Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 39

"Yeah, stop shouting," said Giancarlo.

"I can't believe this," screamed Karp. "She still doesn't realize what she's . . ."

The whole family now did a double take, and in an instant the four of them had swarmed over Giancarlo, to the extent that the various tubes allowed.

"Oh, baby," cried Marlene, "you're back. How do you feel?"

"It hurts, Mom. It hurts like a b.i.t.c.h."

Karp dashed out into the hallway bellowing for nurses, for doctors, for a.n.a.lgesics. Lucy and Marlene were weeping and clutching one another. Zak was holding his brother's hand.

"I caught a big fish," said Giancarlo.

"I saw it," said Zak. "Then you got shot. You got a bullet in the brain, but they took it out."

"My head doesn't hurt, just my back."

Nurses arrived, and Dr. Small, now the happiest non-Karp in McCullensburg.

"Can you move your toes?" asked Lucy.

"Yes." Giancarlo demonstrated.

"You're going to be fine," said Marlene, touching the boy's face.

He smiled at her, the famous GC smile. Then this faded and he asked in a puzzled voice, "Why don't you turn on the lights? Why are we sitting around in the dark?"

Karp and Lucy stood together on the roof of the medical center and watched the helicopter lift off, carrying Marlene and the twins back to civilization and a more advanced level of medical care. They watched it dwindle into a red speck. He put his arm around her shoulder.

"Let's go to Rosie's," he said. "It's catfish day."

They walked through normal small-town streets. The news vans were gone, after a frenzied week of reporting the aftermath of the Burnt Peak War and the simultaneous recovery of the Miracle Twin. At Rosie's the Karps got the kind of service that Edward VII used to get at the Cafe Royale. Everyone loved the Karps in McCullensburg.

"Why did they let her go?" Lucy asked. "I thought she'd be in jail for sure."

Karp shrugged and sipped his iced tea. "Well, she denies everything. And what proof do they have? Her prior connection with Tran? That's not a crime. A helicopter trip for him from Bridgeport to here and back? The maps from Dan? Suspicious, but also not a crime. No money has changed hands that anyone can see. The Viets have vanished except for that old housekeeper, on which they have nothing. They took all their weapons with them. If they had Tran or his people and they could get them to implicate Marlene, it'd be a different story. But they don't even know their names."

"But she did it."

"Yeah, you know and I know how it went down because we know her. But the law deals in facts. Okay, let's say they decide to bring her to trial. Ernie Poole is a good lawyer, probably better than Stan Hawes, when you get right down to it, so it's going to be fought. That brings up the politics of it. Does Stan Hawes want to prosecute the grieving mom of the Miracle Twin in Robbens County? For eliminating a family that's terrorized this county for a hundred years? Could he even get an indictment? Hey, much easier for everyone concerned if it's a gang war ma.s.sacre. It's not the worst thing that ever happened in Robbens County, and at least the bad guys lost for a change. The FBI will do their national manhunt and come up empty."

"It's still wrong."

"Yes, it is. The law's an imperfect instrument. I recall a couple of years back they had a case out in some Midwest town, probably just like this one. They had a fellow who was just bone bad-an arsonist, a tire slasher, a vandal, a bully, a rapist. He'd been in and out of jail a couple of times, and each time he got out, he headed home and kept behaving the same way, or worse. One day a group of guys came up to him on the street, broad daylight, middle of town, and beat him to death with pick handles. No arrests were ever made. Do I deplore it? Yes. Do I also understand it? Yes. We do the best we can. Meanwhile, the instigators of this disaster are going to get a trial, a scrupulously fair trial, and I confidently expect they will spend their entire remaining years in prison. So I have to be content with that."

"Will you try the case?"

"I'll get it started. I want to see George in a courtroom at least. But Stan can carry it out as well as I can. Old Bledsoe isn't going to stand for any delay, so I figure ten days to can Floyd. Lester will plead if he's smart. After that . . ." Karp shrugged.

"Back to the City?"

"I guess. I hate my job."

