Southern Cross (17 page)

“Got
it,” she agreed. She led me to the second ambulance and made me sit on the back
end while she snapped on latex gloves and checked me out. “I see you didn’t
listen to me about pulling out the glass. You’re lucky you didn’t bleed out
before you got out of there.”

“It
didn’t hit anything; it was just in my shoulder.”

“Actually,
it could’ve hit a few things,” she said grimly. “And knowing I was right
wouldn’t have been that much comfort if you died.” She took a pair of scissors
and cut my t-shirt down the back, carefully peeling it away from the wound.

“You’ll
need stitches,” she continued. “Are you up to date on your tetanus?”

“Yeah,”
I said “Got a booster last summer, remember?”

“Right.”
She put a compress to the wound, then took my left hand and guided it back to
my shoulder. “Just hold it there, okay? Firm pressure, and stay still. When Juarez gets here, he can give you a ride to the hospital.”

“Yes,
ma’am.”

A
firefighter carried a teenage girl away from the building, heading toward us. I
watched from the sidelines as Solomon worked with another paramedic, setting
the girl up with oxygen and checking her vitals. The fire had spread to the
front of the building by now, and the parking lot looked like a scene from some
war-torn country: people of all ages milling around, clearly in shock, their
clothing torn and faces bloodied.

One
of the teenagers who’d been sitting behind us stood off to one side. The right
side of his body had gotten the worst of the blast, his clothes and body
burned, a deep gash down his right cheek. No one seemed to notice him, and
Solomon was busy with three of the workers who’d just been pulled from the
kitchen.

I
jogged over to the boy. He spun toward me in confusion.

“Have
you seen Reggie?” he asked. “I…” he trailed off, eyes welling. He was probably
Danny’s age, maybe a little younger.

“It’s
all right,” I said. “I’m just gonna take you over to get some help, okay?”

He
backed away when I tried to touch him, his voice tinged with hysteria. “Nah—my
friend Reggie’s still in there. He’s got a piece of glass… They just left him
in there. Somebody needs to help him. Please.”

“What’s
he look like?” I asked.

“Red
hair. He’s got a pierced lip. And a tattoo.”

“Just
hang here a second, okay?”

I
stopped one of the firefighters as he was walking past, lowering my voice. “Did
you see a red headed kid in there—pierced lip. Tattoo?”

“Reggie
Bloom,” the firefighter said grimly. “He’s gone. Piece of glass severed his
carotid. Bled out before we even got here.”

The
world blurred. Smoke made the air hazy, clouds roiling overhead. My stomach
burned. I jogged back to the boy.

“I
told them to look for him,” I lied, figuring it was better than sending him
into a tailspin while he was clearly in shock. “Everyone’s doing what they can.
What’s your name?”

He
wiped his eyes. His hand came away bloody and he stared at it in confusion. 

“I’m
Diggs,” I said when he didn’t answer. I still wasn’t touching him, but I’d
managed to herd him toward safety.

“Mike,”
he said absently. “I’m Mike.”

“Good
to meet you, Mike. Listen, I’m gonna bring you over to get checked out, okay?
Let’s let these guys do their jobs.”

He
let me lead him to Solomon. Just before we got there, he stopped and stared at
me, eyes uncomprehending.

“Why’d
he do it?” he asked. He shook his head. “I don’t understand why anybody’d do a
thing like this. I know he didn’t like us, but why’d anybody go and do this?”

“He?”
I asked carefully. Solomon approached. I held up my hand to get her to hang on
a minute more. “You saw who did this? You could tell who was driving the van?”

“Yeah,”
he said. “He was right outside the door. Casey saw him. We all knew who it was.
He coached Little League—we’d been in that van a hundred times.”

Solomon
tried to lead the kid to a waiting gurney. I held her off one more second. “Who
are you talking about, Mike? Who was driving the van?”

“Sheriff
Jennings,” he said. “He came straight for us.”

There’s
a reason I didn’t become a doctor. Actually, there are several reasons—the main
one being that, by not becoming a doctor, it was guaranteed that I would piss
off my mother… possibly for life. The other reason, however, is one I would
never, ever admit to aloud:

I
always hated seeing people in pain.

Not
because I’m secretly some saint in love with the human race or something.
Please.

I
just hated the chaos of it all. The lack of control. The loss of dignity. The
screaming and the snot and the tears.

If it
were just blood and guts, I’d be fine.

