by Jake Hinkson
“Why are you telling me this?”
Doolittle didn’t hear me. He was thinking about things, I suppose, thinking about his father’s murder that frigid Thanksgiving night. It didn’t seem like he’d ever given it much thought. Finally, he shook his head, and, as if to put the period at the end of a sentence, he just sighed, “A woman is a hell of a thing.”
It was amazing how little he was aware of me, like I was a bag of garbage he was hauling to the dump.
“May I ask a question?”
He grinned and reached for his spit cup. “Go ahead.”
“You said you wanted to talk about the case. Would you mind telling me what’s going on with the investigation?”
“Not as easy as you think, keeping the heat off of you. I can pull strings with the best of them, but I actually have people working for me who know how to investigate murders.” He spit. “But that ain’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What did you want to talk about, then?”
He sighed. “Well, I found that envelope. Went by your house last night and picked it up. I guess you’ve been too involved with your church work to think about that kind of stuff very much.”
Goddamn it.
That’s all I could think: God. Damn. It.
“At my house,” I said.
“Mm.” He shook his head. “Leaving it there was stupid, you know.”
I nodded. “It was a bluff. But I figured it was too…” I choked a little, rolled down the window and spat a glob of blood. I rolled the window back up and said, “Too obvious.”
“Yeah,” he said, almost kindly. We were like two opposing coaches discussing a football game I’d lost. “I can see that.”
“So you don’t need me anymore.”
“Oh man, we’re way beyond me not needing you. You’re a time bomb. You killed the preacher and his wife.” He shook his head. Then he chuckled. “Christ. I didn’t see that coming. I’ll give you that one. You surprised me by killing the Cards.”
“It was an accident.”
“Yeah.”
I leaned forward.
“And now you have everything you want,” I said.
“Pretty much,” he replied. “I got plans, though. Once the money starts coming in from the aluminum plant, who knows where it could all lead?”
I put my hand on the buckle of my seat belt. “Where do you want it to lead?”
“Honestly?” he said cheerfully. “I’m thinking state senate.”
I put my head back, but I tried to nod. “Is that a real possibility?” As gently as I could, I pressed the button on my seat belt. Norris shifted his weight onto his left hip. His coat fell open and out of the corner of my eye I glanced the gun on his hip.
“You bet,” Norris answered. He took the steering wheel in his left hand.
“Ambitious.”
“Well,” he said, casually inching his right hand down to his gun, “way I see it, ambition is just a dream with a hard-on.”
I laughed, and he laughed too, and I flung myself at him and jerked the wheel hard to the right. We careened into the side of an eighteen-wheeler and the passenger’s side window shattered and sprayed glass across us. Norris growled and cursed “Goddamn you” and elbowed me in the head. But he didn’t take his foot off the petal; he had it pressed to the floor for leverage against me as he hammered my face and neck. But I wasn’t fighting him; I was fighting the wheel. I gave it another hard jerk and we went into a spin.
Then I was tumbling. It was like I was caught in a tornado; sight and sound and sensation had broken apart and swirled together. The dashboard lights and the windshield, the explosion of glass and the scream of metal across pavement. Norris’s yelling and my yelling. We slammed into each other, just two objects in the torrent, two hands clapped together and thrown apart. The truck flipped again, and then I was in flight outside the truck. The weight of air and gravity pulled at me, and then the earth smashed into me, and I was on my side and skidding down the grassy median while things were dropping and breaking all around. Cars were stopping.
And then there was silence and frosty grass and sky.
And after that, there was nothing for a while.
Chapter Seventeen
I woke up in a hospital bed. A black woman in orange scrubs was leaning over me and adjusting something above my head. Behind her on a beige wall hung a Monet print, and above that hung a television. The sound wasn’t on.
“Looks like you’re waking up,” the woman said.
I tried to nod, but my neck was in a brace.
“Jesus,” I said. “Am I paralyzed?”
“No.”
“Just tell me if I am.”
She shrugged. Her skin was caramel-colored and smelled like fresh lotion. “Okay, I will. If you ever get paralyzed, I’ll tell you. But you’re not paralyzed. Which is amazing. You got some cuts and some strained muscles and some broke fingers, but the rest of you is okay. You ain’t feeling much because we have you doped up.”
“Thank the Lord,” I said. It just popped out of my mouth, so maybe I meant it. On the television, a fat guy dressed like Cupid was selling cars.
The nurse smiled and turned to mess with something on a cart by the bed. “You best thank somebody,” she said, “because there isn’t a logical reason why you’re still alive and relatively…”
“Unscathed?”
She said, “You’re a lucky man.”
“This is the first time,” I said.
“Well, you picked a good time to start.”
I thought about Norris. “What about the other man in the truck?”
She shook her head and patted my bare shoulder. Her hand was smooth and warm. “I don’t know about your friend,” she said. “They’re still working on him, but he’s in pretty bad shape. He was in the middle of half a ton of broken metal and glass. But they’re still working on him. We got some good doctors here.”
