“Jamie, I don’t know what’s going on with you, and I don’t have the strength to find out right now. If you’ve made some kind of arrangements with your father’s ‘associate’ Howard, let me just give you some change so you can make your phone call, and I’ll leave you here.”
“I don’t want you to go.” The young voice was so urgent, Allen had to believe him, although there might be any number of reasons for the boy’s desperation.
“Okay. I’ll make my phone calls, and then we’ll go to another place and buy gas.” Allen reached for the heavy jacket, draping it across his upper body to hide the bloody sleeve. He’d look like a hunchback, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Okay, I’ll stay here. Unless . . . Look, shouldn’t I go buy some bandages or something? I mean, you’re bleeding all over the place.”
Allen looked at the boy. He could find no trace of deception in the young face, no blatant innocence or lurking secrecy, only a concern for an injured companion. Still, he had to be sure.
“Jamie, do you want to go back to your father?”
The boy twitched, a physical shudder accompanied by an unmistakable look of fear and revulsion, and although there was longing in the expression as well, Allen reached for his wallet. Surely no twelve-year-old could school himself to react like that.
Handing over two twenty-dollar bills, he said to Jamie, “Don’t buy bandages, that would be too obvious.” The logical alternative was women’s menstrual pads, sterile and absorbent, but he could hardly ask a boy Jamie’s age to casually pick up a package of those. “If they have any cotton T-shirts, get a big one, or another sweatshirt. And a couple of candy bars—not a whole bunch, we’ll stop down the road and buy more.”
Jamie took the money and hurried across the parking lot. Allen fastened the jacket’s top button under his chin and got out of the car. While he was standing and waiting for the fresh nerve-endings to settle, jaws clenched against a moan, he distracted himself by watching the boy enter the bright shop and wander the aisles. Rachel’s image came back to him, the Stephen King character trusting his vulnerable fingers to a disturbed child. He dug some quarters out of his pocket, and went to the phone.
The first call was to Alice’s emergency number. The line picked up and without waiting for any answer, Allen said, “Somebody’s tracked the boy and taken a shot at us. Better call Pete and have him send the family on a holiday, just in case. I’ll let you know when we’ve set down somewhere.” He broke the connection, let the toggle rise, and dialed for information. When the voice came on, he asked for “Reienbach, I’m not sure of the town, but it’s a little ways north of Centralia.”
As he had hoped, after giving him the number, the recording offered to connect him. He fed the required coins into the slot. After the fourth ring, another recording came on, the voice of a middle-aged woman making an effort to be cheerful as she recited the name and her suggestion that the caller leave a message.
“Mr. and Mrs. Reienbach, you may have noticed that your truck is missing. You may also find that you’ve got a five-year-old Honda out behind your old barn, that is, if the guy who’s after me didn’t get to it first. The pink slip’s in the glove box, you’re welcome to fake my signature and keep the car. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t tell the police about it, not for a while anyway. I know you’d have no reason to believe me, but I’m trying to help some people, and it’s not proving easy. That’s why I had to borrow your truck. And I swear it’s only borrowed—I’ll get it back to you as soon as I possibly can. And . . . thank you.” He hung up, grateful that he hadn’t had to deal with a live voice.
Now for the third call. He sagged against the glass side of the booth, wanting only to sink to the filthy floor and go to sleep, wanting desperately to think of some way to do this without making the call. But there was no other way, and here was the boy, standing at the folding door to the booth with a bag in his hand, looking worried.
“You’d better get back in the truck,” Allen told him; when the boy was out of hearing, he let the quarters drop into the phone slot and punched in the number he’d known since before he could read. Jerry was home; nearly every word of the two-minute conversation was Allen’s.
It was a hellish drive, up the western side of Puget Sound and Hood Canal, and it took longer than Allen had reckoned. Jamie had managed to fill the gas tank, with instructions called from inside the truck’s cab, and he added a roll of gauze to his purchases at the service station shop. Behind a deserted fruit stand up the road, Allen eased his shirt off and peeled away the blood-soaked sweatshirt, looking at the injury for the first time.
It was ugly and clean and he was very lucky. His left fingers worked, under protest, and the bleeding had slowed. He reached for the gauze.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if I did it?” Jamie asked. Allen had kept the arm turned away from the boy.
