by Chuck Logan
Jolene smiled, big and easy. Slowly, she reached out and raised a wave of Amy’s hair on her palm. “This is really thick. Have you ever thought of wearing it up?”
“Usually I just put it in a ponytail,” Amy said.
“Sure, I can see that.” Jolene smiled again. “Look, will you excuse me for a minute. I need a quick cigarette to take the edge off and collect myself.” As she turned to leave the room, she switched off the baby monitor on the bed table because, as Earl had pointed out, baby monitors pick up and broadcast cell phone conversations.
Chapter Forty-one
Allen had been kneed in the stomach once, coming down from a rebound in high school ball. He’d sprawled on the gym floor for five minutes, gasping, convinced he’d never catch his breath again.
Right now Allen was having trouble catching his emotional breath. Seeing Broker and the nurse, he briefly lost his bearings and contracted a sudden fatigue. His thoughts turned a tired yellow, the color of nicotine stains on the fingers of a smoker.
The color of Hank’s fingers.
He’d looked out the window of an examining room and watched Broker and the nurse as they left the hospital and got into a dilapidated red Jeep. It was about Hank, of course. Why else would they be together, here?
On automatic pilot, he had changed into his street clothes, gotten in his car, and driven home. He flirted with denial and resolved to shake it off. So he pulled on his wind suit and shoes and went outside and tried to run. He got no farther than the row of box elders that lined the common area of his town house. He stood in place and watched the trees lose their leaves— showers of rounded, yellow, fat triangles, whipping back and forth across his shoes. The trees were going dormant, parts of them dying.
Coming apart.
It was all coming apart.
Should he call Milt? And what? Gossip? Milt didn’t know anything.
He went back inside, and instead of showering and shaving he paced back and forth in his living room. He rubbed the stubble on his chin and encountered his reflection in a hall mirror. What had been a liberating gesture this morning now made him look seedy. He saw the movie box on the coffee table and remembered the clown’s sad, watchful eyes.
He had to know. He had to go to Hank’s and ask Jolene if Broker had brought a nurse around.
Back in his car, he drove through revolving doors of icy wind and leaves. It was dark when he arrived at Hank’s. Halfway down the driveway his low beams picked up a dirty glare of orange on red and he put on the brakes. He slowed and crept forward. It was the rusty Jeep he’d seen Broker and Amy get into.
His fatigue vanished as sudden excitement flushed his veins.
Fight or flight had always been a concept. Now it was a primitive tug-of-war clawing inside his chest.
Allen parked, got out, and saw that the front door was ajar. Crouching, eyes and ears pitched to high alert, he slipped into the house and made his way through the familiar rooms to the kitchen, where a disembodied voice stopped him cold.
“What?” said Broker’s voice. Like a challenge.
Allen froze, swiveling, looking for—and then his eyes fixed on the baby monitor sitting on the kitchen counter.
“Alphabet board,” said a second voice that Allen recognized as Amy’s.
“Okay,” Amy continued, “I point to a group until he blinks twice, then I tap each letter in the selected group until he blinks again. We write that letter down. Then we start over until we get a word. I’ll tell him to shut his eyes for three seconds to indicate a new word.”
“You mean he can talk to us?” Jolene’s voice.
“Yes.” Amy.
Then the sound of paper rustling. Amy again. “Do you understand?”
Allen put his hand out on the counter to steady himself.
This was not happening.
But it was, because Amy said, “Here we go.”
After a moment.
“K,” Amy said.
“I,” Amy said.
“L,” Amy said. “Four blinks, what do you think?” she asked.
“He means twice.” And that was Jolene.
“Could be,” Broker said.
“L,” Amy said.
“E,” Amy said.
Even through the cheap monitor Allen could hear them breathing.
“R,” Amy said.
Then came some words that Allen couldn’t hear because of static. His cheek was practically on the counter, his ear pressed to the white plastic speaker.
“Keep going,” Broker said. “He hasn’t shut his eyes.”
