Last Ragged Breath (28 page)

Bell looked around at the tan-painted walls, the tan-tiled floor. Everything neat, everything clean and bright. Swabbed nightly with a mop. Waxed to a shine. Nothing could be allowed to accumulate. Not germs, God knows, but not emotions, either, because the emotions would be dangerous, combustible. How many people had waited here just as they were waiting here now, filled with questions and dread? Bell envisioned the grief of all of those people over the years, people like the boy and his grandmother, thousands of them, their grief for a sick loved one widening and intensifying, until the hall finally was so crowded that you couldn't move, you couldn't raise a hand, you couldn't breathe. The emotions had to be cleaned out regularly, too, she thought, so that new grief could have its turn.

This hall, and the ICU unit to which it was attached, were familiar to her. Too familiar. Many times, her cases had brought her here; she needed a dying declaration from a witness or defendant. She had visited Clay here, after he'd lost his leg. And six months ago, she had spent a long night here with a young woman who had been assaulted and who was struggling to unearth the secret of her family's history.

A cell rang. It was Mary Sue's. She answered. They watched her. “No, I'm afraid not,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I appreciate that. Yes. Yes, thank you. I certainly will.” Mary Sue hung up, and it was all Bell and the others could do—politeness and decorum barely restraining them—not to fling themselves at her and demand to know the content of the call. Was it news about Nick?

“That was Bud Wright,” Mary Sue said. “He owns the Highway Haven chain. He's called several times already, wanting updates. He's offered to do whatever he can. Organize blood donations from employees—anything. He's a good man.”

Blood donations.
Damn,
Bell thought. Hadn't even occurred to her. She'd been too preoccupied.

“Was Nick conscious when they got him here?” Carlene asked. She didn't look at anyone in particular. She'd take an answer from any source.

Mary Sue shook her head. “No,” she said.

The elevator dinged again and the door opened, disgorging more people into the hallway. They were here for Nick. Some, like Bell, had had to wait until their workdays were over before they were free to come to the hospital. Others had just heard. There'd been a lull of several hours, while word spread throughout the town, but now the news was everywhere, an unstoppable force. Bell offered grim nods of greeting to Lee Ann Frickie, Rhonda Lovejoy, Sammy Burdette, and Sammy's sister, Dot Burdette. A few minutes later the elevator arrived once again, bearing another load.

Some of these people, Bell knew and spoke to; others she didn't know, and didn't speak to. They simply exchanged looks of mutual incomprehension: This could not have happened. Not to Nick Fogelsong. He was—that is, he had been for many years—a public man, a man everyone recognized. He was part of the dense everyday weave of life in Acker's Gap. He would always be here. Nothing serious could ever happen to him. And yet somehow it had.

Sheriff Harrison looked at Bell. Her eyes were sheathed, unreadable to most people, but Bell understood. They moved to a place down the hall, away from the others, to speak in private.

“I know how you're feeling right now—how we're all feeling,” Harrison said. “But I wanted to ask about the trial. Had to leave the courthouse early. Big pileup out on Route 6. Nobody hurt bad, but a real mess.”

“We'll have the jury seated by tomorrow. Next day at the latest. Judge Barbour's an efficient man.”

Harrison nodded. For a moment, neither she nor Bell said anything; rising up behind them were the low-pitched conversations of the others, now gathered in groups of two or three. The concern in their voices, the hum of muffled shock, transcended specific words.

“I had just talked to Nick,” Harrison said. “Yesterday.” Bell didn't respond, so she went on. “He said he'd made a mistake. A bad mistake.”

“What did he mean?”

“Quitting as sheriff. It was too soon, he said.”

Bell had no reply. All beside the point now.

The sheriff settled her hat back on her head. She felt uncomfortable when it wasn't in place. Bell sensed that. Already, the outward signifiers of the position—the hat, the boots, the belt—were synchronizing themselves with the inward part, the part that was working its way into Pam Harrison's soul.
You'll never have another good night's sleep,
Bell wanted to say to her.
You know that, right? Not with that job of yours. Might as well wear the uniform to bed. Save you the trouble of getting dressed in the dark when you're called out at all hours
. Bell had seen what it had done to Nick Fogelsong. She knew the job could swallow you whole.

