The Man Who Risked His Partner

  Which answered one question. He wasn’t here because of what I’d done. He must’ve already been on his way when Haskell and I went to his house. That gave me a queer useless sense of relief.

  Unfortunately, Ginny didn’t miss the other implications. “Don’t tell me,” she retorted fiercely. “Let me guess. You were going to say the only reason he came here and tried to kill us all was because you snatched his girlfriend. He was just an innocent bystander until you made him mad. By the way, that was brilliant, Axbrewder. Real genius. Sawdust is smarter. But never mind. It isn’t true. He didn’t know you took his girlfriend until you told him.”

  Now it was my turn not to look at her. I couldn’t stand it. Instead I concentrated on Novick. Both Canthorpe and Haskell watched me with varying degrees of alarm and hope, but I ignored them.

  “Novick,” I said through his cursing, “listen for a minute. Bite your tongue and listen. This is your life we’re talking about. Years of hard time for attempted murder. Listen.”

  “Go fuck yourself, pendejo. I’m so scared I shit my pants.”

  “I know. You’re as tough as a Glock. Listen anyway. Someone has been trying to kill Haskell for two days now. Three attempts so far. Obviously it was you the third time. But what about the other two? Should we pin those on you as well?”

  From my point of view, that was the crucial question. I thought I knew the answer. But I couldn’t risk putting words in his mouth. And if he refused to say it—if he decided to play belligerent all the way to the state pen—then I was stuck.

  But apparently he didn’t like being blamed for things he didn’t do. “Yeah, asshole,” he spat. “I can think of a reason. I didn’t know his fucking name before you told me. Gail called him Reg. She never told me who he was. She didn’t want him killed. You told me Haskell.” Triumph glittered in his wild eyes. “I looked him up in the phone book.”

  But Ginny wasn’t having any. “That’s a crock. He’s lying. Why not? What’s he got to lose?”

  Somehow I forced myself to face the fever of her alarm. She looked like she was being eaten alive from the inside.

  “It’s true,” I insisted dully. “I told him Haskell’s name. I didn’t know—” But as soon as I said it, I could see that I’d made a mistake.

  “He couldn’t have booby-trapped the Buick last night. And he wasn’t—”

  She cut me off. “I’m not going to argue with you. You’re out of your head. You need professional help. Novick tried to kill us, and we caught him. With a little research, the cops can prove Canthorpe hired him. We’ve done our job. It’s over. I don’t care how many dumb mistakes you’ve made, or how responsible you feel. It’s over. As soon as the cops get here—”

  “Ginny—”

  “—this case is closed.”

  I opened my mouth, but she didn’t let me speak.

  “Shut up, Brew. You’ve said enough. I don’t want to hear any more. You had better sense when you were a drunk.”

  Abruptly she wrenched herself to her feet, scooping her .357 off the carpet as she stood up. Maybe without realizing it, she pointed the gun at my stomach.

  To Haskell she said, “You’ll get my bill in the morning.”

  He threw up his hands. “I should’ve fired you this afternoon while I was thinking about it,” he muttered angrily. “I changed my mind because I thought I could trust you. I thought you were too stupid to stumble onto the truth. And I thought you were honest enough to stick with me. I was wrong both times.”

  “Ginny.” I had to lock both fists to keep myself from howling. “God damn it, it wasn’t Novick in the car that tried to nail us this afternoon.”

  She actually tightened her grip on the .357. “You bastard.” Her voice shook. “What makes you so sure?”

  “I was there, remember?” I couldn’t help it, I was shouting at her. “He’s too tall, too thin! And he’s in love with that fucking M-16. The goon in the car had a shotgun.”

  “He probably has a shotgun,” she fired back. “He probably has one of every gun known to man. And he was in a car. Aiming a shotgun at you. You couldn’t tell how tall or thin he was.”

  I wanted to hit myself in the head, just to make her stop. “I saw him. It wasn’t Novick.”

  “What kind of car does Novick drive?” Haskell asked. “Maybe it wasn’t the same car.”

