C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

After a pause, Torkleson said, “He’s a friend of yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that, I really am. We took the call an hour ago-some drunk found a body in an alley. We just sent him to the trauma center at Denver General.”

Melissa gasped in the backseat and buried her face in her hands.

“How bad?” Cody asked.

“Real fucking bad,” Torkleson said.

“What happened?”

“Well, it looked like somebody tried to kick his face off. The paramedics weren’t even sure at first if he was still alive, man. I’ve seen some beatings, but this one was really, really bad. I hate to tell you this considering he’s a friend of yours and all.”

“And I hate to hear it,” Cody said softly.

Melissa began to cry.

“Hey, who’s that with you?” Torkleson asked.

“My girlfriend,” Cody said absently, obviously not wanting to explain our circumstances.

“Hey, I’m not sure your girlfriend wants to hear this.”

“It’s okay,” Cody said. “Tell me, did you find anything on him?”

Torkleson’s radar went up. “Like what?”

“You know,” Cody said, tap-dancing. “His wallet, keys, phone, documents, anything?”

“You mean does it look like a robbery?”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“That’s what it looks like. His ID was on him, and we found a cell phone in the alley. Nothing else unusual on him. What kind of documents?”

“Any kind.”

Photos, I thought.

“No. His wallet had been cleaned out of cash and dumped. There’s no way to know how much was in it.”

Thousands, I thought, to pay off his contact.

“Denver General, you say?”

“Affirmative. I’m still at the scene, though. We’ve got the photographer and forensics team going over the alley, then I’ll head over to the hospital myself to see if we can get any kind of statement. But from what I saw…”

“No witnesses?”

“None that have come forward, which isn’t surprising. This is a crappy part of town. People don’t tend to talk.”

“It happened in an alley,” Cody asked. “Any lighting? Any windows that overlook where he was found?”

I could hear Torkleson’s voice tense up as he sensed Cody was trying to horn in on his investigation.

“There are overhead lights,” he said, “but no lightbulbs. They’ve all been shot out. And yeah, a couple of windows but no residents in the buildings.”

“Sounds like the Zuni Street area,” Cody said.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Near the Appaloosa Club, then.

“That’s where it is,” Torkleson said. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Where did you hear about this? I can’t see you sitting at home with your girlfriend at four in the morning listening to a scanner.”

Cody snorted. “No chance of that.”

“So how did you hear about it?”

“The perp called us from Brian’s phone.”

“ What? ”

“I’ll meet you at the hospital, Detective. Make sure you secure that phone you found and get somebody competent to download the call log and the text log. Do it now! And I hope to hell you dust that phone for prints, Jason, because whoever stomped Brian held it in his scummy fucking hand.”

“Cody, can I ask you something? Aren’t you suspended? Should we even be having this conversation?”

Cody deftly swerved to miss a pronghorn antelope on the highway. Melissa said, “My God, that was close.”

He didn’t miss a beat. He said, “Torkleson, that’s my friend you found. We’ve been friends since grade school in Montana. I want to find out who did this, and you can either work with me or against me. Do you really want me pursuing this as a private citizen? Showing you up?”

“No.”

“Then meet me at the hospital with those logs.”

WE ARRIVED at Denver General at nine in the morning, after dropping Melissa and Angelina at our house. Not that Melissa didn’t want to be there to be with Brian-she wanted to be there desperately-but she didn’t think she could take the baby with us after twenty-eight hours in the car. Angelina was crabby and sleep-deprived but had been a good traveler overall.

As Cody and I walked down the humming, antiseptic hallways, I felt as if I were shell-shocked. I was sleep-deprived myself, but the visit with my parents and the news about Brian seemed to knock me sidewise. At the front desk, Cody asked about Brian and was told by a severe black woman the patient was in ICU, and there could be no visitors except immediate relatives.

“Damn it,” Cody said, reaching back into his jacket, where he produced a wallet badge and flashed it at her. “We need to see him now .”

“Go right up,” she said, eyes wide. “Seventh floor is ICU. There’s one of your policemen up there already.”

Cody nodded and pocketed the badge. In the elevator, I said, “I thought they took that away from you.”

He nodded. “They took my real badge away. But any cop worth his salt has a couple of spares. You can buy ’em from cop catalogs. No one ever reads the details-they just see the flash.”

The officer on the seventh floor wasn’t Torkleson but a uniform assigned to Brian. He sat on a metal folding chair outside a pair of entry doors to the Intensive Care Unit signed ICU STAFF ONLY.

“How is he?” Cody asked the uniform, who was young with a crew cut and a wisp of a mustache.

“I haven’t heard either way.”

“Detective Torkleson assign you here?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Hoyt,” Cody said, flashing the badge at a distance and pocketing it quickly. He was well practiced, I thought. He could even fool cops . Then he spoke with absolute authority. “We need to get in there and talk to the victim. This is Jack McGuane, an intimate of the victim. He’s likely the only person he’ll talk to.”

The uniform shrugged. “From what I understand, he’s hamburger. You aren’t likely to get anything out of him.”

“Let us by, please.”

The uniform shrugged and sighed elaborately and called inside on the phone near the door. The door lock buzzed, and we were in.

“Mr. Eastman?” Cody asked the desk nurse.

“Room 738,” she said. “Listen, he’s scheduled for surgery any minute now. I’m not sure you…”

I followed Cody and braced myself. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when we went into 738.

“ Fuck! ” Cody said beneath his breath.

He was unrecognizable. He was a body beneath a sheet connected to what looked like dozens of chirping and humming machines and hanging bags of fluid. The bundles of tubing that connected his body to the hanging bags looked like exposed tree roots. His face was entirely covered with ban dages. Thin gauze covered his nose-two dark spots of blood where his nostrils were-and a fogged-up oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. His head beneath the wraps was misshapen, crushed in on one side and bulging out on the other. It didn’t hit home to me that it was Brian in that bed. No way. This long bag of broken bones and bruised meat could not be him. I half expected the Brian I knew to stroll in from the hallway and say something cryptic or sarcastic.

If it weren’t for a sockless ankle not covered by the sheets and a pile of clothing at the foot of the bed I recognized as his, I wouldn’t have known it was Brian at all.

I felt something bitter rise in my throat, and I was unable to speak.

Cody approached the bed and fished through the sheets for Brian’s hand. He found a ball the size of a mitten.

“They even broke his fingers, those bastards,” he said.

He leaned down over the bed. “Brian, can you hear me? It’s Cody. Can you hear me in there?”