by J. S. James
Instead of asking for particulars or saying something like “Let’s get to the hospital,” Gus Lizard Breath Grice buckled up and headed out, toward the Blue Garden.
11
The instant Delia stepped off the elevator at Salem Hospital, her senses came under assault. The smell of used bandages and fear mingled with the taste of bad memories. They multiplied as she plodded toward Harvey’s room, down a corridor banked with gurneys and IV poles. It was the migrant farmworkers’ clinic of her nightmares. Only the wooden bench was missing.
The rural medical clinic had smelled the same but was too small to have a waiting room. Uncle Tino and Aunt Matilda had sandwiched her between them, taking turns hugging her shoulders. Too hard. Kissing the top of her head. Too often. Waiting for an ambulance that came too late.
Delia was eight when the farm truck accident took her parents and she and her brother Enrique went to live with relatives. Eighteen when she nearly lost her aunt Matilda to sepsis. At this very same hospital.
And she was twenty-two on her last hospital visit. That was when Enrique dropped the keys to his cherished Super Sport into her hand and hobbled out of the custody unit on crutches, shackled between New Mexico corrections officers.
Hospitals were places where families fell apart and died.
She made for the open doorway of room 333, thanking God the background check Polk County HR had run on her did not extend to family members. No doubt Grice would have found a way to use her brother’s incarceration against her.
Delia caught sight of Harvey Schenkel and suppressed a gasp.
“Jesus, Mary, Jos—” Her hand flew to her mouth.
Lying prone on a canted hospital bed, his face was a carpet of scrapes and bruises. Tubes snaked into his nose, now broken. The damage hadn’t stopped there. From his neck down, just about every part of his half Dutch, half African, all American frame not in a cast was bandaged or braced.
She leaned against the doorframe, pressing her forehead into the cold metal, choking down the tightness that pulled at the back of her throat. Her heart flooded with a grieflike intensity she hadn’t felt since childhood, since her parents’ funeral.
What now? Who’s got my back? Out of uniform, but on paper-thin ice, she needed Harvey. Here the big man lay, helpless, looking like he’d been hit by a Mack truck.
A nerve twitched inside. She straightened up from the doorframe and forced her eyes to focus. What was she thinking? Hell, he had been run over by a truck. She cast around, looking anywhere but at Harvey, struggling to shed the guilt she felt for thinking of herself.
She peeped at him from the doorway, uncertain whether he was even conscious. His balled fist jerked, the thumb punching on something attached to a cord. His head lolled in her direction and he croaked a greeting.
“Heydee there, Dee-Dee.” Good. Using the family nickname she’d told him about meant he was somewhat lucid.
His eyes glazed as she stepped to the bed and gave a gentle squeeze on the only one of his coffee-colored limbs that seemed undamaged. “Geez, Harv.”
He winced. Her hand sprung up as if from a hot stove. She blinked back the rising moistness. Though his mouth seemed too swollen to smile, his eyes crinkled. He spoke with a stretched-out tempo, his voice wavering in a medicated lilt.
“Boo-boo. Old Harv got a boo-boo.”
“In a lot of pain, huh?” His eyes went out of focus.
“Not ri-ight now-w-w.”
She glanced toward the hallway, thinking she should come back later. As if mind reading, he rested a hand on her arm, his fingers dead cold. “It’s okay-y. Always wanna talk to Dee-Dee.”
She pulled a molded plastic chair close to the bed and sat in a forward lean, fingers clasping and unclasping between her knees. Harv’s eyes rolled toward the left, looking up behind her.
“Dead cow-w.”
She frowned. Okay, this was already too weird. “What? A cow got hit, too?”
Lifting the self-medicator, he waggled it toward the far wall. “Dead cow-w.”
Confused, she shifted around to follow his line of sight. A double wall sconce had one light burned out. She went with the flow. “Oh, right Harv. That cow sure is dead. But the other one is still mooing.” He cracked a one-sided smile and grimaced, making her wince.
Desperate to stay upbeat, she nodded at the coppery-gray fuzz spilling over gauze that circled his head like a melting ice cream cone.
“Man, that thing wrapped around your head makes you look like a Ben and Jerry special.”
