by Julia Keller
Bell thought she was going to die. And thus even though only a second passed, it might have been an hour. It might have been a lifetime. She didn’t know.
Her body was motionless. Her brain, though, was working so quickly, its contents spinning and diving and rising and then diving again, up and down and all around, that it almost made her woozy. Random pictures popped up into her mind, visual snippets from the past. There were no words; words didn’t matter. It was all imagery, image after image, each one vivid and true: There was Carla, beautiful Carla, and the way her daughter smiled at her from the stage on the day of her high school graduation. Bell had driven over to Alexandria from Acker’s Gap for the ceremony. She was in the middle of a big trial and so she was late, driving as fast as she could drive through the West Virginia mountains to get there, taking chances, flooring it, twisting the wheel of the Ford Explorer this way and that, I can’t be late, I CAN’T BE LATE, wishing she’d left the courthouse earlier, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of a murder trial. She got there just in time, blowing through a red light, going the wrong way down a one-way street, parking illegally, forgetting to lock her car, barreling through the security checkpoint—My God, are there security checkpoints EVERYWHERE now, even at high school graduation ceremonies? Yes, yes, of course there are, and thank God for that—and then racing up the center aisle and grabbing the first empty seat she saw, the white wooden chairs arranged in long rows on the field of the school’s soccer field, and the sunlight so bright on this late spring day, and up on the wooden stage, the principal is reading the names—“Eakins, Edwards, Eichhorn, Elkins”—and there she is, Carla Jean Elkins, eighteen years old, the pleats of the royal blue gown swishing around her ankles, she’s walking past the principal, and the principal is handing her the rolled-up scroll—“They don’t give you the real thing at the ceremony, Mom,” Carla had explained to her on the phone the night before, forgetting, the way a teenager always did, that her mother had been through the same ceremony herself and knew a few things, “It’s fake, because they have to make sure you pass your finals and actually graduate before they give you the real diploma”—and then the principal shakes her hand and then her daughter turns and smiles, and Bell knows, she knows, she knows, that Carla Jean is smiling directly at her. It’s just a smile, but it’s not just a smile. It’s a smile from her little girl.
Bell’s made so many mistakes in her life, done so many things wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because up there on the stage is her child, and Carla’s smiling, she’s going to be fine.
A shriek, a piercing one. The picture disappeared.
The sound came from Angie Clark, down on the floor, a few feet away from Lily and Ryerson. Angie pulled her hand away from her face and discovered the amount of blood that was on it, and now she was in a full-blown, top-of-her-lungs panic. Her screams drew Hinkle’s attention away from Bell. He turned, and when he did, the shotgun did, too.
Bell’s brief moment of visual reverie—the picture she had in her head, when she was convinced she was about to die—was over, but she’d learned something. When she finally did arrive at the last second of her life, a time that might come tonight or might come sixty years from now or anywhere in between, she knew what she’d see: the face of her daughter. She’d just had a sneak peek. The sight of it waited for her, waited for that final moment. It would always be there. No matter what Bell happened to be looking at when she died, the last thing she’d ever see would be Carla’s face.
“Shut up, bitch,” Hinkle growled at Angie. “Tired of listening to you.”
Angie’s shrieks continued. They had roused several of the infants, and now the room was awash in sounds of distress, from Angie’s loud cries to the softer, kittenlike fussings of the babies.
Hinkle took his free hand and pushed it against his forehead. Then he made a fist and hit the side of his head. “Can’t take this noise,” he said. “Giving me a headache. Like there’s an iron band around my head and it’s getting tighter and tighter.”
A cell phone ringtone overlapped with his last sentence. Both his hands were instantly gripping the shotgun once again. Hinkle’s eyes narrowed and he scanned the room.
“What the hell’s that?” he demanded.
“My cell,” Lily replied. She kept working on Ryerson as she talked. “It’s in my pocket. I get a call several times a night from the hospital, from the ER doc on call. She checks in to see how things are going over here.” The cell rang three more times, then stopped.
