William Krueger - The Devil's bed

He needed a way to get back to Jorgenson. Every avenue so far had been blocked. But what if the contact came from someone else, someone of higher authority than Bo, from the White House itself? It was time to call Lorna Channing and brief her. He’d had no contact with her since before he left D.C. She didn’t even know he was in Minnesota. He took out his cell phone and from his wallet pulled out the slip of paper on which she’d written her number.

“Excuse me.”

Bo folded the paper and slid it into his shirt pocket, then he looked up.

Two men stood at his table. They wore jeans and sleeveless T-shirts, a little dirty, and work boots. They both held beer mugs in their hands. They looked like construction workers drinking after a day on the job.

“Me and my buddy here have a bet,” one of the men said. His hair was long and sandy colored, and he had a scraggly mustache of the same color. “I say you’re that Secret Service guy who saved the First Lady’s ass. My buddy bets I’m wrong.”

“Your buddy wins,” Bo said. He put the cell phone in the inside pocket of his sport coat.

“Told you,” the other man said. “Come on, Lester.”

“Now wait a minute. I seen your face on the cover of theNational Enquirer, and I never forget a face. It’s…Thorsen, right?”

“Leave him be, Lester.”

“That must’ve been something out there. I mean, taking a bullet for the First Lady.”

“It was a knife,” Bo said.

“There, see. See, I told you it was him. Your glass is almost empty, man. Let me buy you a drink.”

The other guy offered Bo a look of sympathy. “Better do it. He’ll pester you till you do.”

“What’ll it be?” Lester asked.

“Leinie’s.”

“Leinie’s it is. Curtis, get this man a beer.”

Curtis headed off toward the bar. Lester sat down in the booth across from Bo.

“So. What was it like?”

“Look, Lester, your drink I’ll take. Your company I’d rather forgo at the moment.”

“Drinking alone? Bet it’s the pressure of the job does that. Seems to me I heard the rate of alcoholism and suicide is pretty high with you guys.”

“That’s dentists,” Bo said.

Curtis returned. “Here you go,” he said. He set the beer in front of Bo.

“To a real hero,” Lester said and lifted his glass in a toast.

Bo drank with them, from the beer they’d bought him.

“Come on, Lester,” Curtis said.

Lester slid a napkin toward Bo. “Say, could I get your autograph?”

Curtis grabbed his buddy by the shirtsleeve and pulled him away.

“Sorry to have bothered you,” he said to Bo.

Bo was grateful to be alone again. His Reuben arrived immediately, and the smell brought home to him just how hungry he was. He still had to make the call to Channing. He got his cell phone out again, but before punched in the number, he realized that the noise in the bar would make a coherent conversation almost impossible. He decided to wait until he was in the quiet outside O’Gara’s.

He hadn’t eaten all day, still hadn’t touched his sandwich, and the beer was beginning to affect him. He was feeling light-headed. He took a bite of the Reuben. The food didn’t seem to help. He was dizzy and getting sick to his stomach. He pulled out his wallet, dropped a few bills on the table. Hoping the fresh air might help, he made his way outside.

As he leaned against the side of the building, the sky above him flashed and thunder followed almost immediately. Bo felt the first drops of rain from a summer storm. The rain was cold and sharp, but it didn’t seem to be any help in clearing his head.

He was having trouble standing up now. He tried to remember where he’d parked his car. He pushed away from the building, and the world seemed to come at him in a slant.

“Whoa, buddy. You okay?”

The voice was familiar to Bo. Lester, who’d bought him a beer.

“Sick…” Bo managed to say.

“Come on, we’ll help you to your car.” It was another familiar voice, but more distant than the first.

Bo felt support slip under each of his arms. He tried to help them, tried to walk, but he couldn’t seem to make his legs move. He felt himself slipping, going under. But before he was gone completely, he had one lucid thought.

How did they know which car was his?

He felt the vehicle moving and he smelled exhaust. And then he was driving again. Driving the old bus. He sat behind the wheel, as he always did in his dreaming. The bus was on the river, caught in the sweep of a strong current, and he was trying desperately to turn toward the safety of the riverbank. The wheel spun uselessly in his hand. He felt himself and the others who rode with him, all those who relied on him, sweeping toward a blind curve of the river, beyond which something terrible awaited them.

A big bump threw him upward and he hit his head. He half-woke and opened his eyes. There was dark all around him, and the smell of exhaust and water on hot metal, and the rattle of the undercarriage as it negotiated old pavement, and the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. He wondered dreamily, Where am I?

• • •

He woke again to the feel of hands and the sound of voices.

“That’s right, Thorsen. Time to go night-night.”

They lifted his legs and turned him so that he was sitting up, more or less. Bo saw a line of lights like a string of bright pearls against the black throat of the night and the rain.

“Come on, buddy. Just a few steps and you’re there.”

They helped him up. He stood unsteadily. He looked back. At first he saw a huge, gaping mouth. Then he understood that it was a car trunk. They’d lifted him out of a car trunk. That seemed odd. But they were helpful.

“You can do it, Thorsen. That’s right. A step at a time.”

Rain fell against his face, cooling and refreshing. The fresh air felt good after the stuffy car trunk. The air carried on it a familiar scent. The dank, muddy smell of the Mississippi River.

“There we go.”

They leaned him against a metal railing. Bo looked down. In the flash of lightning, he saw the river far below him, black and shiny for a moment, then lost in the dark again, and the rain.

He knew where he was. His old stomping grounds. The High Bridge over the river. In the shadow of that bridge, he’d lived with his family of runaways in the old bus.

“Damn it, Curtis, hold on to him.”

“It’s the goddamn rain. He’s slippery as an eel.”

Bo felt them grasp him low around his hips. He knew he was about to travel again on the black river he’d driven so often in his nightmares.

But this was no nightmare.

Bo gathered himself around that small, hard realization and acted without thinking. His body moved in the way he’d trained it for nearly two decades. He yanked his arm loose and delivered a hard kick to the knee joint of the man to his right, who went down howling. The other man Bo struck with a forearm blow to the middle of his face, and a fountain of blood squirted into the rain. Bo lurched away from the railing toward the car that sat idling on the bridge.

“Christ, don’t shoot him,” one of the men hollered.

Bo tumbled into the car parked at the curb, and he slumped over the wheel. As he jammed the stick into gear, the front door on the passenger’s side popped open. He hit the gas, and the car shot forward. Behind him, someone screamed a curse.

Bo sped across the bridge into St. Paul. He was sleepy, barely able to keep his eyes open or his foot on the pedal. The car swerved across lanes. He mounted the bluff to Summit Avenue and headed west along the rain-swept street between rows of big, fine houses.

Where? he tried to think.

Not to Tangletown. They would look for him there.