Текст книги "Dearly Departed"

Автор книги: David Housewright

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

I plucked the joint from the taller teenager’s mouth, dropped it to the ground, and squashed it beneath my heel. I’ve seen what drugs do to people, I’ve seen it up close and personal, and I’m no fan. Anyone who tells me grass should be legalized gets it right in the neck. They argue that alcohol is worse. Maybe so. But you can have a drink or two without getting drunk. You can have a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers at the ball game and not be any worse off for it. But you can’t smoke a joint without getting high. And after a while you crave a higher high. Then a higher one still. Pretty soon you want to be up there all the time, until you crash and burn. Not everyone, no. But enough. I’ve seen them. I’ve arrested them.

The teenager stared defiantly, wondering what to do about me until his companion whispered to him, “Narc.” They both smiled nervously and walked away without looking back. I did the same, retreating to The Height until the rallies broke up and King Koehn returned to his office.

Ingrid was wearing a white shirtdress with gold buttons that matched the color of her hair. She was sitting at a table with a calculator, ledger book, and a few dozen invoices stacked neatly in front of her. “We’re closed until eleven,” she told me without taking the pencil out of her mouth.

“My name is Holland Taylor,” I announced, giving her a look at my ID. “Do you remember me?”

She looked at the stamp-sized photo and then at me. “Gretchen’s friend,” she said, taking the pencil from her mouth. “Good to see you again.” She offered her hand. I took it, probably held it too long—a soft, pleasant current of electricity passed through it into me, and I didn’t want to let it go.

“Do you have a moment?”

“Not really,” she said, gesturing at her paperwork. “I’m trying to finish up before the rallies end. I’m hoping for a good lunch crowd. Give me twenty minutes?”

“Sure.”

“Ginger!” she called.

A woman poked her head up from behind the stick like she had been squatting there, listening for her cue. “Ingrid,” she answered back.

“Take care of Mr. Taylor, here, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Twenty minutes,” Ingrid repeated, then went back to her calculations.

Ginger motioned me closer to the bar and asked, “What’s your pleasure?”

“Summit Ale?”

I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Sorry.”

“What do you have on tap?”

“Pig’s Eye pilsner—”

I raised my hand quickly to stop her recitation. “Sold,” I said. A moment later she slid a glass of beer in front of me. Pig’s Eye pilsner was named for one of St. Paul, Minnesota’s, more colorful founding citizens, Pig’s Eye Parrant, a rumrunner and all-around scoundrel who had settled in the area when it was still populated almost exclusively by Native-Americans and fur traders. In fact, the city was actually known as Pig’s Eye Landing for many years until a visiting priest decided the name was politically incorrect.

Ginger returned with my beer, and I asked her if she knew Michael Bettich. Waitresses can be a terrific resource for information, especially waitresses in small towns who can actually put a name and occupation to the face of the customers they serve, who are aware of the emotions at the tables they’re waiting. They know when a farmer is having a bad year, when a customer’s balloon mortgage is coming due, when the weather is making people weird; they can point out the customers who are dating for the first time, who are escaping from the kids for an evening, who want to kill each other. Ginger proved to be more knowledgeable than I had hoped and happy to share.

“Michael Bettich? Sure. Deputy Gretchen’s pal. We don’t see much of her these days.”

I took the photograph of Alison out of my pocket and showed it to her.

“Yep, that’s her,” Ginger confirmed. “I think she’s prettier in person.”

“You say you don’t see much of her anymore?” I asked.

“Nah. This gambling thing has emotions running pretty high. I think she’s trying to keep a low profile. Especially around Ingrid.”

“Why?”

“I guess because she might become Ingrid’s chief competitor.”

Have you ever felt like you’ve just walked in at the middle of a movie?