But she also knew how much he'd loved it. Could you hate a thing and also love it at the same time? Despise it and crave it, with equal passion and ferocity? Of course you could.

“He told me he wanted to help,” Harrison went on. “Maybe be a deputy himself again. That's how he started out, you know. As a deputy. Worked under Larry Rucker. Then Rucker had his heart attack and died so sudden-like and—” Harrison wouldn't finish the sentence out loud. It was too close an echo of what seemed to be happening here, right in front of them, in real time: the death of one sheriff, making way for another.

And yet: No. That wasn't the current situation at all, Bell reminded herself. Nick Fogelsong had given up his job voluntarily.
And he's not dead,
she thought, suddenly furious with everything and everyone.
He's not dead. I would know that. I'd feel it. If Nick was dead, I would know it in my bones—and I don't. I don't know any such thing
.

“Be a deputy again?” she said. “Really?”

The sheriff frowned, as if Bell had strayed off topic, or hadn't understood her in the first place. “He's been struggling. I think he was just throwing some ideas out there. Brainstorming. Trying to find a way to—well, to get some meaning back in his life, maybe. To anchor it.”

Harrison didn't know where to look, after uttering a remark that was so wholly out of character for her, and her gaze dropped down to her boots. Bell looked down, too. The boots were black and shiny. Bell had always wondered if Harrison touched them up during the day. Just a quick rub, maybe, with the tip of a rag dipped in black polish, when she was alone in her office. A secret vanity. Everybody had one. How else was she able to keep her boots looking like that, when she spent her days slogging through mud and kicking open trailer doors?

Harrison was talking again. “I wish you could've heard him. When he told me about being on the outside. He wanted to live a different kind of life—that's why he didn't run for reelection—but I think he found out real quick that being sheriff
was
his life. A good part of it, anyway. More than he'd reckoned.” Once again she looked away from Bell, but this time it was to send her eyes around the hallway, the long, antiseptic-looking space interrupted here and there by knots of nervous people. “I know you were plenty ticked off when he didn't tell you about his decision,” Harrison said. “Never even filed the papers. But you know what? He didn't tell his wife, either.”

Another surprise. “Are you—”

“Yeah, I'm sure. She came to me about it. She was pretty darned mad. He waited until after the deadline and then he told her.” The sheriff shook her head. It struck Bell that she knew nothing about Pam Harrison's personal life. She wasn't married, but had she ever been? Was she in a relationship? Male, female—Bell didn't know. She hadn't asked. Lives in small towns could be like parallel lines: close, but never touching.

“He said he was doing it for her sake,” Harrison said, her words running over the top of Bell's thoughts. “So he'd be home more often. And you know what she told him? She said, ‘If I need you to make sacrifices for me, mister, I'll ask. Otherwise, you can take off that martyr's robe of yours and you can dust the damned furniture with it, for all I care.' She's a feisty one, that Mary Sue.”

Bell let the information settle in her mind. “What did you tell him about coming back?” she finally asked.

“That I'd think about it.” A pause. “Never had a chance to give him a final answer.”

The same thought seemed to come to both of them at roughly the same time. They had other duties, too, matters they ought to get back to.

“Best guess about the length of the trial?” Harrison said.

“Couple of weeks, tops. Serena can't refute the physical evidence. I don't know if she intends to put Dillard on the stand, but if she does, he won't help himself any.”

“It'll be good to have things wrapped up,” the sheriff said. “You think he'll appeal?”

Harrison was taking a conviction for granted. “No telling,” Bell said, wishing she could be as certain about things as Pam Harrison was.
Maybe if I shine my shoes more often
.
Maybe that'll do it.

A few minutes later a short, heavyset woman in a white lab coat and dark baggy slacks appeared in the corridor. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun. There was a preoccupied look to her sharp blue eyes, and as she gradually took in the reality of just how many people were standing in the hallway, she seemed a little taken aback by the sheer volume of humanity in residence here. “Mrs. Fogelsong?” she said to the air, hoping that one of these women was the correct one.

“I'm here.” Mary Sue stepped forward.

