by Julia Keller
“Lily,” Bell said, speaking calmly and carefully into the receiver. Lily, she knew, would hear the exaggerated care in her voice and realize she was under duress. She’d do as Bell said. “There’s been an accident out here in the lobby. Delbert Ryerson’s been shot. I need your help in getting him inside. Yours and Angie’s.” Bell felt the heat of Hinkle’s wild-eyed, volatile stare. She had to keep sounding cool and unruffled. In control. Panic would only make things worse. “Jess Hinkle is right here, and he’s agreed to let us help Del. We can make a place in there, right? Where you can work on him? Okay. Okay, good.”
Hinkle poked the shotgun in her direction. “You tell her that if she calls somebody, if somebody tries to get in here, I’ll shoot the lot of you. Swear I will.”
Bell spoke into the phone. “You heard that, right? Okay.”
She hung up. She put a hand on Ryerson’s shoulder to rouse him, and the response was a long scream of pain. It jarred Hinkle.
“Stop it! Stop the damned noise!” Hinkle cried out, the shotgun shaking in his grasp. “Can’t stand it. My head—my head’s spinning around—”
“Hey.” Bell put up her hands, palms facing out, as a way of settling him down. “Easy. Just take it easy. No problem. I’m going to knock on the door here, just to let the nurses know we’re ready to come in, okay? Okay, Mr. Hinkle?”
“Name’s Jess.”
“Okay, then. Jess. We’re good here, right? I’m going to start. Okay?”
Hinkle, still wincing from the spikes of pain in his head, mumbled something that sounded like agreement. Bell put her hand on the knob and turned it. Lily had released the lock on the other side of the door; it opened smoothly and easily.
They had no choice but to drag Ryerson into the main room, flat on his back. Lily took one arm, Angie took the other arm, and Bell handled his feet. He was so heavy that they panted in ragged unison after pulling him the short distance.
There was no bed in this clinic big enough to put him in—and if there had been, there was no way to hoist him up into it, even with all three of them working together. The floor would have to do.
Ryerson’s skin was rapidly turning white. He was ice-cold to the touch. He’s dying, Bell thought, if he’s not already dead. He’s lost too much blood. There’s no chance. She kept the observation to herself.
Hinkle, crouched over like a soldier in a foxhole, followed them in. He had the shotgun in a tightly suspicious grip. Once they were all inside, he kicked the door shut behind him with a black-booted foot.
Lily ignored the man with the shotgun and focused on Ryerson. She kneeled down beside him. “He’s going into shock. We’ve got to stop the bleeding right away,” she declared. “Angie, get the bandages. Bell, I need blankets from those shelves over there. I’ll set up an IV.” She moved quickly and efficiently, locating a portable IV pole, readying the syringe. Then she kneeled down once more, finding a vein in his unresisting arm. While she worked, she directed her words to Hinkle. “Want to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”
“Shut up,” Hinkle said.
“Just promise me you won’t hurt these babies,” Lily said. She said it flatly, not pleadingly. She still wasn’t looking at him. She concentrated on her patient. “Deal?”
“Ain’t here to hurt no babies.” He snorted.
“Then why are you here?” As she spoke, Lily checked the level on the IV pump. She took a load of bandages and gauze from Angie. “Why in God’s name did you bust in here like this and endanger the lives of—?”
Abruptly, he swung the shotgun muzzle around until it pointed directly at Angie’s head.
“I’m here,” he declared, “to put so many goddamned holes in this here bitch that when she takes a drink of water, it’ll look like somebody turned on the goddamned sprinklers. Copy that?”
* * *
Delbert Ryerson was fading. His breaths were shallow and widely spaced. Lily had managed to stop the bleeding, but he’d already lost an immense amount of blood.
Too much, Bell thought, for him to last much longer.
This would not be the first time she’d seen a man die. She wondered if that was the reason she hadn’t panicked yet, and frankly wasn’t likely to panic at all, no matter what happened next on this night. Death was hardly routine—it would never be routine—but it was often the aftermath of violence, particularly gun violence, and Bell had become inured to violence during the last seven years in Acker’s Gap. Violence no longer shocked her. Death was a shame, but it happened. You learned to deal.
Because you had to.
