Ghost Road Blues
Page 57

Crow had awakened around dawn and Terry had filled him in on most of the night’s events, but as he talked Crow’s eyes kept drifting shut and Terry had no idea how much of it his friend had absorbed. A nurse came in, woke Crow up, and then gave him a sedative—a hospital policy Terry had never quite grasped the logic of—and Terry sat by the bedside and watched Crow sleep, feeling wretchedly guilty.
He felt that by sending Crow to the hayride he’d somehow been party to Ruger’s attack on the Guthries. Maybe if Crow had just gone out to Val’s as he’d planned Henry would still be alive and the rest of the Guthrie family—and Crow—would not be in various rooms in this hospital. On the surface he knew that such thinking was absurd, that no one could really ascribe any of the blame to him, but his deeper self refused to let go of the notion, and for that reason he could not bring himself to leave Crow’s side.
As he sat there he wondered how long he would have to wait before he popped another Xanax. The first one was really not doing him much good and he was using every ounce of his willpower not to scream.
3
There was nothing rewarding about waking up, so Crow gave it up and passed out again. He slept for hours and dreamed that someone was sitting by his hospital bed, playing blues to him on a sweet-sounding old slide guitar.
A couple of hours later he gave it another try and opened his eyes. This time the pain in his head wasn’t quite so sharp, and the nausea seemed to have ebbed—but every other part of his body hurt like hell, and his entire waist felt constricted and on fire.
He jacked open one eye and peered around until he saw Terry Wolfe sprawled in an orange plastic chair a few feet away. Terry had his ankles crossed and propped up on a small table, thick arms folded across his chest. His tie hung limp, his red hair was badly combed, and he looked like he’d slept in his suit in an alleyway. He had a copy of the Black Marsh Sentinel folded on his lap. “Good morning,” he said.
“Ug,” Crow said with a dry throat. “You’re a picture to wake up to.”
Terry’s smile made him look old and thin and miserable. “How d’you feel?”
“Like shit.”
“That’s pretty much how you look.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost ten,” Terry said, then added, “In the morning.”
“You been here all night?”
“No,” Terry said, gesturing at his clothes, “as you see I went home and changed into my best dinner jacket.”
Crow licked his dry lips and Terry took the cup of ice water off the bedside table and held the straw up to him. Crow sipped, sighed, sipped again, and then nodded.
“Don’t get used to me waiting on you,” Terry said, replacing the cup. As he sat down again he peered assessingly at Crow. “You faded out on me earlier. Don’t know what you heard or didn’t hear.”
“About what happened? I dunno.” His faced clouded as he tried to think through the cobwebs. He gave a sad sigh as the pieces fell back into place. “Ah, jeez,” he murmured. “I know Henry’s dead. And Val, Mark, and Connie are all here in the hospital. Remind me again…does Val know about her dad?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “I told her last night, but she was wired to the eyeballs with morphine, so I had to go through it again this morning. She took it as well as somebody can, but that isn’t saying much. She’s pretty torn up.”
“When will they let me in to see her?”
Terry shook his head. “I asked Saul Weinstock earlier, but he said that you shouldn’t get out of bed for at least a full day. Besides, they have her pretty heavily sedated. I think letting her rest would be a greater kindness, Crow.”
Crow nodded, but he didn’t like it. “I can’t believe that son of a bitch got away. This is too weird for me, man. I feel like I dreamed all this shit. When I woke up this morning—I think I must have been coming out of the recovery room—I thought I was back in my drinking days and waking up after a bender. I still feel like I’m half in the bag.” And, God, could I use a drink right now! he thought, aching for a Jack Daniel’s neat and an icy schooner of Sam Adams.
“Almost be nice if that’s all it was.”
“How’s that officer? The one who was shot? Rhoda?”
Terry frowned. “She’s alive, doing okay. They took a couple of slugs out of her, but she’s young and that’ll probably count for something.”
“What about Val’s family?”
Shadows drifted across Terry’s face and he rubbed his eyes. “Connie was roughed up pretty badly. Not raped, thank God, but smacked around and terrorized. They admitted her and she’s still under sedation. Mark’s here, too. He has a broken nose, lost two teeth, and is suffering from shock, but he’ll be fine.”
“Jesus. No trace at all of Ruger?”
