by Dave Stanton
“I don’t know. I’m working on it.”
“What else do you know?”
“That’s about it.”
“Hey, Detective,” Cody said. “What’s the worst-tasting drink you’ve ever had?”
“What’s your point?” Iverson said irritably.
“Come on, think about it. You ever have a really shitty-tasting drink?”
Iverson looked at me. I shrugged.
“I don’t have time for games,” he said, but then he leaned back in his chair. “All right, you ever have a Slow Comfortable Screw? It’s a screwdriver with a shot of sloe gin and Southern Comfort. Tastes like cow piss with sugar. Why?”
“The expression on your face—you look like you just drank one.” Cody grinned and raised his beer. Iverson looked offended for a second, then actually smiled. “If you’re thinking about a career in stand-up, don’t quit your day job,” he said.
I listened to the exchange without amusement. Iverson stood and motioned for me to follow him, while Cody headed to the men’s room.
“Look,” he said, as we walked to the front door, “you and your buddy there are playing with fire. If I were you, I’d consider leaving town.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Just don’t do anything foolish.”
“Now why would I do that, Detective?” I said, but he looked at me like I already had.
21
When Iverson pushed open the door to leave, two uniformed cops burst in. One was Deputy Fingsten, and the other was a square-shouldered man in a cowboy hat. Fingsten drew his revolver and pointed it at me.
“Assume the position, asshole,” he said.
“What the hell is this?” I said to Iverson, who was either surprised or doing a good job acting the part.
“What’s going on, Sheriff?” Iverson said.
“Go back to your office, Detective,” the older cop said. “This man’s being arrested on a number of charges. You’re not needed here.”
“What charges?” Iverson said, while Fingsten handcuffed me.
“Take your pick. He’s an enemy of the people.”
“What charges, Sheriff?” Iverson said again.
“Detective, this is county business. I advise you don’t interfere.” I caught the sheriff’s eye, then read the name printed in gold on his shirt: Conrad Pace. He grabbed me behind the arm, Fingsten took my other arm, and they led me outside.
Iverson stepped in front of the sheriff. “I’m in the middle of interrogating him,” he said.
“You can have him after he’s booked. Try tomorrow,” Pace said, and elbowed Iverson aside.
Iverson watched the men walk me across the parking lot. Fingsten pushed me into the backseat of a squad car. As we drove off, I saw Cody burst out through the doors of the bar, his face hot and red, as if he was greatly embarrassed.
We pulled out onto 50. Pace drove and Fingsten sat next to me in the backseat. After a minute I looked at him and said, “I guess you’re not gonna read me my rights.”
Fingsten’s arm shot out and he backhanded me across the face. The same blow from a stronger man would have broken my nose, but his shot just made my eyes water uncontrollably.
“You got the right to shut your fucking mouth,” Fingsten said.
“This how you treat the tourists, Sheriff?” I said.
Fingsten hit me across the face again, harder than before, the back of his fist catching me flush in the nose, and this time I thought he might have broken it. My arms flexed impotently behind my back, and a dark rage rose in my throat. I leaned back, bent my right knee to my chest, and slammed my foot into Fingsten’s chest as hard as I could. He tried to block the kick, but my boot went through his hands like a jackhammer through dry twigs, and my heel pounded into his torso with enough force to snap ribs and cause internal bleeding. Fingsten’s body shot into the door, his eyes rolled back, and his body went limp.
“Goddamn you, that may be the last mistake you’ll ever make,” the sheriff said, and he stepped on the gas. We turned off the highway, then we were driving through a residential neighborhood and then down a dirt road. The car lurched to a stop, and I caught a glimpse of Conrad Pace, his face torqued with fury, his hand grasping his pistol by the barrel as he got out and opened my door.
• • •
When I came to, the first thing I saw was Louis Perdie’s face up close, his complexion rutted and pitted with blackheads. I was sitting in the snow, my hands still cuffed behind me. Perdie held a coffee cup, and he splashed the contents in my face. I blinked the icy water from my eyes. “He’s awake,” Perdie said.
