'Yeah,' said Brinkman. He dropped to one knee, bent over Lydia. 'Calm down, city boy. Nothing wrong with her. Just a bump on the head. I got the Rescue Squad coming.'
'Sheriff,' a voice called from below, 'two of these guys are alive.'
'Yeah?' Brinkman yelled back. 'Which two?'
'The one with the cast. And Ron MacGregor.'
Lydia groaned, stirred. 'Don't move, little girl. You'll be fine,' Brinkman told her.
Lydia's eyelids fluttered, opened. 'Little girl,' she murmured. 'I'll kill you.'
'It'd be a waste,' Brinkman said. 'You saved my life. Now just don't you move.' He took off his jacket, covered her with it. He swiveled to face me, said, 'You know, city boy, you look a hell of a lot worse than she does. Who has the key?'
I had no idea what he meant.
'The cuffs. The key to the cuffs.'
I tried to remember. 'Arnold.'
'Arnold Shea? The big guy?'
'Yes.'
Brinkman narrowed his eyes at Jimmy, smiled a little smile. 'He's stretched out there by your van, Jimmy, deader'n hell. Go get the key off him. For your buddy here.'
Jimmy swallowed hard, turned, climbed down off the mound of rock.
'You didn't have to do that, Brinkman.' I coughed, closed my eyes.
'I like to see that kid sweat,' he said. 'Now how about you telling me what went on here?'
'Later,' I said, my voice sounding distant, even to me.
Chapter 21
MacGregor died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
After Brinkman had unlocked my handcuffs, he’d told Jimmy to get me down to the cruiser, where it was warm. He moved Lydia there also, laying her on the back seat while I slumped in the front, and we were there like that until the ambulance came; but before that, after I had worked my way down the rocky mound with Jimmy's hand tight on my numb arm, I had crouched by MacGregor, motionless in the dust.
Brinkman's fat deputy had covered MacGregor with a blanket from the cruiser. There was blood on the blanket. MacGregor's face was ash gray and his breathing was shallow, ragged.
I spoke his name. His eyes opened. 'Smith.'The corners of his mouth moved weakly. 'I guess no trout this spring, huh?'
'Summer,' I said. 'They'll be bigger by then, anyhow.'
'Yeah.' His face contorted with pain. He said, hoarsely, 'I wouldn't have done it, you know.' He gestured toward Jimmy with his eyes. 'If you'd left it alone, I'd have found a way to let him off. I knew it was a frame. I wouldn't've let it happen.'
I had no way to tell if that was true, but MacGregor's gray eyes were locked onto mine, and I said, 'I know, Mac. I know.'
His eyes closed. I saw him struggling to keep them open, not to lose yet.
'Take it easy,' I said. 'They've got an ambulance coming.'
I tried to find something else to say, but there was nothing. Jimmy tugged gently on my arm, and I stood, my eyes stinging in the cold gray light.
The 'later' I had promised Brinkman happened in the outpatient department of the hospital in Cobleskill. Lydia was in a room upstairs. Brinkman had been right: she had a concussion, not serious. Prognosis excellent. I'd waited until they could tell me that before I let them take me down the hall and put four stitches next to my left eye. I lay now on a bed in a curtained-off stall in Outpatient because, although they'd made a room ready for me upstairs too, I had refused to be admitted. The doctor who'd sewn me up, a round man named Mazzeo, popped in every ten minutes to tell me a man in my condition couldn't leave the hospital.
'You can't drive,' he pointed out, a pudgy finger smoothing his thick mustache. 'You probably can't even see straight. You have a headache to beat the band, am I right? And your hands won't be much good for hours.'
I flexed my swollen fingers. The numbness was receding slowly, leaving the billion pinpricks of returning circulation behind. My wrists were bruised, red and purple under the icepacks that wrapped them.
'No,' I said. 'I'm leaving.' I didn't try for anything else. I knew that I couldn't argue with him, but I also knew I wasn't staying. Everything here was sharp and bright, and outside the curtain I could hear voices and footsteps and the sounds of endless activity. There was no peace here, no darkness, no silence. No music. I couldn't stay.
Immediately after the third or fourth of Dr. Mazzeo's disapproving visits the curtains parted again and Brinkman stood smiling and very tall next to the bed. 'Shit,' he said, took his hat off. 'I brought in four corpses today, Smith, and they all looked better than you do.'
'Go to hell.'
'Christ! For a man whose life I saved, you're an ornery son of a bitch.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'I always was.' I paused, went on, 'But I owe you for that, Brinkman. And for Lydia and Jimmy.'
'So pay up, city boy. What the hell's going on around here, and how come I shouldn't lock you up, you and Jimmy and that china doll of yours?' He dropped his hat on the bed, pulled a stool close.
I turned my pounding head carefully, groped with thick fingers for the button that would raise the bed. Brinkman vertical and me horizontal was bad odds to start with.
