Lake Country

by Sean Doolittle

  Bryce made a gulping sound, working his mouth like a fish. Mike looked away. Only then did he finally spot Bryce’s gun, lying where it had skidded to rest against the baseboard beneath the east windows.

  Mike hopped over on one leg, gritting his teeth through the pain. He braced himself against the windowsill, stooped, and picked up the gun. Brought it back with him.

  Bryce was pawing at the side of his neck. He finally found the knife handle. Gripped it with both hands.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Mike said.

  Bryce didn’t listen. Still gagging, he pulled the knife out, then sat there, wheezing. Nothing happened for a beat. Then a red gout blurted out of his neck and splatted on the floor.

  Bright red. Arterial blood, Mike knew by looking. He’d seen it enough times to remember.

  When he’d come home from the service, Mike Barlowe made himself only one promise: that for the rest of his life he would never again do, for any reason whatsoever, what he was about to do now.

  He hobbled over to Bryce. Pressed the muzzle of the gun against the top of his head. Thumbed back the hammer. He took one look at Darryl’s lifeless body, then slid his finger over the trigger.

  “Mike!” a voice shouted behind him. “Don’t!”

  Mike looked over his shoulder. Juliet Benson stood in the doorway to the bedroom hall, eyes big as hubcaps. She had both hands on her head, gripping her hair. When she saw she’d gotten his attention, she untangled her fingers and lowered her hands. Held her palms out.

  “Please don’t do that,” she said. “Please.”

  Mike looked at Darryl.

  He looked at Bryce, who had slumped off to one side. The bounty hunter’s shoulder was covered in a blanket of blood. There was still more where that came from, pumping from the wound in his neck with every beat of his heart, a pool of it spreading all over Hal’s floor.

  But his eyes had gone flat, and he’d stopped gurgling. There wouldn’t be more coming out of his neck for long.

  Mike looked at Juliet.

  “Please,” she said.

  She almost sounded drunk. What the hell was wrong with her? Did she even know what she was saying?

  “Please don’t,” she repeated.

  Mike’s good leg gave out. He sagged into the only chair still upright. He didn’t move.

  Then, as if operating under someone else’s control, he disengaged the hammer of the gun. Reengaged the safety lever. Let the gun drop out of his hand. The gun hit the floor with a thud he could feel through the soles of his shoes.

  He looked at Darryl’s motionless body. He looked at Bryce, still working his mouth in silence, bleeding out on the floor.

  He looked up at Juliet in the doorway. She’d covered her mouth with her hands.

  Somewhere in the distance, Mike finally heard sirens.

  37

  Later, when they asked her what she could remember of the crash, Maya wouldn’t be able to offer much beyond the images she’d captured on digital tape, up to and including the crash itself.

  After that point, things got hazy. She could remember opening her eyes and looking at spatters of red on a white canvas. She remembered seeing Justin Murdock’s face and thinking that Kimberly Cross’s fiancé must have finally caught up with him. She could remember the point when things came into focus and she realized that the white canvas was her airbag, and the red was her blood, and that Justin wasn’t moving in the seat beside her.

  They’d had to cut them out of the Yaris—much the same way the techs at the station had to cut the DV cassette out of Justin’s demolished camcorder—but Maya didn’t remember any of that. She only knew because people told her afterward.

  She had a few other flashes here and there. A memory of looking up from the stretcher, an image of pine tops against blue morning sky. There were voices in the background. Pulsing lights and radio chatter. Running feet. At one point she remembered looking over and seeing the scruffy director from Twin Cities Public Television, blood streaming down both sides of his mouth from a nasty gash across the bridge of his nose, wandering around with a camera on his shoulder, taking the story into his own hands. She remembered thinking, I’m going to be on the news. Other than that, it was mostly dead air.

  MEASURING TIRED

  38

  They transferred Hal to the VA Medical Center late Thursday, awake and complaining. The way it worked out, he and Mike ended up half a dozen rooms apart on the second floor, which made it easy for Regina to shuttle back and forth between them.

