by Chuck Logan
Allen and Earl hoisted Amy to the bed and arranged her with pillows behind her back, to make her appear comfortable. Allen went back for his bag.
Earl said, “So, we thought—if they’re traveling together, they could be romantically involved.”
“That’d be my guess,” Jolene said dryly.
“Then what if the lodge is found in some disarray, evidence of drugs scattered around in the wake of Amy’s suicide. And some booze. It might look like Broker was distraught over Amy. He finds her dead, he gets high, drinks too much, and takes off on a fuck-the-world drive too fast; he goes off the road, knocks himself out, shatters the windshield . . .” Earl grinned.
Allen’s calm voice continued behind her, in the doorway. “Then we clean up after ourselves, go back home, and no one knows we were here. We read about them in the newspapers. Northwoods lovers claimed by suicide and grief.” He paused. “What do you think?”
“You’re the doctor,” Jolene said.
Chapter Forty-six
Jolene had remained mostly quiet. Now she turned and studied Allen’s face, which looked haggard, with a day’s growth of beard.
Anticipating her question, Allen said, “Someday, when this is over, when the money is in the bank, when Hank is in the ground, and you and Earl have worked out the terms of your relationship—perhaps we could see each other.”
Earl snickered. “C’mon, you guys, let’s keep it clean.”
They were gone, out of his range of vision, somewhere else in the house to where they’d taken Amy. It was just about over. For Amy, for Broker, for him. It infuriated him that Allen, Jolene, and Earl were going to win.
Hank’s thoughts were just embers, but the thing that was coming for him was clearer now. Almost distinct.
But at this moment he was riveted to the story unfolding in front of him.
Allen’s patient courtship of Jolene was based on bad math. Allen had factored in three deaths: Amy’s, Broker’s, and, eventually, Hank’s.
The expression on Earl’s face corrected the arithmetic. When the time was right, Earl would add Allen to the total.
And Jolene was the catalyst, the fire, thought Hank, that we have all swarmed to. And being a drunk, she would always backslide to Earl in moments of crisis.
Hank had heard everything since they came inside. He could not see Amy and Broker, but he understood the play. He had glimpsed Allen, Earl, and Jolene through lidded eyes as they caucused in front of the fire at the foot of his bed.
Allen was very thorough on details and methods, but he should have stayed with working inside immobile, drugged bodies. The outsides of alert moving bodies were still beyond his aptitude. Allen wasn’t ten words into his brilliant plan when Hank realized that Earl was going to kill him. Earl, who knew a good thing, would assist Allen in staging Amy’s suicide and leaving Broker out in the cold. He’d watch approvingly while Allen destroyed Hank’s eyelids. He’d wait until Allen had outlived his usefulness, presumably after the malpractice case was resolved, and after Allen had quietly finished the job of murdering Hank in a medically plausible way.
Then Earl would make Allen disappear.
And at the every end, Jolene would figure out a way to pension off Earl and seize the last, highest grip on the situation—eagle claws.
Too bad. Jolene, Earl, and Allen held great potential as characters if only he could script them before Allen came at his eyes with the needle.
Of the three, the only one he held any hopes of redemption for was Jolene. Of course, he was biased.
Allen came back from the bathroom down the hall where he’d emptied two square lactated plastic ringer bags. After he passed them through the fingers of Amy’s right hand to acquire her fingerprints, he hung the bags from a handy tine on the left antler of a European-mounted twelve-point white-tail deer rack on the wall over the bed.
He took two long, glistening lengths of plastic tubing from his bag. Again the trick with the fingers, like she was handling them. They were jointed and each had a blue clip with a white wheel. Then he did something with needles, hooking one tube to the other at a joint.
“The hard thing is starting your own IV,” Allen said. He took out a strip of rubber tourniquet and he tied it around her arm above the elbow. Then he turned Amy’s left hand, evaluating the network of now-plump blue veins feeding between her knuckles. As her fingers spread open a tightly folded piece of paper fell on her lap.
