by Susanne Beck
"I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here."
She reached for me again, pulling her fingers back just before they made contact with my face. "I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I tried to save you. I . . . ."
"Ice! You did save me! I’m here! Right here!"
But she didn’t hear me. Just kept speaking as if looking at a voiceless ghost. "Please forgive me, Angel. I couldn’t . . . ."
It was then that Bull, no doubt taking Ice’s sudden calm as the perfect opportunity, reached past me, bared Ice’s hip, and plunged his needle into her bruised flesh, depressing the plunger quickly, then removing the needle and stepping back away.
Her eyes flared in anger, then became almost dead as whatever drug he’d used spread through her weakened system. ". . . couldn’t save you . . . ," she mumbled as her eyes finally closed and her head lolled to the side.
I turned to Bull, my own eyes blazing in anger. "Why did you do that??" I demanded, feeling my fists ball tightly with the urge to lash out. "Why???"
"She needed to be sedated, Angel," he said reasonably. "Those stitches need to be tended to."
"You idiot! She thinks I’m dead! And when whatever dope you’ve shot her full of wears off, how do you think she’s gonna react? There’s nothing for her now! Nothing!!"
His eyes grew huge as the realization struck him. "I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . ."
"Of course you didn’t! You didn’t think! You didn’t trust me! You didn’t do anything!!"
"Angel . . . ." Tom tried to break in, so I turned my anger on him as well.
"She’s not a dangerous animal that needs to be tranquilized, Tom. She’s a woman who thinks her lover is dead. How would you feel if it were you?"
Unable to hold my gaze, he looked down at the bed, not answering.
I turned to the others. "Well? Any of you?"
"You called fer help, Tyler," Pop finally said. "It ain’t exactly like any of us has ever done this before. Maybe we made a mistake, but it was an honest one."
I could feel the anger bleed out of me at his words. I sighed, unclenching my fists. "I know, Pop. I just wish I could have had a little more time with her, that’s all. I wish . . . well, that doesn’t matter now." I turned to Bull. "I’m sorry for lashing out on you like that, Bull. I know you were only doing what needed to be done."
He smiled, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Don’t worry about it. Next time, I’ll trust your instincts, ok?"
"Let’s just hope there isn’t a next time." I smiled to take the sting out of my words.
He nodded. "Fair enough. How about if you help me undo the bandages and we can take a look at the damage, huh?"
"Sounds good."
* * *
As it turned out, the damage wasn’t as severe as it first seemed. Though she’d torn some stitches from the long, deep cut in her belly, the other wounds had just been aggravated and, with a little pressure, they stopped bleeding relatively quickly.
Her fever remained the biggest danger, at times soaring so high that Bull feared seizures from it. We bathed her with cool water to hold it down as best we could until the antibiotics he’d loaded her system with could do their job properly.
When things had calmed down somewhat for the moment, I finally had the presence of mind to realize just who had come to my call for aid. From my position on the bed next to Ice, I looked up at Tom and John, who looked profoundly out of place now that the immediate danger had passed.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" I asked.
John nodded. "Yeah. We found the car. What was left of it."
I sat up straighter, pulling Ice’s hand into my lap and clasping it tightly. "Where?"
""bout thirty miles or so southeast of here, off of one of the logging roads we’d been looking at. Less, as the crow flies, of course. It . . .went off the road and into a tree. Pretty damn fast, too."
I could feel the blood drain from my face as I grasped Ice’s unresponsive hand tighter. "What happened?"
John looked at Tom and Pop before returning his attention back to me. "The driver died instantly. He . . .um . . .he had a steering-wheel through his chest."
My stomach turned and I swallowed back the bile that threatened to come forth. Without really knowing why, I nodded for him to continue.
John scratched his heavy beard, then sighed. "The guy on the passenger side, near as I can tell, flew through the window and smashed into a tree. He probably died pretty quick too."
"And . . .the others?"
