— ON THE ROAD —
Christmas Eve to New Year’s Eve, 1950
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
— Proverb
23
Shannon said, “What’s the matter with Megan?”
“She hurt her leg,” Hector said. He checked the rearview mirror: a red coupé slid off the curb in pursuit of his Chevy. Hector could still hear shots being fired in front of the police station. A gray sedan, something anonymous-looking and therefore possibly federal, pulled into the path of the red coupé. Now there was the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass behind them.
Damn. Hector blessed Ed Tilly, figuring him for the federal back up… such as it was.
Hector took a corner at speed and felt his Chevy almost go up on two wheels. He checked the rearview mirror again and saw no tails. He drove three blocks, then skidded into the parking lot of a Sinclair station.
“Slide over the seat, Shannon,” Hector said. “Come up here with me, sweetie.”
The tot did that. Hector locked her in the car and said through the window, “Won’t be a minute. Watch me through that front window there.”
He dashed inside the station. Hector said to the old grease monkey inside, “Got me a little problem with my car. Can I borrow a pair of needle-nose pliers, pal?”
The attendant waddled into the bay and then tossed Hector the pliers. He said, “Sure you don’t want me to handle it, fella? Won’t cost you much at all.”
Hector shook his head. “Nah, it’s chronic and I know the drill. Second nature for me, now.”
Hector climbed into the back seat, hovering above Meg—she was still unconscious. Shock and blood loss to blame, he figured.
Shannon said, “When are we going to play ‘I spy,’ Mister Hector?”
“Right now,” he said. “You keep your eyes off the back seat and try and figure out what I spy,” he said. Hector whipped out his Zippo, opening it with a one-handed snap and then lighting it. He teased the ends of the pliers over the blue edged flame of his Zippo. He said, “I spy something red.”
So much blood: A terrible choice. “I mean green,” he said.
He closed his lighter and fished the cuff of his boot for his flask. He splashed a little single malt whisky over Meg’s wound. That set her a bit astir.
Despite the cold, Hector was sweating: it had been a long time since he’d last played emergency doctor, and years since he’d dug out a bullet. He twisted Meg’s leg around for better access and ripped her skirt up higher on her thigh to get it out of the way. There was some scorching on the fabric so Hector guessed she must have been shot at close range. He felt the back of her leg for another hole and found no exit wound.
Hector bit his lip and eased the needle-nose pliers into the wound. The ends of the pliers parted just enough to grab the bullet when he found it.
Shannon said, “That tree!”
“What? No.” Remembering their game, Hector said, “No, not that tree. Try again.”
Meg frowned and twisted her head, evidently feeling what he was doing. That was a good sign, Hector hoped.
He felt something hard inside there now. There was some give—hopefully it wasn’t simply a bone fragment.
Shannon said, “That tree, then.”
“No, not that tree either,” Hector said. “No trees.” His voice didn’t sound good to his own ears.
The slug came free from the wound. Hector figured it came from a forty-five. The bullet still retained its shape and looked to be intact, thank God. That was some kind of a break.
Hector dashed a little more whisky in the bullet hole, then fished out his pocket knife and heated the blade so he could cauterize the wound. It was going to leave a scar on Meg’s long and pretty ivory stem, but weighing the alternative?
He frowned and looked at his fingers, flexing them. Hector’s left hand was sluggish now, tingling a bit. Christ, he hoped it wasn’t a heart attack or stroke, or something of the sort. Hell, he wasn’t nearly that old, not really. He flexed the fingers of his left hand again. His hand had something of that numbness that comes with sleeping on an arm wrong.
“That car,” Shannon said.
“What? What car?” Hector was suddenly alarmed—had they been tailed after all?
“That green car,” Shannon said.
Hector’s mind was racing: Eliot drove a green car. Maybe Ness had found a way to follow them. He said, “What green car?”
“That empty one across the street. Is that the green thing you spy?”
Their silly game. Damn, he’d lost the thread. “No,” Hector said. “Try again, honey.”
