Chat (18 page)

JMAN:
U there?

JMAN:
Mandi144. U there?

Mandi144:
hey

JMAN:
thot I got the wrong time

Mandi144:
nop. Probs w/ my mom

JMAN:
wat?

Mandi144:
she got fired. At home a lot

JMAN:
bummer

Mandi144:
ur telling me. R plans r messed up now

JMAN:
I cant cum up?

Mandi144:
Ill tell u when

Chapter 17

“
Y
our mom tells me you’re a police officer.”

Joe looked up from the coffee machine, where he’d been hoping the spigot over his paper cup wouldn’t either miss or overflow. He was so used to everyone knowing what he did for a living—and had been, it felt, for two lifetimes—that he was almost startled at the question.

Karl Weisenbeck, Leo’s doctor, was standing next to him with a dollar in his hand.

“Hi, Doc. Yeah. Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

Weisenbeck nodded a couple of times, as if trying to remember the name of a song. “Sounds important.”

Joe laughed as he watched the cup filling, successfully so far. “Not if you’re in law enforcement. Most cops assume we exist only to steal all the credit and headlines they have coming, not to mention the grant money.”

“Do you?”

Joe retrieved his cup and stood back to give Weisenbeck a shot at his own luck. The condition of the floor at the foot of the machine suggested he had a fifty-fifty chance. He enjoyed the man’s directness—had from the day they first met.

“Try not to. How’s Leo doing? I mean really?”

Now it was Weisenbeck’s turn to look up inquiringly. “You think I’ve been bullshitting you?”

“Not one bit. That’s why I’m asking.”

The doctor returned to monitoring his progress, even delicately placing his fingers around the cup so he’d be in position to tear it away at the right moment. A veteran.

They both waited until that time when, indeed, he had to extract prematurely and allow the spigot to piddle a little extra coffee into the miniature catch basin, from where it dribbled onto the floor. Weisenbeck shook his head with disgust and began walking with Joe down the hallway toward the ICU.

“He’s no worse, which, given what he’s facing, is saying a lot. From what we can tell, he’s suffered no additional setbacks, which means that time is now playing to our advantage.”

“Because of the bone knitting?”

“Right. Once the flail chest is behind him and he can breathe entirely on his own, my suspicion is that we’ll see improvement.”

“But you did say, ‘From what we can tell.’”

Weisenbeck stopped walking to look at Joe straight-on. “Mr. Gunther, as I told your mother earlier, there’s a lot we don’t know. Sometimes, it can be like driving in winter with the windows fogged up. You trust to instinct, luck, your knowledge of the road, all your other senses, and anything else you can find. In the end, you can usually figure out why you failed—ice on the pavement, a deer jumping out in front of you, a mechanical failure. But only rarely can you do the same with success. Things often work out simply because it wasn’t your time for them not to.”

Oddly, Joe thought, he found those words comforting despite their absence of medical vocabulary or cant, perhaps because they so eloquently applied to life in general.

Weisenbeck’s pager went off. He glanced at it briefly and began making apologies before Joe cut him off with “Believe me, Doc, I know what it’s like. Thanks for your time,” and headed down the hallway on his own as the doctor disappeared into a nearby stairwell.

In the ICU waiting room, as if in counterpoint to the conversation he’d just left, he walked in on Gail Zigman and his mother, sitting side by side near the window overlooking the euphemistically called “floor,” their heads together in a deep discussion.

They both looked up as he entered, Gail rising.

“Hey, guys,” he said, smiling. “Plotting an overthrow?”

Gail gave him a brief hug as he drew near to kiss his mother, who admitted, “Good Lord, no. We were comparing recipes.”

“God, don’t tell him,” Gail protested. “He always hated my cooking.”

“I did not,” he exclaimed. “I just could never tell what it was.” He glanced at his mom. “Tofu-no-fish? Instead of old-fashioned tuna? I mean, give me a break.”

“That’s an extreme example,” Gail said.

“Tofu instead of tuna?” their elderly spectator spoke up, her interest sharpened. “That sounds wonderful. You spread it on bread?”

Joe left them to exchange details and approached the window, where he watched nurses and technicians in gowns and masks working their way among their swathed, recumbent, immobile charges. It was both futuristic fantasy and lunatic ant farm, where those bedded in the white pods were tended and catered to for reasons far outreaching their apparent usefulness.