"They survived. The accident, anyway."
As I waited for him to continue, John again looked at his brother and Pop. The three men fidgeted, obviously not wanting to say anymore on the subject. "Please?" I asked. "I have to know."
Pop came forward and laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Tyler, the men who hurt Morgan are dead. ‘s best ta leave it go at that."
I wanted to. I probably would have given a king’s ransom not to hear what was coming. But, in the end, I just couldn’t let it go as Pop asked. I had to know what happened. Ice, I was sure, would never tell me, and the hole that would leave would, in time I was sure, become much larger with each passing day. "Please tell me. Please."
More furtive glances were exchanged before Tom decided, apparently, to step forward and take the figurative male bovine by its bony head appendages. "It was like . . . ." He raised his hands, palms up, searching for the right words, "Like a pack of wolves had had at them or something. It was . . . ," he swallowed hard, visibly paling, "bad."
"How bad?" My voice was so soft, I was surprised anyone heard me.
"Bad."
"Maybe wolves did come? After, I mean?"
Tom and John shook their heads. "No," John said. "Corpses don’t spill that much blood."
"Before, then?" I asked, determined to find a way to make things fit, other than the obvious, which I wasn’t prepared to believe. "Maybe she left them for dead, and then something came and finished the job?"
Both men shook their heads again. "I’m sorry, Tyler," Tom said, "but that’s not what happened."
"How do you know?"
"Because they all had bullet wounds to the head. Two of them behind the ear. One to the temple. He bore the brunt of the savagery as well, for some reason."
Oh, I knew the reason. I knew it just as well as I knew who it was who’d been killed by a bullet to the temple.
The same man who had put his gun to my temple.
"Carmine."
"What?" Tom asked.
"Carmine. He was the one who made Ice drop her gun or he’d kill me."
Bull, who’d been listening quietly, nodded his head. "Add to that the fact that he used to be her friend. He betrayed her. She’s never taken kindly to that. Roll all that up in a ball, add in those idiots taking shots at her, and I’m surprised she left enough of them lying around for you to find."
The nausea that was threatening from the start of the conversation finally hit. My stomach cramped, hard, and I dove for the side of the bed.
Bull reacted instantly, steadying me and shoving a basin he’d used to clean Ice’s wounds under my open mouth. There wasn’t really anything in my stomach to expel, but it didn’t seem to realize that right away. I gasped and sobbed, trying desperately to catch my breath as the vision of Ice and the men she’d killed played through my mind in an unending stream, causing my stomach to cramp over and over and over again without pause.
When my muscles finally, blessedly, relaxed, I slumped down on the bed, barely feeling the cool rag that Bull used to wipe my face and forehead. "You ok?" he asked, using almost the exact same tone of voice Ice had used in similar situations.
"I’m not sure," I replied as honestly as I knew how.
And, more importantly, would I ever be again?
That Ice had killed those three men wasn’t really an issue with me.
While it might very well have been once upon a time, during Ice’s capture and my subsequent search for her, I’d come to learn a deep, dark an
d not particularly appealing secret about myself.
And that was that if I could have, I would have killed them all without a second’s pause for taking her so violently away from me.
No, it wasn’t that she’d killed.
It was how she’d killed.
Noticing Bull was still staring at me, one hand on my shoulder, I pulled myself together and moved away from him a bit, straightening my aching legs.
"What’s going on, Angel?" he asked in a gentle tone.
I swallowed hard and manufactured a smile from somewhere. "I . . .um . . .I need some air, I think."
"Oh." Frowning slightly, he straightened back up to his full height and looked down at me.
I forced my smile to broaden. "Honestly, Bull, I’m ok. I just . . .you know. . . need to get out of here for a couple minutes." To lend credence to my words, I slipped from the bed, standing and stretching. "I’ll be right outside. Down by the water. Call me if she wakes up?"
