Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “So how long do you expect to be gone?”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  “Does Roger know what you’re doing?”

  I smiled. “I didn’t tell him. He would’ve just ordered me not to.”

  “But he knows.”

  I nodded. “Probably.”

  “Because he knows you.”

  I shrugged.

  “You’re just going to ask questions, right?”

  “That’s all.”

  “You’ve got enough stuff for a month of espionage.”

  “Probably won’t need any of it,” I said. “I just want to see what I can find out. Talk to Dr. McKibben if I’m lucky.” I looked at my stuff. “What’m I forgetting?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I stuck my cell phone in my pocket and tucked the other tools and gadgets in among the clothes in the duffel so they wouldn’t rattle around and scrape against each other. “All set,” I said. “I’m outta here.”

  Evie followed me downstairs and watched while I pulled on my parka and laced up my old Herman Survivors boots.

  “You gonna be warm enough?” said Evie.

  “Plenty of layers,” I said. “My boots are insulated and waterproof. I’m good.”

  “Got your gloves?” she said.

  I fished in the pockets of the parka and showed my fur-lined leather gloves to her.

  “A warm hat?”

  “It’s in the car, Mom.”

  We headed for the front door. When I turned to kiss her goodbye, Evie was grinning at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You love this stuff, don’t you?”

  “What stuff?”

  “Sleuthing. Answering the call. Setting forth on quests. Being out there on your own. Having adventures. Testing yourself.”

  I smiled. “Probably a guy thing.”

  “Well,” she said, “have fun, then.” She put her arms around my neck, went up on tiptoes, pressed the entire front of her body against the entire front of mine, and gave me a long wet kiss on the mouth. “You better remember to come home,” she said.

  I gave her a squeeze. “How could I forget?”

  “Please be careful.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  Henry was sitting there beside the door with his head cocked to the side and his ears perked up. I scootched down beside him and gave his forehead a scratch. “Sorry, pal,” I said. “You can’t come.”

  He looked at me for a minute, then lay down, put his chin on his paws, and refused to make eye contact.

  I picked up my duffel and got the hell out of there right then, before my resolve evaporated. It’s hard enough to resist a woman when she presses her body against you and puts her tongue in your mouth, but sulking dogs are almost impossible.

  It was a gray Saturday morning in Boston, damp and raw and chilly, and the sharp wind that was funneling down Charles Street blew against me all the way to the parking garage and made the skin on my face cold and stiff. The air smelled like more snow was coming.

  I pulled out of the garage, drove down Charles, turned right onto Beacon, and cut over to Boylston via Mass. Ave. I found an empty meter around the corner from the Public Library, grabbed my duffel off the front seat, and went into my office building.

  On weekends you needed to punch the security code into the keypad in the lobby lest you set off alarms. They changed the code every Friday, and Julie always insisted that I write the new one down and carry it in my wallet. It was her perpetual hope that I’d be inspired to sneak into the office over the weekend and catch up on my paperwork.

  Weekends came and weekends went, and I kept not doing it. But Julie didn’t discourage easily.

  I went into my office, ignored the stack of paperwork on my desk, and opened the wall safe that I kept cleverly hidden behind a big framed photograph of my two boys. I took out my Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special .38 revolver. I kept the gun wrapped in a terrycloth dish towel that was lightly impregnated with Hoppe’s gun oil. The evocative aroma of Hoppe’s filled my office whenever I opened my safe. Sometimes I went into my safe just for a whiff of Hoppe’s. Once in a while I stowed some particularly important documents in the safe, and when I removed them, they smelled good.

  I broke open the gun. The Chiefs Special cylinder held five cartridges. Four of the chambers had bullets in them. I always kept the hammer down on an empty chamber, a precaution that I’d been told was entirely unnecessary, but I did it anyway.

  I kept a few boxes of .38-caliber bullets in my safe, too. I took out one box and put the bullets and the revolver into my parka pocket. Then I shut the safe, twirled the dial, evened up the picture, locked the office, and headed back to my car.