Allen paused to unfold it.
“It’s the alphabet thing,” Jolene said.
“Crude,” Allen said, smoothing the paper on Amy’s jeans. “All wrong. The letters shouldn’t be arranged in normal sequence. They should be grouped according to priority of which letters are most frequently used in speech.”
“Well, it worked good enough,” Jolene said.
Allen folded the paper and slipped it in his pocket.
Agitated, Jolene said, “Allen, for Christ’s sake, she’s waking up.”
Amy moaned softly, her eyes revolved as Allen placed his needle, checked his blood back-flash into the IV, removed the actual needle, left the IV stent in place, and hooked it to the tubing.
“She’s semiconscious, she won’t really be aware. Because—” he opened a bottle containing a white liquid and poured it into the bag on the left—“she’s about to really relax with five hundred cc’s of Propofal in a slow drip.”
The white stuff dripped down the tubing and Allen raised Amy’s right hand and used her fingers to thumb the wheel on the blue roller clamp.
Amy sighed and rolled her eyes up into her forehead. Allen pursed his lips and patted her leg. In a remote voice, he said, “You won’t feel a thing. I couldn’t let them shoot you, could I?”
Then he held up a glass ampule full of clear liquid and swiftly cracked it open between the two red lines on its nozzle and deposited the contents in the bag on the right.
Jolene, watching his nimble fingers, was reminded of someone who was adept at assembling things that came in boxes, good at reading instructions.
“Now, this is one hundred cc’s of Fentanyl, a very potent narcotic and the anesthetist’s drug of choice. They’re famous for abusing it and miscalculating their highs, so a lot of them OD on the stuff,” Allen said. “We leave the clamp closed on this drip for right now, let her loll around in the induction agent, then I’ll open this clamp all the way, it’ll feed through the port into the other IV tube, and in a minute she’ll be apneic.”
“Apneic?” Jolene said.
“Stop breathing.”
They left the bedroom, put on their coats, and joined Earl on the front porch. Earl had rummaged around in Broker’s travel bag and replaced Broker’s boots with tennis shoes. He found a light fall jacket on the coat rack by the door and pulled it loosely over Broker’s shoulders. Broker was turned over on his back and he kept instinctively cringing into a fetal position in an effort to keep warm.
Seeing that, Jolene looked away.
“I managed to get a third of the bottle into him,” Earl said. “But I think the drug is wearing off. What if he wakes up?”
“We don’t want him totally overdosed. He’s got to drive, remember?” Allen said. “Now, go bring our cars down here, transfer Hank’s bedding to the van, and then put Broker in the Jeep. You can drive him,” he said to Earl. “I’ll follow in my car.” He tossed his car keys to Earl, who handed them to Jolene.
Broker flopped back and forth on the porch, Ketamine going out, the scotch coming in.
“See,” Allen said. “It’s like he’s drunk. You can probably coax him to his feet and walk him to the car.”
This last idea genuinely excited Earl, who began to address Broker in a deeply sympathetic tone. “Come on, buddy. Time to get up. We gotta go feed the ostriches.”
“Cut the shit,” Jolene said.
“Aw, why? I kinda like the idea of him walking to his reward. Better’n me having to carry the sucker.”
The two of them managed to get Broker to his feet and
walked him down the steps. Allen watched them stagger off toward the Jeep. Then he went back inside and stood for a moment, warming his hands at the fire. He turned and found himself staring directly in Hank’s very open, alert, angry eyes.
“Well, hello,” Allen said, curious.
Very deliberately, Hank cocked his left eye at Allen and winked.
Chapter Forty-seven
Hank was resolved to go out on his kind of play; he’d bet it all on one gesture. Either he’d get the needle or a response.
