Strange Country (23 page)

Gerson didn’t talk and Hallie was fine with that. Halfway to Templeton, snow began to fall hard. Hallie didn’t think it would last, but it was one more thing. The windshield wipers went back and forth, back and forth. All she could think was—Laddie. Jesus, Laddie. Why didn’t you just let me help?

“You can’t see him,” Gerson said as she pulled into the clinic parking lot. “If he’s awake, I need to question him.”

“Oh, I can see him,” Hallie said. She had her seat belt off and was out of the car as soon as Gerson stopped.

“Hey!” Gerson said, but she was still fumbling with her own seat belt, and Hallie was already inside the clinic. It was weirdly quiet, no one up front and she couldn’t hear any sound from the back. The door closed behind her with the nearly silent whoosh of a pneumatic release. She rounded the front counter and headed down the hall. The first two rooms were empty, but she found them in the last door on the left.

No one moved. The young EMT looked at his hands. The other EMT, whom Hallie hadn’t seen out at the church and who she thought now was Charlie Bishop, who ran the only shoe store in Templeton, sat on a stool with his head buried in his hands. A woman in a white lab coat, who Hallie presumed was the doctor, stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her side. Her coat was streaked with blood, and she was still wearing gloves.

Opposite the door, Laddie lay on a narrow hospital bed with a thin sheet pulled halfway up his chest. There was an impossible amount of blood, IVs still running into both arms, but the monitors were off and the room was silent.

The chill Hallie felt ran all the way up her spine and hit the back of her head like an arctic blast. She recognized this look, this attitude, this silence. She’d seen it before.

“Goddamnit,” she said. No one even looked at her.

She crossed the room and took Laddie’s hand in hers. It was already turning cold.

Oh, Laddie
.

She wanted to cry, but she was too angry to cry. Wanted to hit something, wanted to punish the person who’d done this—why had they done this? To Laddie, who never hurt anyone, who never had any luck, who never
would
have any luck now.

“Who are you?”

The doctor’s voice sounded shrill in the stark, sterile room.

Hallie ignored her. There was so much blood that she couldn’t tell exactly where Laddie had been shot. Just above the heart, she finally decided.

“You can’t just walk in here,” the doctor said.

“I just did,” Hallie told her.

Special Agent Gerson strode into the room. “What did you think—?” then stopped when she saw them all.

“Get out,” Hallie said without turning away from Laddie. “All of you. Just get out of here right now.” Her voice was low without much inflection, but it must have been effective because a moment later she heard the soft whoosh of air as the door closed.

She hadn’t known Laddie long at all, had really known him only the last couple of months, but she’d liked him. He’d been quiet and not particularly comfortable with what life had handed him, his fortune-telling abilities, the dead talking to him. All he’d ever wanted as far as she could tell was a ranch to run his cattle on and to maybe do something that mattered.

Goddamnit.

She sat with him for a few more minutes, just because she didn’t want him to be alone even though whatever made him Laddie was already gone. Then she grimaced and went through his pockets, his shirt and jacket, which had been cut off and thrown on the floor, already gone stiff with drying blood. She found the stone in his front shirt pocket. It was hot when she picked it up, like it had been in a coal fire, and she almost dropped it, but it cooled quickly, though it still glowed blue-white along several thin cracks. There was dried blood, like old paint across the flat top of the stone.

Hallie didn’t care about the blood, thought it was right that it should be bloody, thought Laddie deserved for it not to be neat and clean and as if he hadn’t died. She stuck it in her pocket, brushed the hair off Laddie’s forehead, and kissed him gently on the cheek.

Then she walked across the room and opened the door.

22

The two EMTs, Charlie Bishop and the young man Hallie didn’t know, stood behind the front counter, just stood there, like they’d been frozen. The doctor typed something on a keyboard attached to a wall-mounted monitor.

“Where’s Agent Gerson?” Hallie asked. Her voice sounded so loud and unexpected that she startled herself. The two EMTs turned their heads almost in unison and stared at her as if they couldn’t quite remember who she was. People must have died before, she thought, maybe not like this, but certainly in car crashes and farm implements. Messy deaths, because lots of deaths were messy.