  Ginny ignored him. “You saw him,” she said like she was threatening me. “Sure you saw him. I bet you couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or a woman.”

  I just stared at her for a second. Then I said, “You know better than that.”

  “I do?” Something inside her seemed to snap, and all at once she sounded almost cheerful. Completely out of her skull. “Let’s go outside.” She waggled her gun at my stomach. “I’ll prove it to you.” A wild smile lit her face. “I’ll prove you couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman from ten feet away.”

  Suddenly my throat felt too dry to talk, and my heart knocked against my rib cage. Ginny, I thought. Oh my God.

  Her cheerfulness only lasted a few seconds. When I didn’t respond, her expression turned savage. Before I could defend myself, she stepped forward and poked my stomach with the muzzle of her gun. “I said, let’s go outside.”

  The way I saw it, I only had two choices. I could take the .357 away and hit her until she got her sanity back. Or I could do what she told me.

  I did what she told me. With a shrug, I crossed the atrium to the front door. Unlocked it. Opened it.

  All the outside lights were on. I could see everything.

  Alerted by the noise of the door, and the sound of my shoes on the cement walk, a man came out of the snow around one of the cedars into the other end of the aisle.

  I recognized him right away.

  Short and squat, roughly the size and shape of an Abrams tank. Muscle bulging on him everywhere made him look like he’d been packed into his coat at a sausage plant. A hairline mustache under his nose tried to humanize his face, but his protruding eyes insisted that he was actually a reptile.

  I’d had a run-in with him once. It still gave me nightmares.

  El Senor’s bodyguard. Muy Estobal.

  He looked surprised. He hadn’t expected me. But he didn’t let that stop him.

  Immediately his right hand emerged from the pocket of his overcoat, holding a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38. The lights lit the snow behind him so that he stood against a background of swirling white bits as if the world were going to pieces.

  While I struggled to claw the .45 out of its holster, he started shooting.

  Something that felt like a cannonball punched through my belly, slammed me off my feet. The jolt when I hit turned all my bones to powder.

  I heard Ginny yell behind me. Then she began to lay down fire in the aisle as if she’d lost her mind.

  19

  For what seemed like a long time, or maybe it was short, I was in no condition to keep an eye on my watch, I thought I was conscious when I really wasn’t. I must’ve been unconscious because I missed all the transitions.

  When I landed on the walkway, it turned out to be a hospital gurney in a hurry, and Ginny and Muy Estobal had transformed themselves into people wearing green robes and caps. Except the gurney was a big bed with high railings all around it, and curtains hanging from runners in the ceiling to surround the bed replaced the white corridor walls. The people in green holding me down by both arms looked suspiciously like IV stands with tubes that disappeared into layers of tape around my forearms.

  But it didn’t feel like being unconscious. It felt like walking wide-awake and terrified onto the business end of a harpoon, and then standing there helpless while someone stirred my guts to soup with the blade.

  At first it was nothing except red-gray pain combined with one long scream driven like a spike through the center of the world. My only problem was I needed stomach muscles to scream, and I didn’t have any. Eventually, however, I became more lucid. Lucid enough to count every single
nerve cell torn apart by Estobal’s bullet. The pain was impossibly precise.

  Nevertheless, I lost track after a while. By degrees I came to understand that I hadn’t been shot at all. Oh, no—nothing that tidy and manageable. I’d been blown up. Like my rented Buick. With that poor innocent kid inside. It was always the innocent who got roasted. And it was always people like me who saw the danger too late to save them.

  No question about it, I was having all kinds of fun.

  But what I knew most clearly—knew with the utter certainty and conviction that only comes to you when you’re drunk or crazy, all the way off your rocker with booze or grief—was that I didn’t have time for this.