“Right,” Amy said.
Allen’s hair prickled like needles in his scalp. Hank was communicating.
“S,” Amy whispered.
Allen held his breath.
“New word.”
Amy’s voice rasped in the monitor and Allen jumped at the sound.
“N,” Amy said.
“O,” Amy said.
“T.”
. . .
“A,” Amy said.
“M”
“Y,” barely audible.
“What?” Jolene blurted. “WHAT?”
Static.
“Shhh, new word,” Broker said.
“F,” Amy said.
“A,” Amy said.
“U,” Amy said.
“L,” Amy said.
“T,” Amy said.
Each letter drove a stake into Allen’s chest.
More static. Garbled sounds.
“New word,” Broker said.
Hyperventilating now, Allen listened to the next word, fully expecting to hear his name. Instead he heard: “Nurse,” which didn’t make sense. Nor did the conversation that followed. But then it did make a kind of sense. They seemed to have reached an impasse. Hank was spent, asleep.
This was more information than Allen could process.
His chest churned from the tug-of-war, from the stomp of fear that shouted run away. But something else, too, a bright spur of anger.
Fight them and survive.
Think. They’re not that smart.
Run.
He did run, but just to move his car up to the road, where he tucked it out of sight on the shoulder. Heart pounding, he dashed into the pines, then came to a halt. He was making too much noise. He looked around, amazed at how ordinary things—trees and leaves and pine needles—had acquired hard, glowing edges; danger did that, etched this new world in sharp relief.
So be stealthy.
Quietly he stalked around the garage. It was suicidal, but he was compelled to face the thing that was coming to destroy him. All he had to do was get up on the deck, peek in the window.
The reflection of clouds in the patio door jiggled. The door opened. Allen ducked beneath the edge of the deck as he heard footsteps walk out onto the deck. A second later he smelled igniting tobacco and saw a nervous cloud of smoke jet above him. He snooped up and saw Jolene smoking a cigarette. Her face was etched, almost metal with resolve. She held a cell phone to her ear. She was pacing, agitated.
And then he heard the phone ring and the urgency in her. “Earl,” she asked firmly. “Can you drive?”
Allen carefully listened to the entire phone conversation. By the time Jolene finished he knew his life had changed and that his entire education and training had prepared him for this particular crisis. To know how to read the signs and act decisively.
He mounted the stairs and watched Jolene leave the studio. Broker and Amy were in the house. He didn’t know where. But, for the moment, Hank was unattended. It was time to take another chance.
He found himself in a totally new place that was also very familiar. Sometimes surgeons were called upon to make fast decisions about who lived and who died.
Triage.
Hank fluttered awake as Jolene walked past his bed and disappeared into her bedroom. He smelled an after-scent of tobacco and that made his throat ache. Then he felt a gust of cold air on his face. His lurching eyes caught motion in the windows. L
eaves. Branches heaving. He tried to focus his eyes. Wasn’t going to happen, he was too tired.
Then, wait, a person; slipping in through the door.
Broker?
No, not Broker.
Hank recognized the blue wind shell the man was wearing.
Christ, it was Allen.
Silent and grim, Allen moved swiftly to the bed, pulled a pillow from under Hank’s head. No parting thoughts, hardly even eye contact. All business, Allen lowered the pillow, blocked out light and plugged Hank’s mouth and nose with clean cotton.
Death smelled like Tide.
. . .
Then the pillow pressure released and Allen stuffed it back under Hank’s head, bounded to the patio door, and was gone. Hank panted, regaining his breath.
Footsteps.
Chased Allen away.
Amy and Broker.
Amy smiled, seeing Hank’s eyes flutter once and then close tight. “Okay, Hank, we’re going for a ride; we’ve got a real comfortable bed made up for you.”
Allen! Look out for Allen! He knows!
* * *
“He’s beat, look at his eyes,” Broker said.
“You just take a nap, Hank; you’re going to be fine,” Amy said.