But maybe they’d never gotten used to it.

Hallie never had.

“Who?” the doctor sounded angry, but Hallie didn’t think she was angry at her.

“Special Agent Gerson. From the state.” She cleared her throat, surprised at how rough she sounded. “She was just here.”

The EMTs looked at the doctor, who scowled and said, “Oh, her. She went outside.”

Hallie looked outside. It was still snowing. She pulled open the door and stepped out. She could see Gerson puffing furiously on a cigarette, talking on her phone and pacing. Hallie stepped back inside. “Did she say anything?” she asked.

“She said nobody leaves, nobody touches the body, and nobody goes back in that room,” the doctor said, then gave an exasperated sigh, like all this had been designed to inconvenience her, slapped off the wall monitor, stalked down the hall to the first door on the right, went inside, and closed the door.

Hallie crossed to the far side of the room, to a bank of plastic chairs hooked together. She didn’t sit down, didn’t feel as if she could sit down, like her knees refused to bend. She pulled out her phone and called Boyd.

“Laddie’s dead,” she said when he answered. She didn’t know another way to say it, just flat out, because nothing could soften or make it better.

Boyd swore.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know he was your friend.”

That was painful, like a blade to the heart, because you knew it, knew it all the way down, but you didn’t say it. Saying it made it public, put it right out in front of people. Saying it made you want to actually cry.

“Yeah,” she said. Like, don’t talk about it anymore. “What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and again, he sounded uncharacteristically tired.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Waiting for a tow truck,” he said.

“Did you find anything? Any idea who did this? What they want? Why?”

“Hallie,” Boyd said in that quiet way that made her feel both better and worse. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Hallie said. By which she meant, goddamnit.

She hung up. Charlie Bishop had gone outside, was standing right in front of the glass doors, smoking a cigarette and, Hallie judged by the direction of his gaze, watching Gerson pace and talk on the phone.

The younger of the two EMTs sat in one of the chairs near Hallie. Just sat there, with his elbows on his knees and his clasped hands between them.

Hallie went and sat beside him, leaving one empty chair between.

“What’s your name?” Hallie asked him. He really did look as if he was about eighteen, which he probably was.

He cleared his throat, sniffed a couple of times, and said, “Gatsby Waters.”

“Gatsby?”

He winced. “My dad, he grew up in Wyoming and he had this horse. Killed a mountain lion, he said. Saved his life. He named me after the horse.”

“At least he didn’t name you after the mountain lion.”

“Yeah.” Like he hadn’t really heard her. “I go by Gats mostly. Or just Waters.” He stared at the far wall, like something might appear there, something that would make the day, this particular run, make sense. But Hallie knew that would never happen. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save him.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Hallie said. “You didn’t shoot him.”

Maker trotted into the reception area, stopped and looked at Hallie; then it crossed the room and sat beside her. Maker didn’t shoot Laddie either, she told herself. It was just there, like Death or reapers or the inevitability of time. No one killed Laddie but the person with the rifle. She put her hand on Maker’s head, which she’d never done before. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. Maker lay down and rested its head on her boot.

“It isn’t that I think I can save everyone,” Gats was saying.

Yes, you do, Hallie thought. You do think that. Because that was the kind of thing you thought when you were eighteen. She knew, because she’d thought that way at eighteen herself. She still did.

“I mean … I just. I guess it nicked an artery because it looked bad, but it didn’t look
that
bad. Maybe if we’d gotten there faster or gotten out of there faster or if we’d been closer to Rapid City. Maybe if…” He trailed off because none of those things mattered. He couldn’t go back and do it over or find a way for Laddie to be shot right in front of the hospital. He couldn’t change the way things had happened, though Hallie knew what it was like, that wish that you could try.

Special Agent Gerson came back inside in a swirl of cold air and tiny snowflakes, dry as dust. She crossed the room to where Hallie and the young Gatsby Waters were sitting. Maker stretched out its neck and sniffed at her pants leg.

“I’m sorry,” Gerson said. “I understand he was a friend of yours.”