And the truth was, she’d been accustomed to violence long before she became involved in the criminal justice system as an adult. She’d seen plenty of it as a child, too. Being exposed to violence on a regular basis changed you, she believed. It aged you prematurely. The violence and the chaos aged you just as surely and just as systematically as the cigarettes and the whiskey did men like Jess Hinkle.
Bell watched Ryerson’s motionless body as Lily worked diligently to save him. She was thinking about violence and death in the abstract, which is why she didn’t immediately react to the substance of Hinkle’s threat.
Now she did. She quickly turned to the other nurse. “I asked you before. I’d like the truth this time.” Bell pointed to Hinkle. “Do you know this man?”
“No,” Angie said.
Hinkle’s angry voice exploded against her no: “Like hell she don’t! Tell ’em. You tell ’em. You tell ’em right now or I’m gonna—”
“Okay, okay,” Angie said, sounding more peeved than upset. She’d crossed her arms and taken a step back. There was annoyance on her wide face, but no regret. “I could be helping Lily save that man’s life down there, but—okay, sure, I’ll stand here and listen to this crazy fool go on and on.”
Bell felt the anger rising inside her. “You’re going to tell us what’s going on,” Bell snapped at Angie. She turned back around to face Hinkle. “And in the meantime, Jess, I want you to put down that damned shotgun. Okay? If there’s an accident and that thing goes off in here—” She inclined her head toward the big body of Delbert Ryerson, a bloody mess over which Lily Cupp labored with a forthrightness that had not yet plunged into desperation, but might need to, very soon. “You’ve already hurt one person. Imagine if you hurt one of these children. I don’t think you want that, Jess. Do you? That’s not who you are. You’re no killer. I’m right, aren’t I? I’m right about you. I know I am.”
He hesitated. Then he offered her a brief, nervous nod. There was a contriteness in the way he nodded, and that gave Bell hope. He cared about her impression of him. It gave her something she could work with.
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll put the gun down. I know you will. Just put it down on the floor over there. And then we can talk.”
Suspicion flared in Hinkle’s filmy eyes. “Won’t do no such thing. It’s a trick. You’ll grab it.” He sneered in Angie’s direction. “And then you’ll let her go on home, pretty as you please, without her paying for what she done. I ain’t no fool.”
“Then you don’t have to let go of it,” Bell said. “Just lower it. Please.”
Hinkle pondered, shrugged. He let the muzzle drop an inch or so. The shotgun no longer pointed at Angie.
“Thank you,” Bell said. “Thanks, Jess. I appreciate it.”
Now Bell made eye contact with Lily, who was still kneeling alongside Ryerson. The nurse’s scrubs were flecked and streaked with Ryerson’s blood. Lily lifted blood-soaked bandages from his wound and replaced them with a fresh batch, over and over again.
“How long,” Bell asked, “does he have, Lil?”
“If we don’t get him into surgery—ten or fifteen minutes, tops. And that’s being really, really optimistic.”
Bell addressed Hinkle again. She spoke calmly and slowly, in purposeful contrast to his intense agitation. “Jess? How about we call the paramedics and get Del over to the main hospital? Then you and me and Angie can figure all this out
. Okay? You don’t want this man to die. I’m sure of it. But if we don’t get him to the hospital, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. He won’t survive. So how about it, Jess? We let the paramedics come in and get him. And Lily goes, too. But I stay. Okay? I stay, and Angie stays. That’s how you know I’m going to keep my word. We’ll talk. You can tell me what Angie did to you. And how we can make it right. Okay, Jess? Can we call the paramedics? Get him into surgery? Can we save this man’s life?”
Hinkle appeared to be considering her proposal. Then his face closed down again in a wary scowl. “Nope. Nobody comes in or goes out. Not until I make this bitch pay.” His anger renewed, he hoisted the shotgun back up and thrust it in Angie’s direction. “I gotta hear her say she’s sorry.”
Ryerson’s body suddenly bucked in a series of spasms. A foamy gray liquid bubbled up out of his mouth, like something escaping a clogged sewer drain, and from somewhere deep inside him came a hoarse, drawn-out groan. The exhalation seemed to be a combination of all the shock and pain and panic and bewilderment that his body was enduring.