  The night held only so many hours, and they were getting away from me. There were people I needed to talk to. Information dealers. Two old men drinking together in an odd and half-unreconciled partnership because they were too old and too tired to compete with each other. Until two, when the dives in the old part of town which welcomed and even honored grizzled muchachos like themselves closed, they would follow their exact and unpredictable circuit from place to place, receiving and dispensing knowledge in their relatively humble area of expertise, earning themselves bottles of indifferent mescal with what they knew or could deduce. After that, for maybe an hour or two—or less, considering the snow—they would go to that cheap little park on Tin Street and finish their last bottle together. The same place where I used to spend the nights and wait for Ginny. And then they would be gone. They would evaporate into the dwindling night, disappear so completely that you would never be able to prove they even existed.

  I needed to talk to them. I needed to reach the old part of town and find them and talk to them before time ran out. I couldn’t afford to lie around like a side of beef in an abattoir and let the night get away from me.

  When I finally pried my eyes open and saw Ginny near the head of the bed, I tried to explain. But my mouth and throat were so dry I couldn’t dredge up anything more than a croak. That held me back long enough to realize that I couldn’t say anything to her. If I did, she would refuse to help me. Simply because I’d been hurt, she would refuse.

  In my condition, I didn’t have the strength to tell her why she was wrong.

  When she heard the strangling noises I made instead of conversation, she leaned over the bed. Her fingers stroked my face, running gently around the marks Gail Harmon had made on my cheeks. “Mick Axbrewder,” she said, even though no one calls me Mick, not even her, “you look awful.” I couldn’t focus my eyes on her face, but her voice had a damp blurred sound, like tears. “I did this to you.”

  That didn’t make sense. With an effort, I twisted my croaking until it sounded a bit more like words.

  “Where am I?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” She tried to be comforting. Maybe she even tried to smile. “You’ve done enough for one night. Everything is taken care of. Just relax and get some rest.”

  I persisted. What else could I do? “What time is it?”

  “Late. You got out of surgery half an hour ago. You were lucky again. Anybody else would be dead by now. Or have their internal organs seriously damaged. Not you. That slug just tore up your guts a bit.”

  She sounded brittle and lonely, like a woman standing on the edge of a wasteland. But she fought to put a good face on it.

  “The doctor told me more than I wanted to know. Somehow the slug missed your lungs, your kidneys, and your liver. And it didn’t hit bone going in, so it didn’t mushroom. You’re in surprisingly good shape. You’ll hurt like hell for a while. Then you’ll be all right.”

  Damn woman. She couldn’t possibly know what I was thinking about, but she still wouldn’t give me a straight answer. For a minute there, frustration and pain made me so mad that I wept.

  She leaned on the rail of the bed, holding one of my forearms with her good hand. “Brew,” she said softly, “I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I was so fucking determined to prove you were wrong about the driver of that Cadillac. I needed to believe Haskell was still lying. I couldn’t think about anything else. So I set you up to get shot at point-blank range.”

  Her voice bit in like the edge of a saw, ripping across the grain of her self-respect. Luckily, I still couldn’t focus on her face clearly. God knows how bad she looked.

  “When I saw Estobal there and he started shooting—when you went down—

  “We should never have taken this case.”

  Well, maybe. But it didn’t matter. I was running out of time. And I didn’t know how to get through to her. And one of those IVs fed stuff into my veins that made me want to sleep for three or four weeks. So far the pain was all that kept me awake—and that had started to fade.

  I tried again. “Where am I?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “I used to think I was tough,” she murmured, far away with hurt. “Mentally, not physically. I used to think my mind could stand anything. I never knew I was so dependent on my hands. When I finally understood I was never going to get my hand back, and the best I could hope for was a prosthetic device that made me look like I was only half human, not a person at all, never mind how I looked as a woman—”

  She caught herself, the words like barbs in her throat. “Something went out of me. Whatever it was that held me together. And I discovered I wasn’t tough at all. I’ve been using you to carry me ever since.” Softly she swore at herself—vicious, down-to-the-marrow curses, swearing to hold back the grief. “We never should’ve taken this case.”

  I wanted to scream at her. Silly of me. I didn’t have the stomach for it. The whole situation was getting away from me. Hell, even consciousness was getting away from me. I could hardly remember what was so important to me.

  As clearly as I could, I croaked, “I don’t care about that. What time is it?”

