by Dave Stanton
I raised my eyes to his face and tried to speak, but the words were strangled in my throat. He and Perdie grabbed me by the shoulders and tossed me down a short incline to the edge of a stream. It was iced over, but there was a three-foot hole cut out near the edge. I felt a knee on my back, and then my head was being pushed under the water. I gasped when I went under, and ice water shot into my sinus cavities. My eyes bulged as if they’d burst free from their sockets, and an intense pressure began to grow in my lungs. I strained to lift my head, but the hands gripping my neck felt like iron. My body bucked hard, but someone had all their weight on my back, and I couldn’t move. I squeezed my eyes closed as tight as I could and clamped my jaw shut. In a quiet part of my mind, I realized this is what it feels like to drown. I tried with all my strength to roll over and throw the weight from my back, but my legs were being held, and someone must have been sitting on my shoulders. It started going black around the edges of my vision when they jerked my head from the water.
“Get a good drink?” Pace said, smiling. I retched violently, trying to hack the river water out of my lungs. “I think you need another.”
They held me under twice more, and the last time I must have blacked out, because when I regained consciousness, I lay a few feet back from the water.
“Hey, private dick,” Pace said, grinning above me. “We got your friend here too. Louis said he wanted to be here with you.”
I heard a thud and a grunt, and Cody slid down the snow toward the river. The left side of his face was coated with blood, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. His hands were cuffed behind him.
“You cowards,” I wheezed, but then Fingsten was next to me. He stuck his revolver against my ear.
“Say another word, I’ll blast your brains all over the snow,” he said. “Come on, tempt me.”
Then a man I’d never seen before walked into view. The first thing I noticed about him was his coat hung off his back at an odd angle because of the massive slope of his trapezoid muscles. His black hair was very oily, and it clung to his dark, deeply pocked face like an overturned basket of snakes. He seemed to move with unusual strength and purpose as he stepped down the embankment toward Cody.
“I hear you’re good with a knife,” I said.
Fingsten pressed the muzzle of his .38 into my cheek.
The dark-skinned man turned toward me and our eyes locked. “You know nothing,” he said, his voice quiet and very even, as if it wasn’t him speaking. Then he smiled, and his eyes were suddenly wet and alive, as if a corpse had come to life.
Samantha Nunez had told the truth about the Samoan, I thought. I watched him and Perdie force Cody’s head into the water. The Samoan went about his work without expression or any sign of physical effort. They held Cody under, while Fingsten cackled like a hyena and cheered them on. When they were finished, Pace lit a cigar, and Perdie removed the handcuffs from my hands and Cody’s. The Samoan seemed to have vanished.
“This one’s for Fingsten,” Perdie’s voice said behind me, and he kicked me in the kidneys hard enough to send my body tumbling out onto the frozen stream.
“We see you again, this’ll seem like a tea party,” Pace said. I heard him hike back up the incline, and then they were gone.
******
It became dark as we trudged through the snow back toward the highway. I didn’t have my jacket, and my clothes were torn and soaked. Every time I raised my head to a normal position, a stab of pain shot through my skull, as if a steel spike were jabbing a nerve. I could also feel an odd numbness where Perdie had kicked me, as if some internal organ was damaged, but my body didn’t realize it yet.
Unfortunately, Cody was in worse shape. He limped along slowly, his eyes dull and stupefied. I asked him what happened after I left the King’s Head, and his story of being apprehended by Perdie and the Samoan was disjointed and didn’t make sense. When I asked him to explain, his sentences became gibberish. Concussion, I assumed. We needed to get to a hospital quickly.
The wind started blowing, and the cold became unbearable. Our boots were soaked, and my feet had gone numb. Cody was also without a coat and was turning blue. His hands were balled up in fists, and his teeth chattered loudly.