“I don’t understand,” I said, and my face probably showed it.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Ginger said and laughed. “Okay, here’s the story. There’s this resort called The Harbor. Mostly it’s a restaurant, but they have plenty of space for campers and such, and you can dock your boat, okay? Anyway, it went broke. The lake it’s on, Lake Peterson, had winter kill some years back and lost all its fish. The DNR restocked it, but rebuilding a fish population takes years. Besides, it’s way out on the highway, and hardly anyone went there. Somehow King Koehn got stuck with it—The Harbor, not the lake—and he’s been trying to unload it for years. Now, along comes Michael, and she buys it for—I don’t know—ten cents on the dollar. People tell her it’s a bad investment, but she buys it anyway.”

I took a long pull of my beer as Ginger continued.

“Now, the next day—I mean like the very next day after the deal is done—word leaks out that the local band of Ojibwa is, like, ultrasecretly trying to buy the old civic center from the Kreel County Board of Commissioners—I guess to revamp into an off-reservation gambling casino.”

“You guess?”

“Well, they haven’t actually come out and said it, the Ojibwa I mean, but that’s what everyone thinks. Why else would they want it?”

“What does the civic center have to do with Alison?”

“Huh?”

“I mean Michael.”

“The Harbor?” Ginger asked. “Because it’s … Okay, here’s the rest of the story. When the county decided to build the civic center as a way to generate convention business, there was a big fight over where it should be located, in Saginau or Deer Lake. The board settled on a compromise. They decided to build the civic center on a lake midway between the two towns.”

“Lake Peterson,” I volunteered.

“There you go,” said Ginger. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Only it didn’t do any better than The Harbor.”

“How close is the civic center to The Harbor?”

“Directly across the highway.”

“My, my, my, my, my.”

“Get it now?”

“Uh-uh.”

Ginger sighed, exasperated.

“You don’t think having a casino across the way isn’t going to be good for business?” she asked. “That’s why Michael is keeping a low profile. ’Cuz everyone is mad at her.”

“Who? Why?”

Again Ginger sighed. “Okay, let me count the ways,” she said. “You’ve got your King Koehn, who figures Michael stole The Harbor out from under him, like, unethically, using inside information—”

“Did she?”

“You got Charlie Otterness,” Ginger continued as if she didn’t want to be interrupted. “Charlie owns a bait-and-tackle store outside of town. Big place; you want minnows and stuff, you go to Charlie’s. Charlie is also a Kreel County commissioner. And he’s a widower who rumor has it—now, I’m not one to gossip, but rumor has it he was keeping time with Michael until the day she bought The Harbor and now has nothing nice to say about her.”

“Charlie told Michael about the impending sale,” I guessed.

“It’s amazing what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Oops,” Ginger added, making a dramatic gesture out of putting her hand over her mouth. “Did I say that?”

She laughed and I smiled, but I wasn’t feeling particularly happy. Alison sleeping with a county commissioner to get inside information? I didn’t want to hear that.

“Stupid! People are stupid!”

Ginger and I both turned toward the door. A tall, thin, bearded man dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and an ANIMALS ’R US button, glanced at us and then looked away.

“Hello, Mr. Thilgen,” Ginger said.

“Do you know how stupid people are?” Thilgen asked loudly. Ginger went along, playing straight man.

“How stupid are they?”

“They’re so stupid, they’re out there arguing about gambling, about gambling casinos, but they refuse to see the big picture.”

“The big picture?”

“The environment.”

“Ahh, yes. The environment.”

“Don’t you care about the environment? Are you stupid, too? Are you one of the stupid people?”

Ginger took a deep breath and did not reply. Thilgen seated himself in the restaurant section. Ingrid smiled at him, gathered her materials, and disappeared behind a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

Thilgen was obviously well-known and not particularly popular. The waitresses flipped a coin to determine who would serve him; the loser demanded two out of three.

“Nobody cares about the animals,” Thilgen continued. “They’re going to widen the roads and cut down the trees to make room for parking lots and bring their foul-smelling cars in here and their human pollution. Well, what about the animals, is what I want to know. What about the deer and the woodchucks? Nobody asked them if they want a gambling casino. Oh, no! They’re expendable. So what if we destroy the wetlands, the habitats. So what if we turn Lake Peterson into a landfill. Just as long as everyone makes, a buck, screw the animals, forget the environment.”