“That light it’s green—no, wait, now yellow. No, wait, now red.”
“It’s not the traffic light, either,” Hector said.
He tore off some more of Megan’s dress and bandaged her leg as best he could with his increasingly useless left arm.
There. Done. Now what?
He glanced over the seat: Shannon was craning her neck, looking up through the windshield. She smiled, “I know now!” She pointed at something Hector couldn’t see, smiling at him. “The dinosaur up there! That’s the green thing, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, honey.”
“Is Megan going to be okay?”
“I think so.”
Then she asked it. “Where’s my mommy?”
He couldn’t do it yet. Hector said, “With some men. We’ll check in on her in a little bit.” Hector slipped the bullet he’d taken from Megan’s leg into his shirt pocket. He reached for the door latch to let myself out of the backseat. The fingers of his left hand felt like sausages—thick feeling and unresponsive. His arm was nearly dead.
What the hell?
Hector looked at his left hand again. His fingers were bloody. He first assumed it was of course Meg’s blood. Then he saw the sleeve of his shirt was stained with blood too. A little blood ran down from under his sleeve and across his palm. Frowning, pulse starting to race, Hector felt around his left arm with his right hand.
Goddamn it! Was that a hole in his coat sleeve? He patted around and then felt the pain as his finger slid into the hole a shade.
Hector had been hit back there when all those bullets were flying! He was shot high up on the arm, just a couple of inches down from the shoulder. He felt the inside of his arm and found no exit wound. The slug was still in his goddamn arm! Holy Christ, but this was a bad development. Maybe the worst.
Shaking now, Hector opened the back door of his Chevy with his right hand. He shucked off his overcoat and then his sports jacket. He slid in behind the steering wheel and slammed the door behind himself with right hand.
“My turn,” Shannon said.
Their infernal game…
“Sure, honey,” he said thickly. “But listen, before we do that, there’s something else I have to do and fast. I kind of hurt myself back there. Got hit by a firecracker or something. I’m going to have to take care of it myself. I may yell and maybe loudly. If I do, please don’t let it scare you, sweetheart. Don’t worry, darlin’, okay?”
“Okay.” Shannon didn’t look too worried. Well, she probably hadn’t heard a grown man scream yet, Hector figured.
“And if I should go to sleep suddenly, it’s very important you shake me until I wake up again,” he said. “Maybe pinch my earlobe hard with your fingernails if you have to.” He showed her where to squeeze on his ear. “Pinch right here and pinch me hard as you can with your nails. That should wake me up if shaking me doesn’t work.”
Hector figured he’d probably pass himself out at least twice trying to dig the bullet out of his arm, once when it came free and perhaps again when he pressed that hot knife blade over the wound. He turned up the car’s heater and then ripped off his shirtsleeve at the shoulder. He rolled down the window and reached out with his right hand and twisted the driver’s side mirror around to give himself a better look at the wound.
It was an ugly but smal
l hole, maybe made by a thirty-eight. Something smaller than the slug that hit Megan, that much was certain.
His left hand was all but useless now. He realized he was going to have to use Shannon, a bit. He said, “Really, Shan, if I pass out, if I go to sleep, you’re going to have to wake me up, and right away, okay?” Hector might bleed out, otherwise.
“Okay.”
“Promise me?”
“Pinky promise,” she said. She held up her right hand, her pinky sticking out. They wrapped their little fingers around one another’s and shook. Been a while since he’d done one of those. That other time had been with that little girl in Europe, the one Jimmy and Hector had defied the Nazis to rescue.
Hector handed Shannon the pliers. “I’m going to have you hold the ends of these over a fire,” he said. “It’s to kill germs. Be careful not to burn yourself.” He got his Zippo going and she held the pliers over the blue-orange flame. He closed his lighter with a click and dropped it in his pocket a last time. “Careful, honey,” he said. “Don’t touch the ends or burn yourself.”
