T. Parker - Iron River

“There,” said Petty. She pointed out a very faint circle of darkness on the anterior left side of the skull.

“What do I win?” asked Finnegan.

Reyes stood and stepped up close to the X-ray film. “Are you sure that’s a bullet hole? Kind of faint, isn’t it?”

“The bone will heal over time if the wound is small. What we see here is probably regrowth.”

“How much time?”

“I don’t know exactly. Years.”

“What about damage to the brain tissue?”

“There is some evidence of disturbance. It appears slight. See the pale finger here?” She tapped her own finger to the film.

“Only slight damage from a speeding bullet?” asked Reyes. “Account for that, doctor.”

“I can’t. But there must have been very little brain damage to begin with because brain cells don’t replicate. The brain is a miraculous organ in the sense that we can live without relatively large parts of it. The compensatory powers are impressive. People live normal lives with bullets and other objects lodged deep in their brains. I’ve seen it.”

Reyes looked at the little man, then back to the film. “You’ve got the worst luck in the world, but you’ve got the best luck, too. You get shot in the back of the head, bullet goes through both skull and brain and should have killed you, but instead the hole heals up just fine. Then you get hit by a two-ton Mercury doing sixty. It breaks your neck and half the other bones in your body and messes up your lungs, kidneys, and liver. It breaks your skull and batters your brains, but you crawl a half a mile through the desert. Now ten days later, you’re offering me advice on how to talk to my son. You’re a strange man.”

“I like you, too, Gabe.”

Reyes took another long look at the X-ray, then turned to the doctor. “So, Beth, how is Mike’s overall recovery coming along?”

“Very well. The swelling was a setback and I can’t account for it.”

“You told me his resting pulse is seventy and his blood pressure is in the normal range for a twenty-five-year-old man in good physical shape.”

“Grandma called that an iron constitution. She said it was fresh vegetables, low salt, no tobacco, prune juice.”

“You subscribe to all that, Mike?”

“Don’t ask me about food. I haven’t eaten real food since I got here. Even prune juice sounds good. I’ve never smoked anything in my life.”

“I’m going to ask you about that ninety grand again,” said Reyes. “Where’d you get it?”

“I earned it. I saved it for this, a rainy day. Mike Finnegan Bath.”

“I got the number and address in L.A. from information,” said Reyes. “I’ve called four times. All I ever get is a recording.”

“The landline and office are formalities, really. I mostly use the cell. My clients all know how to reach me.”

Reyes exhaled, shaking his head. “Is the key in your wallet for the office?”

“None other.”

Reyes stood over Finnegan. “I still don’t believe your story, Mike.”

“Which one?”

Hood and Beth Petty stepped into the elevator and when the door shut, Hood felt the sudden pleasure of their aloneness. She wore a yellow dress and her skin was brown with summer and her scent was subtle. In the heeled hemp sandals, she was almost Hood’s height. She smiled at him and looked away.

The elevator stopped at the sixth floor, where two patients in wheelchairs and two nurses and the two deputies who had been outside Jimmy’s door waited.

“We’ll make room,” said Beth Petty and she tugged Hood by his cuff and led him out of the elevator car and around a corner toward the stairs. They came to Jimmy’s room and the door was open, but the privacy curtain was drawn around the bed. Hood stopped and saw the faint shadow of a person leaning over the bed and he heard a woman ask about leg cramps and then Jimmy’s husky response. He heard the swish and ringing of water. Two new deputies stood talking to a pretty woman at the nurses’ station, and the men gave Hood the law enforcement look as he and Petty passed by.

They entered the stairwell. It was very hot. Hood saw that the deputies here had finished shift and vacated their posts and he heard the voices and the sounds of possible replacements coming up at them through the space below the sixth floor.

Hood listened to his and the doctor’s footsteps sound on the metal steps and echo in still flat air. Beth stopped behind him and Hood turned. She looked down at him from five stairs above. She looked inquisitive and lightly irritated.

“I like being where you are,” she said.

“I like it, too. I’ve thought about you.”

She smiled and flushed but didn’t look away this time.

Hood turned and watched the new men arrive on the fourth-floor landing below him, a slight bespectacled older deputy and a big younger man with a head of bleached hair. The size difference made them seem comic. The older man looked up at Hood and nodded and wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief, then they clanged through the door out of the heat and into the building proper. As the door shut, something Hood had just seen triggered a memory, but the memory was too dim and vaporous to identify. When he got to the landing where the deputies had just stood, the air hung electric and wrong. Hood opened the door and saw the two men walking purposefully down a hospital hall toward the elevator.

“What?” asked the doctor, coming up behind him.

“It’s nothing.”

“Dad used to be like that. Always suspicious. He says it kept him alive.”

“Maybe it did.”

“He’s sixty-five and long retired. His god is golf.”

They descended through the echoes of their own footfalls, poly-rhythms on the steel steps. The deputies still tugged at Hood, but they were only doing their jobs by any rational accounting he could apply. Just some overtime to protect the vulnerable and to guard prisoners, a commonplace paycheck booster for deputies, the bane of administrators in cash-strapped departments. He thought that what Beth Petty had said about liking to be where he was was beautiful. He would tell her that. They continued down.

Hood, like Reyes, was a chewer of things.

The older deputy’s handkerchief, he thought, sureno red. No. The glasses?

No, not the glasses, the other guy’s hair.

When he reached the fourth-floor landing, Hood saw the brassy bleached swirl of hair from one of Sheila Dragovitch’s suspect pictures. Meet Silenced Automatics. Silenced automatics are all he talks about.

Hood wondered if the bleached deputy had been working the Iron River undercover. Certainly Imperial County Sheriff’s had a hand in. Other task forces, other lawmen.

And of course he wondered if the bleached deputy was a deputy at all.

Silenced Automatics.

“What floor is your office on?” he asked.

“Three, down one.”

“Go there and call security for assistance in Jimmy’s room. Lock the door and stay there or get to your car and go home.”

“Charlie?”

“This is probably nothing.”

“What is nothing?”

“The man in the stairwell.”

“The old guy or Pompadour?”

“Pompadour. Go.”

Beth hurried down toward the third floor, her sandals soft on the steel steps. Hood watched her stride across the landing to the door and look up at him before pushing through.

He took the steps three at a time back to the fifth floor and when he looked up to the sixth, the two deputies were not there. He made the landing and popped the strap of his hip rig before going through the door.

The hallway was deserted except for one older man pushing a drip trolley. He wore a hospital gown and white socks and he gave Hood a wintry look. Hood rounded the corner to the hallway and walked fast. It was a big hospital and seemed bigger now on this calm Sunday, and Hood went through double doors that stood open, then past a display of children’s art in a glassed wall case and he continued in a quiet trot. Then he came to a dark round woman in a white dress and a brightly stitched rebozo across her shoulders and a bowler with a beaded headband and she held across her chest in both arms a bouquet of immense paper flowers in purples and oranges and blues and reds and she was telling Hood flowers, beautiful flowers, as he passed her. Far down the hallway, he could see that there were no deputies outside Jimmy’s room and when he asked the pretty nurse where they had gone, she said to the cafeteria for coffee, really good lattes for a hospital if you haven’t tried them, and when Hood came to the closed door of Jimmy Holdstock’s room, he palmed his sidearm against one leg and pushed through.