A waitress handed Thilgen a menu and hurried off, not bothering to list the daily specials, not taking a drink order.

“Damn Indians,” he continued. “Indians, not Native-Americans! Indians and their damn dirty money. They’re supposed to be protecting the environment. Noble savages—yeah, sure! General Sheridan was right. The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Ingrid, coming back through the door, had obviously heard him. She was visibly upset.

“I won’t have that kind of talk in my place,” she told Thilgen, her eyes flashing. “Do you understand?”

“Kill the Indians, and kill that Bettich bitch who’s ruining Lake Peterson!” he replied even more loudly, as if daring her to do something about it.

“Get out, Chip,” Ingrid said, moving to his table.

“People are so stupid,” he added.

“So I’ve been told,” Ingrid replied, pushing a chair out of her way, nearly knocking it over. “Get out.”

Chip Thilgen refused to leave his chair. He looked at her across the table and smiled like he owned the place and she was the intruder.

“Make me,” he said.

I figured that was my cue. I left the bar with every intention of offering aid and assistance, but before I had taken three steps, Ingrid was leaning over the table, her arms supporting her weight, and speaking to Thilgen in a voice too low for me to hear. But Thilgen heard her—oh, man, did he. The blood ran out of his face, and his eyes became large and still. Ingrid stepped back, and Thilgen rose on shaky legs. His fists were clenched, yet he seemed more frightened than angry.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” he said softly.

“Put a sock in it,” Ingrid told him.

Thilgen headed to the door, moving slowly enough to prove he wasn’t running but quickly enough to get the job done.

“You’ll see,” he called over his shoulder as he left. “I’m not someone to mess with.”

“Neither am I,” Ingrid said softly before she disappeared back behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY door.

I returned to my table and looked over at Ginger.

“That’s three people who are upset with Michael,” I said. “Who is he?” I asked.

“Mr. Chips?” Ginger asked. “Thinks of himself as an animal-rights activist. They say he sometimes liberates farm animals– cows and hens and horses. That’s what the activists call it when they sneak onto someone’s farm at night and let the livestock go free. Liberations. Only no one has caught him at it yet. I know some farmers, they say if they do catch him, they’re gonna shoot him.”

“So, who else?” I asked.

“What?”

“Who else doesn’t like Michael?”

“Well, there’s Ingrid.”

At the sound of her name, Ingrid reentered the dining area and hung a left for the bar. “What about Ingrid?” she asked.

“You don’t like Michael,” Ginger said.

Ingrid snorted a very ladylike snort—an Audrey Hepburn-like snort—and said, “I like Michael just fine.”

“You do not,” Ginger insisted.

“I’ve liked her from the moment Gretchen introduced us,” Ingrid argued. “What’s not to like? Very smart woman, very charming.”

“She’ll probably wreck your business when the casino opens.”

Ingrid smiled and shook her head at the theory.

“Not going to happen,” she said defiantly.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Several reasons,” she answered, turning her brilliant smile on me. “Want to hear them?”

“Sure.”

“First, for the Ojibwa to operate a casino out of the Kreel County Civic Center, the land the center is built on must first be put into the name of the U.S. government. Then, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the government must put the land in trust for the tribe, making it part of their reservation—and that’s just not going to happen. The issue has been too divisive. Deer Lake is pretty much fifty-fifty on it, and Saginau is the same; that’s what the protests are all about. What politician is going to take up the Ojibwa’s cause knowing he’s going to alienate half of his constituency?”

“That’s what they said about The Forks down the road, and the Ojibwa built that casino,” Ginger reminded Ingrid. But Ingrid ignored her.

“Also,” she continued, “King Koehn is against it, and he carries a lot of weight. You want to get elected in northwestern Wisconsin, you pretty much need his support.”

“Why is King against it?” I asked.

