“Damned if I know, but I don’t think it’s Hershel.”
“I thought it’s only women who have intuition.” She sighed in exasperation. “Then what about this Bill Nolan character?”
I thought about it. “He’s up to something, but then he’s been up to something ever since I’ve known him. I don’t think he’s a killer, even in the more abstract sense of setting the house or the barn on fire.”
Vic risked getting closer to the horses so that she could get into my line of sight. “So, now we’re thinking that Wade Barsad might’ve not set the barn fire?”
I ran my hand down the bay’s muscled throat. “I don’t know.”
“Then why did she kill him?” I turned and looked at her. “Walt, she’s the only one left.”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Then who? That’s everybody who was there the night of the murder.”
I reached out to pet the bay between his ears, but I guess he figured we didn’t have anything in the way of treats and decided to move on; the others followed. Henry started digging in his shirt pocket. He extended his unswollen hand with one of the high-grain sorghum treats-the kind that horses will walk through hell in a napalm saddle to get. The bay turned on a heel and took the horse cookie from the flat of the Bear’s palm. The others crowded near as he distributed a few into my shirt pocket where I’d hidden my star.
“Then it was someone who was not there.”
October 24: five days earlier, late morning.
Frymire had sounded irritated.
“I walked in here, and the prisoner was gone.”
I leaned on the counter at the nurse’s station and held the phone a little away from my ear. “We’re at the hospital. Mary’s getting a mandatory checkup; Vic and I brought her.”
“I thought that was supposed to be at two o’clock?”
“Isaac called and said he could fit her in sooner, so I figured we’d get it over with.”
“What’s the verdict?”
I glanced at the closed door that led to the examination room. “I don’t know, but Isaac, Vic, and Mary are still inside.”
“Well, I’m here serving and protecting. There was a drive-off at the gas station south of town, but the guy came back and paid while I was there.”
“Must’ve known that the International Man of Mystery was on his trail.”
Frymire hung up. My deputies did that to me a lot.
I was bored, and Ruby’s niece was working on the computer at the next desk, so I ambled over and looked down at the sandy-haired young woman. “How you doin’, Janine?” I was particularly proud of myself for remembering her name; it seemed as though I was forever forgetting it.
She didn’t look up. “I’m busy, Uncle Walter, so stop bothering me.”
I decided to take a walk down to the bank of machines by the door and get a bottle of water, seeing as how they didn’t have an apparatus that dispensed Rainier. I dropped in a few quarters, pushed the button, and retrieved the plastic bottle below. It was a nice day, so when the automatic doors that opened to the outside automatically swung wide, I took it as an invitation.
I stepped onto the sidewalk outside the emergency room. There was a grassy hillside that the hospital board had recently landscaped and dedicated to Mari Baroja. There was a conveniently placed bench that had her name inscribed on a small brass plaque, so I sat, sipped my water, and thought about Mari and her granddaughter.
Lana had stopped by the office a week ago to say hello, but I’d been out. Word was that the young baker was buying up a remarkable amount of property on Main Street with the millions her grandmother had left her, along with a large tract of land leading up to the mountains. The buzz was that she was attempting to gather enough land for a ski resort, but I was hoping for a Basque restaurant.
The locals had been predicting, with resigned and doom-filled voices, that Durant was the next Jackson before Jackson had been Jackson. I didn’t see it.
Jackson’s geography was a lot like that of Manhattan in size and restriction-the City of New York because it was an island surrounded by water, and the town of Jackson because it was a valley surrounded by state and national parks. There was a limited amount of land in both places, and a lot of people who wanted to live in either or both.
A ski resort would change things, but I doubted we’d be seeing espresso stands and full-length coyote coats on the sidewalks of Durant-other than the one on Omar, that is.
I sipped my water and looked across the parking lot where another of Kyle Straub’s signs proclaimed A MAN TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. What the hell did that mean, anyway? It wasn’t even particularly good English. The sign still made my ass hurt, but I was cheered by what was sitting on its top. A large, very yellow meadowlark periodically lifted its head and sang out with the gurgling, flutelike notes of its song.
A hardy bird that nests in the grasses of the plains, famous for that song, the meadowlark is the state bird of Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oregon. As a state bird choice, original it was not. The birds always arrive in the spring, but then seem to disappear in July until they come back in fall, like sentinel bookends for summer.
The glass doors slid open to my right, and I turned my head just in time to see Janine run by and down the hallway toward the examination room. I was up and through the doors after her. We reached the room at the same time, and I blew through the door in front of her.
The treatment table had fallen over, and Mary Barsad, still attached to an ECG monitor, was lying on the floor beside a series of small, glass-doored cabinets. Vic was holding both her hands against the woman’s throat as the pulse of the blood from her carotid artery pushed with Mary’s pulse through my deputy’s fingers in a one-and-a- half-foot arc. Vic was the only one speaking. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
There was blood everywhere, and what appeared to be one of those disposable scalpels was lodged in Mary’s throat with the wrapper still half on. Isaac Bloomfield, who sat on the floor across the room, was tangled in an overturned utility cart with his thick glasses askew.
I grabbed a large roll of gauze from the counter and knelt to wind it around Mary’s neck; then I slid my arms under her back and legs. I used my foot to flip the table back upright and placed her on the flat surface as a fresh stream of blood streaked across my uniform shirt and badge.
Vic continued to apply pressure, but the blood loss was catastrophic. “I turned my head for a split fucking second.” She was literally shaking with anger. “Fuck!”
Mary lay with her head turned to the side, her mouth gulping air like a landed trout. It seemed as though the pulse in the veins at her temples was beginning to still. My voice was loud but sounded far away. “Isaac… I need your help.”
The small man, assisted by Janine, slid up the wall and partially settled his glasses while approaching with hands extended, hands that had saved my own life. I hoped they would save hers.
“Vertebral arteriovenous…” The doc’s face turned only slightly toward the young nurse. “I need a transvascular embolization kit. Quickly, please, Janine.” She slipped past us to the cabinets on the wall as he continued to speak, almost as if he were reminding himself of the procedure. “Neurologic deficits coincident with the fistula should resolve with the reestablishment of flow-” Janine brought back a balloon device as Isaac’s hands took over for mine, and I was stirred by Isaac’s sudden switch to his native Teutonic tongue. “Gottverdammit! ”
I held Mary’s head and looked into her eyes, the blue dulling with each pulse of blood. I knew that we were in a race as to whether the woman would die of blood loss or of suffocation from the mounting hematoma of coagulating blood that was forming in her throat. Isaac called for a number of paralytic drugs to be administered through the IV that Janine had nervously pushed into Mary’s arm.
The choice was brutal but necessary, and for the remainder of the episode, no matter how short that might be, Mary would be aware of what was happening and feel everything as we attempted to save her life.
Isaac took the endotracheal tube and began feeding it into the stricken woman’s mouth. He handed Janine the plastic that was connected to the balloon device and to a one-way valve. With hands shaking, the young nurse screwed a syringe without a needle but full of air into the valve and depressed the plunger on the syringe, effectively holding the tube in place as Isaac listened to Mary’s chest and stomach with a stethoscope.
He nodded, and Janine passed the bulb to me. Isaac looked directly into my blood-spattered face. “Einmal