“What happens if you don’t answer?” Hinkle said.
“She’ll figure I’m busy and try again.” Lily sat back, hands on her thighs, her rear end resting on her heels. Sweat plastered her short hair to her scalp. Ryerson was still breathing, but just barely. “After a while, if I still don’t answer, they’ll send somebody to check on us.”
Bell watched Hinkle’s face. His brain wasn’t operating very fast, but it appeared to be clicking through various scenarios as thoroughly as it could, weighing options, calculating odds. There was a temporary lull in the cries from the basinets, and from Angie, as if Evening Street itself had decided to give him the time and the quiet so that he could think.
“Jess,” Bell said. “One way or another, this all ends tonight. You know that. I’m asking you to do the right thing. I want you to let us call the paramedics so that they can take Del. While he still has a chance.”
“And me, too!” Angie cried out. “I need help, too. I’m bleeding here. Real bad.”
Bell ignored her. “Jess?” she said. “They’ll be coming here soon, anyway. This is your chance to show that you never meant any harm here tonight. That things just got out of hand. It could make a difference.” She wouldn’t lie to him. He was in serious trouble, and there was no question of any sort of deal. But a small act of decency might be a factor. It might matter. She had nothing else to offer him.
“I want—” He faltered.
“What?” Bell said. “What is it that you want, Jess?”
She was afraid he’d just make another crazy, reckless threat against Angie Clark, or spew forth another nasty curse at her, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look at the nurse who sat on the floor a few away from him, both hands cupping the bottom half of her face, trembling and whimpering.
Instead, Hinkle’s eyes traveled slowly over to the side of the room in which the white basinets were assembled, each one backlit by a rack of monitors.
“I’d like to see my boy,” he said. His voice had shed its threatening edge. It sounded almost curious now, probing, as if he’d even surprised himself with the simplicity of his request.
Lily spoke before Bell had a chance to. “No,” she declared. “No way. You’re not going anywhere near those babies. You’ve already shot one man. And you’re drunk. I don’t care what we have to do to stop you—you’re not touching a child.”
Hinkle gave her a strained, mournful look. “He’s my son.”
“I don’t care,” Lily said. She was still kneeling, but her voice had the strength behind it of a club-wielding giant who loomed over the room. “You lay a hand on one of those kids—and I’ll kill you myself.”
Hinkle was taken aback by her vehemence. “Well,” he said, and he seemed, in the second before he spoke, to have made a decision. “How about this? I hand somebody my shotgun. Can I touch him then? Just once. That’s all I’m asking. All I want.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Angie broke in. The hard cackle of her laughter bumped up weirdly against the solemnity of the moment. “You really are a dang fool, Jess Hinkle. So whadda you think—you’ll give up your gun and then, when you finish singing a lullaby to your little bundle of joy, they’ll give you the gun back? Oh, Lordy. That’s hilarious. That sounds like the kind of pea-brained scheme you’d come up with. Makes me real happy that I told Tina to quit the drugs like she did. Sure, I knew what would happen to the baby—and that was the whole point, you friggin’ moron. I don’t want any child of yours running around, causing m
ore trouble. I knew that if she stopped taking the pills when she did, the kid would be way too sick to live. Of course I knew that. And the world will be well rid of it. Just like Tina’s well rid of you.”
Hinkle listened to her with no expression on his face. When he finally did speak, he did so quietly, all the fight gone out of him. “Well, now I got something to say to you, too, Angie. You’re a know-it-all bitch with a mean streak, and I pity the people who get nursed by you. I’ve done a lot of wrong things in my life—God knows I’ve done some terrible things, too, including what’s happened here tonight—but on my worst day, I still ain’t as bad as you. Not in my heart.”
With that, he handed the shotgun to Bell. She was startled, but she took it quickly.
“It’s up to you now,” he said to her. “Can I go touch my boy?”