“If he still owned The Harbor, he wouldn’t be,” Ginger suggested.

“You’re probably right,” Ingrid agreed. “He’s not so much against the casino as he’s against Michael. Michael worked with King for a short time, watching over his investments. After a few months she offers to take The Harbor off his hands. He sells. News leaks out about how the Ojibwa might be considering a new casino—”

Ginger rolled her eyes at the word “might.”

“—and King claims he’s been cheated and throws Michael out,” Ingrid continued.

“Was he cheated?” I asked.

“Depends on your interpretation,” Ingrid reasoned. “King claims Michael was his employee and therefore obligated to inform him whenever she learned about a good business opportunity. Michael claims that she was not King’s employee, that she was operating her own business and merely providing a service to King, and was therefore free to seize any opportunity she wished. Me? I’m on Michael’s side.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ginger insisted. “The casino is a done deal.”

“I promise you it is not,” Ingrid told her.

Knowing her boss considerably longer than I, Ginger must have seen signals in Ingrid’s body language that I had missed because she smiled broadly and said, “You know something, don’t you? What?”

“Me?” Ingrid asked. “I’m just a saloonkeeper. What do I know?” Then, to change the subject, she beat a quick riff on the bar top and said, “So, Mr. Taylor. -What brings you back to Deer Lake? Come to see Gretchen?”

“No,” I replied. “Actually, I came to see Michael Bettich.”

“Hmm?”

“You know where I can find her?”

“She used to stay with Gretchen, but I think she moved out,” Ingrid said.

“A few months ago,” Ginger confirmed.

“Where to?”

Neither of them seemed to know. But Ginger had a suggestion.

“Have you tried The Harbor?”

seventeen

The Harbor was all blond wood and glass, surrounded by a gravel parking lot on one side and Lake Peterson on the other; wooden platforms where patrons could dock their boats extended into the water. At the far end of the parking lot were several slots for RVs, each with a bank of water faucets and electrical outlets protruding from the ground. A worn asphalt driveway led past the slots down to the lake, where a sign asked drivers not to block the boat landing with their vehicles. A half dozen pickups and 4X4s were bunched together in the lot.

“Is this it, Alison?” I heard myself ask as I parked my car. “Is this why you faked your death? So you could build a drive-by resort on a mud lake in rural Wisconsin? Is this your dream?”

A moment later I had to duck beneath a plank suspended between two ladders just inside the door. Three men stood on the makeshift scaffold, all of them examining a clump of multicolored wires hanging down from a false ceiling. Another pair was studying a floor duct on the other side of the room. A sixth man was crouched behind the bar, working on a sink, softly humming a country-western tune from the Hank Williams catalog as he fixed a heavy pipe wrench against a fitting.

“Excuse me,” I said.

He turned his head but did not stop working.

“Is Michael Bettich here?”

He shook his head.

“Expect her anytime soon?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“Know where I can find her?”

He shook his head again. “Not my turn to watch her,” he told me, trying to turn the fitting, meeting stubborn resistance.

“It’s important that I find her.”

“Not to me,” he replied, grunting loudly as the fitting slowly turned.

The other workers were equally helpful.

I returned to my car and sat with the door open while listening to the public radio station out of the University of Minnesota-Duluth—the only station I could dial up that played jazz. After two songs I shut the door and fired up the Colt, deciding against waiting for Michael’s return.

“It shouldn’t be this hard, it really shouldn’t,” I muttered.

It wasn’t.

Just as I was about to put my car into gear, a Chevy Blazer cruised into the lot sporting all the paraphernalia of a police vehicle; KREEL COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and a six-pointed star were stenciled on both doors. It was driven by Deputy Gretchen Rovick. Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was her passenger. She had changed the color of her hair from brown to a deep auburn—women have always found it easier to change their appearance than men—but even through the windshield, her blue-green eyes were undisguisable.

I stepped out of my car as the vehicle stopped. Gretchen took a hard look at me. She clearly didn’t like what she saw.

