroughly and with such regularity that she was afraid now her curses alone had killed her.
But she must be alive; she moved, she sighed a long, glacial sigh and she had stretched herself out in the Johnson grass.
So, was she wounded? Maggie looked her over. There was no sign of blood. She was alive, barely breathing, her cheek cold to the touch; she was pale in the face, and her lips were turning blue. She had, by the feel of her wrist, only a whisper of a pulse.
I could leave her, Maggie thought. She’d have left me for sure. She would have looked at me and kept on walking. Which is what Maggie made herself ready to do.
She stood, turned, and told herself, Oh fuck it, somebody has to know.
With as much voice as she could manage, she called “Help. Down here. Help!”
The call may have shocked the girl, for she gave a sudden twitch and a gasp and, it seemed, stopped breathing altogether. Maggie called out, “Help!” once more, then knelt down to check. She listened, she felt for breath, she hoped for breath, but there was nothing.
“Heyyyyellp,” she yodeled. “Helllp,” she called. Her voice gave out and died off to a whisper.
“Dammit,” she gasped. “She’s gonna die right here.” She tapped the girl on the shoulder. “Breathe,” she hissed. “Breathe, you bitch.”
Damn if she hasn’t got me again, she thought. Now what do I do? “Dammit dammit dammit,” she whispered. “Breathe dammit breathe.”
Ain’t this a bitch, Maggie thought. Jesus, this is fucked. Oh my aching Jesus.
She brushed the girl’s hair away from her face, rolled her onto her back, and listened one more time. She leaned her face away in the way she had been trained in prison to feel for the girl’s breath along her cheek. But she felt nothing. She tilted her head back to clear her airway, and listened again. Not a feather of a breath.
You sorry bitch, she thought.
Then she took a deep breath, so deep it made her lungs hurt, pressed her mouth against the girl’s lying mouth, and breathed.
2
RONNIE WILSON found himself again at the bottom of the gully. He was sure, this time, he had broken something. By the feel of it, in several different places. But he had no time to worry over any of them. Tim Weatherstone stood at the top of the hill with a flashlight and a pistol, so he had to run.
Weatherstone shouted, “Ronnie, hold up! You’re in enough trouble already.”
Wilson wanted to shout back at him, I’m gone to look for Sheila, since none of you sorry bastards will. But other flashlights appeared in the shadow of the barn, so he roused himself and ducked into the thistles.
Nothing, in fact, was broken, but he was sore and disjointed. He still ached in his head and felt queasy in the gut and now he had added new scrapes in his shoulders and knees and all he wanted to do was just lie down. The flashlights had begun to spill down the hillside, so he had to move. But where?
On the opposite hillside, moonlight flared in the spaces in between the bales. It’s lit up like Friday night football, he thought. So he had to stay in the brush that collected along the run. He could go upstream—they would not expect that. But he reckoned that the brush would thin out and he would be laid bare. So he had to keep low in the cover of the willows and follow the narrow path of the run. The quickest route, and the one least likely to stir the willows, was straight through the stream itself. He gasped as he stepped into the water. It was colder than he thought it would be, cold for June. He was wearing his heavy, steel-toed boots from work. They soaked through in seconds and turned heavy as lead. But he had no time to worry over it. He could hear the cops cursing their way downhill as they searched the brush. And Tim Weatherstone cursed louder than any of them.
He got used to the cold in a couple minutes, but the water got deeper as he got closer to the road, so he had to slog through the bed of the run, half blind because the brush blocked the moonlight, and he stumbled, soaked his sleeves, cursed, and kept on staggering.
A nice line of coke right now, he thought, would really do the job.
* * *
TIM WEATHERSTONE saw nothing, but he heard the sound of someone sucking air like a runner, and then a string of hoarse curses, and knew, by the hushed intensity of the curses that it had to be Maggie Boylan.
“Maggie,” he called. “What is it?”
“Oh, God,” she croaked. “Do you motherfuckers ever listen to anything but the swinging of your dicks?”
“What’s going on?”
“I found your missing girl, but the bitch won’t breathe.”
He parted the Johnson grass and there was Maggie on her knees beside the missing girl.
He got on his radio and called up the hill.
Maggie leaned back into her task; the breast of the girl rose and fell once more.
“I can’t get her to breathe,” she said. “I can’t get this bitch to breathe.”
* * *
IT COULD have been me, Maggie thought. Maybe it should have been me.
