The interstate. Rush and roar. Music flung from cars. Tiny cars living at the mercy of the behemoth eighteen-wheelers. Video games with American and Japanese and Korean vehicles. Gleaming colors against the rolling Midwestern darkness.
I got to the top in time to see it. His idea was to find an opening in the rush of traffic and make his way across the two lanes here, stop and wait for a break in the lanes on the other side and then leave my sorry ass far, far behind.
He came breathtakingly close to losing his life trying to cross the southbound lanes. He miscalculated the speed of two oncoming cars. One of them had to swerve to avoid him. If car horns could curse, that horn spat out every dirty word ever concocted.
The choice was to let him go or try my own suicide run. Vehicles blasted past me fast enough to make me lean away from their force. Several good citizens, seeing me standing on the edge of the concrete lanes, flipped me off. One teenager was creative enough to flip me off with both middle fingers. A Rhodes scholar in the making. I of course had never done anything that asinine in my own perfect teen years.
The dumb bastard was going to try it. Nolan teetered on the edge of the grass between south and north lanes ready to jump as soon as he saw what he took to be a reasonable chance of making it.
I’d come too far to let him disappear again. Now I started looking for my own reasonable chance. If I got very lucky I could catch him on the grass before he had the opportunity to race across the lanes closest to the woods on the other side.
I had two false starts, both attributable to this vision I had of becoming instant roadkill. When I finally got to it I put my head down and plunged on to the huge roadway. Horns were already blasting me when I was only halfway across.
Because I had my head down and was concentrating exclusively on surviving, I didn’t see the accident. More horns, these from the far lanes. And a scream that must have made the stars tremble. And then a sound of collision. Car and body.
By the time I stood where Nolan had just been I saw the nearest of the two lanes clogged with stopped cars. A man was running from his car, his arms flailing in the air. I could see what he was about to find. Later the driver told the press that Nolan had been knocked maybe seven or eight feet in the air before smashing to the roadway. Right now the man knelt over the bloody rags that had been Nolan’s clothes and shouted at him as if trying to resurrect the dead.
I walked over to him, joining a dozen or so other drivers and passengers who’d come to see what had happened. Through his torn trousers a white bone poked; his right ear had been half ripped away. His chest heaved and blood bubbled in the corners of his mouth. I thought he was trying to say something.
I didn’t bother to introduce myself; I just knelt down next to him, dislodging the man who’d struck him.
‘Nolan.’
The eyelids fluttered but never lifted.
‘Nolan.’
‘You know him?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you see it, the accident, I mean?’
‘Yeah. You couldn’t help it. I’ll testify to that.’ Well, I didn’t actually see it but I still knew this man wasn’t at fault.
‘My wife’s already called 911.’
‘Good. Now leave me alone here, will you?’
‘Sure.’
He got up, middle-aged knees cracking, and was immediately surrounded by the others.
‘Nolan.’
Again the eyelids fluttered; again they refused to open.
Before he left he spoke only one word I could understand: ‘Ward.’
TWENTY-THREE
I saw a woman on TV once who claimed that she could see the souls of the newly dead leaving their bodies and seeking the light only they could see. She said she saw this most often when she visited hospitals, something she didn’t do unless a loved one was sick, because watching the souls flee the dead frightened her. This came to mind as I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of St Francis Hospital, where surgery was being performed on David Nolan.
Mrs Nolan was in the waiting room. She glared at me as I started to enter. I did us both a favor and joined Kathy and Lucy in a small grotto-like cove down the hall. This was an older section of the hospital. I wondered how many hundreds of people had waited here for the appearance of a doctor to bring them his or her verdict. I could almost tap into all the relieved smiles as well as the shock and disbelief and horror of those who wouldn’t be smiling for a long time.
There is no silence like hospital silence. It is easy to imagine the classic Grim Reaper in his hooded attire slipping into rooms at random and smiting sleeping patients with his scythe and dispatching their souls to the next realm. The three of us sat on a small tufted gray couch between framed paintings of a maternal Virgin and a weary Jesus. I sat between the women. Kathy touched my hand and said, ‘It should have been Jeff, not David.’
Her bitter words preceded by seconds a fleeting sob of Lucy’s. She hadn’t acknowledged me as yet. She stared off at something only she could see. And she kept fingering a small gold cross.
One of the police officers at the accident scene had let me ride with him to the hospital. I was there half an hour before Bryn Nolan slammed into the small office where I was talking to the surgeon who’d operate on Nolan. Without hesitating, she pointed to me and snapped, ‘I want him out of here. This is my husband we’re talking about. And this man is no friend of mine or my husband’s. I wanted to call the police about David being missing but he wouldn’t let me.’
Since I’d pretty much passed myself off as a coworker of Nolan’s, the graying doctor’s face tightened in confusion and then suspicion. He wasn’t up for a war. ‘Maybe you’d better leave, Mr Conrad. I appreciate your help.’
‘I want to know everything he told you.’
Even crazed Bryn was an appealing sight in her soft white sweater and jeans, her hair in one of those perfect chignons that upper-class women wear as badges of honor. But crazed she was. Did she really think I would’ve said, ‘You know, Doc, Nolan’s wife was humping the shit out of his best friend.’ Damned unlikely.
There was nothing to say. I left. I used my cell phone to call Ward’s father and got an answering machine. I left a message and told him to call me no matter what time it was.
After fifteen minutes in the cove with Lucy and Kathy, I took the elevator to the ground floor. The cafeteria was closed but there were, mercifully, two pots of free coffee. Neither Kathy nor Lucy had wanted any. As I rode back upstairs on the elevator, a cup of coffee in my hand, I started worrying about how we needed to play all this to the press.
Reporters would soon find out that Nolan had been the disguised man asking the question about prostitutes. They would also soon find out that Nolan hadn’t been at work. Campaigns break people; they’d be wondering where he’d been. I’ve come close myself at times. The days and nights become one and they become endless. You are in a war and the enemy never stops firing. You are constantly backing and filling. And then securing enough ammunition to attack on your own so that the other side spends its time backing and filling.
When I got to the cove I found Lucy quietly crying and Kathy noshing on one fingernail. I was left with no real idea of what was going on. A private detective had videotaped material destructive to both Ward and Burkhart. Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan had conspired and paid to have it done. The private detective died unexpectedly. Nolan raced to Chicago and found the material he wanted and brought it back here. The idea was to blackmail both candidates. Vengeance on the part of both Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan. And then Jim Waters had stolen the DVD and was going to blackmail them himself. Then Waters was murdered. But who murdered him, and why?
‘I wonder what’s taking so long,’ Lucy said.
