by Jon McGoran
“What do you think it is?”
She paused. “I don’t know.”
“Could it be the chemical thing? The MCS?”
“I hope not,” she said, quiet and scared, like she thought it was.
“Is this how it starts?”
She let out a sigh that trailed off into a crackly wheeze. “I don’t know, Doyle. It can be different every time. I tried to call Cheryl, to see how it started for her the third time. But I couldn’t get through.”
We were quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. “Can I get you anything?”
“You can find out what they were spraying.”
Nola didn’t seem the type to scare easily, and the fact that she was scared filled me with dread. Made me think maybe I should be scared, too. I followed Moose up the driveway and parked next to him, waiting while he slowly got out of the truck.
As soon as we got inside, he slumped into an armchair.
I sat in the chair across from him. “So what the hell is going on?”
“Squirrel is dead.” His lip started quivering, and his eyes welled up.
“Yeah, I know that, but before I lose you, you need to tell me what you know about it. What was he mixed up in?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. What were you two up to?”
He bit his lip. “Before I tell you this, I want you to know, Squirrel was a good guy.”
“But he was a junkie.”
“No, he wasn’t a junkie. Never.” Moose seemed to be sinking into the chair. “But he was a scrumper.”
“A what?”
“A scrumper. You know he made his squish, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, he didn’t exactly buy the apples. He scrumped them.”
“You mean he stole them?”
He rolled his eyes like he didn’t want to say it. When they stopped rolling, they half-closed. “Yeah, I guess.”
“From where?”
“All different places. He’d find a place; then he’d move on. He was good about that. He didn’t take too much from any one place, even if he found a really good place, because that wouldn’t be fair.”
“Great.” His eyes were slowly closing. “Something I need to tell you,” I said, and they opened back up a little. “Last night a crop duster came and dusted us with something.”
They opened wider still and looked around. “What are you talking about? With what?”
“Don’t know yet.”
He stared at me like he was trying to make sense of it. “Nola’s, too?”
I nodded.
“Fuck. Does she know?”
I nodded again.
He thought for a moment, then his eyes closed completely. “I don’t even know what to think of that.”
In seconds, his breathing became more regular, and just like that, he was asleep. I couldn’t tell if he was exhausted from the emotional trauma of the past couple days, or if he was crashing after a high. Maybe both. He shook himself awake, and sat up, momentarily confused. “I’m going to go crash for a while,” he said, getting unsteadily to his feet.
I watched him slowly climbing the steps, and after a few moments thought maybe I would do the same. The quiet of the house seemed to be urging me on, coaxing me to sleep.
I sat back on the sofa and closed my eyes, but no more than a few minutes had passed before I heard the doorbell. When I stood up, my entire body ached. The bells started playing again as I was reaching for the door.
It was Sydney Bricker, with a tight little smile on her face.
“Hello, Mr. Carrick.”
As I smiled back, I realized even the muscles in my face ached. “What can I do for you, Ms. Bricker?”
She pulled out a leather folio and a pen. “One last paper you need to sign before we can transfer the assets.”
She opened the folder to a page with a red plastic tab at the bottom, next to a space for my signature. I started to read it, some innocuous thing about having been informed of some estate tax that did not even apply to me. I could have sworn the page was identical to one I had already signed, and I wondered if she had somehow screwed the other one up. She seemed nervous, and I decided not to call her on it. She handed me a pen with her name on it. When I twisted it open it felt solid and expensive.
“Not many lawyers make house calls, you know,” I said, as I signed it.
I expected her to bring up the property again, but she never mentioned it. As I handed her back the pen, she took it between her thumb and forefinger and dropped it into her breast pocket, like she didn’t want to touch it, like she was worried about catching whatever was going around.
“Thank you, Mr. Carrick,” she said with that same tight little smile. Then she turned and left, as if she was in a hurry to get away from me.
I watched her drive away, but as I turned to go back inside the house, my phone rang. When I looked at the ID, my heart sank. Dunston Police Department.
“Doyle Carrick,” I answered, and my phone immediately beeped that it was almost out of juice.
“Chief Pruitt here. I’m over at Dwight Cooney’s mom’s place, 819 Mill Road, about a quarter mile up the road from Dwight’s house. Got something you might want to take a look at.”
* * *
Cooney’s mom lived in a double wide. It was kind of run down, but with window boxes and shutters and a row of marigolds, it didn’t look half bad. She was watching from the front door, holding a towel over her mouth. When she saw me look over at her, she disappeared inside.
A pair of ruts in the grass led to the back, where Pruitt was leaning against the back of his cruiser, arms folded across his belly.
Behind the car was a small, weathered travel trailer, its wheels sunk halfway into the dirt.
“Took you long enough,” he said when I walked up.
“Sorry. They take traffic enforcement pretty seriously in these parts.”
He smiled at that, but not for long. “You know I don’t have to show you this, right?”
Going along seemed like the quickest route, and by now I was curious. “Yes, I know.”