“You don’t need to see this,” Allen told him.
“It’s only blood,” Jamie said, sounding remarkably calm. “I’ve seen blood before. I mean, I dressed out my own deer. Which is a whole lot messier than your arm.”
Allen met his eyes for a long moment, then handed over the gauze. Jamie got out of the truck and came around to the driver’s-side door, to have room to work. Allen shifted over to let him in behind the wheel, and lifted his arm away from his side.
The kid did indeed seem little troubled by the gore. He wrapped the sterile bandage around Allen’s arm, covering the entrance and the larger exit wounds firmly. Next, Allen handed him the T-shirt he’d bought, proclaiming the virtues of Tumwater, Washington, and watched the boy’s concentration as he covered the gauze with gray knit cotton. He wrapped the whole with another glove-box find, duct tape, then helped Allen thread the arm through his jacket. He still looked like a hunchback, but less like the sole survivor of a massacre. The boy got down and came back around the truck, and when in his seat, he reached back into the bag of purchases and pried open the bottle of Tylenol.
“You want two?” he asked.
“Better make it three, and I’ll have some more in a while.” That many aspirin and he’d be leaking down to his boots, but Tylenol didn’t thin blood the same way. He swallowed the pills and put his right arm through its jacket sleeve.
“Thank you,” he said. The boy merely nodded, and snapped the top back on the bottle.
Allen’s left arm was useless, which meant that he could either shift gears or steer, not both. There were several exciting moments on the tourist-clotted roads, but eventually the road veered west. Another twenty minutes, and he turned laboriously down a narrow drive leading toward the water.
That last mile nearly killed him. The bumps and jolts seemed to be ripping his arm right off his body, and the sounds he was making behind his gritted teeth had to be frightening the boy, but he couldn’t keep them back, couldn’t open his mouth to tell Jamie he would be okay, couldn’t do anything but endure and try not to pass out or drive off the track.
They came out from the trees and rounded a ramshackle building, and there was the water, sweet open water graced with the most beautiful boat in all the world, an old converted fishing boat in need of paint, the Orca Queen. Ed was already on his way up the dock, as near to a run as Allen had ever seen him, even the time when the goons belonging to the husband of Streak Rychenkow’s widow had been shooting at them. Allen applied the brakes without taking the truck out of gear, and the engine jerked and coughed itself into a stall. The silence was so profound, so perfect, Allen longed to sink into it like a warm bed.
Ed’s face, creased and brown, was at the truck window, then somehow the door was open. “Jesus, Allen, are you dead? You sure as shit look it.”
“Not quite,” Allen croaked.
“Can you walk?”
“Guess we’ll find out.” The old man reached in as if he was about to lift him out bodily, but before he could do that, Allen told him, “This is Jamie. If I bleed out on the way over, take him to Jerry.”
“You sure about that?”
Allen had never been less sure about anything in his life, but in the end, Jerry was all he had. Anyway, it was out of his hands now. “He’s expecting us,” he told Ed, but when the old boatman eased Allen from the cab, the world quivered and receded. He did not quite black out, but clung to Ed’s broad shoulders as they wavered down the strange dock onto the boat. Once on board, Ed hauled him belowdecks and draped him across a padded bench.
Allen heard Ed’s gravelly voice alternate with Jamie’s piping tones of childhood, but he couldn’t quite follow the conversation. It was all he could do not to roll onto the floor with the gentle pitch of the boat.
Ed swung up the stairs, and Jamie came over to Allen and propped several pillows against his free side, wedging him from falling. The boy even managed to work one under Allen’s head.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Your friend told me to keep you from passing out.”
“Old wives’ tale,” Allen muttered. Passing out would feel good about now.
“He said I should talk to you, keep you awake.” Allen felt Jamie’s gaze on him, and made an effort to open his eyes. “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Tell me a story.” Allen’s mother had read him stories, when he was sick one winter. He’d done the same for Jerry a few years later, after she had died. Wonder if Jer remembers me reading to him? Allen thought.
“I could tell you The Lord of the Rings,” Jamie offered.
“That’d be great.”