"So change it. What do you want to do?"

"What I've been doing here, minus the crazy stuff. Prosecuting cases. I want to be like Domino's Pizza, we deliver hot-no politics, no social work, no supervision: somebody gives me an a.s.s, I put it in jail."

"If they're guilty."

He grinned. "Picky, picky! And what about you? You're leaving today. I presume you'll stay in the City for a while."

"Yeah. I need to marshal the neurological resources of New York to focus on Giancarlo."

"You think something can be done?"

"I don't know. I already talked to some people. Occipital-lobe injuries are funny. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes there's partial impairment, sometimes it's dark for life. At least he's alive. And cheerful, considering. It's funny: there's no one I know that it's less fair to make blind than Giancarlo, and at the same time there's no one I know who could take being blinded with less bitterness than Giancarlo. He's talking about getting a guide dog and taking up the piano. A lot less bitter than Mom, which isn't hard."

"Yes. That's going to be an issue."

"You and her."

"Yeah. I knew she did sneaky and probably fairly dirty stuff for years, but this is different. It's murder for hire, when you cut to the chase. I don't know if I can . . ." He stopped and closed his eyes briefly. "Anyway, I shouldn't be talking to you about this kind of stuff. We'll work it out."

Or not, he thought. "What about you and her?"

"I don't know. I can't look at her and she can't look at me. It's not just the killings. It's her, the way she thinks, what she does. I love her, but I can't be in the same room as her anymore. A failure of charity, I know. It's something I still have to work on."

They finished their meal and he walked Lucy to her truck. A hug and a kiss and she was gone. Karp walked across the square and into the courthouse.

She drove to Dan's brother's place and found Dan in the back, in a deck chair, in cutoffs, with a cooler of beer within easy reach and a thick astrophysics text propped up on a board athwart the chair arms. She marched up to him, removed the board and books, and plopped herself down on his lap.

When he was able to breathe again, he said, "Does this mean you've decided to be nice to me?"

"It could be. Or it could be I am planning to plumb new levels of cruelty and this is the softening-up phase."

"I'm betting on the latter. When are you splitting?"

"Now. You're the last soul in McCullensburg I will see, forever."

"You can't leave without telling me what that Chinese writing on your shirt means."

"No. It says zhi si bu wu, meaning roughly 'unable to understand until death.' It's from a Tang-dynasty story about a hunter with a pet deer who gets along with the hunter's own dogs. The hunter warns it that not all dogs are like his pals, but the deer doesn't listen. It runs off, meets a strange pack of dogs, and gets eaten, without ever understanding why. It's an idiom used to refer to an incorrigibly stubborn person."

"You got that part right. So . . . will I see you in Boston, or what?"

"Oh, yes, I certainly hope so. But I don't know how long I'm going to stay in school."

"What will you do instead, and will they need a computer geek?"

She laughed. "I don't know. I'll let you know when I find out."

"So we just, you know, go on like this? Necking? And, you know, raising the tension to the heart?"

"I hope so. I'll understand, however, if you feel the need to consort with women of easy virtue."

"You'll wait there patiently, like a stained-gla.s.s window, huh?"

"Yes, until you ask me to marry you, at which point I will say yes."

"What if I marry someone else? One of those easier-virtue ones?"

"Then I'll dance at your wedding and stifle my disappointed tears, and then join the Ursulines. But if you wait, I will show you delights beyond the range of your adolescent fantasies. We will have to honeymoon at the Mayo Clinic, you'll need IV tubes, to replenish your bodily fluids, which I will have sucked from your pulsing flesh."

"You are such a lunatic," he said, after which she did suck a little fluid from his mouth.

She then leaped to her feet. "So long and G.o.d bless you, Dan Heeney, until we meet again." She ran out of the yard.

He stood up and watched her. Later, that was how he most often remembered her: running down the narrow lane to her truck, with her long legs, and those floppy shorts and the clunky boots kicking up the gravel, and the grin she gave him over her shoulder, and the head of the great black dog hanging out of the window as the truck pulled away.

end.