“Where am…am I?”
“You’re at Connor County Hospital.”
My head felt thick and spongy. “In Stock’s Settlement. Pretty far…north. North. Why did they bring me, us…me here?”
“You’re so full of questions,” she said. Then she held up something that looked like a tube of lipstick attached to a wire. “If you wake up and you need me there’s a little button and you can buzz me.”
“Lipstick. Can’t…” I drifted off for a second. “What—”
“You’re going to sleep now,” she said. “Medication. You’ll feel—”
I assume she said I’d feel fine.
And I did.
The next time I awoke there was a balloon in the room. It was floating in the corner and read: GET WELL SOON!! in red letters. The air from the ceiling vent stirred it and it thumped against the wall. On the television, a man in a blue shirt and tie pointed at a map of Arkansas while computerized snowflakes blinked over the Ozarks.
I lay there a while watching the weather man pointing at the weather. Then the door opened and people entered. I couldn’t really turn my head to see them, though, so I moaned out, “Hello?”
A middle-aged woman walked up. With her little teeth and her big gums she looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her at first. She looked to the other side of the room and said, “Well, c’mon. He’s awake. Don’t be bashful.”
Then it hit me. Brother Card’s sister. Angela’s aunt.
“Angela?” I said.
Her aunt smiled, and then said again to the other side of the room, “Don’t be bashful, now.”
Angela walked to the edge of the bed. A black turtleneck sweater choked her pale face, and she just stared down at me.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I think so. I just woke up. I’m a little dazed.”
“Yeah,” she said.
She pulled at the hem of her sweater.
Ms. Card said, “She had to come see you, Brother Webb. She was real concerned when she heard about your accident. Everybody was.”
; “I appreciate that,” I said. I looked at Ms. Card. “Thank you for the balloon.”
“Oh, that was from folks at the church,” she said. “A lot of people have been up here in the last day or so. We’re just the lucky ones that got you when you was waking up.”
“Do you know anything about…Doolittle?” I asked.
Angela grimaced. I could tell she was chewing on the inside of her cheek, and I wanted to tell her to stop, but I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t be that familiar with her in front of her aunt.
Ms. Card told me, “He’s still upstairs. He’s...it’s a rough time for him right now. Nick and Lacey are up there.”
For some reason, that sent chills crawling across me like an army of ants. “Nick is here?”
“Sure. He’s been in to see you, I think.”
“He has,” Angela said.
“Everybody’s concerned,” Ms. Card said. “The kids from your youth group are all real concerned. Aren’t they, Angela?”
“Yes,” Angela said.
“And after what happened to…” Ms. Card shook her head. “That church has been through a lot.” She put her arm around Angela. “So you stay healthy, Brother Webb. Those kids need you.”
“I will,” I said.
Angela glanced at the door like she was afraid it would disappear.
“How are you?” I asked her.
“Fine.”
“She’s just bashful,” Ms. Card said. “All she talked about was getting up here to see you and now she’s here she’s quiet as a mouse.” She rubbed Angela’s shoulder and told her, “But you’ve been through a lot lately, so it’s okay to be quiet.”
“Absolutely,” I said. My head felt thick.
Angela started chewing her bottom lip and nodded. “I think we should go.”
“Well, he ain’t been awake five minutes, sweetie.”
“He looks tired.”
Ms. Card looked down at me. “You do,” she said.
I nodded. “I might want to get some more sleep,” I said. “I sort of feel myself drifting, so I may not have any choice.”
Ms. Card patted my arm. “You get some more sleep. You’ll be out of here soon. You just remember everybody is praying for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Angela, still biting her lip, didn’t look at me. “We’ll see you later,” she said.
“Thank you for coming, Angela,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
She said, “Okay” and started for the door.
Ms. Card patted my arm, blessed me and they left.
I stared at a blank spot on the wall. I wanted to cry.
Then Angela rushed back into the room. She stopped at the side of my bed.
“Are we alone?” I asked her.
“Yes. I only have a second, though,” she said.
“Don’t be scared.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to be okay.”
She stared at me and chewed her cheek. “Everyone wants to know why you were in the truck with Sheriff Norris.”
“We were talking about his son Tim.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean? I’m the youth minister. Tim is one of the kids in my youth group.”
She stared at my face like she was trying to decide what it was made of.
“Oh,” she said.
“And I was asking him about the case involving your parents.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing really. Said he couldn’t really discuss an ongoing investigation.”
She stared at me a little more and tapped her fingers on the bed rail. “Oh.” She looked back over her shoulder. “I have to go.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” I touched her hand. “I miss you, baby.”
She said, “Okay” and turned and left, but before she got to the door, she swung around and came back and bent down and kissed me roughly on the lips. Then she was gone. I heard the door glide shut.
For a while, I lay there listening to the silence. I thought of Norris fighting for his life upstairs. I thought about the eventual talk I was going to have to have with Nick. I thought about having to talk to the cops.