Cody was walking more and more slowly, and finally he fell to the ground. I put his arm around my shoulder and dead-lifted him to his feet. I clenched my teeth and swore in frustration as we moved forward. Stopping would be suicide; we had to reach shelter or we’d freeze to death. The cold wrapped my body in a clutch of pain, and only the adrenalin from my fear and anger kept me going. I kept looking around for any form of shelter, but there was nothing but snow and skeleton trees. Exhaustion, desperation, and then panic began to overtake me. We slogged forward and crested a hill, and then I saw the lights from Highway 50 in the distance.
******
We were in a large domed room of some kind, surrounded by stainless-steel walls. The structure fanned out downward from the center of the ceiling, creating a circular enclosure. Cody was sitting at a table. We were talking about something casual, but I knew the purpose of the conversation was to distract me from some horrible, unmentionable reality we shared. I tried to ignore the dread in my heart, but it hovered inside me like an idling motor.
Cody stood and walked toward the single door in the room. He held his leg over his shoulder like a huge baseball bat. The appendage looked like it had been broken from a statue. A long peg leg was attached to his hip, but he seemed to walk without a limp. He opened the door, and in walked two men I didn’t recognize. One was wearing an Abe-Lincoln-style top hat and smoking a mouthful of cigarettes.
The second man was juggling three pieces of bony spine, and he reached up and snapped his ear free of his head and added it to the objects rotating through the air. The smoking man sat down and removed his hat. His head was flat, as if it had been neatly sliced off by a coroner’s saw. I went to shake hands with him, but my hand had no fingers. He opened his fist, and two black fingers lay on his palm. A dark, barrel-shaped man stood in the shadows, but I couldn’t see his face.
“Hey. Hey! Come on, wake up!” The voice snapped me out of the nightmare and into the generic colors of a hospital room.
“My, you were yelling. Rest easy, there.” The doctor was an older man with reading glasses low on his nose.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
“You’re at Stateline Emergency Center.”
“How?”
“You were brought in last night with another man. You were nearly frozen to death. Lucky for you the paramedics knew how to treat hypothermia. They saved your life.”
I tried to sit up. My hands were wrapped in layers of gauze and looked like white boxing gloves.
“Rest easy,” he said, as I struggled upright.
“My friend?”
“He’s on the other side of the curtain.” He nodded at a green divider hanging from a track on the ceiling. I held up my hands.
“What’s my condition?”
“Second-degree frostbite, maybe a touch of third degree. Your feet are wrapped as well. You should recover fully.”
“How’s my friend?”
“He has a moderate concussion, otherwise about the same as you. There was some doubt about his toes last night, but they’re past the danger point.” I felt a huge weight rise off my chest.
“How in the world did you end up out there with no jacket?”
“I was brought here in an ambulance?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Has a police report been filed?”
“No, not to my knowledge. Should one be?”
“Cody,” I said.
“He’s sleeping,” the doctor said.
“Thanks for everything, Doc,” I exhaled. “We’ll need to leave as soon as possible.”
“You should spend two days here for observation.”
“How about the frostbite?”
“We’ll keep the bandages on for two days, then it’s very important to not let your
extremities get cold again. There’s been some damage to the flesh, and although it’s not permanent, it could become so if exposed to cold in the next couple weeks.”
The doctor left and a nurse came by and dropped off an unappetizing breakfast on a tin tray. I pushed the blankets back and carefully pulled my legs up. My feet were wrapped to the point that walking was improbable. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. I swung my legs down and tried putting weight on my feet.
“Hey, Cody,” I said, but he didn’t answer. I reached over and pulled the curtain aside. He lay on his back, dead asleep. I let him be and took inventory on my battered body. The pain in my head and neck had subsided, and I could think clearly. When I touched my nose, it felt bruised and swollen, the result of being sucker-punched by Fingsten. My back was still sore where Perdie had kicked me, but I didn’t think it was serious. My biggest concern was the frostbite.
I rang the buzzer for the nurse. When she showed up, I asked her to dial a phone number for me. Fortunately, I’d memorized Edward’s number.