Allen was startled and his hands began to shake—from excitement, he told himself. This was exciting. So he smiled stiffly and studied Hank. “So you really are in there? Have you been eavesdropping again?” He couldn’t help giving in to a twitch of clinical fascination.
Hank blinked twice.
“Two means yes,” Allen said. “Okay. Just a minute then.” He dug Amy’s famous crumpled alphabet paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and held it up. Hank’s sneering eyes fixed on it and Allen granted their hot wish. “You want to talk?”
Two blinks.
Allen let his finger rove the groups and Hank began to blink.
“P”
“U”
“S”
“S”
“Y”
Hank shut his eyes.
“Bravo, Hank; crude to the end,” Allen said, but a film of sweat started to form across his forehead and on his upper lip. After everything he’d accomplished he was back where he’d started; the object of Hank’s offhand contempt. Allen felt an impulse to plunge his thumbs into those eyes and squash them like grapes.
Hank’s eyes popped open. Now he was sweating, too. They glared at each other.
“I win; you lose. Top that,” Allen smiled kindly and then he swept his upturned hand to the letter groups like a waiter indicating the way to a table.
“D”
“U”
“M”
“Who? Me? Really. I’d think the opposite was true.”
“T”
“H”
“E”
“Y”
. . .
“U”
“S”
“E”
. . .
“U”
. . .
“K”
“I”
“L”
. . .
“U”
“You mean Earl?” Allen’s voice quavered a bit. He heard car motors turn off. Doors slam. A drop of his sweat fell on the paper, blurring some of Amy’s letters.
Two blinks.
“. . . And Jolene?” Allen’s voice turned dry and he swallowed a stammer; the novelty was wearing off, this pointing and blinking.
Two blinks.
The door opened and Allen dropped the paper. His hurried gesture held Earl and Jolene’s attention for a beat.
“What’s going on?” Earl asked.
“Nothing,” Allen said.
Earl eyed him for another moment, then said, “We have him in the Jeep. Now what?”
“Like I said, you drive the Jeep, I’ll follow in my car. We find a spot for him to go off the road. Jolene, you start wiping the place down. Anywhere you touched before we got here. We come back, do a walk-through, load Hank, and that’s it.”
Then Allen walked back to the bedroom and thumbed the white plastic gauge open to the bottom of the roller clamp and the Fentanyl started to flow into Amy’s IV.
Jolene watched him do it.
Efficient, practical; he could have been turning off the lights.
She watched the narcotic streamline into Amy’s blood. Her hips raised into a wanton arch on the bed, her head thrust back, her eyes revolving up. The euphoric spasm collapsed as Allen and Earl went out the front door and she watched Amy writhe, chin on chest, tongue protruding, drool starting to flow down her chin into a curl of thick, white-blond hair trapped beneath her cheek.
Jolene turned away and resented them for leaving her alone with this. And she shut her eyes and saw cops and lawyers and judges. She saw matrons forcing her to strip and sticking their fingers in her and making her put on prison cottons.
And THAT was the future if she didn’t do THIS.
Goddamn Broker shouldn’t have lied to me, she told herself.
But she couldn’t take her eyes off Amy, couldn’t stop watching her breaths getting shallow and coming further and further apart.
Never hurt anybody when I was sober before.
She spun and stalked into the living room, fished in her coat pocket, took out her cigarettes, lit up, and paced in front of the fireplace. About three drags into her Marlboro she darted a glance at Hank.
Hank looked back.
Great, she thought, now he’s awake and watching. Maybe he’d been listening all along.
Maybe he knew Amy was in the next room with a slack, stoned grin on her face, dying; that they were parking Broker in the woods where he’d freeze to death; that Allen was going to kill Hank’s eyes.
“This isn’t me,” she told Hank. “Uh-uh.”
Hank continued to stare at her so she amended her wishful declaration: “This isn’t me most of the time. It certainly isn’t who I want to be.”
Shaking now, she went back into the bedroom and studied the IV hook up.
“Fuck,” she said.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
What if?
