by C I Dennis
There would be no way for her to climb back up—it was far too steep. But she tried, digging her boots into the gray slag, and she began to make progress. If I didn’t do something immediately, she would be back. I picked up lumps of earth and threw them at her, but it didn’t stop her. She found her balance on a small ledge and strung another arrow. I turned and hobbled back to the car.
The vehicle was locked. I was bleeding, and Karen would be back on top of the ridge within seconds. I didn’t think that I could run very far, if at all; the wound in my buttocks wouldn’t kill me, but it would certainly immobilize me.
There have been times in my life when my brain stops and my body takes over, as if I’m watching a video of myself doing something that I would never believe that I was capable of. I reached back and pushed the arrow the rest of the way through the flesh so that the flights came out of the bloody hole where the point had protruded. I didn’t pass out, or even scream. There was no soundtrack to this film, just the silent shock of adrenaline taking control.
I stumbled across the clearing and into the woods.
*
When a deer is wounded in the hindquarters it goes uphill. My father taught me this on the singular occasion that he took Junie and me along to hunting camp. We asked too many questions and were far too rambunctious to be invited back. Besides, having young kids around interfered with his drinking, and the booze was my father’s primary motivation to disappear into the forest for a weekend, not the hunting.
I was trying to disappear too, as quickly as I could, although every step was pure agony. I couldn’t go downhill because the scar of the asbestos mine stretched for a mile in both directions. There was nowhere to go but up, just as a deer would.
The forest had been logged and dead branches and slash lay in my way, making the going even harder although it provided extra cover. My immediate objective was to get out of sight and pray that Karen Charbonneau wasn’t any good at tracking, because I’d left a trail of blood in my wake even though I had wrapped my fleece jacket around my posterior in an effort to staunch the bleeding. Losing this much blood was dangerous. But the far more pressing danger was the woman with the bow. She must have scrambled to the top, because I heard her scream:
Vince Tanzi!
Karen was close. I heard her breathing hard, gasping after the difficult climb up the slagheap, but I couldn’t see her. I crouched down as low as I could behind a thicket and waited.
Tanzi! You’ll die out here!
That’s right, bitch, I’ll die sooner or later, but I’ll do it on my own terms. I could barely contain my rage, I was so incensed at having been conned. I had gone along willingly to my own execution. But she had missed, and I had run. Now, I had to stay quiet and pray that she wouldn’t see me.
I heard her roaming around the woods, calling out my name, which let me know her position. That was fine with me—I needed every advantage that I could muster. When her voice sounded like it was farther away, I decided to start moving again and go deeper into the woods. Uphill, like a deer with an arrow in its flank. The pain was still intense, but it had somehow become less important. My thirst was greater than my pain, and I knew that wasn’t a good sign. I was bleeding and dehydrated, and I was very possibly not going to make it through this.
I was stunned by Karen Charbonneau’s betrayal. I had been expertly played, and that hurt, because I should have seen it coming, but it also didn’t matter. What mattered was my little boy who I desperately wanted to see. I missed my son Royal, and my almost-son Roberto, and Florida, and my normal, mundane existence. Why had I even come up here? Chasing Grace Hebert through Vermont and elsewhere had been the worst mistake of my life, I had put my family obligations on hold to do it, and now all the people who depended on me would suffer. I was a useless, washed-up P.I. with a faulty brain and a wound that was seeping blood, no matter how hard I cinched the fleece jacket. Oh yeah, I had one hell of a pity party going on out here in the deep woods.
I took my phone from my pocket and tried to get a signal, but couldn’t. I could barely focus on the screen because my head had begun to wobble as if it had become unattached to my neck. Goddamn phones. Hate them anyway. I don’t need a phone, I need a canteen. I put it back in my pocket and kept walking.
Uphill, uphill, uphill. I had no idea how far I’d gone. A hundred yards? Miles and miles? The sun was weak now, and was struggling to filter through the trees. I badly needed water, but I couldn’t find a source. Karen Charbonneau’s voice had faded away, but I no longer cared. I just had to keep going.
Uphill. Find water.
The pain gradually disappeared. What pain? It was so calming to walk through these beautiful woods. Yes. I would show them to Royal one day. Just look at all of the gorgeous leaves on the ground, my son, like an oriental carpet in hues of orange and faded bronze. Isn’t this beautiful? This is where your father grew up.
Wait…I’m somewhere different now. We went there once, do you remember? There was lots of water, out there in the mountains. You could hear the streams trickling through the forest. Cold, clear water. Our knees buckled, and we dropped face down onto the soft earth next to the brook. We could reach out, cup our hands, and drink all of the fresh, cool liquid that we wanted. All of this lovely water.
Except that everything was white. Impossibly, catastrophically white. Too white to take even the smallest sip. I would drown in my thirst.
Karen Charbonneau was right. It was a beautiful view, and it explained everything.
*
When you die, they say that a glorious shaft of light descends from the heavens to take you away. This is according to people who have died, briefly, but then mysteriously came back to share their experience with the rest of us on nationally syndicated talk shows, or through a lucrative book deal. So they must be telling the truth, right?
