She was on the telephone. Her mouth parted a little when she saw me. She brought an end to the conversation and hung up. “May I help you?”
I hadn’t looked at myself in a mirror. I probably had dried blood on my cheek, and in my watch cap and skulking clothes, streaked with dirt, trousers torn and soaked through, I must have looked like America’s Most Wanted.
“Amos Walker. I registered this afternoon. I lost my key.”
She recognized me then. Some of the color returned under the heavy cosmetics. “Were you in an accident?”
“A little one. I went snowmobiling with a friend.”
“Do you need a doctor?” She handed me a key.
“Just a good night’s sleep.” I coughed, a lung rattler that alarmed even me. “Could I trouble you for an envelope and a piece of paper?”
The telephone rang. She handed me an envelope with the motel’s return address printed on it and a sheet of stationery and answered. While she was busy talking, I turned my back, refolded the sheet of twenties to fit into the envelope, folded the paper around it, dropped in one of my cards, and sealed it. I got Agent Clemson’s card from my wallet and scribbled his name and office address on the outside with a pen reserved for checkins. When she hung up, I asked for a stamp, and when she tore one off a sheet I opened an empty wallet. Irony.
“I’ll put it on your bill,” she said.
I gave her the envelope to send out with the morning mail and turned away. Turned too soon; but then I hadn’t thought I’d make it up the stairs without passing out.
TWENTY-FOUR
The lake was a living thing made of ice and fire, with a broad cherubic face under an Elmer Fudd cap whose flaps curled up at the ends to form devil’s horns. It opened its mouth to laugh and sucked me in like a moth. I spiraled downward as if someone had pulled the plug out of a drain, debris swirling around me in the form of faces: Oral Canon’s, huge and red and hairless; Rose Canon’s, a pale oval with a delicate upper lip and jet-stream eyebrows like Kim Novak’s; Herbert Clemson’s, chilly-eyed, fashionably stubbled; Jeff Starzek’s, round and calm and watching. I think I saw the Michelin tire man, too. Even delirium has to pause now and then for a word from the sponsor.
The deeper I plunged, the hotter it got, until I was swimming through flaming oil. I smelled alcohol and iodine, which as everyone knows are the principal ingredients of brimstone. From the black depths a monstrous truck came toward me, turning and rising on a collision course; I paddled like mad to get around it and almost made it, but a fender clipped me and sent me cartwheeling toward the surface and back into the cold. Up there, someone was blasting big holes through the murk from above. Fragments of shrapnel skidded past me like tiny torpedoes, plucking at my clothes and slicing peels of skin off my cheeks. I tried to reverse directions, but my limbs were getting stiff. I was freezing to the bone, and all the time I was drifting up, straight toward the source of the blasts.
I had four days of that, they told me, and when I finally broke through to the surface, my bedsheets were soaked. It was like one of those “Was it a dream?” episodes of The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling came in a number of shapes, all of them female, including the doctor, a traffic-stopping blonde with ambitions beyond residency in a small hospital in a port town. Her name was Immelman, like the old flying maneuver, and for a couple of minutes I was in love; but then I’d have fallen in love with the bed rail after being rescued from the lake.
She was more concerned with the condition of my leg than the fever, which had broken, and with the three shotgun pellets that had fallen out of my trousers when I was undressed, pressed between the layers of clothing like flowers in a book. I remembered feeling the heat from the blast against my hip as I dived out of the crawl space beneath the bungalow at the Sportsmen’s Rest. I’d never make a joke about long underwear again.
“Jealous husband?” she asked.
“Hunting accident,” I said. “I got a little ahead of my party.”
“It was buckshot. Firearms deer season is over. And you weren’t wearing hunting clothes. You were dressed like a gas-station bandit.”
“Who are you, Mr. Black?” I resisted the impulse to touch the gauze taped to my right cheek.