“What?” Alison asked. I couldn’t hear her, but it was easy enough to read her lips through the glass.

“Taylor,” Gretchen answered.

Alison seemed genuinely surprised that I had found her.

I waited until they exited the vehicle.

“Good morning, Deputy,” I said to Gretchen. She didn’t reply. I turned to the other woman. Ginger had been right. She was much prettier in person. “Alison Donnerbauer Emerton, I presume. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Alison smiled slightly. “I must have screwed up.”

I told her where. She tapped her forehead with the fingers of her right hand as if to punish herself for her carelessness. “I’d forgotten I told Marie about the name Rosalind Colletti,” she confessed.

“We all make mistakes.”

“And this one is going to cost me, isn’t it? How much?”

A bribe? I thought it was beneath her and told her so. “Besides, I’m already being well paid.”

“What then? What will make you go away?”

“Tell me why, that’s all. Tell me why you went to all the trouble.” I was desperate to hear her explanation, and it probably showed.

She smiled at me; it was a superior smile. “It’s a long story, and quite frankly I see no reason to share it with you.”

Gretchen chuckled. She was leaning on the front fender of her Blazer, watching us.

“I could make your life difficult,” I told Alison.

She smiled some more. A threat? She thought it was beneath me and told me so.

I was contemplating a reply—and getting nowhere—when a desperate squeal of tires captured my attention. A white Buick Regal was cutting across the parking lot at high speed, spitting chunks of gravel and an impressive dust cloud behind it. Two men I couldn’t identify sat in the front seat. Suddenly the car skidded to a stop thirty yards in front of us. The passenger was holding something at arm’s length and pointing it out of the window.

“Down!” I screamed and tried to pull Alison to the ground.

Alison pushed me away and stood up, watching me and not the car, asking angrily, “What are you doing?!”

Bullets were already flying. Gretchen took a slug in the leg. The force of the blow spun her against the side of the Blazer and knocked her down. I rolled away from the Buick, more or less toward the Blazer; and rolled over a Smith and Wesson .38—Gretchen’s gun. I grabbed it with both hands and continued rolling until I was on my feet in a Weaver stance, a shooting stance with good balance. The Buick was moving now, heading out of the parking lot. I squeezed off four rounds just as it hit the highway. The rear window shattered, littering the asphalt with tiny fragments of safety glass. The car fishtailed but didn’t stop.

Her skin was a ghastly, ashen color, and her breathing was so shallow that for a moment I thought she might be dead. But she was warm to my touch, and I could detect a rapid, thready pulse. I gently rolled her onto her back, and she opened her eyes. They were filled with terror and confusion. I said something to her. I don’t remember what. “You’ll be all right, Alison.” Something like that.

I tore open her blouse. The hole was slightly above and to the left of her right breast. I sprinted to Gretchen’s patrol car and found her first-aid kit. I packed the wound with gauze, trying to prevent air from entering the chest cavity. I was fumbling with a compress when I heard Gretchen’s voice.

“Officer down! Officer down!” she repeated. She wasn’t quite screaming. I glanced up at her. She was in the Blazer, laying on her side across the front seat, favoring her right leg as she worked the radio. I could see a hole midway up her thigh. Blood was seeping out of it.

“Deputy Rovick, you’ve been shot,” I told her.

“Don’t you think I know that?!” This time she was screaming.

When we had talked over dinner three weeks earlier, Gretchen had accused her fellow deputies in the Kreel County Sheriff’s Department of sexism, insisting that they were slower to respond when she called for backup than when male deputies called. Maybe so. But you couldn’t prove it by me because an officer—a male– arrived within two minutes, and within five more it seemed the entire day watch had converged on The Harbor. The workers inside the resort studied us through the large windows. Some of them were eating their lunches.

The first officer to arrive went directly to Gretchen. His name tag read: G. LOUSHINE.

“I need a tourniquet!” he barked over his shoulder.

