Evening Street (5 page)

Bell knew she had only seconds before Lily Cupp or Angie Clark, alerted by the massive concussive explosion, would open the security door to see what was going on. They wouldn't automatically think of an armed intruder; they'd think something had happened to the building's mechanical systems, and that Ryerson might need help with a wire or a junction box.

He needed help, all right, but not that kind. And she didn't want the two women to blunder into the lobby, spooking Hinkle all over again.

“This man's in trouble,” she said, talking fast, turning her head toward Hinkle but not moving any other part of her body. “And they've got medical supplies in there. Like you said—you didn't mean for this to happen. So prove it.” She didn't want Hinkle anywhere near the babies, but right now she had to balance that caution with expediency. Ryerson was dying.

Hinkle stared at her. “Nobody leaves the building. Nobody comes in from the outside.”

“Fine. But we've got to get him some help. Okay?”

He thought about it. He dipped his head. “Okay.”

“I can call the nurses, right? To take him in the clinic? To treat him?”

Hinkle was breathing hard and fast. Each time he swallowed the excess spit in his mouth, the effort of it caused him to stretch his neck and stick out his chin.

“Mr. Hinkle?” Bell said. “I can do that, right? Call the nurses?”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

Bell slowly picked up the phone on Ryerson's desk. She kept her eyes trained on Hinkle's eyes. By now the security guard's head had fallen forward on his chest, like somebody praying before a meal. He made no sound at all, not even the soft grunting noises he'd been making before.

“Lily,” Bell said, speaking calmly and carefully into the receiver. Lily, she knew, would hear the exaggerated care in her voice and realize she was under duress. She'd do as Bell said. “There's been an accident out here in the lobby. Delbert Ryerson's been shot. I need your help in getting him inside. Yours and Angie's.” Bell felt the heat of Hinkle's wild-eyed, volatile stare. She had to keep sounding cool and unruffled. In control. Panic would only make things worse. “Jess Hinkle is right here, and he's agreed to let us help Del. We can make a place in there, right? Where you can work on him? Okay. Okay, good.”

Hinkle poked the shotgun in her direction. “You tell her that if she calls somebody, if somebody tries to get in here, I'll shoot the lot of you. Swear I will.”

Bell spoke into the phone. “You heard that, right? Okay.”

She hung up. She put a hand on Ryerson's shoulder to rouse him, and the response was a long scream of pain. It jarred Hinkle.

“Stop it! Stop the damned noise!” Hinkle cried out, the shotgun shaking in his grasp. “Can't stand it. My head—my head's spinning around—”

“Hey.” Bell put up her hands, palms facing out, as a way of settling him down. “Easy. Just take it easy. No problem. I'm going to knock on the door here, just to let the nurses know we're ready to come in, okay? Okay, Mr. Hinkle?”

“Name's Jess.”

“Okay, then. Jess. We're good here, right? I'm going to start. Okay?”

Hinkle, still wincing from the spikes of pain in his head, mumbled something that sounded like agreement. Bell put her hand on the knob and turned it. Lily had released the lock on the other side of the door; it opened smoothly and easily.

They had no choice but to drag Ryerson into the main room, flat on his back. Lily took one arm, Angie took the other arm, and Bell handled his feet. He was so heavy that they panted in ragged unison after pulling him the short distance.

There was no bed in this clinic big enough to put him in—and if there had been, there was no way to hoist him up into it, even with all three of them working together. The floor would have to do.

Ryerson's skin was rapidly turning white. He was ice-cold to the touch.
He's dying,
Bell thought,
if he's not already dead. He's lost too much blood. There's no chance.
She kept the observation to herself.

Hinkle, crouched over like a soldier in a foxhole, followed them in. He had the shotgun in a tightly suspicious grip. Once they were all inside, he kicked the door shut behind him with a black-booted foot.

Lily ignored the man with the shotgun and focused on Ryerson. She kneeled down beside him. “He's going into shock. We've got to stop the bleeding right away,” she declared. “Angie, get the bandages. Bell, I need blankets from those shelves over there. I'll set up an IV.” She moved quickly and efficiently, locating a portable IV pole, readying the syringe. Then she kneeled down once more, finding a vein in his unresisting arm. While she worked, she directed her words to Hinkle. “Want to tell me what the hell's going on here?”

