The Lesson of Her Death (42 page)

Wait. What is this?

Bill Corde stood in the doorway to the lockup and watched one deputy on his knees, leaning over the other one—wait, it was Lance Miller—kissing him.

Wait. No.

What
is
this?

It was CPR. Lance Miller, white-faced and blotched in sweat, thrashed on the floor. Arms sweeping like he
was waving down a rescue copter, legs kicking, whispering in between the county deputy’s smacks, “Gedoff, gedoff, gedoff!” The deputy would pinch his nose then breathe air into his lungs.

Corde said, “I don’t think he needs that.”

“S’all right. I’ve done this before,” the rescuing deputy said as he put both hands on Miller’s chest and pressed down hard. The crack of the breaking rib was audible to Corde. Miller muttered, “Gedoff me,” and fainted.

“Didn’t look like he was having a heart attack,” Corde said.

“Look what I done,” said the rescuer, standing up and looking heartsick.

Corde knelt and checked Miller’s pulse. “I don’t think he’s hurt too bad. Why don’t you call the ambulance?”

“Yeah, I could do that. The kid escaped.” He stood up and ran past Corde to the phone.

“What?”

“What should I call? Nine one one?”

“What do you mean, he escaped?”

Clutching the phone the deputy blurted, “Ran outa here five minutes ago. Hello, we need a ambulance at the sheriff’s office. There’s a injured deputy. I was giving him CPR and he didn’t take to it.”

Corde ran through the lockup, out the back door, then to the Town Hall exit door, which swung wide into the sunlit parking lot.
Outhouse fulla shit!
There was no sign of the fleeing boy. He trotted back into the office just as the fire siren began its throaty wail.

Corde had the dispatcher call Ebbans in then he picked up the phone and dialed Ribbon’s home. “Hey, Ettie, can you get him down here soon’s you can? We got an escape.… Yeah? Where? Fishing? Hell’s bells!”

Jim Slocum ran through the open doorway, passing the county deputy, who kept an intense vigil for the ambulance.
“What’s up, Bill? I just heard an ambulance call.”

“The Halpern boy’s gone.”

“Gone? Whatdya?—”

“Escaped is what I mean. Beat up Lance bad.”

“No shit.” Slocum grinned. “Hell of a scrapper for a fat boy.”

“Where’s Steve?”

“Saturday afternoon? Where d’ya think? In his new goddamn truck.… He got a phone in it?”

“Naw,” Slocum said. “He was gonna put the old CB in but he didn’t get around to it.”

Corde said, “Get out a description but tell them go easy when apprehending.”

“I can say but it don’t mean they’ll do.” Slocum walked off to the dispatcher’s office.

The medics streamed through the door with a low gurney and explored Lance Miller’s body carefully. They gave him an injection then got him outside and into the ambulance. He was awake again and cussing colorfully as they closed the door.

Twenty minutes later Ebbans arrived and Mahoney five minutes after him.

“Great, we got a killer out?” Mahoney said after he’d heard the news.

“Oh, I guess I missed the trial,” Corde said, loud.

Mahoney lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

Slocum said happily, “We got ourselves some proof now. I mean, why’s he escaping if he didn’t do it?”

Corde looked at him as if he’d asked where babies come from.

Ebbans said, “We better call the state and tell them we got one loose.”

“You might want to mention,” the rib-cracking deputy said, “he’s got a gun.”

Outright silence. Every head in the room turned to him.

The deputy blushed then said, “Forgot to say, what with Lance being down and all. He got Lance’s gun. I
thought he’d gotten the Speedloaders but they’d fallen under the bunk. Just the gun he got. I was relieved to find the extra shells.”

Corde said, “Nobody’s supposed to go into the cells with a gun! He didn’t leave it in the box?”

“Guess he forgot.”

“Sweet Mary,” Corde whispered. “Get on the horn,” he ordered Slocum. “Make it APB to county and state. Armed and emotionally disturbed. Tell them that he’s scared but he doesn’t want to hurt anybody.”