“Angie,” Bell said, almost yelling the woman’s name. “We’re losing him. You’ve got to tell me right now what this is all about. So we can get Del out of here.” Bell had, without noticing it, formed her hands into fists. She kept them at her sides, but she wished she could shake them in Angie’s face. “What the hell’s going on? How do you know Jess?”
“Him? I don’t know him.” Angie gave a small snort of derision. “I mean, sure—I know him, but I don’t ever speak to him. Not in public, anyway. I don’t ever admit that I recognize his sorry ass. I don’t want folks to get the wrong idea and think I’d ever hang out with the likes of him. Tina’s the one I know.”
“Jess?” Bell said. “What’s she talking about?”
“Let her speak,” he answered. “Let her tell you. It’s for her to say, not me. She knows what she done.”
Bell was back with Angie now. “Come on. Talk.”
Angie twisted up her mouth into a sour expression. “Tina’s my first cousin. I’ve been advising her, ever since she got close to her due date.”
“Advising her?” Bell said. “What do you mean?”
“I’m a nurse, okay? I think I know a thing or two.” Angie’s tone was petulant. “I’ve been to school. Had some experience. So when Tina came to me and said she was expecting and that the daddy was a no-good SOB named Jess Hinkle, I told her she better do exactly what I said. To help her baby. She was popping pills night and day, okay? He got her hooked on ’em.” She glared at Hinkle. “That’s the kind of snake you are.”
Hinkle shook his head. “I never gave nobody no pills. She’s been using pills since she was fourteen years old.”
“Whatever.” Angie’s voice was dismissive. “Anyway, I told her last week that she better stop using—or else her baby’s gonna have real problems.”
Lily looked up from her spot on the floor next to Ryerson. She was holding her hands over a thick piece of gauze that straddled his midsection. The white gauze was immediately soaked through with blood. She reached for another piece while flinging away the saturated one. “Angie,” Lily said. “You didn’t tell her to stop taking the pills on her own—without medical supervision, did you? Right before giving birth? You know better than that.”
Hinkle cried out, “That’s just what she done. And that’s why my boy’s as sick as he is. I talked to Tina this afternoon and she told me. I went over to the hospital. And she told me. She told me what you done. They explained it all to her—the doctors over there did. About how you can’t quit the pills like that, just before the baby comes—it’s harder on him that way. You can’t go cold turkey. Can’t do it. Makes it worse for the little one. He starts going through withdrawal in the damned womb, didja know that? Well, I didn’t know that—not until they told me. Even before he’s born, he’s suffering. Abraham suffered something terrible. And he’s still suffering now—worse that he ever woulda had to suffer otherwise.” A tremor of emotion ran through Hinkle’s body. “I’d just been over here the night before to check on my boy—and who’d I see? Who’s here taking care of him? Her. The bitch who done this to him. Some of it, anyway.” He shook the shotgun in his hands, from an excess of frustration and abject sorrow.
“Why didn’t you say you recognized her last night?” Bell asked him.
“Thought I’d let bygones be bygones,” he said. He sounded flustered, ashamed of his ignorance. “No need to make a scene here. No need to bring other folks into our family business. If she didn’t want to say knew me, then fine—fine, we’ll do it that way.” He sucked in a breath. “But then Tina told me today what she’d found out. About what happens when you just up and stop like that. Abraham was already gonna be in trouble, sure. But it would’ve been a lot easier on him if Tina hadn’t tried to quit on her own.” He gritted his teeth. “There’s no hope now. I had some hope—having a child is all about hope, ain’t it?—but now there’s no hope left. Nothing. Just the pain. The pain he’s feeling, every minute of every goddamned day.”
Hinkle was, Bell surmised, inching ever closer to the edge. Despair was hardening in him, making him indifferent to his fate. And a man indifferent to his fate is the most dangerous man in the world.
“Jess,” she said, as soothingly as she could manage, “we’ll work this out, okay? We will. Whatever Angie did, she’ll have to answer for. I promise you that. But listen to me—if Del dies, then everything changes for you. You’ll go to prison for a long, long time. You’ll likely never see Abraham again. There’ll be nobody left to care about him, nobody left to make sure he’s raised right.”