The medics rolled out a gurney, lifted the girl, and strapped her to it. Then they loaded her into the ambulance. Maggie stepped aside to let the ambulance pass. The siren began to roar and blood-colored light flared across the fields. The ambulance rattled the boards of the bridge floor, picked up speed, and slung red light down the valley toward the main road. She followed, crossed the bridge and stood in the road to watch the ambulance and to listen to the waning siren.
The moon had risen yet higher. It was getting late. Edie O’Leary would be picking her up for work in just a few hours. She wouldn’t take any excuses, either. So Maggie had to get some sleep. But there was no point in trying to sleep when the night was discolored with whirling red and blue light and the air was perturbed with sirens. She watched until the ambulance was just a trickle of light against the black hills. As she watched, a man emerged from the shadowed willows below the bridge. He looked her way a moment, and she was afraid. But he looked away from her toward the disappearing ambulance, then dropped into the willows of the other side.
*
* *
MAGGIE BOYLAN had just descended into dream when she heard the knock at her door. In her dream, the girl beneath the bloody sheet walked again with her wounds all agape. There was a tongue in each wound and each wound was a mouth, and all the mouths were talking at once in the girl’s confounding clabberjabber of foreign.
What are you saying? DreamMaggie asked the dream girl, What are you trying to tell me? The girl tried to talk; she gaped and struggled. But the killers had cut the chords of her throat and no words came to her mouth. There were only the speaking wounds that knew no English.
What is it? Maggie wanted to know, What the fuck are you trying to tell me?
The dream girl tried. She opened her mouth to speak and it almost seemed that she might be able to speak, that she might be able to carry her voice over the clamoring wounds.
But then came the knock at her front door.
The dream girl gasped. Her eyes went wide and she backed away and faded and Maggie was left in that interdream state where the half-sleeping dreamer tries to make sense of what intrudes into the dream, even as the dream retreats and fades.
Again, the knock, a rattlish, metallic, dream-piercing screen-door knock. Not a polite knuckle knock, but a blade of the fist, pound-like-a-hammer knock. And a voice, calling at a level just above a whisper, “Maggie, Maggie, let me in.” The dream girl and her wounds were gone and Maggie was awake and full frozen into her bed for fear.
More trouble, she thought.
Carefully, so as to give no sign of her movement, Maggie pulled a robe around her and stepped to the front room. The form in her window was the form of Ronnie Wilson and the voice that whispered, “Maggie, Maggie,” was the voice of Ronnie Wilson.
How much trouble, she thought, can one night hold?
She tiptoed to the corner where her shotgun stood, then paused a moment and listened again.
“Maggie, please, let me in.”
Quietly, she broke down the shotgun, took a deer slug off the shelf, and loaded.
“Maggie,” he said again in a hoarse, just-above-a-whisper voice, “I’m about to die out here of the cold.”
She remained in the shadows where she was sure he could not see her and called out, “Ronnie, I don’t know what you’re doing on my front porch at this hour of the night, but you’d better move on before I call those cops from off the hill.”
“Maggie, you never called a cop in your life.”
“Things change.”
“Maggie, “I’m trying to find Sheila.”
“She’s already found.”
“Do you know that? Is she all right? Don’t play.”
“You mean, you don’t know?”
“Maggie, you’re killing me. Is she all right?”
This sorry son of a bitch, she thought. She cradled her shotgun in one arm and opened the door. “You might as well come in. Everything else has gone wrong.”
“Is she okay?” Ronnie’s britches were wet and muddy at the knees and his hair was full of twigs and bits of dried leaf.
“You been on a snipe hunt?”
“I been on a girlfriend hunt ever since they killed all those people. Do you know what happened up there on that hill?”
“Yes, I know what happened. They drug me up there to ID the lot of them. What happened to you? You look like they drug you through the ditch.”
“They might as well have. The cops run me all the way here and they might be here any minute looking for me.”
“Ronnie, if you got something to do with this . . .”
“Maggie, I swear I don’t. They’d have killed me too if they’d found me.”
“Ronnie, I don’t know what you’re here for, but I got three years on the shelf. Three years, and the biggest thing that judge told me was no contact with known users or sellers of drugs or alcohol. And buddy, you are known. I can’t be seen with the likes of you for two minutes.”
“Well then, just tell me is Sheila okay?”
“I don’t know, but you got to get out of here.”
“But you said they found her.”
“They didn’t find her. I did. Now, go on.”
“So how come you don’t know if she’s okay?”
“Because I don’t know. I just seen them drive her off in an ambulance.”
“And was she shot?”
“No, she wasn’t shot.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure as I’m standing here.”
“Well then she was okay.”
“I don’t know that.”
“Well, what the fuck do you know?”