“Now, I’m short-handed as hell, got a bunch of wusses calling out sick every time they get a sniffle, so I don’t want you making anything out of this. And there’s no need to, anyway. I’m doing this out of professional courtesy, and as a goodwill gesture. But have no doubt, you fuck with me or piss me off, I will come down on you like hellfire, do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then, follow me. But don’t touch anything.”
He turned around and walked toward the trailer. “We found a key on Cooney’s keychain, found out he had this trailer parked in his momma’s backyard.” He shook his head. “Boy’s been a thorn in that woman’s side since the day he was born.”
He fiddled with the lock, then swung the door open and stepped aside, waving me in.
The interior was cramped, dingy, and dark. It stunk of lowlife male: stale beer, old pot smoke, sweaty socks, and garbage, with more than a hint of poorly aimed urine, which was odd since there didn’t seem to be a bathroom.
Cooney’s fridge was covered with photos, held in place by magnets and tape, and all featuring grainy candid images of the same woman. They looked like they had been taken with a camera phone. Some of them had been taken from outside a window. There were a lot of them.
Pruitt gave me a moment to look at them. “That’s Miss Watkins, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that’s her all right.”
“I assume she doesn’t have photos of Dwight all over her fridge?”
“No, she does not.”
“Makes it pretty creepy, then. You said she was getting a lot of hang-up calls, right?”
I nodded.
He held up a Ziploc evidence bag with a cheap cell phone in it. “Prepaid, courtesy of the mini-mart. We’ll send it in for testing, but the phone is set so the number is blocked. Almost all the outgoing calls were to Miss Watkins�
�s phone.”
I nodded.
“I don’t think she’ll be getting any more hang-ups, but she should have reported it. If he was stalking her the way it looks like, it could have turned out bad. And if we’d known about it, there’s things they could have done to trace it.”
“Right.”
“Anyway,” Pruitt said, motioning me out the door and fingering the key. “I don’t know if she needs to be told about all this, since Dwight isn’t going to be bothering her anymore. And I don’t know if she was really all that upset about those phone calls to begin with, since she never called them in or anything. But I thought I should let you know, so you could tell her she didn’t have to worry about it anymore.”
I kept quiet about all the reasons why Nola wouldn’t have wanted to tell him about the calls, how useless, unhelpful, and indifferent he could be. “When was the last call to Nola’s phone?”
Pruitt looked at his notes, squinting. “Tuesday night.”
“Did he send any texts?”
“What?”
“The phone. Did he send her any texts. The next day, right before the fire, there was a text, and then the photo.”
Pruitt frowned at me for a moment, looking vaguely annoyed, then he shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about that. Maybe he had another phone somewhere. I’ll keep an eye out for it.”
Maybe those crank calls had nothing to do with developers or land deals or anything else. Maybe it was just a lovesick, lowlife dead guy. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something else was going on.
49
The day’s events and the lack of sleep had left my nerves jangly and raw. When I got home again, it hit me hard: I needed sleep. Climbing the steps to go to bed, my joints creaked almost as loudly as the stairs. I felt like an old man, and smiled grimly at the thought that the way things were going, this could be as close as I got to being one.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw Moose’s light on and his door slightly open. I knocked, but got no answer.
I wanted to respect his privacy, but he’d had a hell of a day, too, and I wanted to make sure he was okay. Pushing the door open, I called gently, “Moose.”
He wasn’t in his bed, but I could hear wheezy, labored breathing. The bathroom light was on, and the door was open.
I called again, louder. “Moose!”
As I stepped into the room, I kicked two empty bottles. They clinked loudly, and one rolled under the bed. From the bedroom, I could see him passed out on the toilet. At least he was clothed.
I’d lost friends before, and I’d gotten pretty drunk when I did. I didn’t fault him for that. I figured I’d put him in bed and let him deal with the hangover in the morning.
Then I saw that he’d thrown up on himself, and I thought he could deal with that in the morning, too. But when I bent down to pick him up, I noticed the bluish tinge to his lips. His breathing was shallow and slow. I gave him a little shake.
“Moose!” I shouted, right in his ear. When that didn’t get a response, I pulled up one of his eyelids. The pupil was almost gone, a tiny black dot in the middle of his brown iris.
The little prick had ODed.
I slapped his face, but there was no reaction. It pissed me off that he had done this in my mom and Frank’s house. I slapped him again, harder. I turned on the water and splashed some in his face.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said out loud, slapping and shaking him. “You do this now? Do you know how fucking tired I am?”
The last slap had a little more mustard than might have been necessary, but it woke him up, goddamn it, for what that was worth.
He moaned and stirred, his eyes open but unfocused, looking past me before closing again. He needed attention fast.
I grabbed one of his other shirts off the bedroom floor and draped it over him so I wouldn’t get any puke on me. Then I picked him up and carried him downstairs.
