mother’s bed at River Acres. Had she died?
He closed his eyes again and opened them in darkness. Silas had floated into the room and was telling him something, not to confess, hear? He didn’t know what was a dream and what wasn’t. When he woke next he seemed in a hospital now, the bed next to him empty, not even sheets. It hurt to turn his head, he felt confined, his throat so dry he couldn’t speak. The window so bright he couldn’t look outside. His chest ached. That seemed real. His nose hurt. His mouth felt tight. His moving toes seemed real. His curling fingers.
He closed his eyes, dreamed of an ambulance, hearing its siren, belted on a flat bed. The black girl (
It hurt to breathe but he was breathing faster, he felt tears tracking down the side of his face.
HE WOKE AGAIN. He moved and a wave of dizziness flooded his head. He heard an announcement asking for doctor somebody to call extension 202. He lowered his chin and saw his bandaged chest and the tubes going into his arms. Something stuck up his nose, something hooked in his lip. He’d never been so thirsty and thought he might gag. He thought how, when Johnny Smith from
He faded back to sleep.
WHEN HE OPENED his eyes again a nurse saw him watching her and jumped. “Oh,” she said.
Then a man in a blue uniform was standing in the door. Talking on a radio.
A moment later a doctor came in snapping on latex gloves and asked him his name and he tried to say it, the doctor working on the tube in his mouth.
“Get him some water,” the doctor told somebody and a moment later a straw touched his lips.
“Sip it slowly,” the doctor said. A suit with a stethoscope around his neck. Short gray hair. Glasses hanging on a string. Shining a light in his eyes, taking his pulse.
“How do you feel?”
Bad, he wanted to say.
“What’s your name?”
“Larry,” he rasped. “Ott.”
“Good. How old are you?”
“Forty-one?”
“Who’s the president?”
Larry coughed. “Did they find that girl?”
The doctor looked behind him. Cop in the door.
“Yes,” he said.
HE WAS FEELING BETTER, a little. The tubes in his mouth and nose were gone but his face felt hot and chapped from the tape.
More sleep, dreams, waking to find three men watching him. The doctor, leaning against the wall. Roy French in a camouflage T-shirt, holding a paper, a cigarette behind his ear. And another, older, balding man he didn’t recognize. The men made the room smaller, plus the nurse now coming in, hair tied back, gloves, scrubs. She pressed a button, raising Larry’s bed so he was in more of a sitting position. She held a straw to his lips and he sipped.
“Now yall don’t take too long,” the doctor said. “He’s still weak.” To Larry he said, “It’s amazing you’re still with us, I can tell you that. If Officer Jones hadn’t sent an ambulance, if the EMTs had gotten there half an hour later, if they hadn’t done everything exactly right…” He shrugged. “And our ER man, Dr. Israel. Just a genius.”
“He was in Baghdad,” French said. “Two tours over there.”
“You’d been shot near the heart,” the doctor said, “had a very leaky hole. Bleeding like stink.”
“Officer Jones?” Larry whispered.
“32 Jones,” French said. “He saved your life, Larry.”
Silas.
“Least you got the place to yourself,” French said, tapping the other bed. “I was in here last year for gallstones and they bunked me with this old geezer kept farting. He was deaf as a post and couldn’t tell how loud they were.”
“Wasn’t that me?” the other man said. He was white, stocky, a tight belly in his button-down shirt and a string tie. Short hair. Pistol high on his belt, star pinned to his chest.
“There was a gentleman in here when they first brought him in,” the nurse said, “but he asked to be moved.”
“That’s enough,” the doctor said.
“If you need me,” she said.
“I’ll call.”
She walked out of the room, leaving the door cracked. French went and closed it, nodding to the deputy outside, and came back and stood looking down.
“You know me,” he said to Larry, “but you might not know this fellow here. Sheriff Jack Lolly?”
“Morning,” he said, nodding to Larry.
French set the envelope and a tape recorder on the empty bed.
“We got to talk,” he said.
Larry adjusted his left arm, stiff and sore, and felt something holding his wrist. He tried to look but couldn’t see what it was.
His right wrist, too. Then he knew.
French picked up the recorder and clicked a button and set it down. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to record this conversation. You get to be as old as me and the sheriff here, you forget things. That okay with you?”
“Yes, sir.” Larry’s voice hoarse.
“Now if you need a break, just say so. We got plenty of time. Doc here tells me you’re gone pull through. Said the bullet just missed your heart. Hit a rib and bounced around your gut awhile. Had yourself a heart attack and then your organs shut down and they took your spleen, but here you are.”
“Miracle,” the sheriff said. “Did you shoot yourself?”
He couldn’t remember. He thought of Wallace giving him the gun. He wanted to ask why he was manacled to the bed. He tried to think and knew things were there to be remembered but where, what, were they? His mother staring off but not at anything he could see. Was that what she was looking for? All those missing things?
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well,” French said, glancing at Lolly. “Let’s come back to that in a minute. Now, Doc here, he says the first thing you asked when you come to this morning was if we’d found Tina Rutherford.”
He didn’t remember that. Then he did. He remembered his old zombie mask, his father looking at it, shaking his head. His mother saying, “Oh, my Lord, Larry.”
“Some memory loss is common, Mr. Ott,” the doctor said. “Delirium. Just relax. Take your time.”
“Can you tell me,” French asked, “when was the last time you seen her?”
Larry moved his eyes-even that hurt-from French to the sheriff. To the doctor.
“Is she okay?”
“No, Larry, she ain’t. She was found buried in that hunting cabin over on the west end of your land. Nine days in the ground, by our estimation. Raped-”
“What?” Larry said, coming off the bed, held back by the restraints on his wrists.
“Beaten.”
“No-”
“Strangled.”
Larry shaking his head despite the hurt, moving his arms, pulling at the leather belts, the sheet over his feet kicking up.
“Stay calm, Mr. Ott.” The doctor there, frowning. “I told yall, it’s too soon.”
Larry had begun to convulse and the men blurred as they tried to hold him down.
“Nurse!” the doctor called, then, to French, “Yall have to go!” his voice spiraling away and Larry falling back into his own face, the ceiling receding, bright then distorted then…
When he woke he lay alone in his bandages and restraints, he thought of his mother and her ladies. Were they