Mahoney asked, “You sound like you’re in charge here, Detective. I seem to recall you’re under suspension.”

The others looked at Corde cautiously, waiting for him to blow. He however had not even heard the words. He was in a different place altogether, running through bushes and trees, wheezing and hawking, right next to Philip Halpern. “The boy’s fifteen. So he doesn’t have a driver’s license. He’s probably trying to get out of the county on foot. How would he do that?”

Slocum said, “I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve ever had an escape situation here.”

Ebbans said, “What about a Greyhound out of Fredericksberg.”

“Maybe,” Corde said slowly. “How about the state park?”

Slocum said. “Damn, sure. It’ll lead him right to the river and I bet he thinks he’ll snatch a canoe or boat and head south.”

The door opened and Harrison County Sheriff Hammerback Ellison stepped into the office. He was a solid, heavy man but his face was pointed and delicate and he had very small feet and narrow ankles. “I just got the call. The boy got away?”

“Sure did.” Ebbans stood up and picked up his hat. “And he’s got a gun. You and me ought to get over to the state park. That okay with you, Bill?” Ebbans asked. His voice was strident; he was challenging anybody to question the shift of authority back to Corde.
Bless you
on this, T.T
. Corde nodded and said to Slocum, “Jim, why don’t you take 302. Just on the chance that he’s hitching. I’ll take 117 down to the river and see if I find him there.”

Slocum looked at Ebbans, who said, “Do it, Jim.”

Then Corde said to Mahoney, “Charlie, maybe you ought to check out downtown. He could be trying to outsmart us and hole up till night somewhere around here.”

Mahoney reluctantly said, “I don’t think he’s that smart. But it’s not a bad idea.”

They all hurried outside to the parking lot. Slocum got into his car and sped off. Ellison and Ebbans vanished in a cloud of dust and tire smoke. Corde hung back. He started the engine then drove slowly out of the parking lot.

He did not however make the right turn onto Cress, which would have taken him directly to Route 117. He turned left then slammed his foot onto the accelerator.

Philip pauses to smell the deputy’s gun. The scents are oil, plastic and metal warmed to 98.6 by the abundant flesh of his stomach. It is a small gun but very heavy.

Systems armed. Xaser torpedoes in launch tubes
.…

Philip is in the woods that border his parents’ house. He is surrounded by lean pines and the hot stems of wild sunflowers and long, bowed grass. Within a frame of trees he can see the Chevrolet. He can see the tail of the duct tape that holds the station wagon’s grille, which was shattered when his mother went off the road two years ago. He can see the barbecue. He can see the back porch with its lattice door open wide—left that way by
his father after digging up the purse. Philip can see the green of the sagging shack in the backyard. Under one eave of the shack is a huge, skin-creepy wasp nest that has weighed on his mind like a fat pimple for a week. After he kills his father and after he kills Jano the Honon traitor he will fire the rest of the bullets into the wasp nest.

Lock on target, entering Dimensional shift now
.…

No, Philip remembers, he will not shoot all the bullets into the nest. He’ll save one.

Philip steps out of the woods and starts toward his house.

Faith. To the Lost Dimension. From darkness to light
.

“D
oing that,” Creth Halpern said, “won’t help much at all.”

His wife looked at him curiously—as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he were simply standing in front of her, moving his mouth silently. As if the words buzzed around her head like bees in an old cartoon.

They were both surprised at his comment. It had been years since he’d referred to her drinking. His wife emptied the contents of the heavy glass into her throat and swallowed. She poured another and replaced the plastic pitcher in a refrigerator that held Kraft cheese slices, a near-empty box of Post Toasties, a package of gray ground beef, a half quart of milk. She leaned against the wall. Halpern gripped the screwdriver he was using to crack open a paint-frozen window. He dug the blade into the seam and levered upward, crushing the wood of the sill. The window didn’t budge. “Damn.”

His wife sipped the drink and looked out at a
blooming lilac bush outside windows bordered with curtains on which were printed tiny brown tepees.