Getting out the front door wasn’t much of a problem, but the car doors were locked. I put Moose across the hood while I fished out my keys, bracing one hand against his chest in case he started to slide off. Once the doors were unlocked, I put him in the passenger seat.
I started the car, but before I drove off, I reclined his seat, making sure his head was back and his airway was clear. As angry as I was, I realized I was scared, too. As my hands tightened on the wheel and my foot pressed the pedal, I said, “You better not fucking die.”
50
St. Mark’s emergency room was already bustling when we got there, but when I brought Moose in and announced he was ODing, a cluster of attendants swarmed over him in a frenzy of attention. He was a mess, but he seemed stable, his breathing shallow and slow, but regular.
In a matter of seconds, he was disappearing through the swinging doors, and in the relative quiet that followed, I noticed that the place was packed with sick farmer types, all pale and sweaty. It seemed like half the town was there, and again I wondered if somehow the crop duster was involved. Part of me hoped it was, and that these people were suffering from some kind of chemical exposure instead of a virus or bacteria, something I could catch.
A wave of coughing spread across the room, and I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could, before I got whatever it was they had, what Nola had, but before I could, the intake nurse called me over and started asking questions. I didn’t know Moose’s real name, or his age, or if he had any allergies. I didn’t even know for sure what was wrong with him.
“But I suspect a heroin overdose,” I told her.
She stopped writing and looked up at me.
“I’m a cop,” I explained. “I’ve seen it before.”
She stared at my face for a moment. “And are you okay, sir?”
Judging from the concern in her face, I must have looked pretty rough. “Nothing a week in bed wouldn’t fix.”
When she was done with her questions, she directed me toward the seating area and told me the doctor would be out to speak to me. I put a handful of singles into a vending machine, and sat in the only empty chair, mechanically chewing cheese crackers.
I’d only been to St. Mark’s a couple of times, and never the E.R., but it brought back memories of my mom, sick and frail. This was probably where they brought Frank, too. Alone, without my mom or anyone else with him at the end.
After twenty minutes stuck in there with all those sad thoughts and sick people, I was starting to feel claustrophobic. I was thinking once again of leaving when the doctor came out. She looked familiar, tall with dark hair and big brown eyes creased with stress. The woman at intake pointed me out in the crowd. The doctor came toward me and held out her hand with a harried smile. “I’m Dr. Walters.”
“Hi. I’m Detective Carrick. You helped care for my mother, Meredith Menlow.”
“Of course.” The creases around her eyes softened and fell. “I heard about your father,” she said.”I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“He was a sweet guy. They both were.”
“Thanks. So, um, how is Moose?”
“Moose? You mean Bruce?”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
She told me he was stabilized and gave me the basics. “We’re pretty busy tonight, but I’ll make sure I keep an eye on him. He should be fine. We treated him with Narcan, which counteracts the effects of the opioids, blocks the system from absorbing them. He might not feel too good for a few days, but he’ll be okay.”
“Thanks, Dr. Walters.”
“Call me Janie.”
“Call me Doyle.”
She smiled, then she looked around the crowded waiting room and her face sagged a bit. “Look, you’re not going to be able to see Bruce until tomorrow. You should go home and get some rest.”
Now that he was out of danger, my annoyance at Moose was undiluted by concern; I had no desire to see him before tomorrow.
“So was it heroin?” I asked.
“Probably. It was some kind of opioid. A lot of alcohol, too. Bad mix.”
I shook my head. “Idiot.”
“The heroin is like an epidemic around here.”
I glanced around at the packed waiting room.
She followed my gaze. “Yes, it’s not the only epidemic. Looks like we’re getting an early start on flu season.”
I turned back to look at her. “I thought there was more of a problem with meth out here than heroin.”
She shook her head. “Not so much. I’ve heard a lot about meth on the news, but I haven’t seen much of it here.”
“A lot of heroin, though?”
“A lot of overdoses. We had an eleven-year-old girl come in. She swore she didn’t do it, so maybe someone slipped it to her. I’ve heard of people doing sick stuff like that. There was a big bust just the other day, apparently, so maybe that will help.”
I thought about the piles of it being unloaded from the van. “I hope so.”
51
I woke up the next day, stiff, exhausted, and fully clothed. My shirt was stuck to the abrasions from where I had hit the wall, and I had to peel it away. As I got into the shower, I noticed that my feet looked strangely pale, and I realized that for the first time in weeks my athlete’s foot didn’t itch. Maybe things were looking up.
When I got out, I saw that my phone was dead, and while I had been recharging, it had not. I plugged it in and turned it on. My stomach knotted when I saw I had nine messages.
Stan had called twice, sounding strange and asking me to call him. Dr. Walters called to let me know that “Bruce” was doing fine, and that he might be released later that morning.
Suarez called, saying I should give him a call when I get a chance. He sounded like he was holding back laughter.
The next message was from Stan again. He sounded gruff, mumbling something about “flowers or some shit. Just give me a call.” Then Stan again after that, saying, “Doyle, where the fuck are you? Give me a fucking call.”
