I cranked it a few times to get the water running and splashed some on my face and the back of my neck. The cool water refreshed me. I pulled Leonardo’s notes out, soaked my shirt, and dabbed my wounds.
I didn’t see a mirror so I went outside and looked over my shoulder-at the reflection in the window. I crossed my arms as if I were doing some chest warmup exercises to see how far the cuts opened. Both needed stitches. Though I kept a fully stocked first-aid kit in the trunk of my car, it wouldn’t do me much good by myself.
I slipped my jacket on and sat down on the front steps and pulled Leonardo’s pages from my pocket. To my relief, they didn’t look any worse for the wear.
I peered long and hard at the drawings. A hoisting system? A harness? What about those nested tubes? They could be connected to each other, or to the Dagger. But maybe not. Probably not. And those Circles. Twenty rings of what? And would they lead to the Dagger?
The afternoon sun bowled its lazy way across the western sky while Leonardo and I camped on the porch, rocking back and forth together, alone at the edge of the earth.
I was ruminating over how cruel the moon looked as it rose in the gold-spotted heavens when Pop appeared, driving a golf cart through a narrow clearing I hadn’t even noticed. As he pulled up in front of me and parked, I tucked Leonardo’s notes back in my jacket.
“Pop!” I shouted. “Did you hear anything about Ginny? Have you seen her?”
“Nope and nope,” he said, extricating himself from the vehicle.
I felt crushing dismay.
“Saw a bunch of coppers, though,” he added. “They had a regular party scooping up the stiffs. Don’t get much mayhem around here that isn’t on TV.”
“What’d you tell them about me?” I managed.
He pulled a brown paper grocery bag out of the floor well of the cart, shot me a grin. “Oh, forty-five, five-eight, two-ten. You know, short and squat. Now come around here and get these sleeping bags.”
I did. They were the green ones with the red flannel liners.
“Where’s that pecker who punched me? You find the rope in the shed? Got him tied up there, or what? I’m gonna kick his ass.”
I told him what had occurred.
“You’re kidding me,” Pop said, hobbling up the steps and into the house.“He tell you what you wanted to know first?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” Pop said, setting the groceries down on the pirate’s chest.
I dropped the sleeping bags, lit the lantern, and slipped off my jacket.
“Whoa, Holmes,” he said. “Those cuts need attention. I better go get some stuff to fix you with. I patched a few guys up in my day, you know.”
I told him about the kit in the car and stepped out to get it. The firewood must have been well seasoned; Pop had a blaze going when I got back.
He had me pull the piano stool over in front of the rocker and sit down with my back to him, while he broke out a bottle of Cuervo Gold and two shot glasses. He poured me one.
“Drink this,” he urged. “It won’t make your back hurt any less, but it’ll take your mind off of Watson.”
“Nothing could do that,” I told him.
“Then drink it ’cause you’re sitting on my piano stool.”
I took it and knocked it back while he poured one for himself. Then he cracked open the first-aid kit and went to work.
“Gee,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the rocker seat. “ Betadine, sutures, Lidocaine, syringe . . . What are you, a spy or something?”
“Actually I’m a stuntman.”
“Well that clears everything up, don’t it. You were just practicing over there at the inn. Now let me see here, I’m gonna poke you with the needle and then stitch you up like a mattress. You pour us each another slug of apple juice. It’ll boost our doctor-patient relations.”
I did as he requested. Pop took a snort. “Ooh, that’s tasty,” he said. “Okay now, Sherlock, I’ll knit and you’ll tell me the tale like you promised.”
Pop took his time sewing me up while I told him the wholestory—my parents, Greer, Tecci, Krell, Venice, Archie, Ginny, Beckett, Gibraltar, Leonardo, and the Circles of Truth.
When I got to the part about Mona, he let out a hoot. “So you’re the one she was talking about! You’re Mona’s Reb.”
He dressed the wounds with sterile pads and adhesive tape.
“As far as I can tell there’s three possibilities,” Pop said. “One, my hearing aids have been picking up an Orson Welles broadcast; two, you just laid twenty miles of the sweetest-smelling shit that ever came out of a pucker; or three, this is a genuine case of truth being a whole lot stranger than fiction. I can’t come up with a reason why it’s not number three.”
I fished the Leonardo notes out of my jacket.
Pop regarded them carefully, squinting to bring them into focus. “By goddamn jingo . . . Number three it is.”