The sheer number of names made it impossible for Allen’s fuzzy mind to follow the story, but after Gandalf and Frodo and Sam, he didn’t try. It was pleasant, lying like a wet rag in Ed’s boat with a nervous juvenile reciting a long and confusing story. So much nicer than the last time he’d been shot, when the VC bullet had smashed into his leg and landed him in a knee-deep paddy. Buddies were great, but none of the guys had told him stories while they were waiting for the medevac. None of the nurses, either.
“You’d make a great nurse, Jamie,” he muttered.
The boy’s narrative faltered and died away. After a minute, Allen felt a presence above him and he opened his eyes again.
“It’s okay, Jamie. I’m not going to die on you.”
“I thought you were going to leave me.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No. I mean, back there, when I told you about Howard.”
“Jamie, Howard’s not your fault. And I don’t walk out on my responsibilities.”
A long pause followed, with Allen drifting far and wee. Then, in a voice so small the engines nearly drowned it out, Jamie told him, “My father used to drive away and leave me in the woods. In the cabin. It was so scary. Sometimes I cried—when I didn’t think he was coming back, and I thought I was going to die out there.”
Somehow Allen’s hand found Jamie’s, although whether he reached out or the boy had, he neither knew nor cared. He left his hand over Jamie’s all the way across. And he kept his eyes open.
Chapter 33
Allen’s eyes remained open, but his mind drifted in and out of awareness. What seemed like a couple of weeks later, he came fully awake with the sound of the boat’s engines backing and the sway of a maneuvering hull. It was still bright outside, but the light was that of late afternoon. He then realized that the small hand was no longer in his, and he battled a moment of panicky confusion—Jamie: gone. But no, the boy had been there minutes before, of that he was certain, and Ed would not have lost him during the crossing. It took a while for these thoughts to expand into a full awareness of his surroundings, but by then he had heard voices, and his mind was again occupying its place in the world.
He considered trying to sit up, but before he could do more than contemplate how difficult it was going to be, a sudden dip of the boat told him that someone had stepped on board, and in a few seconds the cabin darkened with a person coming down the steps. Two people, as it turned out: first Jerry, then an old man he helped steady down the stairs, a bent man who must have been in his eighties, carrying a black doctor’s bag. He set the bag down and pulled a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket, and with that gesture Allen recognized the neighbor, the surgeon who’d patched him together some twenty-five years before. The man had been retired then, for God’s sake.
“Christ, Weintraub, are you still alive?” he blurted out.
The old doctor wheezed a chuckle. “Seems to me I should say the same thing to you, young man. Let’s see what we’ve got here, before we try to move you.”
He took out a pair of scissors and briskly cut away clothes, duct tape, and bandages, pursing his lips at what lay beneath. With the help of Ed and Jerry, he got Allen onto his side so the entire shoulder was in sight. It hurt like holy hell; Allen wished he could just faint and get out of it, but it didn’t work that way.
“I admit I’m no expert, Sheriff, but that looks like a gunshot wound to me,” the old surgeon said, although he did not sound terribly worried at the fact. Allen opened one eye to see his brother’s reaction; incredibly, he too seemed more concerned at the injury than the source of it.
“You can’t report it,” Allen wheezed. “I’ll explain, but you can’t.”
“Yes, your brother rather figured that would be the case,” the doctor said, and began digging quantities of gauze from his bag.
It was still full daylight outside, and the weather was good enough for people to be around. Moving Allen down the dock and into the house on a stretcher would draw some beachgoer’s attention. He could stay where he was until dark, or they could try to get him more or less upright. Everyone there wanted the latter, if possible. Allen thought it might be.
“If I can lean on you,” he said to his brother, “anyone who sees will just think I’m drunk.” And if they knew Allen well enough to recognize him, they’d know his history well enough not to be astonished at his condition. “But you can’t risk having Jamie spotted.”
“The boy can stay on board until nightfall,” Ed offered. “We’ll go find us an Orca pod, come back when it’s full dark.”
“That okay with you, Jamie?” Allen asked.
