“I had him, Alex,” he said. “I had him right here.” He held his hands up and looked at the space between them.
“Who, Bruckman?”
“I wasn’t going to let go,” he said. “But then Prudell started shooting. I was afraid he was going to hit me.”
“He wouldn’t hit you,” I said. “Don’t forget, he’s holding a ten-thousand-dollar bond on you. I don’t know the rules exactly, but I’m pretty sure he loses the bond if he kills you.”
“The bond,” he said, like he was sorry I brought it up.
“When’s the trial?” I said.
“Next week.”
“Now that they know more about Bruckman, they’ll have to go easy on you, right?”
“I don’t know. They still don’t like it when an Indian attacks a cop. No matter what.”
“The tribe will represent you, right?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at the floor again. “They will.”
“Dorothy is still one of you, isn’t she?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s still a member of the tribe, even though she’s been gone so long?”
“Of course she is.”
“So what’s the tribe doing about her? Aren’t they trying to find her?”
“I think they are, yes. I can tell you one thing. If I ever have my hands on him again, I’ll kill him. I’ll choke him to death, Alex. He’s evil. I could see it in his eyes.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw it too.”
“Well,” he said. He seemed to pull himself back from somewhere far away. “I got a shift at the casino. I’m glad you’re okay. I mean, all things considered.”
“I’m glad you came by,” I said. “It means a lot to me.” The drags had me talking mushy again.
When he was gone, I tried to read for a while, but it made my head start to throb. Trying to watch television was even worse. The drags again, or the concussion, or God knows what. I lay in the bed and thought about baseball, for some reason. I replayed a couple games in my head. How long ago was my last game? It was a triple-A game in Columbus, September 1972. I remembered my very last at-bat, a well-hit ball to left field. It settled into the outfielder’s glove, five feet away from a home run. My whole career in a nutshell. It seemed like forever ago, and yet as I looked at my hands I could still see the protrusions from playing four years behind the plate, all the fastballs and foul tips.
And below those old scars, the new wounds on my wrists. The ropes were so tight. In my mind I was there again, sliding through the snow. My heart pounded. I was breathing hard. I could feel the balloon in my chest, this alien thing inside me.
Easy, Alex. This is exactly what you don’t need right now. Just take it easy.
I put my head back on the pillow, forced myself to relax, to think about nothing. I remembered what an old teammate had told me, that the secret to thinking about nothing is not trying to stop thoughts from coming into your head. Instead, you let them come and then slip right through your head. In one ear, across the slippery floor, and then right back out the other ear. But then, this was a left-handed pitcher talking, and everybody knows that lefthanders are crazy.
The nurses made their rounds. Later a man waxed the floor in the hallway. The machine kept pumping air into me. From outside I could hear the sound of the wind.
I slept. Finally, a good night’s sleep. In the morning the doctor came around again. We did the X rays again, and then he asked me if I wanted him to take the tube out.
“Is that a trick question?” I said. “Pull the damned thing out already.”
He gave me a local before he pulled the tube out. On the end of it there was a deflated balloon, covered with whatever that stuff is that coats the inside of your lung. He stitched up the incision in my side and told me to just lie there for a couple more hours until he got back before I tried standing up. When he left the room, I waited all of one minute before I swung my legs around to the floor. Very slowly, I stood up. It felt good, in a violently sick-to-my-stomach sort of way. I was ready to try it again about an hour later.
Leon stopped in around lunchtime. “Where’s your breathing machine?” he said.
“I’m flying solo,” I said.
“Great, where are your clothes? Let’s get you out of here.”
“Leon, it still takes me fifteen minutes to get up and go to the bathroom.”
“Well, I’ve been busy, at least. Your two friends are definitely staying at the Brass Anchor Motel. They have a unit on the end with a window overlooking the main road. With you in the hospital, they haven’t had much to do, I guess. I did see them leave one day and drive around the reservation.”
“What, you’ve been watching them the whole time?”
“Off and on,” he said. Now that I thought about it, he did look tired. “I couldn’t think of any good way to inquire about them at the motel desk. If it got back to them, they’d know somebody’s on to them.”
“I don’t know what else we can do,” I said. “Except call Brandow again, see if he’s gotten anywhere.”
“Cops don’t play ball with private eyes,” he said. “It’s an unwritten rule.”
“Leon, you should really listen to yourself sometime. ‘Cops don’t play ball with private eyes.’ For God’s sake. This is Bill Brandow we’re talking about. He’s a good guy.”
“Not when he’s wearing the badge, Alex.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Whatever you say.”
“Now, about the Bruckman situation…”
“What Bruckman situation? He didn’t take Dorothy.”
“Are you sure?”
“The more I think about it,” I said. “Nothing else makes sense if he did.”
“Then who took her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the two guys who are following me?”
“But if they have her, why are they following you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they have Dorothy but they don’t have the white bag.” I gave him the quick rundown on the white canvas bag that Bruckman wanted so badly.
“No matter who those guys are, or what they want,” he said, “we still have to find Bruckman. He’s our only source of information, number one. Number two, don’t we sort of owe him something now? After what he did to you?”
“Give me a couple days before I have to think about that, okay? It’s all I can do to get up and take a piss.”
“Where do you think he is?” he said. “Right now.”
“Who knows, Leon? He could be anywhere.”
“Think, Alex. What did he say?”
I ran the night through my head, trying to remember what he said. Or what his teammates said.
“One of his guys called him Captain Fuckhead,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”
“Okay, so he has some dissension there,” Leon said. “What else can you think of?”
I kept thinking. “Well, let’s see. They beat the hell out of me. He wanted to know where Dorothy was. He wanted to know where the bag was. Then they carried me outside, beat the hell out of me again. Then they dragged me behind their snowmobiles for a while. Then they stopped…”
“Yes?”
“They argued,” I said. “The guy who called him Captain Fuckhead, he asked him if they were going to drag me all way back over the river.”
“The river,” he said. “The St. Marys. They’re in Canada.”
“Yes,” I said. “They must be.”
“They’re hiding out over there. Something must have happened.”
“And the only reason they came back over,” I said, “was to find that bag.”
“What do you think is in it?” he said. “Drugs?”
“I don’t know what else it could be,” I said. “Although if that’s true…” I didn’t want to complete the
