by Scott Blade
She listened. Didn’t take notes.
She said, “That’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“And you’re a drifter?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“You got money?”
“They took my bank card.”
“They didn’t show it to me.”
“It’s probably in a desk drawer along with my toothbrush.”
“Toothbrush?”
“I carry one with me.”
“Are you obsessed with your teeth?”
Widow said, “It’s inconvenient to have to buy a new one all the time. So, I keep one on me as much as I can.”
She stared at his face.
“They got your razor in that drawer?”
“I shave sometimes.”
“You need to shave now.”
“Think if I did, they’d let me out of here?”
Rower smiled, not a fake, flirty smile, like she might do to entice a male suspect to cooperate, a coercion tactic that she had used many times. It worked. Her mother used to say, “If it ain’t busted, don’t fix it.”
“Tell me, Mr. Widow. What’s with all the stamps on your passport? You a man of leisure?”
“I am, actually, but the stamps are from when I was in the service.”
“What service?”
“Shostrom didn’t tell you?”
“No. Should he have?”
“Usually it’s mentioned.”
“Usually?”
“I was in the Navy and the NCIS.”
Rower cocked her head, shot him a questioning glance.
“You were in the NCIS?”
“Yes.”
“Like the TV show?”
Widow shrugged and said, “Is your job chasing aliens?”
“Chasing aliens? Illegal aliens?”
“Aliens. You know? Little green men?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“That TV show. With Mulder and whatever.”
Rower shook her head.
“Sculley. It’s Mulder and Sculley. The show was The X-Files.”
Widow stayed quiet.
Rower said, “No I don’t chase aliens.”
“So, my job wasn’t like the TV show either.”
“Have you ever seen NCIS?”
He shook his head.
“Great show.”
“Is it?”
“Number one on the planet.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
Widow smiled and asked, “It got aliens?”
“No. No aliens.”
Rower flipped open his passport, glanced through it again, and stopped on his photo ID.
“You were shaved here.”
“In the Navy, they make you shave every day.”
Rower leaned her face over the passport, out toward Widow and took a couple of obvious sniffs of the air.
“They make you shower in the Navy too?”
“I shower.”
“When was the last time?”
Widow craned his neck, leaned his head down the right side of his chest like a bird going to sleep in its feathers, and sniffed.
“I don’t smell anything.”
“A shower wouldn’t kill you.”
Widow returned his head upright and smiled.
He said, “Alaska. Is that your real name?
“It is.”
“Family name?”
“No. Just my name.”
“It seems like I heard something about the name before.”
“Yeah. Duh. It’s a state.”
“No. I mean something that has to do with a woman named Alaska.”
They were both silent for moment.
Widow asked, “You from Alaska?”
“Never been there.”
“Damn. Can’t remember where I heard the name before.”
Rower shrugged.
“It’ll come to you.”
“So what now?”
“You haven’t asked me why the FBI is interested.”
“Why is the FBI interested? It’s not because of the interstates?”
“Could be.”
“Nah. I found her on a country road, not the interstate. Shostrom’s not gonna let you take his investigation from him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have some experience with sheriffs and jurisdiction.”
“I bet you do.”
Widow said, “I bet the reason you’re here is because of her kidneys.”
Rower’s eyes opened wide and her brow furrowed to one side, and her interest perked.
“Kidneys?”
“When I found the girl she was wrapped up in a rug. Someone thought they’d killed her, by all accounts, and they ditched the body. When I went to free her, I found she was all bandaged up, like she had had major surgery. Right where one of her kidneys is.”
“What do you make of it?”
“It’s weird because someone tried to strangle her. Obviously. But someone else took her kidney and took great care of her afterward.”
“Any thoughts?”
“My guess is that you can find out who by checking for the hospital where she had a kidney transplant done. She must’ve been taken from the hospital.”
Widow shrugged and said, “I don’t know why. Seems like it’d be risky to do something like that. Hospitals have staff, security, and lots of witnesses.”
“If any of that is true, wouldn’t my working theory be that a mental patient escaped, kidnapped her?”
“Am I the mental patient?”
Rower said nothing.
“That theory sounds stupid. A mental patient escaped, and took a victim who just had major surgery? No one stopped him? Why would I have been out in the middle of nowhere? In the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know. You’re the mental patient.”
Widow stayed quiet.
Rower said, “No. I don’t believe any of that. The reason you’re here is how you busted into a biker bar with a half-dead girl. The reason I’m here is because this is an old case I had once.”
Widow nodded. He recognized something familiar in her eyes, and he knew what it was, immediately.
He said, “You’ve worked this case before.”
She looked at him.
“What happened?”
Rower stared at him. She never broke contact, but she wasn’t seeing him, not anymore. She wasn’t at the moment. She saw something else, like a face from a distant memory.