“Edward,” I said quietly. “I need your help. Please listen carefully. I’m at the Stateline Emergency Center. It’s about a block east of the Lakeside.”
“What are you doing there?”
“The men behind Sylvester’s death just upped the ante.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I got to get out of here, and quick. I need you to come pick me up.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
“Good man,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
“Hey, Dirt,” Cody said, leaning up on his elbow. His eyes were both blackened and horribly red. “I feel like I just went twelve rounds with Mike Tyson.”
“The good news is it was a draw, and you’ll live to fight another day,” I said. He smiled, then winced. “Don’t make me laugh, man.”
“So the elected sheriff of Silverado County wants us out of town,” I said.
“Incredible. You’d think the stupid asshole would at least hide his identity.”
“Apparently he thinks we can’t touch him.”
“He figured wrong,” Cody said, his eyes narrowed. “It’s a mistake he’ll regret.”
“We’re getting picked up in a few minutes,” I said. “We can’t stay here. The doctor said we just need some rest. It looks like we’ll be all right.”
“My truck. I don’t know where my truck is.”
“We’ll find it. It’s either somewhere between that stream and The King’s Head, or in the police impound yard.”
“I can’t remember how I ended up at the stream. My mind is blank.”
“You’ve got a concussion. It’s normal to lose some memory.”
“All our clothes and gear are in my truck.”
“I know,” I said. “But the first thing we got to do is find somewhere safe to chill out. I’ve got someone coming to pick us up. We’re vulnerable here.” Cody looked at his bandaged hands.
“How did we get here?” he said.
“Somehow we ended up in an ambulance. Maybe a good Samaritan came to our rescue.”
“A good Samaritan?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I must have passed out.”
“Probably because you drank too much. Wenger’s right, you’re a drunk.”
“What?” I said, and Cody was grinning broadly. “This ain’t any worse than a typical hangover, Dirt. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Cody tried to stand up, but couldn’t find his balance on his wrapped feet and fell back over the bed, his bare ass sticking out of the hospital gown. The sight threw me into a punch-drunk laughing fit. I tried to wipe my eyes, but my hands were completely useless, and I was laughing uncontrollably, my stomach heaving, tears streaming down my face. The nurse came over to see what all the excitement was about.
“We’re checking out,” Cody told her. “We’ll need two wheelchairs.” The nurse looked at me with doubt in her eyes. Cody shrugged. “He used to take a lot of acid.”
“Post-trauma stress release,” the nurse said, in that detached way medical professionals sometimes speak. “It’s not uncommon.”
Before they let us go, we had to dictate our insurance information to the nurse. She also gave us a handful of free sample packets containing anti-infection pills for the frostbite. I promised we’d return the hospital gowns once we had some dry clothes.
“Don’t bother,” she said.
When Edward arrived, he made arrangements to rent wheelchairs, which folded and fit neatly into his trunk. I introduced Cody as my friend and associate, and Edward raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Cody reached out to shake hands, and Edward looked at him like he was crazy, then grasped the ball of gauze and gave it an awkward pump.
“You guys look like you’ve been to hell and back,” he said.
“You might say that, assuming hell has froze over,” Cody said.
“Edward, let’s drive over to The King’s Head, and we’ll start from there and try to find Cody’s truck.”
“What in the good lord’s name happened to you guys?”
“Later,” I said, as we climbed into Edward’s sedan. It didn’t take more than a minute after we arrived at The King’s Head to find what we were looking for. Cody’s truck was parked down the street at an awkward angle to the curb, as if he’d been forced to stop. The truck appeared unmolested, save for being covered with a light coating of snow.
The nurse had stuffed our personal effects, including wet and muddy clothes, in a plastic bag. Cody asked Edward to retrieve the keys from the bag and open the truck. Fortunately, most of our stuff, including the suitcase I used to carry my bounty-hunting gear, was locked under the truck’s bed cover, which was still secured. But our vests and firearms, as well as our jackets, were gone. My cell phone was also missing.