When I fell asleep I thought I knew the worst of it.
Chapter Eighteen
Sometime later I awoke. Night darkened my window. I rustled, blinked, and coughed a few times. “He’s awake,” a deep voice said. The voice didn’t seem happy.
A young man I didn’t know was sitting in the chair by my bed. Bald, with a horn-shaped goatee that curved down and jabbed his clavicle, he was muscular to the point of grotesqueness. When he stood up, the wall behind him vanished. In a voice at the lower end of the human register, he said, “I’m going to get Grandmom.”
From somewhere behind him, another man muttered, “Okay” and the muscular young man strode out. Then the other man walked over to my bed and used the electronic doodad to elevate my head. This hurt just about everything and I let out a moan. The drugs were gone, and my body ached.
The man was short with intense dark eyes and curly hair the color of steel wool. He was wearing a pressed white shirt with a gray tie and looked, to me, like a lawyer.
He asked, “Do you know where you are?”
“Connor County Hospital,” I said.
“That’s correct,” he said. He rested his hands on my guard rail. His hands were clean and smelled pleasantly of aftershave.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s about seven.”
“At night?”
“Yes. You’ve been asleep for the better part of two days.”
I nodded. My head was still in a brace, and still hurt, but it didn’t hurt as much as I would have thought. I ached all over, like I’d taken a beating, but I could tell—could just feel—that I was okay. I’ve always had that kind of luck, the kind of luck that ensures that you’re always healthy enough to fall deeper into trouble. I’ll never die accidentally.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Vandover Norris. Friends call me Van.”
“I’ve heard of you. You’re a lawyer.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And Sheriff Norris’s brother.”
“Yes.”
“I see. How is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Under my clean, warm sheets I felt my skin turn to ice. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He shrugged and looked over his shoulder.
The muscular young man had returned pushing a little old woman in a wheel chair.
Her pinched face was powdered white, and a thick gob of lipstick sat on her tiny, toothless mouth like a drop of blood on a corpse. When the young man stopped, the old woman rose slowly from the chair. A long, snowy ponytail hung over her yellow flower print dress, and she brushed it back.
When she spoke, her broken voice was soft, even fragile, but her gray eyes were as dead as gravel. “Are you…the one…who killed my son?” she asked.
I could not think of how to answer her. Next to me, Van Norris seemed to shrink.
The tiny old lady stared at me. As she began to speak, her voice quivered, unsure from syllable to syllable, but not from anything resembling fear. Her eyes sparked to life, like coal catching fire, yet they were still trapped in a body that was wasting away beneath her. “I asked you…a question. Did you kill…my son?”
“No ma’am.”
“No ma’am,” she sighed. With the young man standing behind her like a wall, she leaned across the guard rail, close enough that I could smell her lipstick. “I know…all about you,” she said. Her voice was thin and frayed, but the closer she got the more her powdered skeleton seemed as hard as a corkscrew. “You’re a …degenerate, a murderer, a molester of little girls…” She turned to her son. “What do you…call that, Van? A man who…molests little girls?”
“A pedophile.”
She turned back to me. “That’s right. A pedophile. That’s…what you are.”<
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I shook my head. “No ma’am,” I said. “She’s a little young but she not…”
She patted my arm again like she was my grandmother. “I want you…to be quiet now,” she said. “Like a little baby…like a little baby in a crib. Quiet…as can be.”
I nodded.
“Ian,” she said, “give me…my purse, dear.”
The young man handed her a wide maroon handbag. She lay it on my bed and unsnapped the silver clasp in the middle and took out a small handgun. Like it was a pet, she scooped it up with both hands and held it out to me as if she wanted me to take it. I didn’t move and neither did anyone else. She was simply showing it to me. Then, holding the barrel with one hand she tried to pull the hammer back with her other hand.
“Tough,” she said. “I don’t know why … they make these things…so hard to use. Hope I never get…jumped in the alley.” She pulled on the gun some more and shook her head. She said, “Ian, honey…”
The young man reached around, took the gun, cocked the hammer back and put it back in her hands.
“Thank you,” she said. She put the gun against my sternum, Van said, “Mother,” and she pulled the trigger.
And nothing. Just a sharp metallic click.
“Weepin’ Jesus,” she said. She looked at the gun as if it were a phaser from Star Trek.
Pain shot up my neck and tears formed in my eyes.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
Ian cocked the gun once more, she pointed it at me and pulled the trigger, and it clicked again. Ian took the gun, sprang the magazine and said, “No bullets, Grandmom.”
“Well for…Christ’s sake.”
“You forgot to load it,” he said. His voice had as much personality as a sheet of ice.
Van wiped his face, and I could hear his sweat hit the floor. “Mother, we’re in the middle of a hospital,” he pleaded.
“I told you…I should keep it…loaded,” the old woman told Ian.
“You don’t need a loaded gun around the house,” he replied.
“I would have…swore I loaded it…’fore we come up here.”