But
it’s not.

Strangely
enough, my mother—the least empathetic person on the planet—seemed to thrive
amidst the screaming and the snot and the tears. Of course, she was never Miss
Sunshine about it, but in New England that doesn’t actually matter so much.
Mainers are a pragmatic lot; we’ll take competence over kindness any day. If my
mother practiced in Kentucky, she’d probably be burned in effigy within the
week.

Despite
the screaming and snot and tears, however, about two months after the nightmare
in Black Falls last summer, I enrolled in a basic course on first aid. And
while I was recuperating and dealing with shitty surgeries and generally trying
to pick up the pieces of my life after a year that had included a miscarriage,
a divorce, multiple attempts on my life, and saying goodbye to the best friend
I’d ever had, I kind of… found medicine again. After that basic first aid
course, I took another, less basic course. Which led me to a harrowing
eight-day Wilderness First Responder course, followed by my first ride-alongs
with Portland Emergency Services.

I
told almost no one—not Juarez, and certainly not my mother. I did tell my
mother’s partner, Dr. Maya Pearce, since I needed a reference and Maya seemed
as good as anyone for that. I swore her to secrecy, though. I’d wondered more
than once what Diggs would say about this unexpected development, but, of
course, I wasn’t talking to him anymore. And so, this odd new piece of my life
became sort of my dirty little secret.

Until
now.

Late
that night in Kentucky, while doctors were still trying to sort through the
casualties and nurses waded through the bleeding masses at Paducah General Hospital, I found a plastic chair and sat alone with my head tipped back
against the wall. I was bruised and gashed and stitched in two places. Covered
in other people’s blood. My hand throbbed.

I
felt movement beside me. Juarez sat next to me and draped his arm around my
shoulders. I tensed, strung tight. I opened my eyes when he pressed a kiss to
my temple.

“Hey,”
he said. He looked tired. I still hadn’t seen Special Agent Blaze since the
explosion, but I figured when I did we were all goners. She’d melt us with her
poison-dart, über-military death ray eyes. I snickered at the thought.

Juarez
looked at me like I was nuts.

“I’m
a little punchy,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You
were incredible, you know,” he said. He rubbed my knee. Usually, Juarez has a soothing effect on me, but his touch wasn’t doing much just then. There was no
part of me that didn’t ache. Someone should make a PSA about getting caught in
a car bombing. Those fuckers hurt.

“Can
I get you anything?” he asked. “Tea? Soup?”

I
arched an eyebrow. Even that was painful. “Have you met me? When have I ever
wanted tea? Or soup?”

It
came out snippier than I meant it to. Juarez removed his hand from my knee. I
put it back.

“Sorry,”
I said. “Apparently, tragedy makes me bitchy. Er. I’ll get myself something in
a minute. What about you? You okay?”

“You
mean aside from the fact that my girlfriend and a restaurant full of innocent
civilians just got blown up by a guy who was supposed to be on our side, and
not one of us saw it coming?”

Right.
Dumb question.

“Sheriff
Jennings never really seemed like he was on our side as far as I could see,” I
said sympathetically. “And, realistically, who thinks a guy like Harvey
Jennings is gonna snap and drive his minivan through the local Dairy Queen? If
you’d told me he was gonna grab a semi-automatic and mow down the local chapter
of the Sierra Club, I wouldn’t be surprised... But this was a shocker.”

“Well,
it’s my job to anticipate these things,” he said.

We
sat there in a mutually miserable silence until he squeezed my hand and stood.
“I’m going to speak with the doctors one more time, then we should go.” He
hesitated. “If you’d like to stay with me at the hotel, there’s room. Unless
you wanted to go back to the Durhams’ with Diggs.”

I
thought of sleeping in the car the night before. My whispered screaming match
with Diggs. The Kiss. The feel of his body sheltering mine when the world
exploded around us.

If I
didn’t have a headache before, I sure as hell had one now. “No,” I said. “I’ll
stay with you. Thanks.”

He
left. Five minutes later, I was half-asleep when someone pressed something warm
into my hand. I opened one eye as Diggs sat down.

“You
brought me coffee?”

“Only
half-strength—I figure eventually you’ll want to sleep. And here.” He set a
Hershey bar on my leg.

“Coffee
and chocolate,” I said. I looked at him suspiciously. “Did you hear what Juarez wanted to get me?”

“Rookie
mistake.” He shrugged. “He’s just trying to take care of you.”