“Shut up,” Hinkle said.

“Just promise me you won't hurt these babies,” Lily said. She said it flatly, not pleadingly. She still wasn't looking at him. She concentrated on her patient. “Deal?”

“Ain't here to hurt no babies.” He snorted.

“Then why
are
you here?” As she spoke, Lily checked the level on the IV pump. She took a load of bandages and gauze from Angie. “Why in God's name did you bust in here like this and endanger the lives of—?”

Abruptly, he swung the shotgun muzzle around until it pointed directly at Angie's head.

“I'm here,” he declared, “to put so many goddamned holes in this here bitch that when she takes a drink of water, it'll look like somebody turned on the goddamned sprinklers. Copy that?”

*   *   *

Delbert Ryerson was fading. His breaths were shallow and widely spaced. Lily had managed to stop the bleeding, but he'd already lost an immense amount of blood.

Too much, Bell thought, for him to last much longer.

This would not be the first time she'd seen a man die. She wondered if that was the reason she hadn't panicked yet, and frankly wasn't likely to panic at all, no matter what happened next on this night. Death was hardly routine—it would never be routine—but it was often the aftermath of violence, particularly gun violence, and Bell had become inured to violence during the last seven years in Acker's Gap. Violence no longer shocked her. Death was a shame, but it happened. You learned to deal.

Because you had to.

And the truth was, she'd been accustomed to violence long before she became involved in the criminal justice system as an adult. She'd seen plenty of it as a child, too. Being exposed to violence on a regular basis changed you, she believed. It aged you prematurely. The violence and the chaos aged you just as surely and just as systematically as the cigarettes and the whiskey did men like Jess Hinkle.

Bell watched Ryerson's motionless body as Lily worked diligently to save him. She was thinking about violence and death in the abstract, which is why she didn't immediately react to the substance of Hinkle's threat.

Now she did. She quickly turned to the other nurse. “I asked you before. I'd like the truth this time.” Bell pointed to Hinkle. “Do you know this man?”

“No,” Angie said.

Hinkle's angry voice exploded against her no: “Like hell she don't! Tell 'em. You tell 'em. You tell 'em right now or I'm gonna—”

“Okay, okay,” Angie said, sounding more peeved than upset. She'd crossed her arms and taken a step back. There was annoyance on her wide face, but no regret. “I
could
be helping Lily save that man's life down there, but—okay, sure, I'll stand here and listen to this crazy fool go on and on.”

Bell felt the anger rising inside her. “You're going to tell us what's going on,” Bell snapped at Angie. She turned back around to face Hinkle. “And in the meantime, Jess, I want you to put down that damned shotgun. Okay? If there's an accident and that thing goes off in here—” She inclined her head toward the big body of Delbert Ryerson, a bloody mess over which Lily Cupp labored with a forthrightness that had not yet plunged into desperation, but might need to, very soon. “You've already hurt one person. Imagine if you hurt one of these children. I don't think you want that, Jess. Do you? That's not who you are. You're no killer. I'm right, aren't I? I'm right about you. I know I am.”

He hesitated. Then he offered her a brief, nervous nod. There was a contriteness in the way he nodded, and that gave Bell hope. He cared about her impression of him. It gave her something she could work with.

“Okay,” she said. “You'll put the gun down. I know you will. Just put it down on the floor over there. And then we can talk.”

Suspicion flared in Hinkle's filmy eyes. “Won't do no such thing. It's a trick. You'll grab it.” He sneered in Angie's direction. “And then you'll let her go on home, pretty as you please, without her paying for what she done. I ain't no fool.”

“Then you don't have to let go of it,” Bell said. “Just lower it. Please.”

Hinkle pondered, shrugged. He let the muzzle drop an inch or so. The shotgun no longer pointed at Angie.

“Thank you,” Bell said. “Thanks, Jess. I appreciate it.”

Now Bell made eye contact with Lily, who was still kneeling alongside Ryerson. The nurse's scrubs were flecked and streaked with Ryerson's blood. Lily lifted blood-soaked bandages from his wound and replaced them with a fresh batch, over and over again.

“How long,” Bell asked, “does he have, Lil?”