“Rise and shine, shit for brains,” Conrad Pace said. He knelt down in front of me. When I lifted my head to meet his eyes, a sharp pain in the back of my skull made me dizzy, and I had to look back down.
“Here’s how it’s gonna be, private eye,” Pace said. He snatched my head up by the hair. “When we’re done with you, you’re gonna want to get as far away from Silverado County as quick as you can. You don’t stop to eat, piss, get medical attention, nothing. All you’re gonna want to do is get your ass out of my county. Because if you don’t, I promise the only way you’ll leave is in a body bag. Does that make sense to you? I know you’re a stupid fuck, so I want to make sure I’m getting through. Hey! Look at me, asshole!”
I raised my eyes to his face and tried to speak, but the words were strangled in my throat. He and Perdie grabbed me by the shoulders and tossed me down a short incline to the edge of a stream. It was iced over, but there was a three-foot hole cut out near the edge. I felt a knee on my back, and then my head was being pushed under the water. I gasped when I went under, and ice water shot into my sinus cavities. My eyes bulged as if they’d burst free from their sockets, and an intense pressure began to grow in my lungs. I strained to lift my head, but the hands gripping my neck felt like iron. My body bucked hard, but someone had all their weight on my back, and I couldn’t move. I squeezed my eyes closed as tight as I could and clamped my jaw shut. In a quiet part of my mind, I realized this is what it feels like to drown. I tried with all my strength to roll over and throw the weight from my back, but my legs were being held, and someone must have been sitting on my shoulders. It started going black around the edges of my vision when they jerked my head from the water.
“Get a good drink?” Pace said, smiling. I retched violently, trying to hack the river water out of my lungs. “I think you need another.”
They held me under twice more, and the last time I must have blacked out, because when I regained consciousness, I lay a few feet back from the water.
“Hey, private dick,” Pace said, grinning above me. “We got your friend here too. Louis said he wanted to be here with you.”
I heard a thud and a grunt, and Cody slid down the snow toward the river. The left side of his face was coated with blood, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. His hands were cuffed behind him.
“You cowards,” I wheezed, but then Fingsten was next to me. He stuck his revolver against my ear.
“Say another word, I’ll blast your brains all over the snow,” he said. “Come on, tempt me.”
Then a man I’d never seen before walked into view. The first thing I noticed about him was his coat hung off his back at an odd angle because of the massive slope of his trapezoid muscles. His black hair was very oily, and it clung to his dark, deeply pocked face like an overturned basket of snakes. He seemed to move with unusual strength and purpose as he stepped down the embankment toward Cody.
“I hear you’re good with a knife,” I said.
Fingsten pressed the muzzle of his .38 into my cheek.
The dark-skinned man turned toward me and our eyes locked. “You know nothing,” he said, his voice quiet and very even, as if it wasn’t him speaking. Then he smiled, and his eyes were suddenly wet and alive, as if a corpse had come to life.
Samantha Nunez had told the truth about the Samoan, I thought. I watched him and Perdie force Cody’s head into the wat
er. The Samoan went about his work without expression or any sign of physical effort. They held Cody under, while Fingsten cackled like a hyena and cheered them on. When they were finished, Pace lit a cigar, and Perdie removed the handcuffs from my hands and Cody’s. The Samoan seemed to have vanished.
“This one’s for Fingsten,” Perdie’s voice said behind me, and he kicked me in the kidneys hard enough to send my body tumbling out onto the frozen stream.
“We see you again, this’ll seem like a tea party,” Pace said. I heard him hike back up the incline, and then they were gone.
• • •
It became dark as we trudged through the snow back toward the highway. I didn’t have my jacket, and my clothes were torn and soaked. Every time I raised my head to a normal position, a stab of pain shot through my skull, as if a steel spike were jabbing a nerve. I could also feel an odd numbness where Perdie had kicked me, as if some internal organ was damaged, but my body didn’t realize it yet.