She scowled at my chart in her hands. She wasn’t reading. “The details are none of my business, except we have to report this kind of thing to the police. I’d brush up on my answers before they come back.”
“Back?”
“They’ve been here every day, state and county, waiting for you to come around. They think you may know something about an incident on the lake.”
“What incident?”
“Some fools went joyriding on the ice the night we checked you in. There were two vehicles involved, and someone reported shooting. One body’s been recovered, a woman’s. They’re looking for others. We get that a lot, and there’s always alcohol involved.” She flipped a page. “Your blood-alcohol was three-point-oh when you came in.”
“What about my leg?”
She flipped the page back, pursed her lips. “GSW, several weeks healed. I guess you left your thermals behind that time, not that it would have stopped the bullet that made that wound. Can I assume the authorities were notified?”
“They were all over it. What about the leg?” It wasn’t hurting, but I was hooked up to an IV and whatever was dripping into it wasn’t apple juice. First thing I’d done when I woke up was to check and see if the leg was there.
“You strained a ligament. At first we thought it was ruptured. Half the staff wanted to amputate. Another couple of hours stumping around on it and the vote would have been unanimous. I never saw anyone abuse a major injury so completely.”
“Can I get a second opinion?”
“Not in this facility. You can’t afford it. I just found out this morning you don’t have insurance.”
“Were you surprised?”
“No. Just from what I’ve seen, you couldn’t get a group rate with the bullfighters’ union. What are you, a crash dummy for Smith and Wesson?”
“Only on the side. The rest of the time I’m a detective.”
“I thought detectives were stealthy.”
“I didn’t say I was any good at it. Are you kicking me out?”
“Not right this minute, but you might want to make arrangements for a change of clothes before the end of the day. We had to cut you out of what you came in with.”
“What about my wallet and gun?”
“You’ll get your personal effects when you sign the release.”
“Only dead people have personal effects.”
She pointed to an aluminum walker standing at the foot of the bed. “There’s your ride for the next couple of weeks. It’ll appear on your bill.”
I was alone with my thoughts for two minutes before the cops came. The first one wore a county uniform, trimmed like a Christmas tree in Baghdad, with weapons of small destruction and electronic equipment that muttered and peeped throughout his visit. He was a large black man with a round jolly face and eyes as hard as hammers. When he started asking questions I pretended to be asleep. I actually did fall asleep before he gave up; I hadn’t felt so tired since basic training, or so weak since I forgot and drank the water in Cambodia. Getting shot was easy compared to a night of blind fear followed by four days of fever.
I found out from his questions that Miss Maebelle’s body hadn’t been identified, or maybe I didn’t. It might have been a snare, but I was too full of morphine to step into it. He left.
For a while between visits I lay in the twilight between boredom and sleep I didn’t need, listening to the sounds of a hospital at work. It was a pretty noisy place, all things considered: Rubber casters squeaked on waxed linoleum, monitors bleeped, the nurses at the station down the hall spoke into telephones and among themselves, a maintenance worker strode past my door jingling his keys and humming. Outside the double-paned windows a turboprop took off from the harbor airport, whooshing its after-burners and fluttering its
pistons in what sounded too much like a death rattle for comfort, but then I don’t fly well. The flutes and ricochets of a spaghetti western drifted out of one of those rooms where the TV was never turned off. I’d seen the four walls of my room only but knew what the rest of the place would look like, the way a microbiologist reconstructs a lake from a single drop of water. I was becoming a reluctant expert on hospitals.
I elevated the head of the bed, took a lidded cup off the rolling bed tray, and sucked water through an old-fashioned glass straw. The jointed plastic kind hadn’t yet made its way up the two-lane blacktop on that side of the state. The water seemed colder and wetter that way, and it gave me an idea.
A nurse came in to disconnect the IV and drop off the lunch menu. When she left carrying the empty water cup, she didn’t seem to notice the straw wasn’t in it. I was grateful for that, but I hoped she paid more attention to such things in surgery.