“Wha’ flavor, Rocky Road?”
“No, Orange Man Bad.”
The Iraqi vet wheezed out a laugh that ended in a pained expression. She sat back.
“Damn. Sorry, Harv.” He managed a wave-off and she breathed a little easier. “What the hell happened, anyway?”
He said nothing. His upper eyelids lowered to half-mast. She tried a prompt.
“The Yamhill deputy said he’d spotted your truck and trailer, headlight deep in the Willamette, with the county’s search-and-rescue boat wrecked. Said the current took it downstream and wrapped it around a piling.”
“No mer-gen-cee.”
Delia frowned. “It sure as hell was. The EMTs had to dig you out before they could put you on a stretcher. If it wasn’t for the thick river mud at the bottom of that boat ramp, you and the truck would’ve been toast.”
“No. No farking mer-gen-cee.” She cocked her head, trying to understand. Harv rolled his eyes upward in exasperation. His one free hand waved in a circle at the wrist. “Crankety-crank … whoopsy-daisy … ka-whump.”
She followed his gaze toward the ceiling, wondering if they’d looped back into the dead-cow conversation. Saliva dribbled out the corner of his mouth as he sighed with effort, then appeared to give up.
Delia pulled a tissue from a box and dabbed at his chin, his hazy words drifting in her head like dust balls. Maybe his truck’s gear had slipped out of park, or he forgot to set the—
“Harv, did you mean the emergency brake?”
Harvey’s lids had closed. An air bubble formed between his lips and popped soundlessly. She slumped back into the chair to wait. It wasn’t like him to forget to set a brake. Not Mr. Careful.
She rapped her knuckles on her knees, assaying the damage. People who got banged up in accidents seemed worse off than they were. But Harvey looked as bad as she’d seen—out-of-commission bad. And here they came, trooping back: her own how-fucked-am-I questions just wouldn’t stay tamped down.
Like Annie, Harvey was family. Not by blood—a kindred spirit who got her and she got him. Gut check? He’d kept her on track. But now? How would she make the shift into Investigations without Harvey? Without derailing herself?
Earlier that morning, she’d scanned the roster of active investigations and found a substantial backlog. Nothing major was brewing aside from the human remains that had turned up just inside Yamhill County jurisdiction. The hunter who had gone missing was a Polk County resident. His death would likely be ruled accidental drowning. Case closed, like the Gatlins.
Oh yeah, she could work off the case notes, manage for a while, but—
A nurse bopped in. “Sorry. Time to take care of business—fluids, meds check, and such.”
Delia headed for the waiting room thinking about how Harvey finessed the sheriff with ease. How Grice’s sour face alone could set her off. And how that friction, minus Harvey as a buffer, could put her in deep shit.
* * *
On Delia’s return trip that afternoon, a gray-haired man in a knee-length white coat walked out of Harvey’s room and disappeared into the next. She continued to slow-step. Key questions for a doctor had been answered on her initial visit to the room. Polk County’s senior detective wouldn’t be back on the job anytime soon.
While leafing through her fill of waiting room mags, Delia had resigned herself that Grice would find a way to bounce her out of Investigations and back into a patrol unit. She could almost hear the creak of her
old duty belt, feel the daily groove it rode into the flesh on her hips. Familiar territory, but could she take six more months of running property checks, refereeing domestic squabbles, and busting reoffenders paroled through a revolving-door system? Weeks of uniformed boredom, sprinkled with seconds of heart-pounding terror?
Three hours had done wonders. Harvey was sitting up and looking sharper. The nurse was long gone.
“Ah, back from Purple Haze–ville, I see. How you feeling, Harv?”
He shrugged the shoulder that wasn’t in a cast. “Like that comic strip caveman after the first stone wheel rolled over him. Thor sore.” His eyes motioned toward the chair beside his bed. She sat and leaned toward him, a rolled-up People magazine still clutched in her hand.
“Harv, did you see anybody else around that boat ramp? Anything out of place?”
“Uh-uh.” His head tilted. “Thinking on it, you don’t see many kayakers this time of year. But he’d paddled off.” She made a mental note: Ask the Yamhill deps to check the cab. That brake. Dust for prints.
