be all right, brother. For a time they thought you'd fractured your skull, but X rays show otherwise. Mild concussion, lots of cuts, scrapes, and bruises to keep the other bruises you had company, but you'll live. You've got a twelve- stitch gash over your right eye, but the eye itself is undamaged; they just found it easier to bandage it the way they did. You've lost a little scalp and hair on the right side of your head, but you were thinking of getting a haircut this week anyway, right?'
'There you go again with another real knee-slapper.'
'How do you feel, Mongo?'
'Garth, my physical and mental states of being lend the term 'feeling like shit' new depths of meaning.'
He began to gently knead my shoulder in a way that relaxed my muscles, and somehow began to ease the twin suns of white-hot pain that were blazing behind my eyes. 'That was some job of flying you did in the Volkswagen, brother,' he said softly, his tone soothing, almost hypnotic. 'You must have sailed better than a hundred feet through the air going down that hillside; you flew right between the eaves of two houses, rolled over, and landed on top of a tree beside some guy's deck. You made him spill his drink. When the paramedics finally managed to climb the tree, they found you hanging upside down in your harness. You're a hell of an advertisement for seat belts and harnesses.' He stopped the kneading, eased himself carefully down on the side of the bed. When he spoke again, all traces of warmth and humor were gone from his voice. 'What the hell happened, Mongo? What's going on here?'
I worked my tongue over my gummy lips, tried to clear my throat. 'Get me some water, will you?'
'Watch your eye,' Garth said as he rose from the bed.
He turned on the light, came back, and poured me a glass of water from a plastic carafe on a table beside the bed. Then he sat down again, gently raised me up, and handed me the glass. As I sipped the water, he gently rubbed my back between the shoulder blades, then kneaded the back of my neck. Incredibly, my nausea and pain began to ease, and the vision in my uncovered left eye began to clear somewhat. If I was ever to bet on the healing power of the laying on of hands, it would be Garth's hands I'd bet on. They were hands that, more than a few times in the past, since his poisoning with nitrophenyldienal, had been ready to kill-never inappropriately, but often prematurely, at least in my opinion. But they were also, most definitely, a healer's hands.
'So,' I said as I drained off the water and handed him back the glass, 'where am I?'
'Cairn Hospital. I'm told it's a very good one.'
'What time is it?'
'Three o'clock in the morning, Monday. I got home around six yesterday, found your note. When you weren't home by nine, I picked up the phone and called the police and the hospital. Bingo. That's how I found out you'd been in an accident.'
'It was no accident; it was an on-purpose. Two guys ran me off the road.'
Garth grunted, as if he wasn't surprised. The knotted muscles in his jaw and neck were the only sign of his anger and concern. He refilled the water glass, then pulled a chair over to the bed and sat down in it. When he spoke, his voice was low, but humming with tension. 'What was the bad news you wanted to give me on Saturday, Mongo?'
'Oh, that,' I said, rolling over on my side and propping myself up on a very sore elbow. 'You mean the bad news you said I should take care of?'
'Come on, Mongo.'
'The bad news on Saturday was that I'd become convinced Michael was murdered. Today's bad news is that the KGB agent who probably murdered Michael works for Elysius Culhane. Naturally, Culhane isn't too eager for this fact to become public knowledge, and the FBI seems perfectly willing to help him cover it up. Cairn has a chickenshit police chief who doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it, and then there's the minor matter of the possible existence of a death squad in Cairn, which may be responsible for me being here.'
'Whoa, Mongo. I feel I've done sufficient groveling, so stop trying to be clever and just start from the beginning.'
I did, relating what I'd learned and everything that had happened from the time I arrived in Cairn on Friday afternoon to the moment on Sunday afternoon when I yanked on Beloved Too's steering wheel and went soaring off into space. Garth listened in silence, the steady, bright gleam in his limpid eyes his only display of emotion. When I finished I was exhausted, once again in pain, and with increasingly blurred vision in my good eye. Garth seemed to sense this; he leaned forward in his chair and once again began to knead the muscles in my back and neck with his powerful but incredibly gentle hands.
'Okay,' Garth said softly. 'First, let's try to sort out this attempt to kill you. Trex and one of his buddies ran you off the road. The problem is that nobody seems to have seen it happen.'
'Who reported the accident?'
'The guy who spilled his drink when you landed in the tree next to his deck. He just saw the car come sailing out of nowhere and land on top of the tree; he didn't see what happened up on the road, and no other witnesses have come forward. Do you think the ambush was Trex's idea?'
'He sure as hell had a powerful itch to kill me.'
'And he was waiting for you in ambush. He knew you'd probably be using 9W to get to the Palisades Parkway. How did he know you were in Cairn? Could he have been following you?'
I shook my head. 'He couldn't have been out of the hospital himself for more than a short time before he came at me. Besides, Gregory Trex wasn't interested in following me, only killing me-and, if he'd been following me, he'd have had a lot better places to kill me than on 9W. Even if they weren't in trucks, that shithead and his friends wouldn't be good enough to tail me without my knowing it. He must have seen my car parked outside Town Hall, or seen me go in. He figured I'd be going home eventually, so he rounded up a buddy and set up the ambush.'
'Maybe Culhane put Trex and his buddy on to you.'
I thought about it, nodded. 'Could be; it would be enough simply to drop a hint to Trex that I was in town, and Trex would take it from there. After Mosely called him, Culhane had time to call Hendricks at the FBI before he came to confront me. Maybe he also took the time to call Trex.'
'There's another possibility, Mongo. There is indeed a death squad operating here, with Gregory Trex and his masked buddy being two of its members and Jay Acton controlling it.'
'Acton shouldn't have a clue that I'm breathing down his neck. Supposedly he was out sailing when Mosely called Culhane.'
'Mosely could have reported to Culhane on the conversation you had with him on Friday evening. If Culhane mentioned to Acton that you had questions about Burana's death, it would have put Acton on his guard.'
There was something odd in Garth's tone that made me nervous. 'Okay, Garth,' I said, watching his face, 'that's a possibility. But I really can't see a clever KGB agent having anything to do with a loose cannon like Gregory Trex. Like I said, Trex didn't need anyone to goad him into trying to kill me. The ambush may be totally unrelated to the other matters.'
'I think it is related.'
'What's the matter, Garth? What is it?'
'Somebody has been following you, Mongo-and I agree that it had to have been a pro, or you'd have picked up on it.'
'How the hell do you know somebody's been following me? You didn't even know I was in the hospital until a few hours ago, and you didn't know what's been happening until a few minutes ago.'
Garth bowed his head slightly, sighed as he ran the fingers of both hands through his long hair. 'Harry Peal's dead, Mongo.'
'Oh, God,' I said, turning my face away and clenching my fists against the new pain that suddenly shot through my heart. '
'He died in a fall off the cliff outside his home sometime Sunday afternoon.'
'That was yesterday; I told you I went up to see him yesterday afternoon.'
'I know. Supposedly there was a witness to his death. This witness claims there was a struggle between Peal and a very small man-'dwarf is the word he used, I'm told-and the dwarf pushed Peal off the cliff.'
I kept my fists clenched and face turned away, fighting back tears of grief, frustration, and rage. Mosely had been dead on target when he labeled me, in so many words, a kind of pariah, but that wasn't news to me. A grand old man of folk song, conservation, and fierce