The moment Hinkle relinquished the shotgun, Lily yanked the cell from her pocket. She punched in 911 and had a brief, hectic conversation with the dispatcher: “This is Evening Street clinic—I’ve got a gunshot victim—no, not an infant, an adult male, substantial blood loss, critical—and a hostage situation has just been resolved.”
Once Lily finished her call, Hinkle went on speaking to Bell: “Your friend down there says I can’t touch my boy. Not even now, when I’m unarmed.” He tilted his head and looked searchingly at her. “It’s the only time I’ll have with him. We know that. Only time I’ll touch him in this life. But it’s your decision.”
The sounds of a medley of sirens—still distant, but growing closer—were audible. Angie Clark mumbled, “Thank the Lord, we’ll soon be rid of this bastard,” and sank back into a heap, hands clapped to her bloody cheek. She gave Hinkle a grimly triumphant stare. “You’re gonna pay for this, buddy-boy. Just you wait. They’ll be locking you up for a good long time. And if that man over there dies, wellsir, they’ll throw away the key.”
The shotgun was slimy in Bell’s hands, from all the sweating that Hinkle had done. She held it as tightly as she could and addressed Lily. “Need help getting Del ready to go?”
“No,” Lily said. “Paramedics will be here any minute. It’s under control.”
Bell nodded. She looked at Jess Hinkle. His hands hung down at his sides. He had turned away from all of them and was gazing at the basinet where his son lay in a nest of lines and wires and electrodes. But Hinkle didn’t move. He was waiting for permission. It might not come, but he’d wait anyway.
“Lily?” Bell said. She knew Lily would understand what she was asking, without her having to spell it out.
The sirens were louder now. It sounded as if the vehicles had turned into Evening Street and were racing from the corner to the clinic. Any second now, Bell surmised, the big doors would heave open and Sheriff Pam Harrison and her deputies would come hurtling in, followed by the paramedics.
“Lily?” Bell repeated. She had control of the weapon, and she knew that Hinkle was no longer a threat. But she wouldn’t give the okay unless Lily agreed. Bell had been wrong once before about Hinkle, and had missed the signals that he was a dangerous man, and she was afraid she might be wrong again. She trusted Lily’s instincts. More, at this moment, than she trusted her own.
All at once, the building itself seemed to shift slightly on its foundation, owing to the massive vibration of heavy footsteps in the lobby, footsteps now approaching the door of the room in which they stood.
“Oh, hell,” Lily said wearily. “Let him say good-bye.”
Hinkle leaned over the basinet. Bell was right behind him, shotgun at the ready. She was taking no chances.
He had only seconds. There was no time for him to pick up the child before the door pounded open and the shouts and confusion would commence, before he was handcuffed and hauled away, forever exiled from the only thing in the world he truly cared about. Yet even if the authorities hadn’t been on the doorstep, Hinkle still wouldn’t have picked up his son, Bell surmised. He was afraid of hurting him. He was too intimidated by the great phalanx of medical equipment surrounding the infant, all the intricate machinery that had been marshaled to save these smallest and frailest of lives, lives permanently compromised by other people’s bad decisions.
Hinkle smiled. With great gentleness, he sent a scarred, gnarled finger toward his son’s tiny white fist. As Bell watched, Abraham stirred and yawned, and then he seemed to sense the presence of something there beside him. His eyes stayed closed, but he moved his fist, so that it brushed against his father’s finger.
Hinkle looked up at Bell. His eyes were bright and wet, and luminous with love. “That’s my kid,” he said.
And then the door crashed open.
* * *
“I don’t get it,” said Bret White, one of the paramedics. “What’d he want here tonight? What’d he hope to gain? Revenge against that meddling nurse—okay. But he coulda just jumped her on her way out to her car tonight, after her shift. And it’s not like he was gonna kidnap the baby—he knows how sick the kid is. So what was the plan?”