She breathed for a long moment. Then she said, “A lot of cops work cases that haunt them. Cases that never get solved. Sometimes for months. Sometimes for years. The cases often hit brick walls and go cold. Most of them never get solved. They’re cases that the investigators never shake.”
“You ever work a case like that, NCIS?”
Widow nodded.
“I’ve got a few those.”
Rower turned away and stared down the hallway. Then she turned back to Widow.
She said, “I look you up, am I gonna find that who you claim to be is real?”
“You already looked me up?”
“I didn’t actually. Shostrom just told me your name when I got here.”
“They probably looked me up.”
“No. They’re not…”
She paused a beat and then said, “They’re not the most thorough cops in the world.”
“Better check me out then.”
“I will. But first. Do you like coffee?”
Widow smiled.
Chapter 16
T Y McCOBB WAS NAMED after the great baseball player—Ty Cobb, only with a Scottish twist on it. That’s what he always told people anyway, even though it wasn’t true.
The joke got a chuckle here and there. The truth was he hated baseball, but the bats came in handy for his job.
McCobb’s job entailed recon and reaction based on results he found out. So
metimes this was passing on information. Sometimes it was giving out a warning. But sometimes, it was retaliation—his favorite.
Right now, he was being ordered by his boss, a guy named Holden from Rapid City. This was all Holden’s region. Most of the Black Hills were.
McCobb was a kind of part-time problem solver and a part-time delivery boy.
He wasn’t a drug dealer, per se, but he worked with and for a drug dealer.
McCobb’s job was more on the execution side of thing. He was charged with executing orders—problems too.
He walked into the hospital in Deadwood. It was a redbrick, three-story building. It was no kind of major, metropolitan hospital. But it was busy enough.
He left his car parked in the annex lot across the street. He wore a ball cap and sunglasses.
He entered through the emergency room entrance. He walked past security, which was an old guard behind a desk and a security camera that didn’t move. It was planted up high on the inside wall and pointed right at the entrance and exit.
He was on camera. No getting around that.
McCobb had to leave the baseball bat behind in the trunk of his car. Couldn’t bring it into the hospital—no way. They’d see something that big in a guy’s hand.
But he could bring in a revolver.
Deadwood Hospital was no kind of top-security clearance place, like a bank or a prison or a military base. There were cameras, but there were no metal detectors. The hospital wasn’t going to fork over money for that. They had the elderly guard.
McCobb kept the revolver nestled in the single inner pocket of a denim jacket he wore. It was on the left side, which made for a right-handed draw. Not his idea of ideal since he was left-handed, but it was better than no gun.
On his way in, he nodded a polite hello to the elderly security guard and clocked the gun strapped to the guard’s hip. It was in a holster in a belt with the safety button buckled. No way would the guard be able to draw on him before taking two to the chest.
McCobb passed the guard and walked past a full waiting room and past hospital staff and walked into a hallway until he found a large map of the hospital on a bulletin board.
He studied it and found where he was on the map. He found the right floor where they would keep someone like the person he was looking for.
McCobb walked down the hall to a pair of elevators, only two. He hit the button for level two and rode up.
He got off on a floor that seemed busier than he had expected. There was staff doing things. He saw a patient engaging in physical therapy. She was walking along the wall with one hand planted against it, and the other draped over a therapist in scrubs.
He saw another woman in a wheelchair just rolling up and down the hall. There were nurses walking up and down the hall, some carrying trays, others pushing carts.
McCobb stopped at an open doorway and studied a sign on the wall that pointed the direction for recovery, which was more than half the floor.
He walked up and down the corridor, looking in every room that he could. He woke up one old man who was vocal about the disturbance.
The thought of shooting him crossed his mind for a moment.
McCobb couldn’t find anyone who fit the description of the girl he was looking for.
After twenty minutes of searching, McCobb decided to ask someone at the nurses’ station, a risk because then he would be exposing himself to a witness. But at this point, it seemed necessary.
So, he approached the station and asked about the donor. He gave her name and asked what room she was in.
One of the nurses, a black woman in purple scrubs, looked up at him from her chair. She pointed him to a white phone hung on the wall behind him.
She told him to use that for information.
McCobb thanked her and turned to the phone.
A sign above the phone read: Pick up for information.
He picked up and heard a voice instruct him to dial a number that coordinated with the first letter of the last name of the patient he was looking for.
He dialed 6 for the letter O.
He waited, listening through a list of names. The list was pronounced slowly and dragged on in a monotone computer voice.
First, he had to wait through the Ms and then the Ns, until he got to the Os.
Finally, he got to the Os, and he listened. There was only one. Oxford.
That wasn’t the right name.
He hung up the wall phone and pulled out his own phone. He texted Holden that she wasn’t there.
He waited.