  I was feeling furtive and clever. Armed and dangerous. Ready for action. I had to resist the impulse to slink down the sidewalk with my back against the wall.

  My gun was licensed, and I had a permit to carry it—in Massachusetts. When I crossed the state line into New Hampshire, I’d become an instant criminal. New Hampshire had no reciprocity agreement with the Commonwealth on the matter of concealed-weapons permits.

  If I got caught in New Hampshire with that gun, I’d be guilty of a felony. And I couldn’t very well plead ignorance of the law. I was, after all, a lawyer.

  Actually, I’d be committing a felony whether I got caught or not, which should have bothered the conscience of a lawyer, not even to mention the risk of disbarment.

  My plan was to not get caught, which is probably a sign of a criminal mind.

  I’d owned the revolver for about twenty years and had used it just twice. Killed two men. A single shot in the chest each time. The Chiefs Special packed a wallop.

  Both of my victims were evil men who murdered people for a living and were prepared to murder me, and I had no regrets about killing either of them. But shooting people was an unpleasant business, and I profoundly hoped I’d never have to do it again.

  When I got back to the car, I stuffed the gun inside a sock, leaving the handle sticking out. I shoved it and the box of bullets into my duffel, which I left half unzipped on the front seat beside me. If I needed the revolver, I could reach in, grab its handle, and be shooting in about two seconds.

  Evie had me pegged. I did thirst for adventures. Negotiating divorces, settling estates, and suing companies that had screwed my clients was useful and sometimes rewarding work. I liked helping people. Justice always made me feel good.

  But practicing law, even when the stakes were high and the adversaries were formidable, hadn’t really pumped my adrenaline for many years.

  Smuggling a handgun across a state line was not exactly my idea of adrenaline-pumping adventure, but it was a start.

  Nineteen

  I headed north on Route 93. I’d loaded the CD changer with an assortment of stuff I liked—The Beach Boys, Beethoven, Oscar Peterson, ZZ Top, The Band, Sibelius, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan. I was facing four or five hours in the car, and I intended to do some serious daydreaming. I wanted to put Dana Wetherbee and Shirley Arsenault and Dr. Judson McKibben, Misty and Zooey and Kayla, Sunshine and Patricia McAfee and Dr. Rossi—all of them out there on the periphery of my consciousness where they could mix and mingle and match, and maybe a serendipitous association might occur. My mind sometimes performed interesting creative tricks when I wasn’t paying attention to it.

  The sky hung heavy with ominous gray clouds, and about the time the highway passed through the outskirts of Concord, New Hampshire, I noticed that dry snow as fine as baby powder was swirling on the pavement. I didn’t remember seeing it before then, but it must’ve started sometime earlier.

  I didn’t have much of a plan. Hang out in Churchill, New Hampshire, and talk to people. Ask about trucks with bear logos on the sides, see if anyone knew anything about Dr. Judson McKibben and his dead daughter, Ursula, or remembered seeing a pregnant young blond girl mailing a card back around Christmas time. I’d show Dana’s photo a
round, the one her grandmother gave me in which Dana was looking young and cute and alive. Maybe I’d pull out her morgue shot, too. That might get a rise out of somebody. I had them both with me.

  Thrashing around, Gordie called it. The modus operandi of the diligent private investigator. Keep asking questions. Annoy people. Turn over rocks, kick the underbrush, shake the branches, rattle the cages. Disturb things and see if anybody reacted.

  By the time the highway began rising and twisting into the foothills of the White Mountains around Plymouth, the snow was blowing across the highway and accumulating on the pavement. I slowed down to forty-five, turned on my headlights and windshield wipers, and stuck to the right lane. Now and then an oil tanker or a ten-wheeler pounded past me at its usual cruising speed of seventy-five, and I gripped the wheel hard against the sucking backdraft and the clouds of swirling snow and resisted the impulse to touch the brakes.

