Chump Change (11 page)

The old man hitched up his pants. “Go on . . . get outta here,” he said to Suit Jacket. “Ain’t nothin for your kind out here.”

“County gonna take it for taxes,” Suit Jacket said. “No damn money in the cattle business anymore. You know that, Sarah. It’s all economies of scale, which is just what you two don’t got. We’re gonna end up with this place one way or another.”

“Not gonna happen,” the old woman snapped.

“Not ever,” the old guy piped up.

I missed whatever was said next. My attention was diverted to the side of the truck, where a square, white sign proclaimed in red script:
The Keeler Group. Into the Future Together
. I felt better already.

I veered slightly to the left as I moved their way. Kept moving that way until I could make out that the driver’s door had the same Keeler sign on it. The muscle noticed and waddled toward the back of the truck.

I walked up and looked down at the thick brown layer of dust covering the back bumper. I used my hand to wipe it off. No
BANTAMS
bumper sticker.

By the time I dusted my hands off, Muscle Man was standing one pace away.

His black eyes moved over me like I was a lunch menu. I’d seen eyes like his before, but only at the Seattle Aquarium.

Whatever pleasantries we were about to exchange were put on hold when Suit Jacket said, “Let’s go, Dexter. Some people are just too damn stubborn to let you help them.”

Suit Jacket threw an angry glance at Keith and me as he strode toward the truck.

Dexter lingered long enough to be threatening and then hopped into the passenger seat in the half-second before Suit Jacket put the pedal to the metal and fishtailed his way out of the yard in a rooster tail of dust.

The old man pulled out a blue bandana and held it over his nose and mouth. The old lady hunched her shoulders and turned her back to the cloud.

Took a couple of minutes for the yard to clear. Out in the distance, the Keeler truck raced away from us, inside a swirling mantle of dust. I could hear the old man having a coughing fit. Choking and spitting into his bandana, as the dust swirled around us like locusts.

When I opened my eyes, the old lady was standing directly in front of me.

“Didn’t you see the damn sign?” she wanted to know.

She had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen.

“Yes ma’am, I saw it.”

“Well?” She looked from me to Keith and back. “Can’t either of you boys read?”

“We came about Gordon,” I said.

And she knew why I was there. I could see it in those deep blue eyes.

The Snake River was aptly named. From where we sat, about a hundred yards behind the Hardvigsen house, the canyon writhed its way through the steep terrain like a slithering serpent. She was finished crying. She’d reached that point in grieving where you start reliving your life and wondering how things might have turned out differently.

I’d asked her if there was someplace we could sit down and talk. She’d led me out back to where the yard overlooked the river. Keith stayed back by the car. Seemed like he didn’t much want to be there when I told her the news. Probably smart.

We sat down on half a log that served as a bench. There was no way to soft-pedal what I had to tell her, so I took a deep breath and blurted out that her son Gordon was dead. I left out the gory details. Telling her he’d had a heart attack seemed close enough to the truth for me.

“Nothin good was gonna come from all that money,” she said finally.

I kept my mouth shut. I’d pretty much decided that I’d told her about all I was going to. Then she asked the question.

“Where’s his body now?” she asked. “I wanna make sure he’s put away decent.”

I took a deep breath. “Well . . . there’s a . . .” I stopped.

She pinned me with her eyes.

I told her the story of the woman in black picking up her son’s body.

The news pleated her leathery brow. “Why would somebody do something like that?”

I told her I had no idea, at which point she switched gears.

“Gordon and Olley never got along,” she mused. “Gordon thought Olley was extra hard on him cause he was a stepchild.” She caught my eye. “Wa
sn’t true, though. Olley woulda been the same way if they was blood.”

“That why Gordon changed his name?” I asked.

She nodded. “They had a fight. Gordon wanted to give us some of the money, but Olley wouldn’t take it. Not if it come from gambling. Said it was the devil’s money.”

“And you?”

She pinned me with those eyes again. “He’s my husband,” she said stiffly.

She gazed out over the vista in front of us. “It’s a hard life out here,” she said. “Gordon just wasn’t much suited to it. Gettin by was enough for him. Just his nature, I guess,” she said with a sentimental shrug. “Got it from his daddy, I suspect.”

“The two guys in the truck . . .” I began.

The very mention of them freshened her anger. “Damn Keeler,” she spat. “Think they own the damn world.”

And then I heard my name being shouted. I swiveled my head around in time to see Keith jumping up and down, waving his arms frantically. He beckoned for me to come and then turned on his heel and sprinted from view.

I’m not much of a sprinter, but I gave it all I had. By the time I arrived at the corner of the house, I was gassed. The old man was laid out on his back in the driveway. Keith was doing chest compressions and counting. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight . . .

“He’s not breathing,” Keith said through clenched teeth.

He laced his hands together and started pumping again. “One, two, three . . .”

He was up to twenty again when I heard the old woman’s voice.

“Merciful Jesus,” she panted, and dropped to her knees in the driveway.

And then Olley coughed and flailed his right arm. Keith put his ear up to the old man’s mouth, then looked over at me. “Breathing,” he announced.

“We better get him to a hospital,” I offered.

Keith was feeling along his throat.

“Better hurry . . . he’s barely got a pulse.”

I backed the Blazer right up to where he lay, folded the rear seats down, and helped hoist him into the cargo area. Keith rode back there with Olley. Sarah Jane rode up front with me.