“Thank you,” Hallie said. “He didn’t kill Prue Stalking Horse.”

“No,” said Gerson, considering. “If he had, he wouldn’t be dead now.”

Hallie winced, though she figured Gerson was right.

“Where’s the doctor?” Gerson asked.

“In her office,” Waters said, and pointed.

“Huh,” Gerson said, and headed over.

Four hours later the coroner had come and taken Laddie’s body away, the Templeton police under Gerson’s direction, had bagged all of Laddie’s clothes as evidence and taken those away as well. The EMTs had restocked their ambulance and left, called out to a car accident seven miles north. Gats came over and said good-bye and thanked her, though Hallie wasn’t certain exactly what he was thanking her for. Gerson left after an hour and a half, sweeping through the reception area as if no one else were there.

Finally, there was just Hallie. She called Boyd.

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Hallie admitted.

“I should be there in ten minutes,” he said. “It took a while for the tow truck to get here. It wasn’t Tom and they got lost twice. Plus the snow, I guess. Hang on.”

That’s what I do, Hallie thought. I hang on.

She saw his car as it pulled into the parking lot and was out the door and pulling the passenger door open as soon as he’d pulled into a parking space. She didn’t want him to get out, to come inside the clinic, to touch her, especially she didn’t want him to touch her. She didn’t want him to say he was sorry, to ask her if she was okay, didn’t want him even to look at her with sympathy.

“We have to stop at Laddie’s house,” she said.

“Hallie, you can’t go there. It’s an—”

“Don’t say it, goddamnit. I know what it is.”

“Well, they’re going to have to search his house. It’s all evidence now. Everything.”

“He has dogs,” Hallie said.

“Oh.”

Hallie wasn’t sure how many dogs there were, because Laddie had different dogs every time she saw him, but she knew she couldn’t leave them there alone and she didn’t want to hear about evidence and official investigations. Someone told her once that Laddie found stray dogs and took them in, fed them up, and found them homes. Dogs who never had anything until Laddie gave them something. They wouldn’t understand. Wouldn’t understand why Laddie wasn’t coming back or why strangers were going through his things. They would probably hate her, dogs did, because of the ghosts. She’d do it anyway.

When Boyd pulled into Laddie’s oversized front parking lot, three motion lights snapped on, the day just dark enough with the snow and clouds overhead to activate them. Inside the yard, drifting underneath the light closest to the house, was Laddie’s ghost.

“Shit,” Hallie said.

“What?” asked Boyd.

“Never mind.” The ghost looked younger than Laddie had looked in life, wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and lacers. It wore a battered black cowboy hat tilted forward, and it pissed Hallie off because of course it had unfinished business, of course it was here, but she didn’t need to be reminded.

She got out of the car, Boyd next to her. She wasn’t even sure yet what she was going to do. Laddie’s ghost hanging around in the yard wasn’t going to help.

She’d expected the dogs to be hiding, but to her surprise, all three of them were right beside the ghost—a Jack Russell with a graying snout, a young fawn and white pit bull, and a slender Australian shepherd with an amazing blue merle coat. They huddled against each other for warmth, from the snow and the cold and the ghost. She could see three doghouses with blankets inside and electric running to them. But the dogs were here, with a ghost who’d once been a man who’d taken care of them.

If the person who’d shot Laddie were standing in front of her right then, Hallie would have ripped his heart out with her hands.

She opened the chain-link gate slowly, prepared to get out quick if the dogs made any aggressive moves. They didn’t, though the pit bull watched her suspiciously as she approached. Laddie’s stone felt warm in her pocket, growing warmer with each step she took.

She crouched beside the dogs and offered the back of her hand; the pit bull stretched its neck as far as it could without actually shifting its position and sniffed suspiciously. The other two dogs curled tighter into their balls. The Jack Russell shivered so hard, Hallie could see it shaking. The temperature was in the low twenties and damp, and the extra cold from the ghost just in front of her left Hallie feeling as if she were deep in the depths of arctic winter.

“You can’t stay here,” she said quietly to the dogs, like they would understand her. “Laddie wouldn’t want you to.”