“If we don't get him into surgery—ten or fifteen minutes, tops. And that's being really, really optimistic.”

Bell addressed Hinkle again. She spoke calmly and slowly, in purposeful contrast to his intense agitation. “Jess? How about we call the paramedics and get Del over to the main hospital? Then you and me and Angie can figure all this out. Okay? You don't want this man to die. I'm sure of it. But if we don't get him to the hospital, that's exactly what's going to happen. He won't survive. So how about it, Jess? We let the paramedics come in and get him. And Lily goes, too. But I stay. Okay? I stay, and Angie stays. That's how you know I'm going to keep my word. We'll talk. You can tell me what Angie did to you. And how we can make it right. Okay, Jess? Can we call the paramedics? Get him into surgery? Can we save this man's life?”

Hinkle appeared to be considering her proposal. Then his face closed down again in a wary scowl. “Nope. Nobody comes in or goes out. Not until I make this bitch pay.” His anger renewed, he hoisted the shotgun back up and thrust it in Angie's direction. “I gotta hear her say she's sorry.”

Ryerson's body suddenly bucked in a series of spasms. A foamy gray liquid bubbled up out of his mouth, like something escaping a clogged sewer drain, and from somewhere deep inside him came a hoarse, drawn-out groan. The exhalation seemed to be a combination of all the shock and pain and panic and bewilderment that his body was enduring.

“Angie,” Bell said, almost yelling the woman's name. “We're losing him. You've got to tell me right now what this is all about. So we can get Del out of here.” Bell had, without noticing it, formed her hands into fists. She kept them at her sides, but she wished she could shake them in Angie's face. “What the hell's going on? How do you know Jess?”

“Him? I don't know him.” Angie gave a small snort of derision. “I mean, sure—I
know
him, but I don't ever speak to him. Not in public, anyway. I don't ever admit that I recognize his sorry ass. I don't want folks to get the wrong idea and think I'd ever hang out with the likes of him. Tina's the one I know.”

“Jess?” Bell said. “What's she talking about?”

“Let her speak,” he answered. “Let her tell you. It's for her to say, not me. She knows what she done.”

Bell was back with Angie now. “Come on. Talk.”

Angie twisted up her mouth into a sour expression. “Tina's my first cousin. I've been advising her, ever since she got close to her due date.”

“Advising her?” Bell said. “What do you mean?”

“I'm a nurse, okay? I think I know a thing or two.” Angie's tone was petulant. “I've been to school. Had some experience. So when Tina came to me and said she was expecting and that the daddy was a no-good SOB named Jess Hinkle, I told her she better do
exactly
what I said. To help her baby. She was popping pills night and day, okay? He got her hooked on 'em.” She glared at Hinkle. “That's the kind of snake you are.”

Hinkle shook his head. “I never gave nobody no pills. She's been using pills since she was fourteen years old.”

“Whatever.” Angie's voice was dismissive. “Anyway, I told her last week that she better stop using—or else her baby's gonna have real problems.”

Lily looked up from her spot on the floor next to Ryerson. She was holding her hands over a thick piece of gauze that straddled his midsection. The white gauze was immediately soaked through with blood. She reached for another piece while flinging away the saturated one. “Angie,” Lily said. “You didn't tell her to stop taking the pills on her own—without medical supervision, did you? Right before giving birth? You know better than that.”

Hinkle cried out, “That's
just
what she done. And that's why my boy's as sick as he is. I talked to Tina this afternoon and she told me. I went over to the hospital. And she told me. She told me what you done. They explained it all to her—the doctors over there did. About how you can't quit the pills like that, just before the baby comes—it's harder on him that way. You can't go cold turkey. Can't do it. Makes it worse for the little one. He starts going through withdrawal in the damned womb, didja know that? Well, I didn't know that—not until they told me. Even before he's born, he's suffering. Abraham suffered something terrible. And he's still suffering now—worse that he ever woulda had to suffer otherwise.” A tremor of emotion ran through Hinkle's body. “I'd just been over here the night before to check on my boy—and who'd I see? Who's here taking care of him?
Her.
The bitch who done this to him. Some of it, anyway.” He shook the shotgun in his hands, from an excess of frustration and abject sorrow.