“I know I got to get you out of my house before five-o comes looking for you.”
“Fuck you, Maggie Boylan. I try to ask you a simple question about my girlfriend and all you give me is riddles.”
“Fuck you back. I never told you riddle one. You just riddled your own damn self. If you’ll listen, which I doubt, I’ll tell you what I know, which is—are you listening?—she was fixing to turn blue when I found her passed out at the bottom of the hill. She was down in the Johnson grass or they’d have plugged her too. But they didn’t, so I mouth-to-mouthed the bitch for an hour—a full fucking hour—or she wouldn’t have been alive when the ambulance people come and got her. And after that, whatever happened to the bitch—yes, you heard me say that—whatever happened to the bitch after that is something I don’t know and I don’t care to know, because I did my duty by her and now the further I stay away from that hussy the better I feel and pardon me for spitting, but I just want the taste of her out of my mouth.”
“Damn, Maggie, you’ve gone total bitch.”
“You would know one.”
“Fuck you, Maggie. Fuck you entirely.”
“And now you can get the fuck out of my house.”
“Maggie, I ask you one time as a friend to help me out and you dig up some old shit that didn’t mean nothing.”
My God, she thought. Was I that ignorant when I was still using? “This ain’t no old shit. This is right now. Her lying ass got me three years on probation which’ll turn into three years in prison if you don’t get off this porch in half a minute.”
“Maggie, I didn’t have nothing to do with her testifying against you.”
“You sure didn’t stop her.”
“Maggie, I ain’t never been able to stop her from nothing. I tried to keep her off the Oxys, but somebody . . . let me think . . . who was it got her started?”
“You prick. Now you can get out of my house for sure.”
“Maggie, they’re looking for me out there.”
“I’m sorry for your little problem.”
“Maggie, just help me get to the hospital.”
“On what? My magic horse?”
“You got a couple cars back there.”
“If either of them would start and I didn’t have a suspended license and if I gave a shit about you and your problem, I might drive you up there. But right now, I couldn’t ride you to the mailbox.”
“Maggie . . .”
“So go on. What do I have to do to make my point?” She raised the shotgun. “I got a deer slug in here that’ll cut through your liver like a hot knife through butter. So, get out of here and down the road.”
She was afraid she really would shoot him, so she pointed the gun just to his left, but close enough. Ronnie raised his hands. “All right. All right. All right,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
He backed out the door and into the night.
* * *
THE DREAM girl’s wounds had not yet begun to speak again when Maggie heard the next knock at the door. It was Tim Weatherstone this time.
Please, God, no more bodies, she thought.
She opened the door just a crack. “What now?”
“We’re looking for Ronnie Wilson.”
“Ain’t seen him,” she said. The lie came easy as ever. “I don’t want to see him.”
“Have you seen anybody lurking around, looking suspicious?
”
“I just been trying to sleep. I got to work in the morning. I ain’t got time for suspicious people or nothing suspicious.”
“Well, I got to find him.”
“Can I shoot him if I see him?”
“Naw, I need him first.”
“You’re welcome to him. I got no use for the sonofabitch.”
Weatherstone pitched the beam of his flashlight along the exhausted pickets of her front fence. “He’s a slick one. He might be right out here listening to us and we never even know it.”
“And do you think he had something to do with all of this?”
“No, he’s harmless. But he’s as close to a witness as we’ve got.”
“Well, if I see the motherfucker, he’s yours.”
“Thanks, Maggie. You’re a sweetheart.”
“Yeah, tell me what you really think. Now, can I go back to sleep?”
“Here, Maggie, take my number. If you see him or hear from him, call me.”
Maggie took the card and nodded. She did not tell him that her phone had been cut off. She just nodded and slowly closed the door. She went to the window and watched him follow the beam of his flashlight down the ditches and back and forth and across the road. When he was out of earshot, she gave a low whistle. “Come on out, Ronnie,” she said.
There was a stirring from beneath the porch and Ronnie Wilson squeezed out through a gap in the porch facing. He pulled himself to his feet and stood, his jeans and jacket even more clotted with mud, his hair and beard even more tangled with leaf and twig.
“How’d you know I was there?”
“Do you ever do what you’re told?”
“Is he gone?”
“He’s gone for now.”
“You reckon he’ll come back?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think he believed me.”
“So what do you think I ought to do?”
“What part of ‘get out of here’ don’t you understand?”
“And what if I don’t?”
“I still got this shotgun.”
“Maggie, you’ve done a lot of things in your life, but shooting an unarmed alcoholic ain’t one of them.”
Maggie Boylan Page 14