Terry drew in a breath, held it, and then blew it out. He shook his head. “Nope. They didn’t find a single trace of him except some footprints that went nowhere and then vanished into some mud puddles and that was that. I mean, Val backed up your story that it was definitely Karl Ruger, which the cops are finding hard to take. They can’t wrap their minds around the idea that you were able to fight him, or that you shot him. As far as that goes, by the way, the general consensus is that either you missed, or that he was wearing a vest of some kind and all your shots did was bang him around a little and then drive him off.”
“That son of a bitch,” he said in a soft hiss. “I should have killed him with my hands. I should have made sure. It’s my fault that kid Rhoda got shot, and it’s my fault Henry’s dead. If I’d killed him, then we might have gotten to Henry in time.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Crow,” Terry said wearily. He rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. “Last night you did more than anyone else, so skip the what-ifs. Right now you have to focus on getting well and on being there for Val. She’s in pretty rocky shape.” He tried on a smile but it didn’t seem to fit. “Besides, you’ve survived two gunshots and lived to ride off into the sunset like a real hero.”
“Oh, big deal. A graze on one love handle and a bullet graze on my hip. Even the recovery room nurse told me it was nothing. Five measly stitches and a bone bruise.”
“For which you should thank your lucky stars. Couple inches over and it would have punched a big hole in your kidney. Plus you look like you’ve been mugged by a whole platoon of prizefighters.”
Crow gave a rueful smile. “Yeah, there’s that. Jeez-zus, but that son of a bitch could hit. Hardest fists I ever felt. Fast, too.”
“Don’t forget, you have another eight or nine stitches on your ugly mug, not counting those pansy little butterfly stitches. Your face looks like a tropical sunset. You’ll look great when the news guys come in to take your picture.”
“My picture? What for?”
“Dude, you’ve become quite the celebrity.”
“For what? Standing too close to a coupla bullets?”
“No, for kicking the bejesus out Karl Ruger.”
“As I remember, he kicked some of the bejesus out of me, too.”
“Mm-hm, but from what Val told us and the police were able to piece together from the crime scene, you danced Ruger real good.”
Crow just grunted. “He was choking Val, and I made the mistake of trying to hold him at gunpoint. He used her as a shield to knock the gun out of my hand. We tussled some, and I came out lucky. In a manner of speaking.”
Terry smiled and looked up at the heavens, reciting, “‘…We tussled some and I came out lucky.’ Dear me but those Philly cops are gonna love that.” He looked at Crow, his eyes amused but intense. “You have, I believe, the distinction of not only being the first person to kick his butt in a fight, but the only person he’s tried to kill who’s still sucking air.”
“Sucking it through a tube, mind you,” Crow said, tapping the line that fed cool oxygen into his nose.
“The point is,” Terry said, lacing his hands behind his head, “that you kicked his behind and the cops think you’re Superman.”
“So, what did I get shot with? A kryptonite bullet?”
“According to Detective Sergeant Ferro, you must have.”
“Great, when the nurse comes in I’ll check out her bod with my X-ray vision.”
“Go ahead, she looks like Steve Buscemi.”
“And…who is Detective Sergeant Ferrell, or whatever?”
“Philly cop,” Terry said and explained the interjurisdictional arrangement.
Crow leaned back and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. He ached to see Val, to hold her and do something to try and comfort her. “Jesus. One man did all this?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Um…weren’t there supposed to be three of them?”
Terry sucked his teeth. “‘Were’ is the operative word, boyo. One of them—Kenneth Boyd—is unaccounted for. Mark said that Ruger told them he had an injured buddy out in the fields, but he never showed up, and nobody’s been able to find him.”
“Maybe he took a hike when he heard all the sirens and stuff.”
“That’s the talk around the shop. Took the money and lit out for parts unknown. He was supposed to have a broken leg, but then we only have Ruger’s word for it, so take that for whatever it’s worth. Either way, the cops aren’t as worried about him as they are about Ruger.”
“What about the third guy?”
“He’s dead.”
“Cops get him?”
Terry hesitated briefly. “No. They think Karl Ruger killed him. Possibly over a dispute about the split, who knows? Point is, Ruger messed him up pretty bad.”
“What’s ‘pretty bad’ mean?”
“You don’t want to know.”