The others were gone. Bell had stayed behind with White to help him finish the incident report. Delbert Ryerson had been transported to the hospital, with Lily at his side, filling in the paramedics on what she’d done. Angie Clark rode to the same place in a squad car, insisting that she, too, deserved an ambulance. Deputy Jake Oakes had arrested Hinkle and taken him to the Raythune County Jail, where he’d wait for his arraignment.
Three nurses, sent by the hospital to take charge of the clinic and the infants in the wake of the crisis, moved around White and Bell, and around the basinets, in studious, efficient figure-eights. Most of the babies had—mercifully—barely noticed the drama, except to cry and fuss from time to time at the excessive noise.
“I don’t know,” Bell said.
White, a good-looking, middle-aged man with a blond crew cut and a broad face, gave her an I-know-better grin. “Bet you’ve got a theory, though.” He and Bell often worked together at the same crime scenes. He’d heard her philosophize many times about good and evil, in light of the terrible things they saw.
“A theory.”
“Yep.” He clicked his pen shut and slid it into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “Hinkle didn’t just get up this morning and decide to go terrorize a clinic with a bunch of seriously ill newborns. So why’d he do it? Where’s the upside?”
“There’s not always a reason for everything. Sometimes there’s just an emotion. A ragged one. One you don’t know what to do with—and so you lash out. You end up doing something monumentally stupid. Something like this. And like Jess said, maybe someday, Abraham will hear about how his father came here tonight to defend him—and he’ll know how much he was loved. Jess loved him enough to give up his freedom for him. His future. I’m not saying I condone what Jess did—but part of me can understand it.”
White thought about it. “Yeah, okay.” He pushed the clipboard up under his arm. “Looks like ole Del might pull through. That nurse—he owes her his life.” He looked around the clinic. “Life and death. This is a kind of crossroads, I guess. Same as any hospital. People are born. Some of them live and some of them die. Here, a lot of them don’t make it. But we keep on trying, don’t we? We just keep on trying to make it right.”
“We do.”
They were interrupted by the stark umbrage of a baby’s cry. A nurse leaned over the basinet. She lifted out the child, cooing softly while she swayed back and forth in a comforting rhythm.
“Is that Hinkle’s kid?” White said.
Bell took a look. “No. That’s a little girl. Name’s Sunny.”
“Sunny.” White waited for her to explain the name, a name that seemed incongruous in a place dominated by tragic fates and constant pain. “Sunny,” he repeated.
When Bell didn’t offer a backstory—she was too tired—White said, “So how is Hinkle’s kid?”
“Stable. He has a hard road ahead, though. He’ll be getting methadone for a while. And the way I understand it, they have to administer a ton of othe
r drugs, too, just to stop the seizures. Those take a toll. Chances are, he’ll have severe developmental delays. He’s got some pretty big mountains to climb.” She surprised herself with what she said next. She wasn’t sure why she said it, or where it came from. “But he’s fighter, that one.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s still here, isn’t he?”
* * *
Jess Hinkle never saw his son again. He died in prison four months after the night he stormed the clinic. He’d gotten caught up in a nasty feud with another inmate, and the bad feelings finally erupted in a fight in a shower stall. Hinkle held his own, even after the other man produced a razor blade he’d hidden in a bar of soap, and the fight ended in a draw. A guard had separated the two men and was leading Hinkle away when his opponent rushed back toward him and gave Hinkle a last hard push, just to make his point. Hinkle lost his balance on the slippery tiles and fell, hitting his head on the floor. He died in seconds of a subdural hematoma.
The month before Hinkle’s death, Angie Clark had been forced to undergo a formal disciplinary review by the ethics division of the Raythune County Medical Center. There were no witnesses to her conversation in the hospital with Tina—the one during which she’d advised the young woman to stop her drug use without medical supervision—and Angie claimed she had misspoken during the standoff with Hinkle when she admitted to giving that advice. She was under extreme stress at the time, she said. She was out of her head. She was a nurse, for heaven’s sake. Why, she would never—never—put an infant at risk by telling the mother to quit drugs just before giving birth.
