Tom McInnes - Dog Island Part 27

Captain Billy handed me his gun and walked over to the bed. He held out his hand and parted his Brillo-pad beard into a brown-toothed smile. Seora Carpintero didn't take his hand, but she did stand and walk toward the door. She was leading us away from her child. We let her.

Unfortunately, just down the road, her husband lay dead in a wrecked Mercedes, which didn't seem to be a recipe for either calm or cooperation. I stopped her in the outer room, which was kind of a living room, dining room, kitchen combination. I pointed at a green sofa, and she sat down.

I said, "Billy, go stand by the front door," and I walked to the sink. On the plywood counter, four gla.s.ses had been left upside down to drain on a red striped washcloth. I picked one up, turned it over, and filled it with water from the tap. After handing the gla.s.s to Seora Carpintero, I pulled over a folding director's chair from next to the dining table and sat down.

"Do you speak English?"

She sipped the water and searched my face with her black eyes.

I repeated my question.

"S. Un poco. A little." Ah leetle.

"Good. We do not want to hurt you. Do you understand that?"

She said, "I understand the words."

I smiled. "You have a son, uh, hijo. S?"

The seora's eyes grew large and her arms tensed. Then, just as suddenly, the muscles in her face and arms relaxed a little. "You are the man from the beach? La isla?"

"The island. Yes. I am the man who spoke to your son on the island."

She said, "There were shots." And she pointed at the open door leading outside.

"Yes."

"The doctor, ah, he is the dead?"

"You mean your husband?"

She nodded her head.

"Yes. He's dead."

Now all the tension seemed to drain from her body. "You kill him?"

I said, "No," and she simply nodded her head.

"It was, como se dice? Destino?"

"Destiny?"

"S. Destino. My husband, he go with violent men."

I watched her eyes. She seemed neither happy nor sad that her husband was dead. She accepted it the way people accept the death of the old and sick. She seemed to say, Perhaps it's better.

"We know your son is here. Do you want to bring him out?"

She looked less-than-genuinely surprised. "Que?"

I smiled. "Fine. Can we take you somewhere?"

"The four-wheel. It is outside still?"

I nodded.

"You will leave it for me?"

I nodded again.

A weak smile turned the corners of her full lips. She saw hope for her son.

I asked, "Can you help me? I'm looking for a friend. I believe your husband knew where she is. Now he cannot tell me."

"No. Now he cannot."

"Can you?"

"I am the wife. My husband did work not... I have no understanding of his work."

"My friend will die. She does not deserve to die."

"My husband, he deserved to die?"

I didn't answer. Seconds ticked by. Seora Carpintero said, "Your friend, she is granjero?" I raised my palms in the air and shook my head. Her face brightened. "Farmer. She is farmer?"

"Yes. She has a farm."

"Then she is with a man who is the fisherman. That is all I know."

"Is anyone else with them? A young girl? A teenager?"

She repeated, "That is all I know."

"What do you know about why your husband, the doctor, was here?"

She went back to, "I am the wife."

"Yeah. I got that. You are the wife. But I don't think even a South American wife boards a boat with smugglers and lands in a new country in the middle of the night without a pointed question or two for her husband."

"Que?"

Wonderful. We were back to Spanish again. I tried a more direct path. "Is that your husband's laboratory out there?"

"Yes."

"What's he been cooking up? Meth? c.o.ke?"

The seora's high cheekbones burned red. "My husband was a medical doctor, expert in tropical disease. He was not the drug lord."

I started to ask more, but decided it was a lost cause. Or maybe I was a little afraid of Seora Carpintero.

Billy Teeter and I left dark, beautiful, dangerous Seora Carpinteroa"or whatever her name wasa"sitting on the green sofa in the living room of a metal house deep in the bowels of Tate's h.e.l.l Swamp.

After taking a cursory look into the doctor's lab, I retrieved Joey's Walther PPK from Willie's corpse. Captain Billy and I loaded his grandson's body onto the air boat that The Sequel had used to tail us to Carpintero's compound. Billy climbed into the high chair in front of the fan. I sat at his feet as he steered away from the compound and skidded across miles of flooded saw gra.s.s.

We didn't talk.

I didn't kill Willie. I hadn't even gotten him killed. Not really. Willie got killed playing tough guy. It was his choice. If it hadn't been that day, it would have been another. Sooner or later, he would have met up with men who don't play tough, the kind who make money by taking it away from wanna-bes.

Billy Teeter and I would not be friends. And, from that day on, neither would he and Peety Boya"the childhood friend who had fought Hitler in France. And won.

Marina was too complimentary a term. It was a gray-weathered shack with sodas and bait inside and a ragged dock outside. Billy was using the pay phone. I waited with Willie's corpse.

A ba.s.s boat pulled up and two men climbed out and walked over to look at Willie's body. "G.o.dd.a.m.n. What happened? Who is that?"