The boy shrugged. The doctor’s gentle hands wrapped up Allen’s shoulder, and once he was sitting upright, the doctor taped his arm securely against his chest. Then Jerry draped one of Ed’s old shirts over the bandages, and he and Ed lifted Allen to his feet. With his right arm around his brother’s shoulders, Allen managed to negotiate the steps and the side of the boat onto the dock. Jamie remained in the cabin while Ed followed the staggering Carmichaels; halfway up the dock, Allen stopped him.
“Ed, you better go back with the kid. And look, keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere near your radio.”
That was all he said, but Ed immediately turned back, casting off and hopping back on board with the ease of a young man. The Orca Queen’s engines growled to life, and the boat pulled away into the privacy of open water.
Rather than try to carry Allen up the stairs, Jerry eased his brother onto the TV room sofa. Then the arguments commenced. Doctor Weintraub insisted that Allen had lost so much blood he had to be transfused, in a hospital, and only backed down when Allen told him that if he went into a hospital, that kid on the boat might die. The doctor looked his disbelief at Allen, but he did not speak it, merely then speculating aloud on how he might arrange a transfusion on his own. Jerry offered his own blood (which was, in fact, the same type as Allen’s) but Allen put an end to it all by pointing out that if the good doctor would just do something to stop the bleeding now, before the last of his blood leaked out on the floor, his own body would soon enough make up the difference. “Jerry can feed me steaks three times a day,” he said.
“Not on a sheriff’s salary,” Jerry objected, but at any rate, the doctor turned from argument to treatment. He continued to object, saying that Allen needed an X ray, but when Allen asked him what he would do if the bone proved to be cracked, he admitted that unless it was actually broken, which it didn’t seem
to be, all medical science would do was give him a sling and wrap it firmly, which he would do anyway.
At the end of it, stitched and strapped and woozy from blood loss and painkillers, Allen stretched out on the scruffy old sofa and listened to his brother, thanking old Weintraub and shutting the door. Jerry’s footsteps went past the television room to the kitchen; he rattled around for a while, then made a phone call. He seemed to be checking in with his colleagues, because Allen heard him say that he’d be at home that night if Bobby needed him. There followed some more rattling, accompanied by the odor of frying onions. In a while, his head poked around the door; seeing Allen awake, he came in all the way, carrying a pair of plates.
Jerry had produced the traditional Carmichael bachelor’s meal of Joe’s Special: fried onions and hamburger with spinach added, then a couple of eggs broken over the whole mess to glue it together. Allen gulped the food like a starving dog. Jerry took his empty plate out to the kitchen and brought it back with the dried-up dregs from the pan, and Allen polished that off as well.
“Iron, you know,” Jerry said, amused. “It’s supposed to build up the blood.”
“I love you, Jerry,” Allen said, intending a jest, although it didn’t quite come out that way. Must be the painkillers, he thought.
Jerry cleared the plates away, came back with coffee, arranged a couple of pillows to support Allen’s head, then shifted one of the armchairs until it faced the sofa and sat down in it.
“So, what kind of a mess have you gotten yourself into?”
“This is going to take a long time, Jer.”
“Took you long enough to get into it,” Jerry said over his cup. “Thirty years or so? Let’s see how far you get explaining before you pass out.”
It had to be done sequentially, and thoroughly, or else not at all. So he had to begin with Vietnam, and a good man with a white streak in his dark hair and a penchant for privacy when it came to his life back in The World. He talked about The Wolf and the squad and friendly fire in a muddy river—but not Brennan. He didn’t want to tell Jerry about Brennan, ever. But the rest of it, yes, because only within the context of Vietnam could what Allen had done seven years later for Streak’s widow even begin to make sense, and only when that adventure was explained did the rest of it follow: the letter that had reached him a year later from the Rychenkow widow, concerning a woman she’d met in the shelter whose husband had framed her in order to gain custody of their three children. And after that, a similar problem, and eventually his association with a group that existed solely to help women and their children when the law could not. He was careful to use no identifying names or places—Jerry might well turn him in when this was all over, and he’d be damned if he was going to give up Alice and the others as well—but Jerry didn’t push, didn’t even ask many questions, only those necessary for clarity. And if he noticed the number of times his brother failed to mention the name of his coconspirator with a boat, he did not ask about that, either, he just nodded and grunted and made more coffee.