Unfortunately, Cody was in worse shape. He limped along slowly, his eyes dull and stupefied. I asked him what happened after I left the King’s Head, and his story of being apprehended by Perdie and the Samoan was disjointed and didn’t make sense. When I asked him to explain, his sentences became gibberish. Concussion, I assumed. We needed to get to a hospital quickly.
The wind started blowing, and the cold became unbearable. Our boots were soaked, and my feet had gone numb. Cody was also without a coat and was turning blue. His hands were balled up in fists, and his teeth chattered loudly.
Cody was walking more and more slowly, and finally he fell to the ground. I put his arm around my shoulder and dead-lifted him to his feet. I clenched my teeth and swore in frustration as we moved forward. Stopping would be suicide; we had to reach shelter or we’d freeze to death. The cold wrapped my body in a clutch of pain, and only the adrenalin from my fear and anger kept me going. I kept looking around for any form of shelter, but there was nothing but snow and skeleton trees. Exhaustion, desperation, and then panic began to overtake me. We slogged forward and crested a hill, and then I saw the lights from Highway 50 in the distance.
• • •
We were in a large domed room of some kind, surrounded by stainless-steel walls. The structure fanned out downward from the center of the ceiling, creating a circular enclosure. Cody was sitting at a table. We were talking about something casual, but I knew the purpose of the conversation was to distract me from some horrible, unmentionable reality we shared. I tried to ignore the dread in my heart, but it hovered inside me like an idling motor.
Cody stood and walked toward the single door in the room. He held his leg over his shoulder like a huge baseball bat. The appendage looked like it had been broken from a statue. A long peg leg was attached to his hip, but he seemed to walk without a limp. He opened the door, and in walked two men I didn’t recognize. One was wearing an Abe-Lincoln-style top hat and smoking a mouthful of cigarettes.
The second man was juggling three pieces of bony spine, and he reached up and snapped his ear free of his head and added it to the objects rotating through the air. The smoking man sat down and removed his hat. His head was flat, as if it had been neatly sliced off by a coroner’s saw. I went to shake hands with him, but my hand had no fingers. He opened his fist, and two black fingers lay on his palm. A dark, barrel-shaped man stood in the shadows, but I couldn’t see his face.
“Hey. Hey! Come on, wake up!” The voice snapped me out of the nightmare and into the generic colors of a hospital room.
“My, you were yelling. Rest easy, there.” The doctor was a man in his fifties with reading glasses low on his nose.
“Where am I?” I croaked.
“You’re at Stateline Emergency Center.”
“How?”
“You were brought in last night with another man. You were nearly frozen to death. Lucky for you the paramedics knew how to treat hypothermia. They saved your life.”
I tried to sit up. My hands were wrapped in layers of gauze and looked like white boxing gloves.
“Rest easy,” he said, as I struggled upright.
“My friend?”
“He’s on the other side of the curtain.” He nodded at a green divider hanging from a track on the ceiling. I held up my hands.
“What’s my condition?”
“Second-degree frostbite, maybe a touch of third degree. Your feet are wrapped as well. You should recover fully.”
“How’s my friend?”
“He has a moderate concussion, otherwise about the same as you. There was some doubt about his toes last night, but they’re past the danger point.” I felt a huge weight rise off my chest.
“How in the world did you end up out there with no jacket?”
“I was brought here in an ambulance?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Has a police report been filed?”
“No, not to my knowledge. Should one be?”
“Cody,” I said.
“He’s sleeping,” the doctor said.
“Thanks for everything, Doc,” I exhaled. “We’ll need to leave as soon as possible.”
“You should spend two days here for observation.”
“How about the frostbite?”
“We’ll keep the bandages on for two days, then it’s very important to not let your extremities get cold again. There’s been some damage to the flesh, and although it’s not permanent, it could become so if exposed to cold in the next couple weeks.”