He looked at her, his eyes still smeared over from drunkenness but with one clear truth evident in their depths. “Didn’t think of it that way,” he said. “I’m only here for him, you know. That’s why I done this. I wanted to show him that I cared.” He shook his head. “I know that don’t make no sense—he don’t even know I’m here. But later on, when he’s old enough to understand, maybe somebody’ll tell him. They’ll tell him I tried. They’ll tell him I cared enough to bust in here to get him some justice. I never meant—” He took a number of deep, heavy breaths and glanced for a moment down at Ryerson. “—I never meant to hurt this fella here. But he moved. I thought he was comin’ for me.”
“Jess—” Bell took a step toward him. She had sensed that he might be ready now to give up the shotgun, if she moved slowly and gingerly.
“Get back! Get the hell away from me!”
She was wrong. The shotgun flew up at her face. Hinkle backed up a step and then stopped, panting wildly, fury in his eyes, aiming his weapon at Bell with a definite seriousness of intent.
“You come any closer,” he said, sounding ragged and mean, “and I’ll blow your damned head off. Don’t care what they do to me. Don’t matter no more, anyway. My boy ain’t gonna live a normal life, nohow.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Bell countered. Arguing with him was a calculated risk. But coddling and capitulation, she guessed, weren’t going to work, and so she was left with only one option: Talk to him candidly, straightforwardly, and hope that the bedrock decency that she’d perceived in him the night before—the earnestness, the love for his child—was a real thing, and that, in the end, it would have some power over his choices, including the ultimate one:
Whether or not to let them live.
* * *
Lily’s voice rang out. “I can’t stabilize him. Blood pressure’s dropping,” she said. The urgency in her voice had ratcheted up a few degrees. “For God’s sake, Hinkle,” she went on, “you can’t just let him—!”
“Shut up. Shut up!” he barked back at her.
His gray, nicked-up hands were so shiny with sweat that they glittered in the overhead lights. His eyes, Bell saw, darted around the room; he didn’t know what to do next. He was afraid of losing control of the situation. All he knew how to do was exactly was he was doing: telling the world to stand still, and enforc
ing the order with a proffered shotgun.
And then, in the half-second of silence that followed in the wake of Hinkle’s bitter retort to Lily, there arose a sound like no other sound they’d yet heard since the ordeal began: the thin, high-pitched wail of a baby’s cry. It came from the rows of basinets on the far side of the room.
It didn’t last long—less than ten seconds. But it seemed to have a galvanizing effect on Jess Hinkle. A ripple of shock ran through his entire body, causing the shotgun to quiver in his hands.
His voice sounded wrung out, twisted and pummeled by emotion. “Is that—is that my boy? Is that Abraham?”
“Could be,” Angie said. “They all sound pretty much alike, though. A sick kid’s a sick kid. They’re all in distress here. Do you get that? They need a lot of care. And you’re keeping us from doing our job. So guess what, Jess? If Abraham’s suffering—it’s on you, mister.”
That was the wrong answer. Before Bell realized what was happening, Hinkle lunged forward. The alcohol made him clumsy on his feet, but he was still strong, and he had surprise on his side. He raked the shotgun barrel across Angie’s face. She staggered sideways, falling to her knees and then all the way down, settling on her butt. Blood rushed from a triangular rip in her cheek. She screamed and flailed, trying to piece back the severed flap of skin with her fingers.
“Jess!” Bell said. “Don’t—!”
Now he whipped his body around in her direction. She wondered if she was about to get the same treatment.
“I’m tired of listening to that bitch talk about my boy! You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Bell said. Quietly, calmly. “Loud and clear. Just settle down, okay? I don’t want anybody else getting hurt. There’s no need for that. We’ll all just be cool here. Okay?”
He kept the shotgun trained on her face, his own face transfixed in a spasm of hate and fear and uncertainty and something else, too—something Bell couldn’t name, some emotion that was an amalgam of so many other emotions, a portion of them unique to him and his psychology and experiences, and thus ultimately unknowable by her. All Bell could say for sure was that he had a shotgun pointed at her face and a wildness coursing through his nerved-up body, a wild despair and a wild sorrow, and that she might be, in the next instant, the target of all that raw and deadly passion, when it was channeled—like a raging river forced into a narrow chasm between the rocks—into the curved index finger now twitching on the trigger.