  Friday morning, after they’d stitched him up, fitted him with crutches and a three-panel knee splint the size of a hard-shell rifle case, and while Mike waited for the ortho to come in and schedule him for surgery, a guy in a suit appeared in the doorway. The guy chatted a few minutes with the county deputy posted in the hall, then came into the room.

  Mike didn’t recognize him. He looked too slick to be another cop. He stood at the end of the bed and nodded crisply. “Mr. Barlowe. How are you feeling?”

  “Unwell,” Mike said. “Can I help you?”

  “I certainly hope so,” the guy in the suit said. “If you can’t, it will limit my ability to help you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Morton Clay.” He placed his briefcase flat on the roll-around table and released the latches one at a time. “I’m Wade Benson’s personal attorney.”

  Mike thought, Here we go. He’d rather have talked to another cop.

  “Pending your consent,” Clay said, “I am also your attorney.”

  “Say what now?”

  “I’m here to act as your legal counsel, Mr. Barlowe. I thought we should begin by meeting each other. And there are items we should discuss sooner rather than later.” Clay tilted his head. “Is now inconvenient?”

  “Listen, I’m not sure what this is,” Mike said. “But if you want to talk to me about what happened, I need my advocate here.”

  Clay nodded. “The VA has already referred you to someone, then?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ll want me instead. No disrespect intended. Your advocate—do you have his information?”

  “Her information,” Mike said, “and yes. Where did you come from again?”

  “I’m here at the request of the Benson family. At the request of Juliet Benson, specifically.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Miss Benson has asked that I represent your interests going forward. If that’s agreeable to you.”

  I’ll be damned, Mike thought. “Thanks,” he said. “But I don’t think I can afford you.”

  “A fact that needn’t concern us.” Clay opened the briefcase. “Felony conspiracy, aiding and abetting, accessory after the fact. These are the things that need concern us at the moment. Now.” He looked at Mike grimly. “If you’ve lied to the police in any way, this is the time to tell me. If you knew about, or participated in, the events of these past two days in any way, or to any degree that differs from your accounting of said events up to this point, this is the time to tell me.”

  “I didn’t,” Mike said. “And I haven’t.”

  Not that it mattered. The people who were dead were still dead. Mike had done what he’d done. He wished he’d done differently. He thought that he’d wish he’d done differently for all the rest of his days. But he couldn’t go back and do it again.

  “Then congratulations,” Morton Clay said.

  “On what?”

  “You may just turn out to be one of the lucky few whom the truth actually does set free.” The Benson family attorney took a brown folder and a stack of papers from the briefcase. “Let’s take about an hour for now. We’ll meet again after you’ve been discharged. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  Around noon, just as Morton Clay was leaving, Regina came in. Mike sat on the bed with his brace up and his head spinning. Regina jerked a thumb over her shoulder and said, “Who’s Mr. Fancy Pants?”

  “My high-powered lawyer, appare
ntly.” At Regina’s look, Mike shook his head and said, “Tell you about it later. How’s Hal?”

  “He has a message for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  Regina came over and took Mike’s face in her hands and planted a fat smooch on his forehead. She was a roving cloud of sweet-smelling perfume. “He says to tell you that you have to pay for your sandwiches from now on.”

  Mike smiled. It caught him by surprise and felt good. “I guess he’s going to be okay, then.”

  Regina took his hands and squeezed and said, “He also said to tell you how sorry he is.” Her eyes filled up with mother-hen mercy and she squeezed his hands tighter. “About Darryl.”

  Mike looked at her. Her eyes gave her away almost immediately. “Hal said that, huh?”

  “Well,” she said. “I’m saying it for him.”

  Mike nodded. “Tell him I said thank you.”

  Regina smiled and nodded back. Then her lip started quivering, and she let go of his hands. Mike looked out the window. He heard hoopy bracelets clatter together as Hal’s third ex wiped her eyes.

  After a minute, she stood up and said, “Here we are sitting around, talking about sandwiches, and you’re probably starving. What would you like me to bring you from the cafeteria?”