Despite the ruin in Harvey’s face, he’d put on a work frown. “Anyway, wanna talk shop?” His voice was an echo of the old, healthy-as-a-Clydesdale Harvey.
“It can wait.”
He shook his head. “Too much goin’ on.” His brows bunched. “Sorry I left you hanging this morning.”
Delia shrugged, quoting one of his fortune-cookie wisdoms: “Cop with hot tip burns rubber to crime scene. Pokes in stinkometer before shit cools.”
Harvey sniggered with obvious pleasure. “Yeah well, that Falls City hunter has to be colder’n a brass suppository. If he still has a colon to insert one into. Better follow up with Yamhill on those remains, huh?”
“Already on it. I meet with their ME tomorrow—if I’m still acting detective.”
He glanced toward the hallway. “Anybody else around? Annie, maybe?”
“She’s coming as soon as she can arrange a dispatch fill-in.” She stared at the floor. “No doubt the sheriff will have me back in a patrol car in a blink. So he can start over.”
Harvey touched the back of her hand, and she looked up. “Not gonna happen, Dee-Dee. Grice has burned so many personnel bridges, nobody qualified will touch our investigative unit with a forty-foot flagpole. Especially on short-term assignment. County commissioners won’t budge on their hiring freeze, either—not while they’re reviewing his expenditures.”
He continued to stare into her eyes. In that pregnant silence, it dawned on her where the conversation was headed. She sat up straight and studied Harvey’s battered features. “So that leaves …?”
“You, Dee-Dee.”
She tensed, shifting in her chair. “Me? Solo in Investigations? Oh hell, no.”
“Oh hell, yes.” Through his distorted features, Harvey managed to fake an indignant pout. “But, Acting Senior Detective, cane or crutches, I’m coming back. Maybe not as far as I wanted, but back I’ll be.”
“Damn straight, Harv.”
Her body language must have telegraphed the panic inside her. “I know this is patently unfair, Dee-Dee. You deserve to be brought along step-by-step instead of having the whole caseload dumped in your lap. Think of it as the chance to stretch your legs, put that do-right obsession of yours to a real test. Yeah, that’s it: Senior Detective Delia Do-Right.”
“Oh, har-har, Harv.” Her leg danced a nervous bop.
“Seriously, it’s KOKO time for both of us.”
“Cocoa?” Two inside of a minute? She wondered how much of his meds had worn off.
“Short for keep on keepin’ on. Martin Luther King borrowed it from the Salvation Army. You’re stubborn enough to get really good at KOKO.”
“Thanks, I think?”
Despite them being alone in the room, Harvey lowered his voice. “Grice has himself between a boulder and a rock crusher. Talk to Annie.”
“Have been. We’re looking into why he’s acting so close to the vest lately.”
“He’s bound to be uptight. After the mess he’s made, they’re sure to elect a reformer, somebody who’ll turn the Sheriff’s Department around.”
“I don’t know …”
Her hesitation wasn’t over the county’s white shirts and black skirts—staunch Republicans all—concluding their boy was a screw-up, or concern that they would actually do anything. No. It was her getting bulldozed.
“Harv, you know Grice can barely stand to talk to me, let alone sit through case reviews. Even if he is replaced, the switch won’t come soon.” She popped up and paced. Three steps put her under the TV monitor, three back to bedside. “That’s months of lame-duck revenge. If he knows he’s on borrowed time—”
“Ah, but Grice believes he’s still got a shot.”
“What if he doesn’t? What’s to stop him from sabotaging cases?”
“Perry Barsch. He’s had it with Grice. Wants badly to keep in a simpatico sheriff, so he’ll back my recommendations over the interim.”
“Sim … huh? You, a Republican pol? I thought sheriffs were nonpartisan.”
Harvey tilted his head, the corners of his mouth drooping, shrug-wise. “I prefer Centrist.”
Delia frowned. “How’d you manage to get Perry on your side?”
Harvey Groucho’d his brows. “Haven’t kept my Second Amendment powder dry for nothing. Got him into my Set Wings Hunt Club. Grice will think twice before he tries to step on your neck. Just remember KOKO and you’ll own the senior detective slot, assuming I win the election.”