A good two minutes passed before Holden responded.
He responded with, “Check around again. Be sure.”
McCobb texted back, “Okay.”
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and then he walked the floor one more time, checking the rooms for recovery patients and found nothing.
He decided that he’d better check the entire hospital, skipping places that wouldn’t have an organ transplant patient recovering in, like the maternity ward.
McCobb went back to the elevator and started on the fourth floor and worked his way down.
The fourth floor was clear—no sign of anyone recovering from major surgery on that floor.
The third floor was the same.
At the third floor, he took the stairs down instead of the elevator.
He got out on the first floor, back where he’d started. He began searching the parts of the first floor that he could search. He had to skip over the emergency room.
That didn’t leave him much. Most of the first floor was the lab and technician and administrative areas.
Before he gave up, he saw something peculiar.
Through the windows on a pair of swinging doors to the ICU, he saw a uniformed deputy standing guard at an open room.
The deputy sat in a chair, reading a day-old USA Today. He had a pencil missing an eraser in his hand. He was doing the crossword.
A man passing the time.
McCobb stepped to the side as a doctor, and a nurse were pushing through.
As the door swung wide open, McCobb saw a young, twenty-something girl lying in bed in the room beyond the deputy. She was completely out and strung up to an IV drip and a heart monitor that blipped at a steady pace.
McCobb stepped back and pulled out his phone. He leaned against a wall and looked up and then down the hall for anyone who might get curious about him.
There was no one.
He texted back to Holden, told him he’d found her, told him that she was under guard by the cops.
Holden was quiet for another long two minutes.
This time he came back with an order for McCobb to hold, to sit tight for now, while he got instructions on what to do next.
Chapter 17
W HEN ROWER asked Widow if he “liked coffee,” he smiled because he thought she was going to let him out so she could take him somewhere to get a cup of coffee, like a date. It was an impulsive thought, an instinctual miscalculation, he knew, but he wanted to think that she believed him.
He was partly right. She did let him out, in front of the deputies, in front of the sheriff.
Rower turned to Shostrom, asked for the keys, which turned out to be keys and not an electronic lock system. The look on Shostrom’s face was surprise, but that didn’t compare to the looks on the faces of Rousey and Roberts.
The two deputies stood back and watched as if their boss wasn’t opening a cell door for a man. They watched as if he was opening a cage and they feared what was inside.
After Widow got out, he asked for his belongings, which they denied for the moment.
Agent Rower had possession of his passport and his bank card and not his toothbrush. His coat was still in evidence.
Roberts cuffed him in the front, and they put him in an SUV and took him to get a coffee, as promised.
The coffee was hot too.
Rower bought the coffee for him at the same gas station where he’d claimed to be the night be
fore.
She convinced Shostrom to hand Widow over to the FBI.
Now, he was in her custody, technically, but the sheriff had assigned his two deputies to chaperone them while they stayed in his county, which Rower took as half extra protection for her from him, and half the sheriff keeping a watchful eye on Widow and herself.
She was in his domain, and he was going to make sure that she respected it, respected the unwritten rules.
Widow sat in the rear bench of a Lawrence County sheriff’s SUV, a Ford Explorer, painted with the sheriff’s department colors, and a South Dakota state badge on each door. A big light bar was framed on the roof. There were lights embedded in the front grille as well. A black ram bar was mounted on the front of the vehicle.
The Explorer sat five people comfortably. This unit didn’t have a third row of seats. Instead, it had a built-in cage, which Widow assumed was meant for a large cop dog.
Thankfully, there was no dog in it.
Widow liked dogs.
In the past in the Navy, he had worked with military dogs, mostly I.E.D. sniffing dog units, mostly Marines, and mostly huge German shepherds the size of small ponies, trained in police and military tactics like obeying commands, such as breaking the bones in a guy’s arm in seconds.
He remembered the Marines treated the dogs like Marines. They gave them designations of Colonel Rex and Commander Thor. He was pretty sure these were official names, but the dogs were considered to be property of the USMC, just like the Marines, and they were given virtually the same treatment, minus the dog kennels.
Rousey drove with Rower in the passenger seat and Roberts next to Widow. They took the long way around to Old Highway Sixteen, a forty-minute drive. Widow didn’t know why they didn’t go the way he had come, back down the country road, where they could connect to the Sixteen a lot faster.
He figured that Rower was waiting to search the country road last, like some big reveal, or maybe she was just thorough. Maybe, she liked to think linearly. First, this happened and then that.
Maybe she was starting where he had started and following his story back to the part where he passed out from the exhaustion.
However, when they arrived at the Conoco, he started to suspect that it might’ve been because no one believed him. They thought the country road was a waste of time because it had no landmarks—no signs. No structures to go by. How were they supposed to find the spot where Widow claimed to have found the girl?