  Late Monday morning, her fourth full day in the hospital, Maya woke up from a nap to find Rose Ann Carmody sitting in the chair by the bed, typing on a laptop.

  Maya thumbed the incline button on the control and raised herself up a little, servomotors humming quietly beneath her. When she released the button and the humming stopped, Rose Ann looked up and said, “It’s alive.”

  Maya tried a smile. Her mouth felt gummy. “Hi, Rose Ann.”

  Rose Ann appraised her over the top of her reading glasses. “Well, I’ll hand it to you,” she said. “When you decide to insert yourself into a story, you don’t stop halfway, do you?”

  I guess not, Maya started to say, but she was so dry that her voice barely worked. She looked around in the folds of her blankets for the nurse call button. Rose Ann put her laptop aside. “What do you need?”

  Maya gave up. She relaxed her head against the pillow. “Some ice chips?”

  Rose Ann stood from her chair and said, “Don’t get used to this.” She grabbed an empty foam cup from the roll-around table and disappeared.

  Ten minutes later, Rose Ann returned with a new cup in each hand: ice chips with a tiny plastic spoon in one, steaming coffee in the other. She handed the ice to Maya. “There you are.”

  Over the weekend, in between nurses and residents, Maya had entertained any number of visitors. Detective Barnhill. Her surgeon. A few colleagues from the station. A few reporters from other stations, as well as from the newspapers. A short call from her dad back in Wichita, who arrived in Minnesota by Winnebago RV early Saturday morning.

  Sunday evening, around seven, she’d even been visited by Wade Benson and his family—including Juliet, who came in on a crutch but otherwise looked amazingly well, considering. She’d hugged Maya’s father and kissed his cheek, and they’d all stayed about half an hour. It had been so nice to see them that Maya had been sorry to see them go.

  But this was the first she’d heard from her news director. Maya thanked her for the ice. “Does this mean you’re not still mad at me?”

  “Of course I’m still mad at you,” Rose Ann said.

  “Are you in pain?”

  Maya shook her head.

  Rose Ann frowned at her.

  Maya nodded her head.

  “Shall I get the nurse?”

  Maya looked at the clock on the wall by the television. A few minutes of eleven. “No,” she said. “They’ll be around with drugs soon.”

  As Rose Ann sat down with her coffee, Maya crunched a few ice chips in her teeth. The cold slush felt sublime against her throat. She said, “How’s Justin?”

  “Better than you,” Rose Ann said. “I just came from his room. They’ll release him this afternoon.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “He said you can expect a visit on his way out. Fair warning.”

  “Even better.”

  Rose Ann smirked. “You realize that you nearly disfigured a perfectly good-looking backpack reporter.”

  “He was the one driving,” Maya said.

  “I suppose that’s true.” Rose Ann shook her head. “You’re both lucky.”

  Maya couldn’t argue. Even at moderate speed, a fair fight between a Lincoln Navigator and a Toyota subcompact wasn’t much of a fight at all. Morningside’s nephew, Maya heard, had walked into police custody with hardly a scratch on him, while a mede-vac chopper from the Northern Memorial/HCMC Air Care base in Brainerd had transported Maya and Justin Murdock back to Minneapolis. Justin had come through with a concussion, stitches, broken ribs, and a punctured lung. Maya had woken up in a recovery room with pins in both ankles, missing her right pinky toe and her spleen.

  As of this morning, she hurt all over. But she was still here. And here she would stay, the doctors assured her, for at least three more days, counting her lucky stars.

  Funny the way those stars had aligned. More than once it had occurred to Maya that she was recuperating in the same hospital where Becky Morse had died.

  “Well, at least we didn’t lose you,” Rose Ann said when Maya mentioned that fact. She sipped her coffee, then tilted her head. “Did you think I was kidding when I said that I wasn’t finished with you yet?”

  Maya sighed. “Rose Ann, I’m in no condition to discuss my future at News7. Or lack thereof.”

  “I’m not talking about your blasted future at News7. Or your lack thereof.”