I saw a light too, but it was no divine shaft. It was the harsh, fluorescent kind that you see in the back of an ambulance: the kind that makes the injured and sick look even worse than they feel. I was floating in and out of consciousness, taking in bits and pieces of the surroundings as the vehicle caromed and bumped down a darkened road.
Rose was belted into a jump seat next to my gurney. A dog was licking my hand. An IV bag swayed with the bumps, suspended on a pole above my head. My ass was on fire.
I was alive.
“Where am I?”
“You’re in an ambulance, Vince.” Rose said in a hushed voice. The lighting created a halo effect around her curly black hair. She looked like an angel. Maybe I was dead.
“I detected that,” I said. “I’m a detective, you know.”
“You’re a brain-damaged P.I. with an arrow hole in his butt,” she said, louder this time. “And you’d be dead if it wasn’t for this dog.”
“Chan?” I raised my head off the gurney to look at the animal that was still licking my hand.
“He found you,” Rose said. “I got to the building at the mine, and he jumped right out of the car window and took off. I watched him climb the hill, way up, barking like crazy. I thought he was after an animal or something. Then we started looking for you, and somebody heard him in the woods. When we got to you, you were facedown next to a stream with the dog by your side, howling.”
“Howling?”
“Saddest thing I ever heard. The other guys thought it was a wolf.”
I looked at the dog. “You saved my life?”
No big deal, he said. His furry chest was puffed out. I could swear that he was smiling.
“Who are you, Lassie?”
Don’t go all sarcastic on me.
“You wouldn’t have lived if the arrow had been a broadhead,” Rose said. “It was a target arrow. A hunting tip would have killed you a lot quicker.”
“She was going to finish me off, but I pulled her over the edge.”
“Cindy? She left the scene. We have the whole state looking for her.”
“Not Cindy,” I said. “It was Karen. We passed you i
n her Jag going the other way.”
Rose’s eyes widened. “Oh, really? So I guess your hot date didn’t work out so well?”
There was no way to answer that without making it worse. Fortunately for me, whatever was in the IV bag began to kick in, and I drifted off to a warm, sunny place where there were no jealous customs agents, no gloating dogs, and no P.I.s with perforated backsides.
SATURDAY
I have seen my share of hospital rooms, and they are all the same. When you want to sleep, they wake you for reasons known only to them. When you’re wide awake and your body is screaming for more painkillers, the entire staff has suddenly disappeared because they are “in rounds” or “on break.” Hospitals are a business, you’re the customer, and in the medical world the customer is always wrong. You know nothing, they know everything, and from the moment that you surrender your street clothes you are at their mercy. After all, how much credibility can you have when you’re shuffling to and from the bathroom in an outfit that exposes your lily-white derrière with the slightest breeze?
Chan was asleep at the foot of the hospital bed, tethered by a leash that was fastened to a side chair. Rose had managed to get him past the front desk by declaring him a service dog and flashing her badge. She was also asleep in the visitor chair, snoring lightly with her mouth open. It was ten in the morning, and I figured that they had both been up all night worrying about me.
Me, I was fine. Sure, my wound hurt, but the pain only served as motivation. I was angry as hell, and I could hardly wait to get out of this stupid hospital and right a few wrongs. I’d been shot with an arrow and betrayed by a woman who I had thought was on my side. I’d even believed that there was an attraction, and had allowed myself to share a bed with her, which I have become much more careful about in recent years after some disasters. Karen Charbonneau wasn’t a black widow, she was a praying mantis: have sex and then bite the guy’s head off. Not most peoples’ vision of the ideal male-female relationship, although it does eliminate the whole thing about sitting by the phone wondering if he’ll call.
I worked while my visitors slept. I left a message for Barbara to let her know that I would be in Vermont longer than I’d thought. The doctors wanted to get my vital stats back to normal and then operate on my brain. My ex picked up halfway through the message and put Royal on the phone for a few seconds to coo and ramble in toddler non sequiturs. He didn’t really understand that it was Daddy on the line, but it still cheered me up.
After I finished with Barbara I had a conference call with John Pallmeister and Robert Patton. The State Police hadn’t seen a trace of the Charbonneau twins, or Grace Hebert, or Clement Goody. No one had come back to the bible camp, the bunker, Karen’s apartment, or the machine shed by the asbestos mine. Karen’s Jag was gone, as were Cindy’s van and the Hummer. They had all vanished.
Robert Patton filled me in on the heroin-smuggling operation. Three trucks had entered the country in the last month bound for the machine shop. Each had been noted in the customs records at the Derby Line station as “unladen,” carrying only an empty, rusted-out container that was going to Belvidere, Vermont, to be restored. Three containers had been found at the shop with marks that indicated the removal of a false panel. A forensic accounting team from ICE headquarters in Burlington had gone through Matthew Harmony’s financial life and had found three deposits into his bank account of $9,000 in cash—just under the reporting limit. Pretty good pay for some quick work with a torch.