He looked as if he was going to say something, but after a moment, I could see his shoulders sag and he simply nodded in acquiescence. "Ok."
"Great. Thanks."
As I came to the bottom of the stairs, I saw Pop putting the phone back down in its cradle. I looked at him with questioning eyes.
He smiled slightly. "Ruby," he explained. "Corinne’s been sprung. Gonna go up and get ‘em both ‘n bring ‘em back home."
The smile which spread my lips this time was genuine. I would welcome them both back home with open arms, particularly Corinne, who I sensed just might have some of the answers I was so desperately seeking in my mind. "Thanks, Pop. That’s great news."
"Yup." His eyes narrowed as he looked at me. "You sure you’re gonna be alright, Tyler? Don’t seem none too good to me right now."
I felt myself nodding, my lips moving to form the lie so naturally falling from my tongue. "I’m fine. Really. I just need some fresh air, that’s all."
The look he gave me let me know in no uncertain terms that my lie wasn’t in the slightest believed. After a moment, though, he shrugged. "Do what ya gotta do, I guess."
I nodded. "Thanks, Pop."
* * *
I found myself on the little green dock, not really aware of how I’d gotten there, only grateful for its cool, silent and non-questioning peace.
My head was a jumble of conflicting emotions; my heart, not far behind.
Lowering myself down to the weathered wood of the dock, I trailed my feet in the water, watching the crescent moon play tag with the wavelets stirred up by the freshening breeze as I leaned my back up against one of the posts which anchored the dock to the shore and disappeared beneath the shallow, glistening water.
Ice had spent long winter days trying to teach me the skills needed for meditation. I called upon those skills now, clearing my mind of all intrusive thoughts and concentrating on the air as it entered and left my lungs, never really realizing when I’d fallen asleep between one breath and the next.
I found myself standing on a dirt road deep in the middle of nowhere. For reasons known only in dreams, I was in nothing save a white sheet, which twisted and rippled around my body in response to the wind circling through the grove in which I found myself.
The night was bright with stars which, as I watched, wheeled themselves over my head in a ballroom’s stately waltz to music known only to them.
I tried to turn my body, to move, to look around, but I seemed to be rooted to the ground. A ground which was neither warm nor cold, wet nor dry; a ground which simply was.
Looking down at my feet, I saw them hidden, enveloped in a soft white ground-mist which covered the forest floor like something out of a fairy tale.
Though perhaps I should have, I didn’t feel any fear. Just a sense of anticipation, knowing my mind had brought me here for a reason, and further knowing I probably wasn’t all that far away from finding out just what that reason was.
My reverie was broken by twin spears of bright lights which lanced through the misty forest glen like a white knight on a charging steed. As I continued to watch—having no other choice but to do so, might I add—the lights coalesced into the high beams of an oncoming car. A car that was headed, at a very high rate of speed, down the very road upon which I was currently rooted, unable to move from its onrushing path.
My mouth opened wide in a silent scream as my legs ignored the desperate messages my brain was sending to them.
At the very last second, the car veered sharply left and headed down a small embankment and into the forest proper, where it was halted, suddenly, violently, in a scream of tearing metal and breaking glass, by the massive trunk of a very old, very sturdy tree who hardly shook at all with the tremendous impact.
Then the forest was silent once again.
I looked on in horror, knowing that no one could possibly have survived the carnage of that wreck. Still, I needed to run forward, to be sure, but my cursed feet remained rooted to the ground, refusing even the most forceful commands to move.
Then, to my amazement, one of the rear doors opened, and a blood-spattered figure stumbled out, collapsing on the ground and groaning as he—and I could definitely tell it was a man—cradled his head with both arms while rocking his massive body side to side in pain.
A second man followed the first. This man somehow managed to stay on his feet, though his face was a grisly mask of blood which literally sheeted down from the gaping cut to his forehead and nose.
Then a third figure emerged, and this was one I recognized easily, immediately though she was battered, bruised, and as bloody as her two predecessors.