I looked at the men, who looked excited. To them, this was a story to tell, something to spread around work the next day.

I said, "Show some respect." They ignored me, so I tried another tack. "Get the f.u.c.k out of here."

One of the mena"he wore a slouch hat with fishing flies stuck in the sweatbanda"said, "What's your problem?"

I stepped into the boat and picked up one of the carbines. The men moved off. When he thought he was out of earshot, the one with the flies called me an a.s.shole.

Captain Billy walked out onto the small dock. "Ambulance is on the way. I talked to the other boys who got shot. Told 'em to say somebody shot them and Willie from a bridge. Told 'em which one."

"Cops going to buy that?"

The old fisherman shrugged.

"Thank you."

Billy sat on the dock with his feet hanging off the side and rubbed at his eyes with the thick muscles at the base of his thumbs. "Way I see it. You didn't kill Willie. You might've got him killed a little sooner than he should've been. But you called me up on the phone last night to tell me what'd happened, and I told you me and Peety Boy'd cover your back." The old man wiped his palms on his pant legs. "Naw. You didn't kill him, Tom. But my grandboy did try to kill you. Twice. I owe you something for that."

I said, "You didn't owe me anything. But I appreciate what you did."

Billy looked out across the water. "Yep."

"I don't guess you want to see me again, though."

"No, Tom. I don't."

chapter thirty-five.

The ambulance bearing Willie Teeter's young body pulled into the emergency entrance of Apalachicola Memorial Hospital more than an hour after Captain Billy placed the call. No need to hurry. The EMTs off-loaded the gurney with its lumpy, sheet-covered cargo and wheeled it inside. Billy followed along to the morgue, and I went in search of Joey. I found him in a private room on the third floor. A clear bag of something dribbled through a tube into his arm; silver wires peeked out through his lips; and he was seriously sedated.

I went in search of a doctor, then a nurse, then another living soul. Lots of patients, but no healers in evidence. Finally, I just reached over the nurses' station and helped myself to Joey's file, which was hanging on a rack with the rest of the patient histories. I had just hooked the file folder and flipped it open when a nurse appeared as if by magic.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to find you."

She said, "Did you think I was hiding inside that private folder," and took Joey's chart out of my hand.

I smiled. "It was the last place I looked." She didn't return my smile, which was kind of a shame. Nurse Ratched wouldn't have been a bad-looking woman if she smiled or maybe just quit looking quite so p.i.s.sed off. "The patient is a friend of mine. I wanted to find out how he is."

"Are you family?"

"If I were family, I would have used that word. I just want to know how he's doing." So much for charm.

She flipped open Joey's chart. "Your friend has a fractured nose, multiple hairline fractures of the left orbital globe, and a dislocated jaw. His left shin has been fractured." She skimmed the page. "He also has a minor concussion. He has been sedated."

I said, "Thank you," and turned to walk away.

Nurse Ratched said, "This is a hospital. The way you live is your business, but you shouldn't come in here covered in filth."

Nice lady.

I found Joey's room again and placed a credit card call to Loutie. She promised to be in Apalachicola as soon as possible, and I promised not to leave Joey's side until she got there.

I sat down in the hospital's idea of an easy chaira"a metal frame holding foam rubber cushions covered in tan plastica"and tried to get comfortable and think. The swamp water had evaporated out of my clothes, leaving my pants and shirt, even my underwear, crisp with dry sand and sludge. My mouth tasted like mud; my hair felt like steel wool; and, in every little out-of-the-way, never-seen crevice of my body, I could feel small, crusty remnants of my morning dip in the swamp each time I moved.

Two long nights had gone by now without sleep. I put my head back and tried to concentrate.

Somewhere, buried deep in the foggy recesses of my mind, I knew that I knew where Carli was, if only I could reach in there and pull it out. I started with her good-bye note and tried to work forward. The room got kind of shifty. Shadows floated and blurred, invisible weights pressed on my eyelids, and I fell into a dark pit of unconsciousness. When a woman's hand finally shook me awake, I was vaguely aware that I hadn't dreamed or turned or even moved my hands for more than four hours.

"Tom?" It was Loutie Blue's voice.

I think I said, "Umphum."

"You okay?"

I sat up and moved my head around, trying to roll the crick out of my neck. "Fine. Just tired."

Loutie stepped into the bathroom. I heard water running, and she came back out with a wet washcloth. She wiped my face with the warm cloth, like a mother waking a toddler from a nap. She asked what had happened and I told her, starting with Joey's condition and then looping back to our encounter with Willie at my beach house and coming forward.

When I was finished, Loutie said, "We have news about Carli, but we haven't found her yet."

"What news?"

"She's back in the state. A pulpwood-truck driver reported seeing her either yesterday or the day before, hitching outside a little town called Pine Hill. There's a big pulp mill there..."