  When she met Rose Ann’s eyes, Maya saw a seasoned perspective. An intuitive grasp on the meaningful angle here. The way the sun came in through the window, Maya could almost see her own reflection in Rose Ann’s half lenses. Or at least she liked to imagine that she could.

  With a little effort and a sharp jab in her side, she raised her cup of ice chips and said, “Well. To happy endings, I guess.”

  Rose Ann winked and touched her cup to Maya’s. “I was going to say big fat book deals,” she said. “But whatever makes you feel better.”

  Wednesday came around. With it, an anniversary:

  One full week since Juliet Benson’s abduction.

  All that day long—cooped up in bed, too spaced on pain meds to read or concentrate on television, by now nearly bored out of her skull—Maya found herself glancing at the clock, trying to place where she’d been the same time a week ago.

  Her surgeon came by to check on her incision around 8:30 a.m.; a week ago, Maya had been looking out a window with Juliet Benson in Linden Hills.

  Detective Barnhill stopped by around noon. She and Deon were back at the station, eating vending machine cookies in an editing bay.

  The nurse brought drugs at 4:00 p.m., just as Maya and Deon arrived at the county facility in Plymouth. Miles Oltman, her assignment editor, came around with a pot of flowers in the middle of the six o’clock news; Maya was looking at an abandoned Buick Skylark on Third Avenue.

  Sometime after that, she fell into a dreamless sleep, and when she awoke, the room was dark. Her dad’s chair was empty. Downtown Minneapolis twinkled outside her window.

  And she had a visitor.

  Maya blinked her eyes. The clock on the wall said 8:23 p.m. Last week, at this very moment, she and Deon had been stuck in traffic, trying to get over to St. Paul. Here and now, in room 517 of the Hennepin County Medical Center, visiting hours were nearly over for the day.

  “Darlin’,” the figure in the doorway said.

  How long had he been standing there? Maya hit the buttons. Motors hummed in the bed as Buck Morningside came into the room. He took off his Stetson and held it in his hand.

  “Hubert,” she said thickly.

  When she reached for her water, Morningside said, “Lay back, now.” He tossed his hat on the chair, picked up the water bottle from the roll-around cart, and hand
ed it to her. “That’s a girl.”

  In the dim light from the window, Maya could see white tape across the bridge of the bondsman’s nose. Both his eyes were black, and he had stitches over one eyebrow. He was balding on top, she noticed, and it occurred to her that she’d never seen him out of character before. All in all, the one-and-only Buck Morningside looked remarkably humanesque. Maya wasn’t sure she liked it.

  “Heard you lost a damn toe,” Morningside said.

  Maya shrugged. “Only a small one.”

  “Hell of a cute one though, I bet.”

  There. She’d used up all her banter. Maya nodded at a fat manila envelope Morningside held in one hand. Even in the dimness, she could see her own name written on the envelope in heavy black ink. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  Morningside looked down. He seemed to consider the envelope in his hand as though unsure of where he’d found it.

  “Well, now, this last week, I been thinkin’,” he finally said. “Going over things, I guess you’d say. Some of ’em … well. Some I guess I’d do differently. Hindsight-wise.” He shook his head. “But we only do ’em once, don’t we?”

  Maya sipped her water. “Usually the way it goes,” she said.

  Morningside handed her the envelope. “Had a couple of my gals put this together. Ain’t much, but I thought you might find a use. Interesting to read, anyhow.”

  She took the envelope. It was dense and heavy. Before she could ask about it, Morningside spoke again.

  “Now, this one here,” he said, a sly look crossing his bruised eyes, “I already had.”

  Maya watched him reach inside his coat and pull out a second manila envelope. This one was much thinner than the first. Crisp along the edges. There was nothing written on it.

  He placed the second envelope on the bed beside her leg.

  “What are these?” Maya said.

  Morningside picked up his hat. He patted her leg gently through the covers on his way out. “Feel better, now,” he said.

  That night—after Ernie Lamb returned from the cafeteria downstairs, tucked his poor maimed daughter in, and departed for the Best Western three blocks from the hospital—Maya sat up in bed, going through the contents of the envelopes Buck Morningside had delivered.