Pallmeister had reopened the murder investigation, and had learned from the coroner’s report that Matty’s blood alcohol content at the time of his death was point-two-eight, which would have made him far too drunk to kill himself. You can barely hold a gun with that amount of booze in you, let alone stick it in your mouth and pull the trigger. No one had put that together before, but they did now. Someone had gotten Matthew Harmony shitfaced and had blown him away. My chips would have been on the dissembling and deadly Ms. Karen Charbonneau, except that it could have been anyone, because I now knew that there was big money involved—more than enough to get someone killed, especially if they were about to jeopardize a multimillion-dollar drug ring.
Robert Patton estimated that over a hundred kilos of heroin could have been hidden in each of the containers. He admitted that the scheme was ingenious, as even an experienced border agent wouldn’t have looked too hard at an empty truck, nor would they have bothered with the X-ray equipment or a detection dog. At fifty thousand dollars per kilo, three container loads would equal fifteen million bucks worth of the drug at wholesale prices. Once it was on the street, the dealers would step on it—mix it with all types of ungodly chemicals—and would mark it up many times beyond that. Where in the unholy hell had Clement Goody come up with the money to finance this? He was broke, or at least he had been until recently.
Goody must have had a backer. Someone who could front him several million dollars.
And I had a notion about who it was.
I was in and out of sleep for most of the day. A steady stream of visitors came into the room, including my brother and sister, both of whom lived near Burlington. My mother made the trip up from Barre with Mrs. Tomaselli, but I shooed them off before they could set up permanent camp. They had watched over me in this same hospital during the weeks after I had taken a bullet to the head two years ago, and I told them that there was no need for a sequel: this was a flesh wound, and I would be fine. Mrs. T smothered me with a garlic-flavored kiss, and my mom left me a plastic container full of her homemade amaretto cookies, which would surely cure me a lot faster than whatever was in my IV drip.
During the time I was awake, Rose and I chatted and theorized about who was guilty of what. I didn’t let on to my theory about the front money. It wasn’t that I wanted to hold back or because I was testing her. It was because I had worked hard on this goddamn thing for the past two weeks, and I wanted to own the answer when it arrived. You get possessive when you spill your own blood over something.
I got my chance at around eight in the evening when Rose had taken off for Trish Lussen’s with the dog. The new shift of nurses had arrived and settled in, the doctors were gone, and the patients were bedded down for the night. The wing that I was on was quiet except for the bleeping of machines and the occasional noise of a television from someone’s room.
I sat up in the bed and felt everything that was in my IV bag rush to my head. Whatever was in there was good stuff, because I felt hardly any pain. I took hold of the wheeled pole that held the bag, and used it to help me navigate out of my room and into the hall. I was dressed in my hospital johnny—just a 200-pound ex-cop with his ass in a sling, going out for a little stroll.
A young nurse with spiky dark hair looked up from her computer. “Everything OK, sir?”
“I felt like moving,” I said.
She smiled. “That means you’re getting better.”
“Hope so,” I said, smiling back. “Is Angus Driscoll still here?”
“You know him?”
“We go back a long way,” I said. Like, two weeks. “I’d love to say hello if he’s still awake.”
“He’s on the secured floor,” the nurse said. “I can call up there. You’re a policeman, right?”
“Sort of.”
“They have a bodyguard outside his room. Someone came in last night and shut off all his support devices. He might have died, but a nurse heard it, and the person took off. The police were here.”
Driscoll was on somebody’s hit list? My theory was looking better and better. “Which way?”
“End of the hall, take the elevator to McClure Six. You look a little unsteady. Are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “It will be great to see him.”
*
I wheeled myself into Angus Driscoll’s room after giving a perfunctory smile to the guard sitting outside. The guy didn’t seem interested in anything except for the wrestling magazine he was reading. I must not hav
e appeared to be a risk, seeing how my flimsy hospital outfit looked about as threatening as a tutu.
Driscoll was in his bed watching the TV with the sound off. He was hooked up to a rack of machines and his complexion was as pale as his bedclothes, although he looked better than the last time I’d visited him. His eyebrows rose when he saw me. “What happened to you?”
“The Charbonneau sisters,” I said. “They happened to Donald Lussen, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard someone tried to kill you last night,” I said. “Was it one of them?”
“I’m alive,” he said. He pushed a button to make the back of the bed rise up. “And I don’t know anyone named Charbonneau.”
“I have some questions,” I said. I would have taken the visitor’s chair but my ass hurt too much to sit, so I stood next to the bed. “About the import business you had with Goody. Which is history, by the way. I doubt you’ll get your investment back.”
The gray eyes narrowed. “You can leave right now, Tanzi. Or I can have the guard escort you out.”
“These holy roller dope dealers are pretty touchy,” I said. “I only scratched the surface of what was going on, but they decided to kill me just in case. They’ve already taken two shots at you, and eventually they’ll get you. And your daughter Trish.”
“Trish has nothing to do with any of this.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “Goody is in too deep, he’s scared, and he’s irrational. Fear makes people do stupid things. Don’t tell me that you’re like that.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re a pragmatist,” I said. “You make deals happen.”
“You’re looking for a deal?”
“I’m looking for a young woman who is caught up in a very bad situation.”
Angus Driscoll sighed. The sound was like a tire deflating. “Go ahead,” he finally said. “Ask.”
“Where are they? Where’s Grace?”
