John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

“You’re a lucky man,” said the elderly doctor, her smile a mixture of surprise and concern. “Another couple of inches and Alvin here would have been composing a eulogy.”

“I bet that would have been something to hear,” I replied.

I was sitting on a table in the emergency room of Haven’s small but well-equipped medical center. The wound in my arm was minor but had bled heavily. Now it had been cleaned and bandaged, and my good hand clutched a bottle of painkillers. I felt like I’d been sideswiped by a passing train.

Alvin Martin stood beside me. Wallace and another deputy I didn’t recognize were down the hall, guarding the room in which the woman was being kept. She had not regained consciousness, and from what I had heard of the doctor’s hurried conversation with Martin, I believed that she might have lapsed into a coma. Rudy Fry was also still unconscious, although he was expected to recover from his injuries.

“Anything on the shooters?” I asked Martin.

“Not yet. We’ve sent photos and prints to the feds. They’re going to send someone from Richmond later today.” The clock on the wall read 6:45 A.M. Outside the rain continued to fall.

Martin turned to the doctor. “Could you give us a minute or two in private, Elise?”

“Certainly. Don’t strain him, though.” He smiled at her as she left, but when he turned back to me the smile was gone. “You came here with a price on your head?”

“I’d heard a rumor, that’s all.”

“Fuck you and your rumor. Rudy Fry almost died in there and I’ve got an unidentified corpse in the morgue with a hole in his neck. You know who called out the hit?”

“I know who did it.”

“You gonna tell me?”

“No, not yet anyway. I’m not going to tell the feds, either. I need you to keep them off my back for a while.”

Martin almost laughed. “Now, why am I gonna do that?”

“I need to finish what I came down here to do. I need to find Catherine Demeter.”

“This shooting have anything to do with her?”

“I don’t know. It could have but I don’t see where she fits in. I need your help.”

Martin bit his lip. “The town council’s running wild. They reckon if the Japanese get wind of this they’ll open up a plant in White Sands before they come here. Everyone wants you gone. In fact, they want you arrested, beaten, then gone.”

A nurse entered the room and Martin stopped talking, preferring instead to seethe quietly as she spoke. “There’s a call for you, Mr. Parker,” she said. “A Lieutenant Cole from New York.”

I winced at the pain in my arm as I rose, and she seemed to take pity on me. I wasn’t above accepting pity at that point.

“Stay where you are,” she said with a smile. “I’ll bring in an extension and we can patch the call through.”

She returned minutes later with the phone and plugged the jack into a box on the wall. Alvin Martin hovered uncertainly for a moment beside me and then stomped out, leaving me alone.

“Walter?”

“A deputy called. What happened?”

“Two of them tried to take me out in the motel. A man and a woman.”

“How badly are you hurt?”

“A nick on the arm. Nothing too serious.”

“The shooters get away?”

“Nope. The guy’s dead. The woman’s in a coma, I think. They’re patching in the pics and the prints at the moment. Anything at your end? Anything on Jennifer?” I tried to block out the image of her face but it hung at the edge of my consciousness, like a figure glimpsed at the periphery of one’s vision.

“The jar was spotless. It was a standard medical storage jar. We’ve tried checking the batch number with the manufacturers but they went out of business in nineteen ninety-two. We’ll keep trying, see if we can access old records, but the chances are slim. The wrapping paper must be sold in every damn gift shop in the country. Again, no prints. The lab is looking at skin samples to see if we can pick up anything from them. Technical guys figure he bounced the call-no other way the cell phone could have shown a callbox number-and there’s probably no way we can trace it. I’ll let you know if there’s anything further.”

“And Stephen Barton?”

“Nothing there either. The amount I know, I’m starting to think that I may be in the wrong business. He was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, like the ME said, and then strangled. Probably driven to the parking lot and tipped into the sewer.”

“The feds still looking for Sonny?”

“I haven’t heard otherwise but I assume they’re out of luck too.”

“There doesn’t seem to be much luck around at the moment.”

“It’ll break.”

“Does Kooper know what happened here?”

I could hear what sounded like a choked laugh at the other end of the line. “Not yet. Maybe I’ll tell him later in the morning. Once the name of the trust is kept out of it he should be okay, but I don’t know how he feels about the hired help whacking people outside motel rooms. I don’t imagine it’s happened before. What’s the situation at your end?”

“The natives aren’t exactly greeting me with open arms and leis. No sign of her so far, but something isn’t sitting right here. I can’t explain it, but everything feels wrong.”

He sighed. “Keep in touch. Anything I can do here?”

“I guess there’s no way you can keep Ross off my back?”

“None whatsoever. Ross couldn’t dislike you more if he heard that you screwed his mother and wrote her name on the wall of the men’s room. He’s on his way.”

Walter hung up. Seconds later, there was a click on the line. I kind of guessed Deputy Martin might be the cautious sort. He came back in after allowing enough time to elapse so that it didn’t look like he’d been listening. The expression on his face had changed, though. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad thing that Martin heard what he did.

“I need to find Catherine Demeter,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. When that’s done, I’ll be gone.”

He nodded.

“I had Burns call some of the motels in the area earlier,” he said. “There’s no Catherine Demeter checked in at any of them.”

“I checked before I left the city. She could be using another name.”

“I thought of that. If you give me a description, I’ll send Burns around to talk to the desk clerks.”

“Thanks.”

“Believe me, I ain’t doing this out of the kindness of my heart. I just want to see you gone from here.”

“What about Walt Tyler?”

“If we get time, I’ll drive out there with you later.” He went to check with the deputies guarding the shooter. The elderly doctor appeared again and checked the dressing on my arm.

“Are you sure you won’t rest up here for a while?” she asked.

I thanked her for the offer but turned her down.

“I partly guessed as much,” she said. She nodded toward the vial of painkillers. “They may make you drowsy.”

I thanked her for the warning and slipped them in my pocket as she helped me to put on my jacket over my shirtless chest. I had no intention of taking the painkillers. Her expression told me that she knew that as well.

Martin drove me to the sheriff’s office. The motel had been sealed up and my clothes had been moved to a cell. I showered, wrapping my bandaged arm with plastic first, and then slept fitfully in the cell until the rain stopped falling.

Two federal agents arrived shortly after midday and questioned me about what had taken place. The questioning was perfunctory, which surprised me until I remembered that Special Agent Ross was due to fly in later that evening. The woman had still not regained consciousness by 5:00 P.M., when Martin came into the Haven Diner.