Then he poured some whisky on his wound—that stung—and took a little drink for himself. That swill sharpened him up a bit. Or it felt like it did, anyway. He took the pliers from Shannon and took a few deep breaths. He waited for his right hand to steady.
Shannon was watching him with those big and luminous blue eyes. They were like Meg’s eyes, but innocent. He said, “We still have a game to play, right? Still want to do that?”
Poor kid looked pretty worried, now. Hector figured he must not look too good to her. She said, “You still want to play? You’re sure? It’s freezing but you’re sweating. Are you sick? Why are you bleeding?”
He said, “Take a good long look around out there. Find something really good and tricky to spy. I won’t watch where you’re looking. I’ll just fix myself up while you do that.”
Hector took another deep breath. He took a look in the mirror, then set to it. He started to root around the wound and tears came to his eyes. He stopped long enough to get his wallet out and slip it between his jaws. He was determined not to scare the little girl with any screams from the agony of what he was trying to do to himself.
24
Hector was dreaming of the war, his first more or less, down there in Mexico, chasing Pancho Villa. He was dreaming about the first time he was shot. That had happened the same night Hector lost his virginity.
This voice: “Wake up, Mister Hector! Please, wake up! You’re scaring me!”
Hector opened his eyes. Shannon’s face was in his. Her tiny fingers were pinching his right ear lobe. His ear hurt like hell, just as it was supposed to. It had brought him back around like her shakes hadn’t, he guessed. He said thickly, “Good girl. You can stop squeezing now, honey. How long was I out?”
“I don’t know how to tell time,” Shannon said. “You screamed, then dropped these on the seat.” She held up the bloodstained pliers and a bloody bullet.
Hector took the bullet from the little girl and looked it over. The slug seemed to be in one piece. “There are paper napkins in the glove compartment,” he said. “Wipe your hands and then wipe off that tool, won’t you, honey?”
He dropped the bullet into his shirt pocket along with the one he’d pulled from Meg’s leg. He looked back over the seat. Meg was still breathing, thank God. There didn’t seem to be too much fresh blood coming through the makeshift bandage bound ’round her thigh.
Hector didn’t have the stomach to cauterize his own wound—it would almost certainly put him under again if he attempted it. As it was, he already felt nauseous. He couldn’t bandage the arm himself, not with one hand. He handed Shannon the sleeve he’d torn from his shirt. “Do you know how to tie your shoes, honey?”
“Not very well.”
“Time to start learning then,” he said, trying to smile. “You’re going to tie that around my arm, over where it’s hurt.” He pulled loose the knot from his necktie and then tugged the tie from around his neck. “We’ll tie this over it, too. We’ll make a game of it, to help you learn how.”
Shannon gave him an uncertain smile. “A new game?”
“That’s right,” Hector said thickly. “Make bunny ears. The quick rabbit…”
***
“I did a good job?”
“A very good job,” he said. “I’m very proud of you, Shannon. You’ve been a big help through this. You’re a good nurse.”
“I had to wake you up again.”
Jesus, he hadn’t even known he’d blacked out the second time.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re very brave and very smart. I’m so proud of you, kid—you don’t know how proud.”
“Megan’s been talking in her sleep,” Shannon said.
“That’s good—a good thing, really.” Hector figured it was good in the sense that Meg was still in the game. He pointed at the pliers on the dash where Shannon had evidently placed them. “Do me a favor, honey. Take those things in there to that building and give them to that man in there behind the counter. Thank him, please. Can you do that for me, Shannon?”
“Sure.” He watched her struggle with the door latch, then slide out and run head down through the whipping snow flurries.
While she did that Hector checked his face in the mirror. His eyes didn’t look too good. They were bloodshot and it was hard to focus. He still felt dizzy. Nauseous, too. His arm had gone from numb to throbbing.
There was motor lodge just across the street. After Shannon slammed the car door he said, “Put on your lap-strap, honey. We’re going to try and cross the street.” God willing, he wouldn’t get them killed making what should be a simple crossing.
It should be plenty easy enough to do. Yet in his present state?