Of course, one of those pods had a very clear use to him personally, and he found himself staring at Leo’s supine shape with the intensity of an aspiring mentalist, wishing he could transfer some of his own life force across the sterile space between them.

“What’re you thinking?” Gail’s voice said quietly from beside him.

He turned to look at her, surprised by her presence. A glance over his shoulder revealed his mother’s absence from the room, as well as how deeply in thought he must have fallen.

“Bathroom trip,” Gail explained.

He returned to his viewing and answered her question. “I was trying to figure out how to revive him using ESP, or maybe a ray gun.”

“It’s weird seeing him like that,” she said. “A guy so famous for his energy. You learn anything new? I heard you talking with Weisenbeck outside.”

“No,” he answered simply. He considered sharing some of the thoughts he’d entertained as a result, but held back, realizing that he didn’t have that kind of bond with her anymore—a continuing revelation, which jarred him still, and which, he knew, was inhibiting his taking any great steps forward with Lyn. He and Gail were friends now—old and deeply intertangled friends, to be sure. But they weren’t what they’d once been, and he now found a governor restricting the things that he’d never held from her in the past.

As if to cover his own embarrassment, he added, “It boiled down to no news being good news.”

“No news is becoming agony, if you ask me,” she said softly. She then checked her watch and added, “I better get going.”

They both turned as the door opened and his mother rolled in. Gail crossed to her and made her farewell, giving Joe another brief hug, and was gone before they knew it.

And before she noticed that she’d left her cell phone behind.

Joe grabbed it and jogged for the elevator banks, finding nobody there. He mimicked Weisenbeck earlier and headed for the stairs, taking two steps at a time and hoping the elevator had lots of stops.

When he reached the lobby, he saw her in the distance, swinging through the bank of doors to the driveway outside. He broke into a jog that wouldn’t also alarm the small army of people milling around him, and reached the doors in under a minute.

From there, he saw her approached by the well-dressed driver of a fancy waiting car, its exhaust plume thick in the cold air, and greeted with a hug and an intimate, almost lingering kiss.

He stopped dead in his tracks, assessing what to do.

In his training as a cop, public and personal safety were the priorities, followed by tactical considerations—level of threat, availability and nature of countermeasures, and on down the line.

Here there was none of that. The adrenaline rush was similar, but the situation was absurdly benign. He stood rooted where he stood, people jostling him to use the doors before him, and tried to unscramble his synapses.

Fortunately, or perhaps not, Gail ended his dilemma by glancing over her shoulder as she broke away from the embrace and began circling the front of the car.

She, too, froze in place, transparently nonplussed.

Lamely he held up the cell phone he still clutched in his hand, and pushed the door open before him, hoping his expression was within a mile of normal.

The car’s owner, one foot already inside his vehicle, was arrested by Gail’s abrupt immobility and glanced in Joe’s direction, giving the latter more purpose.

This was perfectly reasonable, Joe was thinking as he approached—reasonable and logical. Wasn’t he seeing someone else? Hadn’t he and Gail both moved on?

He smiled as he reached them. “Can’t live long without this, I bet,” he told her, sticking out his right hand to the man and adding, “Hi. Joe Gunther. Glad to meet you.”

Gail had, by now, returned to that side of the car, a black BMW, her face red and pinched as if from a steady blast of cold air. “This is Francis Martin, Joe. He works with Martin, Clarkson, Bryan.”

Joe laughed. “Top of the masthead. Good going.”

Martin smiled back, his eyes betraying that he’d figured out what was going on. “Not that tough when you created the company. I’ll never have a reputation like yours—or deserve it.”

Joe gave his hand a last squeeze and dropped it. “I guess that depends on the reputation and who you’re hearing it from.”

Martin nodded. “Good one. You’d make a good lawyer. I promise, I’ve only heard the best.” Here, he glanced at Gail, who was standing quietly, her eyes blank, fingering her cell phone.

“You all set?” he asked her. “We’ll have to beat feet to make that meeting.”

Nicely done, Joe thought, and stepped back. “Have a safe trip,” he said, waving to them both, and added to her, “I’ll let you know if anything changes, one way or the other.”