  Somewhere around Franconia, while The Band and I were singing “It Makes No Difference,” history’s saddest and most beautiful song of lost love, my mind unexpectedly linked the puzzling fact that Dana Wetherbee had been taking a fertility drug called clomiphene with the fact that Ursula Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been in the business of stem-cell research. There seemed to be a link there somewhere.

  I pondered those two facts but drew no conclusions. So I pushed them to the outskirts of my consciousness and went back to singing.

  The snow petered out and then stopped as I was coming down out of the mountains, but the sky still hung low and heavy and dark and foreboding. I turned off the highway onto the winding two-lane northbound road that my atlas promised would take me to Churchill. It cut through a board-flat valley that I guessed would be planted with hay and corn in the spring. Widely-scattered mailboxes poked out of the high snowbanks at the ends of long straight driveways that led to trailers and boxy ranch-style houses and farmhouses with barns and silos. Here and there a rocky ice-rimmed brook passed under the road.

  It was a little after three-thirty in the afternoon when I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. When I went inside to pay, I found a coffee urn and some donuts in a transparent plastic case. A hand-lettered sign claimed the donuts were “fresh today.” I poured a large container of coffee, balanced two plain donuts on a napkin, and took them to the front of the store

  A boy wearing a Phish T-shirt sat behind the counter reading a Sports Illustrated magazine. I paid him for the gas and the coffee and donuts.

  When I asked him how far it was to Churchill, he said, “Huh? Where?”

  Back in the car before starting up, I consulted Mr. McNally again. By my crude calculation, Churchill lay seventy-five or eighty miles to the north.

  Head-high snowbanks on both sides of the road crowded against the shoulders and made the lanes barely wide enough for two cars to pass.

  I drove slowly, sipped my coffee, and munched my donuts. Some lunch. The least healthful kinds of fat and empty calories washed down with muddy concentrations of caffeine. Evie would not approve.

  That got me thinking about Evie, which reminded me how her body felt when she pressed it against mine, and that reminded me of how she believed that what I was doing was immature and macho.

  I had to admit that she was pretty much right. It was all about adventure. Brady Quixote Coyne on his noble quest, rattling around in his squeaky suit of armor, driving through the snow-covered countryside on a gray Saturday afternoon in the middle of January…two hundred miles from his loving woman and his faithful dog and his warm hearth.

  I fished out my cell phone and hit speed-dial for our home number. I wanted to hear Evie tell me she missed me in that unbearably sexy telephone voice of hers, see if she’d try to tempt me to turn around and come home and then force me to articulate the reasons why I wouldn’t do it.

  The phone didn’t ring. On the display it said, “No Service.” Oh, well.

  No road sign told me that I had entered Churchill, but according to my odometer, I had traveled seventy-six miles since leaving the gas station where I bought my donuts.

  I did appear to be entering a town of sorts, the first one in the past eight or ten miles. A medium-sized river appeared along the east side of the road and then passed under it at an old iron bridge. On the downstream side of the bridge the river widened into a frozen millpond. The pond was bounded on one side by a brick building that had once been some kind of factory. Now the windows on the flat wall that faced the millpond were covered with plywood.

  On the other side of the bridge there was an intersection too insignificant to warrant a traffic light. This seemed to be the commercial heart of Churchill. Here were a mom ’n’ pop grocery store, an animal hospital, a hardware store, a Catholic church, a lumberyard, and a couple of boarded-up storefronts.

  I drove through the intersection, passed a post office and an Exxon station, and found myself in the country again. I’d been driving with my headlights on since the snow squalls in the mountains. Now it was a little after five o’clock in the afternoon, and darkness had already settled over the land. Nighttime came early in the middle of January up near the Canadian border. Here and there specks of pale light shone from houses set back from the road. My headlights burrowed down the dark, narrow highway.

  Two or three miles north of town I came upon a low rambling log building. A brightly-lit sign out front said “Nick’s Cafe.” Floodlights lit the entire area, and warm orange lights glowed from the windows. Half a dozen vehicles were nosed up to the big snowbank in front.