Experimentally, her Latex-clad finger curled around the back of the blue clamp, her thumb caressed the small white plastic wheel. She listened to Amy’s thready breathing.
Why would she paint her fingernails a dumb color like that?
Her thumb debated, moving the wheel up and down. She saw how simply it worked. Flattening the tubing and cutting off the flow. All comes down to this cheap plastic piece of shit, probably cost eighty-nine cents, probably some nine-year-old kid made it in Singapore or China.
Fuck.
She thumbed the wheel up the track and then down the track. Up, down. She pulled away, nervously puffing on her cigarette, and left the white wheel at the top of the clamp. Off.
For now.
It’ll give me a little time to think.
She went back in the living room and paced in front of the fireplace.
Allen was such a mixture of innocent lamb and cold, efficient operator. And Earl was all smiles, like a big cat who was lying back for the moment, sort of amazed by the machinations of this dazzling killer mouse who’d danced onto the scene. Who was trying to impress her.
And she knew what Earl was thinking: Allen was another loose end, a tricky one, for sure; but he’d have to be dealt with. She turned and saw Hank still watching her like an old billy goat.
“What?” she shouted at Hank’s relentless eyes.
Two blinks.
“Oh Christ, when is this going to stop?”
Two more blinks.
She sat on the edge of the fold-out couch and toyed with the wrinkled sheet of paper that Allen had dropped. This insistent new sound whistled from Hank’s mouth. A jerky panting sound.
Everyone else had; why not me? She started smoothing out the sheet of paper. Amy had this tall, bold way of printing; strong letters, upright, nothing weak about them. She was like Broker, probably—never sick, no flaws.
She could imagine them walking around in the fucking woods, being healthy together.
“Okay, okay,” she said and let her finger linger on the alphabet game. Hank’s eyes snapped from group to group and line to line.
“H”
“I”
“T”
“Hit?” she puzzled. Then she saw the longing in his eyes, shining through the clay of his flesh. Hank always could put a lot into a glance. And she wasn’t so bad when it came to fast reading of a pair of eyes. She inhaled and exhaled in a very exaggerated manner.
Two blinks.
“You want a hit?”
Two blinks.
“Aw, God.” She slid across the blankets, turned, and reclined next to Hank. She wished she
could shake out her hair the way he liked. Yeah, well, she wished a lot of things.
“You and me, honey; like in Casablanca, remember, when smoking was sexier than sex.”
She leaned over and, as she kissed Hank on his motionless lips, she felt his breath mingle with hers. Then, she turned her hand so the cigarette fit between his lips and sealed her cupped fingers over his mouth.
Bogey one last time.
Hank sucked in and the nicotine mushroomed in his lungs, invaded the air sacks, and pillaged through his blood, and he could feel his entire circulation system brighten up like a mile of Christmas lights strung through a bombed, blacked-out city. It made the sperm dust jump.
This was the tough lady he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her walk into that church basement. He’d thought to soak in her like the proverbial fountain, but she was no fountain; she was a Raymond Carver short story when he met her, up to her neck in low-rent heartbreak, with the tatters of her alcoholism not quite tucked all the way in. Now here she was with her growing pains, stranded in a North Woods Crime and Punishment.
His heart began to beat faster. There wasn’t much time left. And she was the only legacy he had.
Jolene lowered her head to Hank’s shoulder and could have cried. But if she were the crying type she couldn’t come out of this on top. Which she fully intended to do, one way or the other. So she appreciated the last hand Hank was playing, having his last smoke before they put on the blindfold. And now he was blinking again.
She removed the cigarette from his lips, flipped it into the fireplace, and held up the paper.
“A”
“L”
. . .
“K”
“I”
“L”
“L”
. . .
“E”
“R”
“L”
. . .
“W”
“A”
“R”
“N”
“What am I supposed to do? This isn’t exactly an ideal situation.”
“G”
“E”
“T”