William Krueger: Mercy Falls

“As soon as I knew they were bringing Marsha in, I called Charlie.” She walked with Cork toward the surgery waiting area. “Then I called Bos and asked her to relieve me early. I didn’t want Charlie to have to wait alone. You mind?”

She was still wearing her uniform, and there were dark stains under the arms. It had been a tough evening all around.

“Makes good sense,” he said.

Cork knew he shouldn’t feel this way, but he hated hospitals. They were places that did people good, that cured the sick and healed the injured, but it was also a place completely outside his control. He’d watched both his parents die in hospital rooms, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do about it. Rationally, he knew that hospitals weren’t about death, but whenever he entered the glass doors and caught the unnatural, antiseptic smell in the corridors, his heart told him differently.

They found Charlie Annala in the waiting room. He was sandy-haired, heavy, with a face made babylike from soft fat. He wore a forest green work shirt, dirty jeans, and scuffed boots. Cork figured he’d come straight from his job at the DNR’s Pine Lake Fish Hatchery. He stood with his big, fat hands stuffed in his jean pockets, his head down, staring at the beige carpeting. There was a television on a shelf in a corner, tuned to one of the new reality shows. Cork figured Annala wouldn’t have minded dealing with somebody else’s reality at that moment. When he heard them coming, Annala looked up, not a happy man.

Charlie Annala was the protective type. Marsha didn’t need that, but apparently she didn’t mind, either. Maybe she appreciated that Charlie saw her in a different way than her male colleagues: saw the woman who liked, off duty, to show a little leg, line dance, and wear jewelry and cologne. Cork knew that her job was a sore point with Charlie, who was worried about her safety, a worry that, until this evening, Cork hadn’t particularly shared.

Patsy rushed forward and threw her arms around the big man. “Oh, Charlie, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. He looked over her shoulder at Cork.

“Any word?” Cork said.

“Nothing since she went in. I haven’t called her dad yet. I won’t until I know how it’s gone. What happened?” Charlie’s eyes were full of unspoken accusations.

Patsy stood back, and let the two men talk.

“We’re still trying to piece it together.”

“What do you mean, ‘piece it together’? You were there.”

“At the moment, all I know is somebody shot her.”

“Who?” He’d leaned closer with each exchange, putting his face very near to Cork’s. There were deep pits across his cheeks from adolescent acne.

“I don’t know,” Cork said.

“Why not?”

“He was too far away, hidden in some rocks.”

“Why her?”

Cork figured what he really meant was Why not you?

“When I understand that, Charlie, I’ll let you know. I honestly will.”

Patsy put her arm around Annala just as a nurse entered the waiting area. “There you are,” the nurse said to Cork. “We’ve been expecting you in the ER.” When he turned to her, she said with surprise, “Oh, my.”

The shot that grazed his ear had opened a spigot of blood that had poured all over his shirt, and he looked like hell, as if he’d sustained an injury far worse.

“Keep me posted,” he said to Patsy.

“You know I will.”

Cork followed the nurse. He was beginning to feel his strength ebbing, and thought about what Larson had said. Maybe his wounded body was finally overtaking his stubborn brain. He hoped not. There was still so much to do.

He called Jo from a phone in the ER and asked her to pick him up, then he let them sew his earlobe closed.

She was waiting for him when he came out. She looked with alarm and sympathy at the gauze and tape on his ear. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

Two blocks from the hospital, Jo pulled her Camry to the side of the street, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and listened. He told it calmly, almost blandly, but her face registered the horror of the scene.

“Oh God, Cork. How’s Marsha?”

“She’s still in surgery. We won’t know for a while.”

She gently lifted a hand toward the side of his face. “How’s your poor ear?”

“Smaller.”

“Does it hurt?”

“They gave it a shot. Can’t feel much now.”

She stared through the windshield. It was night and quiet and they sat in the warm glow of a street lamp. She put a hand to her forehead as if pressing some thought into her brain. “Why, Cork?”

“I don’t know.”

She leaned to him suddenly and held him tightly, and the good smell of spaghetti came to him from her hair and clothing. It was a quick dinner and a favorite of their children.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ll get you home and you can relax.”

“No. I need to go to the department. I want to listen to the tape of Lucy’s call.”

It was a little before nine on a Tuesday night. Aurora, Minnesota, was winding down. Many of the shops had already closed. A good crowd was still visible through the windows of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, and the air on Center Street was full of the tantalizing aroma of fried food. In front of the display window of Lost Lake Outfitters, against the buttery glow of a neon sign, stood old Alf Pedersen, who’d started the outfitting company fifty years earlier. Alf knew the most beautiful and fragile parts of the Boundary Waters, the great wilderness area north of Aurora, and although he’d guided hundreds of tourists in, he kept those places secret. In the next block, the door of Wolf Den Books and Gifts opened and a plank of light fell across the sidewalk as Naomi Pierce stepped out to close up. He couldn’t hear it, but Cork knew that the opening of the door had caused a small bell above the threshold to jingle. He thought about the show that had been on television at the hospital. He didn’t know whose reality that was, but his own reality lay in the details of this place, his hometown, details an outsider might not even notice. A tinkling bell, a familiar silhouette, the comfortable and alluring smell of deep-fry.

There was another reality for him as well. It was grounded in a maple leaf of blood on Marsha’s uniform, the sound of glass shattered by a bullet capable of exploding his head like a melon, and the long, terrifying moments when he’d scrambled desperately to make sense of the absolutely senseless.

“You okay?” Jo asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” he answered.

She accompanied him into the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Bos Swain, who’d relieved Patsy as dispatcher, buzzed them through the security door.

Bos was short for Boston, which was the name by which Henrietta Swain was known. As a young woman, she’d dreamed of going to college, specifically to Boston College, for reasons which she’d never divulged. Instead, she’d married her high school sweetheart, who went off to Vietnam and came back messed up psychologically. Bos had worked to support them and the two girls who were born to them, and although she never went to college herself, she sent both girls east, one to Barnard and the other to Boston College. When the girls were gone, she divorced her first husband and remarried, a good man named Tim Johnson who had a solid job stringing wire for the phone company. Although she didn’t need to work to support herself anymore, she kept on as a dispatcher, drawing a county paycheck every two weeks, which she deposited in trust funds for her grandchildren’s education. She was a fleshy woman, unusually good-humored, but the events of that evening had put her in a somber mood.

“I thought you were going to the hospital,” she said to Cork in a scolding tone.