The doctor left and a nurse came by and dropped off an unappetizing breakfast on a tin tray. I pushed the blankets back and carefully pulled my legs up. My feet were wrapped to the point that walking was improbable. “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. I swung my legs down and tried putting weight on my feet.
“Hey, Cody,” I said, but he didn’t answer. I reached over and pulled the curtain aside. He lay on his back, dead asleep. I let him be and took inventory on my battered body. The pain in my head and neck had subsided, and I could think clearly. When I touched my nose, it felt bruised and swollen, the result of being sucker-punched by Fingsten. My back was still sore where Perdie had kicked me, but I didn’t think it was serious. My biggest concern was the frostbite.
I rang the buzzer for the nurse. When she showed up, I asked her to dial a phone number for me. Fortunately, I’d memorized Edward’s number.
“Edward,” I said quietly. “I need your help. Please listen carefully. I’m at the Stateline Emergency Center. It’s about a block east of the Lakeside.”
“What are you doing there?”
“The men behind Sylvester’s death just upped the ante.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I got to get out of here, and quick. I need you to come pick me up.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
“Good man,” I said, but he’d already hung up.
“Hey, Dirt,” Cody said, leaning up on his elbow. His eyes were both blackened and horribly red. “I feel like I just went twelve rounds with Mike Tyson.”
“The good news is it was a draw, and you’ll live to fight another day,” I said. He smiled, then winced. “Don’t make me laugh, man.”
“So the elected sheriff of Silverado County wants us out of town,” I said.
“Incredible. You’d think the stupid asshole would at least hide his identity.”
“Apparently he thinks we can’t touch him.”
“He figured wrong,” Cody said, his eyes narrowed. “It’s a mistake he’ll regret.”
“We’re getting picked up in a few minutes,” I said. “We can’t stay here. The doctor said we just need some rest. It looks like we’ll be all right.”
“My truck. I don’t know where my truck is.”
“We’ll find it. It’s either somewhere between that stream and The King’s Head, or in the police impound yard.”
“I can’t remember how I ended up at the stream. My mind is blank.”
“You’ve got a conc
ussion. It’s normal to lose some memory.”
“All our clothes and gear are in my truck.”
“I know,” I said. “But the first thing we got to do is find somewhere safe to chill out. I’ve got someone coming to pick us up. We’re vulnerable here.” Cody looked at his bandaged hands.
“How did we get here?” he said.
“Somehow we ended up in an ambulance. Maybe a good Samaritan came to our rescue.”
“A good Samaritan?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I must have passed out.”
“Probably because you drank too much. Wenger’s right, you’re a drunk.”
“What?” I said, and Cody was grinning broadly. “This ain’t any worse than a typical hangover, Dirt. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Cody tried to stand up, but couldn’t find his balance on his wrapped feet and fell back over the bed, his bare ass sticking out of the hospital gown. The sight threw me into a punch-drunk laughing fit. I tried to wipe my eyes, but my hands were completely useless, and I was laughing uncontrollably, my stomach heaving, tears streaming down my face. The nurse came over to see what all the excitement was about.
“We’re checking out,” Cody told her. “We’ll need two wheelchairs.” The nurse looked at me with doubt in her eyes. Cody shrugged. “He used to take a lot of acid.”
“Post-trauma stress release,” the nurse said, in that detached way medical professionals sometimes speak. “It’s not uncommon.”
Before they let us go, we had to dictate our insurance information to the nurse. She also gave us a handful of free sample packets containing anti-infection pills for the frostbite. I promised we’d return the hospital gowns once we had some dry clothes.
“Don’t bother,” she said.
When Edward arrived, he made arrangements to rent wheelchairs, which folded and fit neatly into his trunk. I introduced Cody as my friend and associate, and Edward raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Cody reached out to shake hands, and Edward looked at him like he was crazy, then grasped the ball of gauze and gave it an awkward pump.
“You guys look like you’ve been to hell and back,” he said.