"Ice!" I yelled out to her, my heart beating quickly in my chest.
She didn’t hear me, though. Didn’t even lift her head to look my way as she stepped over the body of the first man, almost colliding with the second as she did so.
As I watched, she looked at the man she’d almost run into, a brief flare of rage lighting her pale eyes. Then it abruptly died out and she pushed past him, heading in an unsteady walk back toward the road where I was standing, her lips moving in a silent litany I would have paid a king’s ransom to hear..
It was then that the third man pulled himself from the wreckage, and this also was someone who I immediately recognized, having had an up close and personal interaction with him just days earlier, when his gun was pressed against my temple.
"Carmine," I spat. I could feel my lips twist in revulsion as I watched him casually brush the broken glass from his still pristine suit, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Smirking slightly, he carefully reached behind his back. When his hand came back into view, it was holding the same gun which had been pushed against my head earlier. With an almost careless grace, he lifted the muzzle and aimed in Ice’s direction.
"Ice!" I screamed, jerking my entire body in an attempt to move. "Ice! Get down!!!"
But of course, she didn’t hear me. Just kept walking toward the road, her hand occasionally going to the back of her head where the butt of a pistol had come down and knocked her unconscious, an almost distracted look on her face.
"Ice! Please!!! Get down!!"
Almost as if she’d heard me, she turned, but it was too late.
A pistol shot rang through the forest.
Ice crumpled to her knees, her hands instinctively covering the wound just above her hip.
Lowering his gun, Carmine slowly walked over to Ice while in the background, his two goons managed to shake off their injuries and flank their boss, one to a side, like a pair of bloody bookends.
He moved forward until he stood just before her kneeling figure, his gun still hanging loosely at his side. "Mr. Cavallo wanted you brought to him so he could finish you off himself."
"He doesn’t have the balls to finish off dinner," Ice replied, her voice jeering and cold.
Carmine tilted his head—in acknowledgement, I think--before stopping one of his goons from backhanding Ice for her insolence. Then he continued on in his even, quiet to
ne. "Since that now seems an impossibility, I really have no choice but to end this here."
Reaching out his free hand, he almost gently cupped Ice’s chin.
She jerked it away, staring daggers through him, teeth bared in a snarl of pure challenge.
He tilted his head again, then removed his hand. "I’d say I’m sorry, but at this point, I don’t think you’d believe me."
"Ya got that right."
"Anything you’d like me to pass on?"
I watched, panic-stricken, as she jerked her head back once again. A second later, a shining glob of spittle sprung from between his eyes.
Once again he prevented his cohorts from exacting revenge, then casually reached up and wiped Ice’s gift away, smirking slightly and shaking his head. "Goodbye, Morgan. Despite how it now seems, it was an honor to know you."
Then slowly and deliberately, he raised his gun until the muzzle was just six inches from her forehead.
"No!!!" I screamed. "Ice!!!"
Again, my pleas went unanswered.
"This is just a dream," I whispered to myself, tears streaming down my face. "Just a dream. That’s all it is."
To prove the point to myself, I pinched the tender flesh of my inner arm as hard as I could.
The vision didn’t change.
Reaching down, I jabbed two fingers into the swollen skin of my lacerated knee.
Blinding pain tore through me, enough to wake up the stiffest corpse, and still no release from this nightmare.
Blinking tears of pain and grief from my eyes, I almost missed what happened next.
Almost faster than the eye could see, Ice’s fist shot out, scoring a direct hit to Carmine’s groin. The gun wavered, then dropped completely as he used both hands to cup himself. His eyes bulged and, almost in slow motion, he fell to his knees, mouth wide in a rictus of noiseless agony.
I found myself cheering loudly as the two remaining goons, in a universal empathy of men everywhere, winced and automatically reached down to protect their own private parts.
Which gave Ice time enough to roll away and come, more or less steadily, to her feet.