As Hank sank deeper into a stupor of fatigue they eased him up, bent him in the proper places, and lowered him into the wheelchair he’d come home from the hospital in.
Allen was here! He tried to kill me!
Listen!
But he was too damn tired to even open his eyes.
Chapter Forty-two
Earl had just lost an argument with a nurse about trading his Percocet prescription up to morphine when his cell phone rang on the stand next to the bed. He just stared at it with fogged eyes because it could only be one person. So he let it ring. Fuck her.
Five hours out of the recovery room, his left cheek, chin, eye, and ear had turned deep black and blue. His neck was stiff. They said they were concerned about concussion. In the meantime, the staff kept popping in to view him: Earl Garf, the ostrich-kick novelty.
His left upper arm was now held together by a thirty-four-millimeter titanium rod. The surgeon had accessed the ball of the left humerus through an incision in the shoulder. Then he’d inserted the rod down the bone channel and, working under an X-ray machine to get his alignment, had joined the rod and broken bone in place with two screws. Then he sutured the gashes in Earl’s biceps, lightly casted the whole business, and folded it into a hanging traction sling.
The pain was nonspecific at this point, more like just everywhere. The fingers of his left hand peeked from the sling and were starting to resemble Oscar Meyer wieners, plump and brown-gray. But he could move them.
Because his neck was stiff, he had to rotate his whole upper body to turn his head. Percocet was not doing it. He needed morphine. He began to marshal his case to present to a doctor.
But then, after the phone stopped ringing his pager buzzed on the table. With difficulty, he swung his right arm across his chest and pressed the call button.
6666666.
The devil, the end of the world; the code he and Jolene used for a major emergency. Now what?
Again, with difficulty, he reached over to the table and manipulated his cell phone in his good hand. He punched Jolene’s wireless number.
She answered immediately except it wasn’t an answer, it was, “Earl, can you drive?”
“Hey, fuck you. I’m off the island, remember? I got a broken arm because of you. I may never bench-press again.”
“Listen, Earl, things just got serious,” Jolene said.
“Which part of ‘fuck you’ don’t you understand?”
“I mean serious, Earl; NoDak serious.”
More personal code. NoDak meant the convenience store in North Dakota. It meant life and death. “Okay. I’m listening,” he said.
“Good, because Hank’s talking.”
That brought him up sharp; the Percocet haze wavered and dimmed as a cold streak of sweat shot down the inside of his stitched broken arm. He tried to focus on the voice in the phone. “Hank is talking?” he repeated, incredulous.
“He’s not word-talking with his mouth, he’s blink-talking with his eyes. The point is—he’s communicating. You may remember certain conversations we had in front of him about you taking Stovall into the woods and leaving him to die nailed to a fucking tree?”
Kicked by an ostrich and now this. Unbelievable. “So what’s he saying?”
“What happened was, this afternoon he tickled my hand with his finger. I didn’t call Allen or you because you guys laughed at me the other night. So I called Broker.”
“Sure, fine; makes perfect sense.” Earl was having trouble controlling his voice.
“Any rate, Broker comes over with this nurse . . .”
“Like real light blond?”
“Right. And we’re all excited and I’m not tracking—like, who is this chick? But she knows her stuff, she makes this alphabet board thing and gets him to wink to select letters to make words. Guess what his first word was?”
Earl gritted his teeth, heaved up, and swung his feet over the side of the bed. Funny how the idea of Hank talking put his pain in perspective. He eyed his clothes which hung on hooks in the small bathroom alcove. “What?”
“Killers.”
Earl started hyperventilating and struggled to get his breathing under control. “Did he name anybody?”
“Not exactly, he blinked out the words: ‘Not Amy fault.’ ”
“Who’s Amy?”
“The nurse Broker brought.”
“I don’t get it.” Earl discovered he had more than partial use of the fingers of his left hand, limited range; but he could painfully grasp and hold. Maybe he could drive. Thankfully his van was an automatic. He managed to pull on his jeans. He held the phone wedged to his ear with his good shoulder.