“I can still tap you for advice? I mean, when—”
“Ah damn it to hell, Harvey.”
That came from Annie at the hospital room door, looking like she was trying to swallow her knuckles. Tears welling, she rushed in.
“Couldn’t get away,” she said. “Got here soon as I could.”
Delia backed out of her path as Annie fell across the hospital bed, bending far over to dispense a hug—a hefty, clearly heartfelt embrace.
Harvey didn’t flinch.
12
NINE DAYS INTO WATERFOWL SEASON
A car honked impatiently on the far side of the Willamette. Packy McFarley scanned upriver from inside the Buena Vista ferry’s wheelhouse, thankful for a day with no fog and few rainsqualls. Spotting nothing adrift—no prop-tangling limbs, no monster logs barreling downstream—he kissed the crucifix on the rosary hung from a window latch, touched a snapshot of himself from his bantamweight boxing days, and set his shore-powered vessel in motion. The prop shafts rumbled and four electric motors whined. The upriver guide cable bowed, and one of the thin cords connecting his boat to each shore lagged in a low droop, first dipping into the water, then skipping across the backwash of yellow foam. Only Packy’s wife knew how much the river ate at his nerves.
A week to go. Seven more days of high-water crossings and back-rev landings before the county ferry service shut him down due to rising water. Couldn’t come too soon.
Packy respected the force that slid beneath the hull. Like him, the river could pack a punch. Twenty-seven years captaining ferryboats had taught him why the local Indians had worshiped the godlike powers of the river. Buena Vista had not broken loose. Yet. One nightmarish, cable-busting ride downriver in another ferry had taken what was left of Packy’s youth and rooted that fear deep in his bones. Two years, then done with the river.
The current was really rolling today. Strong enough that he angled the boat upstream to keep her on course.
He shifted his glance upriver, keeping a close eye on the loop of coated coaxial cable that sagged farther underwater the closer his ferry came to the top of her upstream arc. God knew that connector made for a nothing lifeline. Three days back, he’d had a devil of a time keeping a snagged fir bough from swinging in under the west-end forward drive. Thank God it had broken free and slipped around the stern. Staying safe meant keeping a sharp lookout for anything the river tried to sneak under his nose.
The swing mark was a piece of red canvas wired onto the ma
in cable high overhead, signaling halfway. As it slid past, he held his breath. A minute more and he’d ease off the upstream slant and square the bow with the landing ramp on the Marion County side.
A barely detectable shudder vibrated up through the soles of his shoes, translating into the slightest change in the ferry’s course. In nearly three decades, Packy’s senses had become part of the machinery, prompting him to zero in on the drag source.
“Good Lord, not again.”
Normally a curving U, the guide cable now cut a deep V that bottomed out well below the river’s surface. No limbs or branches, so the obstruction had to be something waterlogged. The roots of an old cottonwood?
Packy cranked the wheel and reversed the engines, swinging the ass-end of his ungainly craft upriver. He slacked off on the power and the boat inched downstream, pulling the guideline taut. The cable rose and the underwater blockage surfaced.
Packy’s spine went icy stiff. The lump he first took for a bare tree trunk or stump was clothed in hunter’s camouflage.
River water backed up on the object, peeling away fabric from patches of stark white—a bloated belly, a puffy face beneath a balding scalp. For Packy, the impossible position of the body was the heart-stopper. Its spine and torso bent sharply backward, doubled over the cable like a wet mop. Arms and legs, palms and heels dangled together, dancing a Pinocchio jig, the surging current acting as puppet master.
* * *
Delia shook water off her rain slicker and hung it on the wall beneath the staircase that connected the old courthouse with the sheriff’s annex—just as Grice was coming down.
“Where’s Cha-vez? She was supposed to be here at ten.” His shout seemed directed at all personnel in the duty room.
“Right here,” she shouted back. His head hunched into his neck as he wheeled on her.
“Jeezum. Don’t sneak up on a man.” His foot landed hard, slipping off the last step with a phwap.
She came around the banister and matched his pace toward the com desk. “My car died this morning and I had to get my brother’s out of storage. What’s got you so skittish, Sheriff?”