He stayed standing there, the polite host after the party, until they’d both settled in, slammed their doors, and the dapper Francis Martin had driven halfway down the drive. Gail’s pale face was still visible through the back window as Joe finally turned on his heel and went back inside, his heart beating somewhere in between relief and sorrow.

Sammie Martens parked her car on the street, across from the bus depot parking lot on Liberty Street, and paused before getting out, surveying the surrounding bleakness. Springfield, Massachusetts, was huge in comparison to anything in Vermont, or, as most Vermonters saw it, huge and crowded and blighted and depressing. Sammie had personal knowledge of the social troubles this area visited upon her state. She’d gone undercover in nearby Holyoke for a while in a vain attempt to stifle some of the drug flow heading north.

Of course, she knew that her prejudice was unfair. Springfield was an oversize urban center, no more or less saddled with its ills than most places of its kind. And no bus terminal that she’d known was located in a town’s upscale section. This one was wedged against two interstate overpasses, surrounded by industrial-style low buildings and adjacent to the train terminal, which looked as though it dated back to when robber barons called the shots.

Barely visible in the gray, flat daylight, a strung-up sign of extinguished lightbulbs was attached to the low, arching stone overpass that carried the railroad tracks between the depot and the rest of the city, to the south. The sign spelled out, “City of Bright Lights.”

Sam popped open her door and got out into the kind of harsh cold that only miles of concrete can exude, the wind whipping between the nearby buildings and shredding the warm cocoon around her. She stood next to the car, getting her bearings and noticing the contrast between the bland, towering, modern Mass Mutual building in the distance, and the ornate, Italianate campanile beside city hall behind it—the only sign of grace within sight. Her contact had told her, on the phone, to park where she had and that everything else would become obvious.

It did. She saw, over the tops of a row of salt-streaked, dirty parked cars, a clearly marked police van, the glimmer of some yellow tape, and several cold human shapes standing around, most nursing coffee cups. She crossed the street and walked down the length of cars to join them.

As she drew near, a tall, white-haired, red-faced man in a down jacket that made him look like a tire company mascot broke away from the small group and approached her.

“Agent Martens?” he asked. “Steve Wilson, Springfield PD.”

She nodded in greeting, not bothering to shake, with everyone wearing gloves. “How’d you know?”

A wide smile broke his craggy face. She imagined he was old-school—hard at work, hard at play, and no stranger to the bottle. Some stereotypes existed for a reason. “You walk like a cop.”

That made her smile. A cop was all she’d ever wanted to be. She pointed to a small, dark sedan parked almost nose to nose with the police van and surrounded by the yellow tape. “Don’t tell me—that’s the car, right?”

He laughed. “I wish I could tell you we’d wrapped the wrong one on purpose, but that’s it, all right. Good detective work.”

Several of Wilson’s companions chuckled in the background, eavesdropping and, she knew, checking her out. Not that she minded especially. Guys she could handle. Women cops were tougher to figure out.

She stepped up to the car’s hood and looked at the vehicle straight on—a dark blue Ford Escort, several years old, but in pretty good shape. A middle-class car, economical and dependable. Its inspection sticker was up to date and issued from Connecticut.

“You run the registration yet?” she asked.

Wilson nodded. “Frederick Nashman. A couple of old moving violations, nothing big. That’s assuming the car wasn’t stolen to get it here.”

She looked at him.

“It’s not reported stolen. I’m just saying . . .”

“Got ya.” Sam went back to studying the car, slowly walking around it, her hands in her coat pockets. “Anybody notice it out here before we raised the alarm?”

Wilson was walking with her. “Nah. Would’ve happened eventually, but they can be parked out here a long time.”

She finished her tour and straightened to give him an eye-to-eye, as best their relative heights allowed. “This when you tell me you’ve gone through it all already and have everything bagged and tagged in the back of the van?”

His eyes and eyebrows expressed theatrical shock, but his laugh gave him away. “It did cross our minds, what with the weather, but given the respect we have for . . . What do you call yourselves again?”

She gave him a friendly sneer. “Cute. You got the paperwork at least?”

He nodded, adding, “And we popped the lock, just to make sure we wouldn’t be screwed after you got here. Thing opened like a soda can. No one’s been inside yet, though.”

Sam nodded. “That was nice—I do appreciate it.”