The next visit was from the State of Michigan. It was a two-man invasion, a tall trooper in uniform and a bearish skinhead in a black trench coat over a suit with a wild check; I figured he used the pattern to hypnotize suspects into confessing. There was nothing jolly about either of them. They’d come in straight from outdoors and brought with them a chill I felt through the thin sponge-rubber blanket that covered me to the chest.
“Mr. Walker. Glad to see you’re awake. I’m Lieutenant Kunkel.” The plainclothesman tipped open a folder. “We have some questions to ask.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“That’s not important.”
“Doesn’t know your name,” I said to the trooper.
“I said never mind.” Kunkel’s face darkened under the flush from the cold. “A man answering your description was seen getting into a delivery truck on the state highway Wednesday night. We got a partial plate number and traced it to the driver. He said he gave you a ride to your car.”
I looked at the trooper. “Even if he just borrowed you from the local post, he could’ve asked you your name on the way here.”
“Evans.” The trooper opened his mouth just wide enough to let out both syllables.
Kunkel ground on. “That was the night you collapsed in the lobby of a motel here in town and were taken by ambulance to the emergency room of this hospital and checked in for treatment and observation. That same night, two vehicles, a snowmobile and an International CXT diesel pickup truck, this year’s model, drove out onto Lake Huron and fell through the ice. The Sanilac County Sheriff’s Department pulled the truck out yesterday morning. Divers are still looking for the snowmobile, but they recovered a body.
“Those same two vehicles caused an accident on the highway,” he said. “We’ve got a good description of the operator of the snowmobile. It matches the corpse. No description yet of the truck driver. Someone saw shooting. You came here with buckshot in your clothes. Maybe you’d care to connect the dots, save us trouble and expense, help out the deficit in Lansing.”
The nurse came in. I took my thumb off the call button I had under the blanket and asked her to check my blood pressure.
“Are you experiencing anxiety?”
I looked from one cop face to the other and back to hers. She cleared her throat and unslung the equipment from around her neck.
“Later, please,” Kunkel said. “We’re busy here.”
“So am I.” She tugged down the blanket and slid the cuff up over my right bicep. The arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow. I’d gouged it punching through lattice.
“Nurse—”
“Van Ash.” She pumped the rubber bulb.
“Nurse Van Ash, you’re interfering with the police in the performance of their duty.”
“Who’s stopping you?”
“What about it, Walker?” Kunkel said.
I’d broken two inches off the end of the glass straw, stashed the rest of it in a Kleenex box on the rolling tray, and was holding the jagged piece in my left hand under the blanket. As the cuff filled and tightened, I made a fist. I gasped a little, coughed to cover it.
Nurse Van Ash’s face didn’t change during the reading. It wouldn’t. She was a short-haired brunette of forty with old campaign lines drawing down the corners of her mouth. She let out the pressure and slipped the cuff down and off.
“You gentlemen will have to come back later. Mr. Walker is in no condition for visitors.”
“We’re conducting an interview,” Kunkel said.
“Sorry.”
“Who’s your supervisor?”
“I’m in charge of the station on this floor. You can talk to Mr. Baird, the administrator.”
“Where is he?”
“Out on the lake. He’s the official mayor of Tip-up Town this year.”
The lieutenant spun on his heel and clomped out into the hall. Evans hung back.
“You, too,” said Nurse Van Ash. “Shoo.”
He slouched on out as if it were his idea. The nurse stayed. “Show me your left hand, please.”
I brought it out full of blood. She seized it, picked out the glass, stuffed a wad of Kleenex into my palm, and closed my hand tight. Her fingers were strung with steel cable. “That’s going to take a couple of stitches to close,” she said. “Your timing was off. The spike came in the middle of the reading.”
“Where’d you work before this, Jackson Prison?”
“Port Sanilac High. Some of those kids would do anything to get out of gym. What are you going to do when they come back?”