Hector steered one-handed in front of the motor lodge’s lobby. He had Shannon cover Meg’s legs and all that blood on the seat with his overcoat, then leaned on his car’s horn.
A surly young bellboy came out. Hector draped his sports jacket over his wounded arm to hide the damage. He rolled down the window with his right hand and said to the boy, “Can you have the clerk come out here and check us in? We’ve been on the road all night coming down from Canada. Just too tired to make the Indiana border. That’s where we live. I don’t want to wake my wife or leave my little girl alone. Really, I’d come in if I at all could, but it’s been nearly thirty straight hours of driving in the snow. I’m plumb beat to the wide, sonny.”
Hector’s sorry and haggard looks must have convinced the kid he meant it about being exhausted. “I suppose we can do that,” the kid said, seeming not at all sure.
He went in to talk to the clerk and Hector shucked out some bills from his roll.
***
Hector parked directly in front of their room and handed Shannon the key. “Can you go open the door to the room honey? Can you keep it open for me? I’m going to have to carry Meg inside.”
“Sure I can.”
“Good girl.” Hector smiled: the kid was a brick.
“I hope Meg will be better soon,” she said, looking worried now. “Tomorrow is Christmas.”
“She’ll be fine, I swear it,” Hector said. “Go get that door open, honey. I’ll bring Meg.”
He waited until Shannon had the door open, then Hector climbed out of his Chevy, feeling very woozy. It was quite a struggle getting Meg up and over his good shoulder. He thought he’d black out a third time from the effort.
Weaving, Hector carried Meg in and laid her out on one of the room’s two full-sized beds. Hector had a little movement back in the fingers of his left hand, but any attempts to move that arm hurt like hell.
Hector swayed there, seeing spots. He sat down quickly on the foot of the bed and got his head down between his knees, taking deep, slow breaths until he felt something close to steady again. When he thought he could make it, he limped over to the door to watch Shannon as she went out to close the rear door of his Chevy and lock it up.
Hector waited
until his dizziness subsided, then, went back out, opened the trunk, and pulled a car cover from the trunk. With his one arm, he managed to get the Chevy under wraps, at least enough to hide the plates and distinguishing features of the new model car.
Hector then locked up the hotel room door and fumbled with the phone. He let the operator do all the work.
A police dispatcher answered. He asked her to find Jimmy Hanrahan.
It seemed to take forever for that request to be fulfilled. Hector cursed each passing click of the clock: he knew time was not on his side.
That blessed tenor: “You’re alive, then, Hec?”
“Alive, yes. You too.”
“I’m fine and about to blow this cursed place,” Jimmy said. “Worthless cretins here have all they’re getting from me.”
“I need help, Jimmy. I badly need a doctor. Megan and me both.”
Jimmy’s tone shifted. “Oh, Christ. Where are you, Hec?”
Hector told him. He said, “I don’t know what you can do, Jimmy. A real doctor is going to have to report these wounds. We’re both shot. I’ve got the bullets out myself, but I think Meg may need a surgeon. Slug dug in close to an artery in her leg. My wound isn’t closed yet. I’m bleeding like a son of a bitch.”
“Christ,” Jimmy said. “You hang in there Hec, damn ya, you reckless idgit. Let me worry about finding you help. Stay strong, brother. I’ll be there in jig’s time.”
25
Hector heard Jimmy’s voice through a kind of haze. “That seems to have it,” he said. “And the woman?”
A silky voice—lyrical even—answered. “Oh, she’ll be just dand-dee. Your friend did quite a respectable job, under the circumstances. He’s much man, as the saying goes. Digging that bullet out of his own arm like that? Some very tough guy… Just like you, yes, James?”
“Just finish patching him up, freak,” Jimmy said, all acid.
Hector opened his eyes. He mumbled, “I’m not dead yet?” His mouth was dry. The fingers of his left hand tingled.
“Not yet,” Jimmy said. “You and Meg will be okay. We’re just finishing up with you.”
The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 15