“Edward, we need to go to a hotel,” I said. “Can you take a cab out here and drive the truck back for us?”
“What? Screw that,” Cody said. “I’m not leaving it here. I’ll drive it.”
Edward pulled his car forward so Cody could stretch from the backseat of the Ford into the truck’s driver’s seat. He managed to get behind the wheel without falling, which was impressive considering his hands and feet were hardly functional.
“I’ll just drive slow,” he said. But before we pulled away, a tow truck came up the street and stopped alongside us.
“I was sent out here to tow this truck,” the driver said. “They said it was abandoned.”
“Who sent you?” I said.
“Sheriff’s office.”
“Marcus Grier?”
“Grier? No, apparently he doesn’t work there anymore.”
“Doesn’t work there? I was just in his office last week.”
“Well, he’s gone now.”
“Why?” I said.
“Beats me. I’m just a tow truck driver. I don’t work for Silverado County.”
“Who called it in then?”
He looked down at his clipboard. “Deputy Fingsten.”
Edward turned the key, starting the truck for Cody, and got back into his sedan.
“I guess it ain’t abandoned,” the tow truck driver said.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said.
“Hell, no skin off my ass. I get paid by the hour.” He smiled, turned around, and headed back down the road.
We drove over to Harvey’s Casino. I asked Edward to check us into a two-bedroom suite under a phony name. Eventually Pace and his crew would know we were still in town, but I hoped to avoid that until we were able to defend ourselves.
Edward finished at the check-in counter, then wheeled Cody and me through the lobby and over to the elevators. With my hands and feet the size of soccer balls, and wearing the hospital gown, I’m sure I looked like something out of a freak show, but Cody looked downright scary with his black eyes and unruly beard.
“You look like a broken-down Frankenstein going in for repairs,” I told him on the elevator.
; “Yeah? Well, I’ve got advice for you—save yourself some grief and don’t look in any mirrors.”
Once we got into our room, I filled Edward in on the details of the previous afternoon’s events.
“What happens now?” he said. “Do you go into hiding, or what?”
“Or what,” Cody said.
“Huh?”
“If Pace suspects we’re still in town, he’ll try to do something about it,” I said. “Pace obviously doesn’t want Sylvester Bascom’s murder solved. He threatened to kill me if he sees me again.”
Edward blinked and his eyes grew round. “Was he serious?”
“He nearly killed us last night,” Cody said.
“Edward, your involvement potentially puts you in danger,” I said. “You need to be careful you’re not followed. If you see anything suspicious, call me right away. Keep your car doors locked. If you’re in California and a Silverado County squad car tries to pull you over, drive into Nevada and don’t stop until you get to the Douglas County Sheriff’s building. It’s up Highway 50 a few miles.”
“Aren’t you going to leave town?”
“No.”
“Hell, I just got here,” Cody added, a thin smile on his battered face.
“Right now I’d like to talk to John Bascom in person to update him on the situation. And also, would you mind bringing our stuff up from the truck?”
“Are we gonna eat today?” Cody said. It was noon.
“Edward, what do you say? How about a large combo pizza and some beers? And after you bring up the stuff, would you move Cody’s truck across the street? Park it in back of Harrah’s, in that big main lot, the one that’s always packed. Try to find a spot where it’s not very visible. Remember, call me if you think you’re being followed.”
Edward didn’t protest or hesitate for a moment. “I’ll call Mr. Bascom and ask him to be here shortly,” he said, then left on his errands.
“The dude’s a trooper,” Cody said.
“Yeah, he’s a good guy,” I said. “I hope he’s being paid well.”
CHAPTER 22
Cody and I were finishing the pizza and drinking beer out of straws. The bandages on our hands were smeared with grease and pizza sauce. There was a knock on the door, and Edward let John Bascom in.