“I
don’t need someone to take care of me,” I said testily.

He
harrumphed, but wisely let it go. We sat there in silence for a long time, arms
touching, sipping our coffee. I closed my eyes again. Bloody faces swam through
the darkness. Kids screaming. The smell of burning flesh. I thought of the look
on Sophie’s face—the terror she must have felt in those instants before she
died.

“So,
you’re doing this now,” Diggs said.

The bloody
faces vanished. “Doing what?” I asked.

“Fixing
people up,” he said knowingly. “Don’t tell me all that was just your mother’s
lessons from fifteen years ago kicking in. You knew what you were doing.”

“I
may have taken some courses over the winter.”

When
I opened my eyes again, Diggs was grinning at me. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,”
he said. He shrugged, but he was still smiling. “I just love it when you
surprise me.”

“Glad
I could oblige.” I started to lean back again, but something about the way Diggs
was looking at me stopped me. Like he was getting ready to dive from an
airplane and he didn’t have a lot of faith in his parachute. “You have
something else you wanted to say?” 

He
thought about it for only a second more before he spoke. “My brother was a
vegetarian,” he said.

It
took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. Then it came to me:
our fight back at the house the day before.
Everything’s this deep dark
mystery with you.
I looked at him. He looked back at me. No flinching. No deflection.
Despite that, there was no doubt how hard it was for him to share this piece of
himself with me.

“He
had been since he was six,” he continued. “I told him where burgers came from,
and that was it. The kid was crazy about animals.”

“So,
you stopped eating meat…”

“I
haven’t had so much as a fish stick since the day he died.” He got quiet and
looked down, rubbing his palms on his jeans. “You know me better than anyone,
Sol. You always have.”

We
sat there a second more before he stood abruptly. He lay his hand lightly on my
head. “You should talk to Juarez. Let him be nice to you. Who knows—you might
actually like it.”

He
walked away.

I sat
there with my coffee and my chocolate and my bruises. I could still feel the
weight and the warmth of his hand.

Danny
sat on the cool ground with zip ties cutting into his wrists. He didn’t know
what time it was. He’d been fuzzy about details when he first woke up, but they
were getting clearer now. Behind him was a cement wall. A big, thick steel door
was the only way in or out. Above the door, angry red numbers below a bare red
light bulb counted down:

24:09:52

He’d
been watching those numbers so long he thought he’d lose his head. When he
first woke up, they’d been at 38:42:20. He’d memorized that number. Couldn’t
get it out of his mind now.

His
body ached. His mouth tasted like he’d swallowed a wool blanket.

Just
like he’d been doing since he woke up, he thought back to the night before.
Tried to remember what happened. He remembered talking to Dougie over to
Casey’s house. Playing guitar. Smokin’ up.

He
remembered somebody calling to him from outside. A lady’s voice. Familiar, but
none of the girls he knew. Saying sweet things that made him leave the garage
like he was a puppet on a string. I
been watchin’ you, Danny Durham
,
she’d said in a low, whispery kind of way that made him ache in a way he never
had before.

He’d
taken his stuff—his backpack and his cell phone and his keys. Gone out into the
dark night.

It
all went black from there.

And
he woke up here.

His
backpack was gone. So was his cell phone, and his smokes.

“Hello?”
he called out again. He’d been calling out since he got here. Nobody ever
answered, though. His voice echoed in the small room.

Quite
a pickle you got yourself into, boy,
his
daddy said. He sat down on the floor across from Danny, stiff ‘cause his daddy
never sat on the floor. He was wearing jeans and that flannel Rick and Danny
got him for his last birthday—not the ugly brown suit they buried him in.

Tears
needled behind Danny’s eyelids. “Quit hauntin’ me, old man.”

You
really wanna be alone in this place?

Danny
shook his head. Fear knotted up his insides.

Nah
, his daddy said.
I didn’t think so.

Somewhere
above him, Danny heard music—he’d been hearing music for awhile, actually. Not
too bad, either: mostly classic rock, but a little of that indie stuff Diggs
always sent him. Sometimes, he heard footsteps off in the distance. He wondered
what would happen if he made a racket—a big one. Took off his shoes and threw
them at the door. Screamed bloody murder.

“You
think they’ll kill me like they done you?” he asked his daddy.

His
daddy just looked at him.
I don’t reckon they brought you here for a game of
checkers, son.