“I'd like to speak with you, please. I'm Dr. Allison. The cardiothoracic surgeon who operated on your husband. Are there any other family members present?”

Someone took hold of Carlene's arm and drew her forward, the crowd parting automatically to enable her to join Mary Sue and the surgeon. All conversation had stopped, and the atmosphere was as tense and strained as a held breath.

“There's a private room around the corner,” Allison said. “I think it's best if we go there.”

The three of them—Allison, Mary Sue, and Carlene—headed down the hall. Before they rounded the corner, Mary Sue looked back for half a second. She sought and found Bell's eyes.

Her expression echoed the very elements prominent in Bell's mind as well: dread, fear, and a solemn realization that in the next minute or so, depending on what the surgeon said, all of their futures would be changed forevermore. Nick's was not the only life that hung in the balance.

 

Chapter Twenty-six

He was alive. And he was pissed off, too, which in Nick Fogelsong's case, was redundant.

Still woozy from surgery, he tried to sit up. The nurse, a muscular man in sea green scrubs and sturdy black Rockports, restrained him by propping two fingers against his shoulder. That surprised Bell, who was watching from the foot of the bed. It showed how weak he was.

“Lemme up,” Nick said, his words gravelly and slurred as they slowly clambered up through a haze of anesthesia that was dissipating only slowly, like tissue paper in water. “Gotta go, gotta—”

“You don't have to do anything, Mr. Fogelsong, except lie back and get better,” the nurse said. He was clean-shaven but the shadow on his jaw was blue-black, a heavy beard held in abeyance, eager to spring. His words were kind but his tone was not; he'd dealt with patients such as Nick Fogelsong before, Bell surmised, and he understood that politeness got you nowhere. His name tag said his name was Bobby Lee Lustig. The room's bright lights reflected off his shiny shaved head, the way sunlight glints off a chrome fender.

Nick tried to raise his left arm, the one less laden with bandages, and he gurgled something incomprehensible but most likely profane. Cocooned in thick gauze and IV lines and wires, wires that led to a console of chirping machinery behind him, he looked like a grumpy mummy who'd been awakened and dragged from the tomb about a millennium too soon.

Bell stood next to Mary Sue. They had been here since their conversation with Dr. Allison some six hours ago. Nick had stirred and shouted in his sleep, and moaned and tried to kick off his blankets, but it was not until now—almost midnight, Bell noted with a quick glance at her wristwatch—that he really seemed to be waking up. To be coming back to them.

“Nick,” Mary Sue said. “I'm here. Bell's here, too. Carlene was here for a long time but she had to go pick up her kids.”

At 5
P.M
., Bell had texted Ben Fawcett and asked him to take Goldie over to his house for the night, if his mother agreed; she had realized that she might very well need to be here for a very long time. She kept a change of clothes in her office at the courthouse. If she had to, she could go right from here to the courtroom in the morning.

Nick gurgled something else, equally incomprehensible but softer this time. Not combative. Lustig checked several of the monitors behind the bed, adjusted the rate of the IV drip, and then looked down at his patient with an expression that mingled authority with pity. Of the two men in this room, one was upright and in command, and the other prone and helpless, weak and needy; you could call what you saw in Lustig's eyes “concern,” but it was pity. Nick would hate that, Bell knew, but he was in no position right now to tell Lustig where he could shove his damned pity.

“Okay, Mr. Fogelsong,” Lustig said. “I'm going to let you visit with your family now. But don't cause any trouble, okay? You need to take it easy. You just had major surgery. Promise me you'll rest and I'll let them stay a while. Do we have a deal?”

Nick blinked, which was good enough for Lustig. He nodded to Mary Sue on his way out. “You all can stay for a little while longer, ma'am,” he said, “but after that he really needs his sleep. He's still pretty fragile.”

Bell let Mary Sue go to him first. She wanted to be here, but there was an awkwardness about it, too; she wasn't family, no matter what the nurse believed. Right before they went in, Bell had murmured her uncertainty to Mary Sue—
Technically, I'm not a blood relative, and so maybe I'd better not
—but Mary Sue had cut her off: “You sure as hell are. Now, come on.”