  Her reaction sent a quiver through the bed. Pieces of something wet landed on my face, trickled down my cheeks. “Fuck you, Axbrewder,” she said stiffly. But then she softened. She stroked my face again, spreading the wet around. “Ah, hell. They’ve got you so doped up, you probably can’t understand a word I say. We’ll talk about it later.”

  That was a lie, and I knew it. The loss in her voice made it obvious. She would never talk about this again.

  “In the meantime, you’re not going anywhere.” Now she was trying to be kind. “This one”—she pointed at the IV on my left, a large plastic packet full of fluid—“replaces the blood you lost That one”—the other IV—“is your medication—antibiotics to fight off peritonitis, dope for the pain, sedatives, nourishment. You’re going to spend a lot of time asleep.”

  I was going to scream, pain or no pain. But at last she took pity on me.

  “But if it will help you rest,” she sighed, “you’re in recovery at University Hospital. It’s a little after ten thirty. The nurses will check on you in an hour or so. If you’re stable, they’ll transfer you to a room. You’ll have a private room. All those hospitalization premiums I’ve been paying have got to be good for something.”

  Involuntarily I groaned. University Hospital was too far from the old part of town. I couldn’t possibly walk—

  “I’m sorry, Brew,” she said contritely. “The doctor warned me not to keep you awake. I’ll leave now. If you need me, I’ll be in the waiting room. I’ll see you again after they transfer you to your room.”

  She seemed to be receding. Or maybe it was me. Wandering away from consciousness to find the real source of my pain. The bed had a distinct tendency to float. But I couldn’t just let go. That would be too easy. Easier than anything. Even the road to hell.

  “Ginny,” I croaked like the damned. “Wait.”

  She didn’t exactly come back into range, but at least she stopped receding.

  “What happened to Haskell?”

  She wanted to treat me kindly, but our client wasn’t a subject that brought out her gentle side. “He got lucky,” she rasped. “If you hadn’t been bleeding like a geyser, I would’ve r
edesigned his vital organs for him. If he’d told us the truth from the beginning—” She stopped herself. “As it was, I was too busy. And Acton got there before the ambulance did. I turned the whole mess over to him—Haskell, Canthorpe, Novick, everything. We’re out of it. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  Wait a minute, I wanted to say. It isn’t that simple. Haskell’s story about Chavez changed everything. As soon as it got around, Haskell’s case would be turned over to Cason. Which would be like flushing the whole thing down the toilet.

  Ginny had never flushed a case down the toilet in her life.

  My lucidity was amazing, especially when you consider that Ginny—in fact, the whole room—had disappeared. I must’ve been three-quarters unconscious while I watched ideas and possibilities walk back and forth in front of me, as primed for violence as assassins or rapists. But somehow I forced my eyes open again. Somehow I shoved my left arm across my chest and used those thick fumbling fingers to pull the IV needle out of my right forearm.

  I couldn’t afford to screw up now. Absolutely not.

  Concentrating fiercely, I slipped the needle back under the bandages so that it looked like it was still plugged into my veins. If a nurse glanced at those bandages, saw what I’d done—

  The exertion took everything I had left. When I was done, the bed tipped over and pitched me out into the black middle of the night.

  But it worked. Sweet Christ my stomach oh the pain it worked. I wasn’t getting any more painkillers or sedatives, and the unintentional jostling when the nurses and aides eased me out of the ICU bed onto a gurney roused me in a sweat of agony. This definitely wasn’t sane. Nevertheless, after the first groan I managed to keep myself quiet and limp. My guts hung out in shreds, but if I couldn’t fake being relaxed and practically asleep, the nurses would wonder why I was in so much pain and check the IV.

  I was never going to have the courage to pull that same stupid stunt twice in one night.

  Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your point of view—nurses and aides are human, too, and they’ve been known to get tired and maybe even a little careless in the middle of the night. None of them noticed that my IV oozed into my bandages instead of dripping into my veins. Instead they gave me an elevator ride for three or four hundred floors, wheeled me along a few miles of corridor, and finally shunted me into a room.