  I pulled in and parked between two pickup trucks. One truck had a snowmobile tethered in its bed. A plow was bolted to the front of the other one.

  My forest-green BMW with its Massachusetts plates bracketed by those banged-up old Live-Free-Or-Die trucks was a neon sign screaming “Yuppie City Slicker.”

  That was all right. I didn’t care about blending in. I’d never been any good at role playing, and I didn’t intend to try it now.

  I went inside and stomped my boots on the mat. It was a large dimly-lit rectangular room with a low ceiling and a wooden floor. The walls were raw pine planks stained brown from years of smoke and sweat. They were hung with stuffed brook trout and deer heads and neon beer signs. To the left was the dining area—a bar against the back wall, a few square tables by the front window, and some plain wooden booths along the side wall.

  Three or four men wearing baseball caps and flannel shirts perched on stools at the bar. They had beer bottles in front of them, and they were leaning on their elbows and gazing up at the television where a college basketball game was in progress. The booths and tables were all empty.

  There was a pool table at the other end of the room, plus a row of old-fashioned pinball machines. A couple of men were playing pool. I watched them for a minute. A young guy with a ponytail and an earring seemed to be running the table. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and when he leaned over his cue stick to line up a shot, he squinted against the smoke. A bulky guy with a big droopy mustache and a bald head was sitting on a high stool against the wall chalking his cue and looking up at the ceiling.

  There were some wooden pegs on the wall inside the doorway. I hung up my parka, went into the dining area, and slid onto an empty stool down at the end of the bar.

  The guy beside me turned his head and said, “Howya doin’?” He had a scraggly red beard and a rumbling voice. A green John Deere cap was pulled low on his forehead.

  I nodded. “Good. You?”

  He mumbled, “No complaints,” and returned his attention to the basketball game.

  A minute later a woman appeared from the kitchen behind the bar area. She had short blond hair and a wide, generous mouth. She was wearing skin-tight blue jeans and a little leather vest over a snug-fitting black T-shirt, and it was hard not to notice her body.

  She wiped the bar in front of me with her rag, and without looking up said, “What can I get for you?”

  “Coffee,” I said. “And so
me advice.”

  She lifted her head and looked at me. Late thirties, early forties, judging by the squint lines at the corners of her eyes. “Coffee’s cheap,” she said. “Advice is free, which is just about what mine’s worth most of the time.” She turned, poured a mugful of coffee from a pot on a burner, and slid it in front of me. “Cream and sugar?”

  I waved my hand. “Black is good.”

  “Haven’t seen you around,” she said.

  “First time I’ve ever been to Churchill,” I said. “My name’s Brady. Brady Coyne.”

  She nodded slowly, as if she intended to memorize my name. “I’m Nick.”

  “Nick.”

  She smiled. “Short for Niccola. I own this dump. This plus my daughter are all I got left from a crappy marriage. Both of ’em cost me more money than they’re worth, but I love ’em anyway. So what kind of advice you looking for?”

  “I’m a long way from home,” I said. “Is there a motel or inn or something near here?”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Boston.”

  She nodded as if she already knew that. She pointed off to the right. “There’s a motel up the road. Keep on going north five or six miles, you’ll come to it. Big red neon sign out front. You can see it a mile before you get there. Bruce and Joanne Sweeney been running it for twenty years. You want me to see if they got a vacancy?”

  “That would be nice,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  She took a cordless phone from under the bar, pecked out a number, listened, then said, “Hey, hi, it’s Nick…Yeah, not too bad. You know how it goes. Look, I got a fella here from Boston needs a bed….” She listened for a minute, then looked at me. “They got a couple units vacant. She wants to know, twin beds or a double, and for how long.”

  “Double, I guess,” I said. “Just one night.”

  “He’ll take the double,” Nick said into the phone. “Yeah, just tonight. His name is Brady. No, that’s his first name. Brady—” She looked at me with her eyebrows arched.

  “Coyne,” I said. “With a Y.”