Halpern for the life of him couldn’t understand why she looked so good. In the mornings, a little puffy-faced; at night, eyes dead to all who bothered to look. But that was the only real evidence. Last summer one of Philip’s friends had hit on her. A skin-and-bones high school kid! Halpern admitted she had a great bod. How could she pour down the Beefeaters faster than any one of the guys down at the Tap and still keep her face clean and her hair all permed up nice? Her nails done? Her legs shaved?

“Our son,” she said by way of announcement, “in jail.”

“He didn’t do it. He’ll be out tomorrow.”

“Oh, come on. He did those
things
to her.…” She didn’t even sound drunk. He wondered if he’d just gotten used to it. He tried to remember her voice when he’d met her, when he’d first started hanging out in the New Lebanon Inn, where she was waitressing. He couldn’t. This saddened him greatly.

His wife said to a lumber yard calendar, “I can’t call my mother. How can I call her? I’d be so ashamed.”

“He did some things to that girl, yeah, and he oughta be whipped and he will be. But he didn’t kill anybody. I’ll swear to that. What we should do is get some help.”

“Oh, sure. How?”

“There’s state help, I guess. Talk to a … I don’t know. Somebody.”

“Oh, just like that? Sure. If you made money maybe.” Her voice clear as gin.

“I put a roof over his head. I put food in his mouth. And yours too. Food, and that’s not all.” Two digs in one day. Halpern was shaken.

“If you made money—”

“I fucking make money. You could make money too.”

“—we could do a few things.”

“I’m stopping you from getting a job?”

“You don’t remember. You don’t remember anything.”

Halpern said, “I can’t talk to you when you’re this way.”

“How come,” she asked curiously, “you don’t fuck me anymore?”

Halpern’s temper blazed then died immediately to a simmer. He considered open-handing her cheek but was paralyzed by a bottomless remorse. He joined his wife in gazing out the window. It occurred to him that most of their arguments happened just this way—her drunk, him thinking about other places and people, both of them staring out the window. Wanting to smack her and not having the energy or the type of hate required.

“Oh, go to hell,” his wife said as if giving directions.

Halpern snatched up the screwdriver. He squeezed it a dozen times, feeling the resilience of the rubberized handle spattered in paint. He stepped slowly to the kitchen sink, leaned forward and dug the screwdriver furiously into the seam of the window, cracking chunks out of the soft pine sill.

He heard a clatter of pans behind him.

He heard the sticky sound of the refrigerator door opening.

He heard the sound of pouring liquid.

He heard his wife’s voice. “Philip!”

Halpern turned. The boy had entered through the back door and stood in the center of the kitchen.

“When d’you get out?” his father asked. He felt a horrid urge, a salivating urge, to step forward and bloody the boy’s nose. To scream at him. (To scream what?
“How could you do that to a poor girl? How could you, you stupid little prick?”
To scream:
“What’d I do to make you this way? I loved you! I really loved you! I’m so sorry!”)

Creth Halpern stood completely still, the screwdriver sliding from his hand. He stood twenty feet away from his son, whose upper lip glistened with snot and
whose face was glossy with sweat, his fat three-dimensional chest heaving.

“How did you?—”

His wife whispered, “Oh my God.”

Creth Halpern too saw the gun.

“Whatcha got there, boy?” he asked.

Philip’s head turned to his mother. The glass fell from her grip, hitting the floor and whipping a tail of liquor against the refrigerator. Her smooth hands, tipped in unchipped red nails, went to her mouth. Philip turned back to his father. The boy’s mouth moved but no words came out. It was the mouth of a fish eating water. Finally, he swallowed then said in a weak voice, “The handy man’s here.”

“Listen up, young man. Put that gun down.”

“The handy man.”

His mother said, “Philip, don’t do this.” She sobbed, “Please, don’t do this.”

“I never did anything to you,” the boy said to his father.

“Son—”

Philip held the gun up and said, “Handy man. Handyman, handymanhandyman—”