I tossed him one from the first-aid kit while continuing to maintain pressure on Alison’s sucking chest wound with the palm of my hand. Her eyes were still open, but she didn’t speak.

“Two suspects, white males I think, driving a white four-door sedan,” Gretchen recited as the deputy applied the tourniquet. “They hit us with a MAC 10.”

“A Buick Regal, Wisconsin plates W-ZERO-F-F-W,” I added. “And it was an UZI.”

“You’re crazy! How do you know that?” Gretchen yelled at me.

“How come you don’t?” I yelled back. Gretchen didn’t relay even her incomplete information to dispatch when she called for assistance, giving the suspects a good five-minute head start, and it troubled me.

“W-ZERO-F-F-W?” Loushine repeated.

“Call letters for a ham radio operator,” I told him. “Wisconsin allows hams to use their call letters in place of regular license plate numbers.”

“That’s right,” Loushine agreed under his breath and sprinted to his own car to broadcast the information I supplied instead of using Gretchen’s radio. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass her.

While Loushine was making his call, the sheriff arrived. His name tag read: R. ORMAN. He didn’t rush to his deputy’s side, which is what I would have done. Instead, he moved directly to where Alison lay on the gravel in an expanding pool of her own blood.

“My God!” he said, sucking in his breath. “Mike!” He knelt next to her and took her hand in both of his. “Mike,” he repeated. The woman looked up at him but otherwise didn’t respond.

The sheriff’s eyes glazed over until they resembled Alison’s. They were both in shock. Loushine placed a hand on the sheriff’s shoulder and said, “The bus is on its way.” Orman didn’t reply, and Loushine had to shake him. “Sheriff? Sheriff, the bus is on its way.”

Orman turned to stare at his deputy, but it was a few moments before his eyes focused.

“Saginau to Deer Lake, thirty-seven minutes,” he said shaking his head, regaining his senses. “The Harbor is midway—make it eighteen minutes. Another eighteen going back. Too long. Can’t wait for the ambulance. We’ll take her to the hospital in my car. Get a blanket.” A few seconds later four of us gently lifted Alison from the gravel and slid the blanket underneath her. I insisted that we roll her over on her chest. “Transport the victim with her injured side down,” the first-aid manual says. Using the blanket as a stretcher, we gently placed the woman on the back seat of the sheriff’s car. I rode with her. No one questioned this.

Sheriff Orman didn’t speak, instead concentrating all his energy on driving the cruiser at high speed over the winding Wisconsin back roads, his siren blasting the woodland quiet to shreds, although we didn’t overtake a single vehicle. He took one curve too fast, and Alison moaned. It was the first sound she had made since being shot. The sheriff tried to check on her through the rearview mirror, but she was too low on the seat.

“We’re almost there, Alison,” I told her.

We drove another mile before the sheriff said, “Did you call her Alison?”

I didn’t reply. It wasn’t a good time.

We were Code Ten when we rolled to the emergency entrance of the three-story Saginau Medical Center. Code Ten means sirens and flashing lights. It was a good thing we had them, too, because without them the hospital staff would not have known we were coming. No one had bothered to warn them—not the sheriff, not his deputies. Some people just don’t react well to catastrophe.

Two doctors, male and female, and two nurses met us at the door and helped us transfer Alison from the back seat to a gurney. I discovered later that the doctors were husband and wife. Both had agreed to work in a rural community for three years in exchange for medical school scholarship money. The National Health Service Corps sent them to Saginau, population 3,267, the seat of power in Kreel County. Here they met, married, and decided to stay after satisfying their obligations. He was from New Jersey, she was from New Mexico. She gave the orders.

“Goddammit Bobby, you should have told us you were coming,” she scolded the sheriff as she examined Alison. Her husband was taking blood pressure and pulse.

“Can you hear me?” the wife asked Alison. “What’s your name, honey? Do you know who you are?”

Alison’s answer was just above a whisper: “Don’t call me honey.”

“Pulse is one twenty-two, blood pressure ninety-six over fifty-eight,” said the husband.