“What kind of cultures you got in the lab?”
The lines in her face didn’t stir. “The police put in more time here than the residents. Most are okay, but you’ve got to take the Kunkels with the rest. Did I do the right thing keeping my mouth shut?”
“You weren’t the only one. The lieutenant didn’t mention the buckshot holes in the truck.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” she said. “Miss Maebelle’s a beloved local character.”
“Who said anything about Miss Maebelle?”
“The description’s all over the news. There’s only one fat woman around here who drives a snowmobile.”
“Do the police know?”
“If they don’t, they’ll put it together when she doesn’t answer the telephone. One of the buildings at the Sportsmen’s Rest burned to the ground last night.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Nurse Van Ash helped me into the bathroom the first time. After that, I took the walker for a spin around the room. It took a little longer than the Rose Bowl Parade and all I got for my efforts was a fresh case of the shakes and a view of a maintenance man blowing snow off the walk outside the window. My leg was a little swollen, the foot dragged. Mostly I needed the support because my body had used up all its strength fighting fever, but I didn’t like the way my foot felt as if it weighed fifteen pounds. Dr. Immelman might not just have been trying to throw a scare into me after all. Hauling a cane around for the rest of my life would throw a crimp into climbing through windows and dodging buckshot.
I hated to do it because I owed him already, but I put a call in to Barry Stackpole. I couldn’t think of anyone else who would drive all the way up there to bring me a change of clothes. Nurse Van Ash may have been the original immovable object, but Lieutenant Kunkel was an irresistible force with a bald head and a loud suit. He wouldn’t waste time poking his face into a couple of hundred ice shanties looking for Administrator Baird; he’d go straight to the nearest district judge and come back with a warrant for my arrest. That could take hours or minutes, depending upon whether court was in session.
Barry didn’t answer, and the cheerful nasal voice of the new Ma Bell told me I couldn’t keep ringing. I hung up just as Herbert Clemson entered.
“Nice legs. You ought to wear Bermuda shorts.”
I was sitting on the edge of the bed in a paper gown and slippers with a bandage on my scraped ankle. The Homeland Security agent was better turned out. He’d traded his gray coat for an insulated parka, boots with felt line
rs that stuck up above the tops, heavy woolen trousers, and a cable-knit turtleneck. With his cool eyes, clean features, and cultivated blue chin, he looked like a ski instructor. I asked him if he’d been downhill racing.
“I’ve just come from a long walk along your beautiful Lake Huron shoreline. It reminded me all over again how many thousands of miles of border I have to protect. I can’t get enough staff to sharpen pencils.” He was carrying a briefcase, the bulky old-fashioned kind with straps. He set it down, took off the coat, and flung it across the visitor’s chair.
“What’s it pay? I’m looking for a desk job.”
“I don’t blame you. I saw your chart.”
“I thought that information was confidential.”
We laughed.
He picked up the briefcase and started unbuckling. “I like you, Walker. I’d put you in for it if I didn’t have a conflict.”
I watched him draw out an envelope I’d seen before.
“Three days from Port Sanilac to the Federal Building in Detroit,” he said. “That’s a couple of hours by automobile. Seems to me the post office was more efficient when it didn’t have any competition, but that’s someone else’s department. You should know it isn’t a good idea to send cash through the mail.”
“I didn’t, technically.”
“Let’s not split hairs. We have people who do that. They’re testing the sheet now.” He took out the piece of folded motel stationery, tipped my business card out of the end, looked at it as if he hadn’t seen it before. Then he put both items back in the envelope. “I went to the motel first. That’s the reason you sent it. Were you really planning to wait for me?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t exactly hitting on all cylinders.”
“They told me you were here. I got the rest from the local authorities. For a man with one good leg you manage to get around.”
“The good leg isn’t that good. I tricked out the knee in basic. I don’t guess you brought cigarettes.”
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss Page 16