I was still doing fifty when we fishtailed out onto the paved road. The tires screamed in protest, and the rear of the car wiggled like a belly dancer, then righted itself as we went screaming down the two-lane blacktop.

About halfway back to town, the old man’s heart stopped again. Keith started compressing and counting again. He was nearly through with his second set of thirty when Olley resumed breathing. “Come on, mister,” he said. “Hang in there.”

We crested a ridge fast enough to become completely airborne. When my vision stopped bouncing, I could see the Main Street Bridge in the distance.

Above the roar of the engine, I shouted, “I’m gonna need directions.”

Sarah Jane looked around as if I’d spoken to her in some strange language and then pointed out toward the back of the Blazer. I checked the mirror at the same moment when I caught the wail of the siren.

Deputy Rockland Moon was thirty yards back, in his county cruiser, the siren screaming, the light bar ablaze.

I put the pedal to the metal.

“I can’t keep him breathing,” Keith shouted above the din. “Hurry.”

We were screaming downhill at over ninety. The Main Street Bridge was maybe three hundred yards away. “Where we going?” I shouted again at Sarah Jane.

“Over the bridge,” she said. “Go right on Eighth. Hospital’s down the end.”

Keith pulled out his cell phone. Dialed 911. “We’ve got an elderly man in full cardiac arrest,” he shouted into the mouthpiece. “Comin up on the Main Street Bridge.”

He looked up at the old lady. “What’s the name of the hospital?”

Her blue eyes rolled in her head like a spooked horse, “V-V-Valley Medical Center,” she managed to stammer.

“Need a cardiac team ready at Valley Medical Center,” Keith shouted into the phone. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”

“Roger that,” I heard the dispatcher say.

The deputy was right on our ass, whoop-whooping along with every other sound he was making.

I kept the hammer down and leaned on the horn.

We swung onto the bridge at full volume. My horn screaming, the deputy’s bullhorn blaring, the Blazer’s engine bellowing like a wounded animal.

“Come on, man . . . Come on . . .” Keith chanted as he compressed the old man’s chest, over and over and over. “Twenty-one, twenty-two . . . twenty-three . . .”

When I swung right onto Eighth Street, mid-morning traffic was thick and lazy. I had to weave through startled motorists, swerving left and right, passing people on both sides, with Deputy Moon stuck to my tail like flypaper.

Half a dozen blue-clad medical personnel trotted a gurney out the emergency room door at the precise moment I slid the Blazer to a stop. I hurried around the back of the car to help, but they were all over it. Practiced hands slid him out onto the gurney and hooked him up to a swinging bag of something as they sprinted back inside, with Sarah Jane hurrying along behind.

When I turned back toward the car, Deputy Rockland Moon was pointing his automatic at my head. I don’t know what possessed me, but the sight of that moron pissed me off to no end. “Fuck off,” I said. “The man had a heart attack.”

It was like he didn’t hear me. “On the ground,” he screamed.

I started to open my mouth. From inside the car, Keith said, “Don’t, Leo.”

Something told me Keith was right. This crazy bastard just might blow my brains out, right here in the hospital parking lot.

What saved the day was the arrival of a Lewiston Police car.

“On the ground, goddammit,” Moon shouted at me again.

A pair of Lewiston cops stepped out of the car, careful not to walk in front of the gun. “Easy now,” one of them cautioned Moon, who hesitated and then slowly lowered the automatic to his side, still holding it with both hands.

The other looked at me. “What’s goin on?” he asked.

“Guy named Olley Hardvigsen had a heart attack,” I said.

He looked over at Keith, who nodded that it was true.

“Where’s Sarah Jane?” he asked me.

“Inside with Olley,” I said.

“They come down Bridge Street at ninety-five miles an hour,” Deputy Moon said defensively. “Coulda killed somebody.”

One Lewiston cop headed into the emergency room. The other turned toward Rockland Moon with a thinly disguised look of contempt on his face.

“Kind of an emergency, don’t you think, Deputy?”

Moon didn’t say anything. Didn’t take either hand off the automatic either.

“Bit out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Rockland?” the cop asked.

“Expecting a little interagency cooperation here,” Moon muttered.

“This side of the river, we don’t usually shoot people over traffic violations,” the cop said.

The first cop came back outside. “Heart attack,” he confirmed.

Everybody stood still and waited for Moon to get the message.

Another tense moment passed before Moon holstered his weapon. “I’ll be filing a report with your chief,” he promised.

“Look forward to reading it,” one of the cops said.

After he’d sauntered back to his car, and fiddled with his seat belt and radio knobs a bit, Moon gunned it out of the emergency room driveway and peeled off down the street.

The nearest cop looked over at Keith and me. He wasn’t about to say anything detrimental about another police officer, no matter what kind of idiot the guy might be, but each of us knew what the others were thinking. Keith slid out of the cargo space and stood next to me on the concrete.

“Sarah Jane looks like she could use some company,” the nearest cop said.

I threw my overnight bag onto the bed and sat down beside it. Keith had the TV on, watching the local news, when a knock rattled the motel room door.

Everybody’d agreed. The Holiday Inn out on Nez Perce Drive was
the
place to stay in Lewiston, so we collected our thanks, said our goodbyes, and headed that way.