“Okay, here we go,” the wife warned her husband and the nurses. “Gunshot wound, right side, midlobe, no exit. She has blood in her mouth, she’s vomiting blood. Hang a liter of D-5 and lactated ringers. Run it wide open. Wake up pharmacy. She needs to be dosed. I want an antibiotic that really cuts the pus. Call X ray. Tell ’em to bring the portable. I want a full set of chest films and a flat plate of the abdomen. She doesn’t sound good. I want respiratory therapy down here right away. Put her on 0-2. CBC type and cross-match for six units. Get an NG tube into her.”

“Should we put in a catheter?” the husband asked.

“First things first. We’ll take her directly to OR. Let’s roll, people. Stat!”

I understood “stat.” It’s an abbreviation of the Latin word “statim,” meaning “right fucking now!” The rest was all Greek to me.

They wheeled Alison down a dimly lit corridor and into a room designated simply Room One, where we were not allowed to follow.

“She’s in good hands,” a nurse informed us. The sheriff apparently wasn’t so sure and tried to stay with the gurney. The nurse stopped him, using both hands and all her weight to keep him from crossing the line of yellow tape on the floor that separated the receiving room from the rest of the emergency facilities. Reluctantly, he spun away and went to look out the door.

The nurse took a deep breath. “You can clean up in there,” she told me and gestured toward a rest room with her head. That’s when I noticed for the first time the blood that stained my hands, my jacket, my shirt, my jeans, my Nikes. I nodded and headed toward the rest room, stopping first at a water fountain. While I was drinking, the sheriff slapped a handcuff over my left wrist. I protested, but he wasn’t listening. He pulled me to a set of metal chairs that were anchored to the floor and wound the other cuff around an arm. Well, at least I could sit down.

He abandoned me without comment and stood vigil just behind the yellow tape, the tips of his black boots toeing the line, his eyes fixed on the closed operating room door. He stood there, not moving, for nearly twenty minutes, until the ambulance arrived with Deputy Rovick.

The receiving nurse poked her head inside the operating room, and soon the woman doctor emerged and went over to Gretchen. She loosened the tourniquet and examined the deputy’s wound.

“I know you’re hurting, but there’s someone else who needs me more right now,” the doctor said “Do you understand?”

Gretchen nodded.

The doctor gave quiet instructions to the nurse and then told Gretchen, “We’ll give you something for the pain, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can. Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine. I wouldn’t leave you otherwise.”

The deputy nodded again, and the doctor directed the ambulance drivers to wheel Gretchen into Room Two. Orman clutched the doctor’s elbow. She pulled away. “I need to scrub,” was all she said. She returned to Room One.

A moment later Deputy Loushine burst through the door like he’d had a running start.

“The scene has been secured for CID; we have bulletins on the car,” he announced.

“What about the plates?” I asked.

“They belong to a ham operator in the next county,” he answered as if he worked for me. “The sheriff over there is moving on it for us.”

“What about witnesses, Gary?” the sheriff asked his deputy.

“Just Gretchen, Mike, and him,” the deputy answered, indicating me. “The workers inside The Harbor claim they didn’t see anything.” He said to me: “Gretchen said you got off four rounds at the vehicle.”

“Hit it, too,” I replied.

“You’re under arrest,” the sheriff told me.

Loushine caged me inside a large tiled holding cell that resembled a locker-room shower. It was empty of all furniture except a lidless toilet that was hidden from outside view behind a low wall in the corner. The floor sloped gradually to a drain in the center of the room. Overhead, fluorescent lights were protected by a metal grating. The sole window looked out across the corridor to the fingerprint station. A blind was on the outside of the window. I sat on the floor in the corner directly across from the door. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I sat a long time. And as the hours flowed away, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done for years, not since my wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver. I prayed. I prayed for Alison, beseeching God to intervene on her behalf. But just as hard, I prayed for myself—prayed that I wasn’t responsible for bringing the shooters down on her.