“She was the anesthetist in Ely. She’s one of the nurses we’re suing for Hank’s accident. She came down with Broker. They’re working together.”
“I still don’t . . .” But he had a bad feeling.
“Broker didn’t arrive just to deliver Hank’s truck, he used that as an excuse because he’d read about Stovall in the paper and he was suspicious. Then he tried to get close to me.”
“Try, shit. There was no daylight between you.”
“Well, that’s what he’s good at, see; the nurse got real excited about Hank. A regular babbling fucking brook. She was telling me how Broker was an undercover cop. BCA.”
Earl started hyperventilating again.
“Earl? You there?”
“Jesus. Fucking. Shit. We are—”
“Yeah, how do you think I feel. I said was—he’s retired. But he knows all these cops.”
“Shit!”
“We have one thing going for us. The last word Hank blinked was: ‘nurse.’ Then he was exhausted, or something; and he fell asleep. I have no idea what he’s getting at, but Broker and this Amy start making like detectives and think he meant the other nurse up there in the recovery room tried to kill him. So, I’m playing for time and I suggested we pack up Hank, drive up to Ely, and try his blinking routine on the nurse.”
“The old killer-nurse theory,” Earl said.
“It buys time. Maybe twenty-four hours.” She paused and Earl heard her exhale. “You sure can get offered some fucked choices in life,” she said.
“Amen,” Earl said.
“So, can you get a cab back here, pick up your van, and meet me up there?”
“Like you say, it’s a fucked choice, but I’m with you.” Despite his pain, Earl smiled because it felt like old times.
“Okay, we’re going to Broker’s uncle’s place. It’s called Uncle Billie’s Lodge, on Lake One. They say it’s just outside Ely. Any gas station can direct you. Nobody is there this time of year. You with me so far?”
“I’m still here. Uncle Billie’s Lodge on Lake One in Ely, Minnesota. Then what?”
�
��Page me with sixes when you get in position, like outside the front door. I’ll lure Broker out. Then I’ll try to distract him so you—”
“I get the picture.”
She paused, then said, “So you better bring it.”
“I thought we weren’t like that anymore,” Earl said, clicking his teeth.
“I don’t see any other way,” Jolene said.
She clicked off the phone, flicked her cigarette, and watched it spiral out, sparks in the gloom. She straightened up her shoulders and raked her fingers through her short hair.
She reminded herself that she didn’t kill that guy in North Dakota.
And she wasn’t going to kill Amy and Broker, either.
Chapter Forty-three
They’d folded down the rear seat and put in a futon mattress and blankets. Broker lashed Hank’s wheelchair to the rack on the roof. Hank slept on his side with a pillow between his knees. Amy was stretched out next to him. Jolene rode shotgun. They had good tires and a full tank of gas. The heater worked just fine.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone until he gets a full night’s rest. And he’s fed. And he’s comfortable with his new surroundings,” Jolene said.
“Understood,” said Broker, who was feeling very agreeable. The day had taken on an irresistible momentum. Hope rode with them. Broker wondered if the brief exercise with the alphabet system could foreshadow some kind of recovery.
He settled in and focused his attention on the cold, empty pavement unreeled in the Jeep’s high beams. Interstate 35 going north was almost deserted, as if the plunging temperature and the wind had swept away the cars.
Earl heaved out of the cab with his trench coat slipping off his shoulders. He was only able to get his good arm in a sleeve. The shredded left sleeve hung empty. Cursing at his clumsiness, he paid the cabbie and fumbled one-handed in his jeans pockets for his keys. Just as Jolene had said, the house was deserted and his van was in the garage. Goddamn chickenshit Rodney still had the Ford.
He lurched going through the door and slammed his sling against the doorjamb.
“GODDAMN SONOFABITCH!”
The curses echoed in the empty house. They’d left for up north: Jolene, Hank, Broker, and the smarty-pants nurse with the alphabet board. Now he had to follow them. And he didn’t want to think about what was going to happen.