The Poisoned Rose (5 page)

“You must have knocked your head when we hit the tree.”

I looked at the blood on my fingertips. It looked as black as oil in the dark. It shimmered. Without realizing it, I muttered, “So much for the easy night, huh?”

Augie took a quick look around us, at his wrecked truck and the two men sprawled out on the ground.

“We’d better find a phone and call the cops.”

“They’re not all that fond of me. I’ve had run-ins with them before.”

“It’ll be all right, son,” he said. “You’re with me.”

Chapter Two

 

An ambulance arrived not long after the police. I watched the red and blue lights play hide-and-seek in the tree tops. Eventually a few of the town cops recognized me, but Augie stuck to his word and told them I was with him. He showed them something in his wallet and mentioned that we were working for Frank Gannon. They didn’t give me trouble then. Augie and I rode away from the scene in an ambulance. I felt light-headed and my limbs were weak. I said nothing about my ribs or shoulder. Augie sat across from me and just stared at me the whole way. The paramedics tended to our cuts and took our stats. Then we were asked our names.

“Hartsell, Augie.”

One of the paramedics nodded and wrote Augie’s name on a form attached to a clipboard. Then she looked at me.

“Declan MacManus,” I said.

She wrote that down. As she did, Augie said, “You’re last name is MacManus?”

He seemed surprised by this. He seemed, too, a little concerned.

“Yeah,” I said. “Mac is short for MacManus. Why?”

He shook his head but didn’t say anything.

It was only a five-minute ride to Southampton from North Sea. We spent it in silence. Once we reached the hospital, we were taken right in to the ER. I knew this was because our attackers would be brought in right after us and that Augie and I would have to be kept separate from them.

I was led to an examination area by the paramedics and helped up onto the bed. They did the same with Augie, only they took him to the other end of the ER so we couldn’t talk. After a few minutes two uniformed cops approached Augie. I watched as he talked to them for a while. Every now and then he nodded toward me, and whenever he did the cops would glance over their shoulders at me, then turn back to Augie. Eventually an ER doctor in green scrubs showed up and the cops stepped away. The doctor drew the curtain closed around himself and Augie. The cops just looked at me then, till finally they started toward me. Before they could get to me, though, someone came into my area and drew the curtain closed around me, cutting them off.

I expected a doctor, but instead it was a nurse named Gale Nolan.

She had short dark hair and was taller than I by a few inches and older by ten years. She had been my night nurse a few years back when a slug from a .45 crushed my collarbone during the last of my foolish favors for people. I’d made the papers then, and Gale kept the reporters away for the month I was laid up in the hospital. She was big on celebrity gossip and visited me often and talked to me about people I had never heard of. It was nice to just listen, to be with someone and not have to talk. She seemed accepting of me, more so than others, and she didn’t ask a lot of questions about me or my past. I got the sense that she knew enough.

“Gale,” I said.

“I thought I told you I never wanted to see you again,” she teased. She stepped directly in front of me to examine the cut on my forehead.

“I stayed away for as long as I could.”

“I’m a magnet, aren’t I?” She lifted the bandage, her eyes squinting as she studied the wound. “You play too rough. Mac.” She removed the bloodied bandage and then tossed it into a garbage can. It landed inside with a light slapping sound. “You’re going to need a few stitches. There are easier ways to see me, you know.”

“I don’t have any money, Gale. I can’t pay.”

“Actually, your big friend over there says Frank Gannon is paying. Is that true? Are you mixed up with Gannon? I thought you were smarter than that.”

“I’m not mixed up with anyone, Gale.”

“But you’re working for him?”

“It was just a one-time thing,” I lied. “I needed the money.”

“I can get you a job here, you know that. We need orderlies, especially in the emergency room on weekends.”

“I need more than what that kind of job would pay. You know what it’s like out here.”

She unwrapped a fresh gauze, then carefully pressed it to my cut. I felt a sharp pinch.

“Just when I stopped worrying about you, you waltz right back in here and get me started all over again.”

“I hardly think I waltzed, Gale.”

She paused, busying herself with examining my wounds, then said, “Someone told me you saw someone get killed tonight, and that you almost got yourself killed in the process. Is that true?”

I nodded.

“You play too rough, Mac. Have I mentioned that?”

“Like I said, it was a one-time thing.”

“I take it you haven’t heard, then.”

“Heard what?”

“The cops were talking. One of their own got killed tonight.”

“When?”

“Just a little while ago, as they were bringing in one of the men who ran you off the road. The guy had a broken hand or something, his wrist was all swollen, so the cop didn’t cuff him. On the way in the guy started convulsing in the back, and the cop pulled over to check him out. But it was a trick. Somehow the guy got hold of the cop’s gun and killed him. They found the patrol car a few minutes ago, empty. Every cop in town is out on the road now, looking for the killer. They’re going to want to talk to you, find out what you know about this guy.”

“I don’t know anything. I never even got a good look at him.”

“Who’s your big friend?”

“His name is Augie.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not much. Why?”

“He’s got two healed-over gunshot wounds. That’s one more than you. In my book that makes him double trouble.”

“In my book it makes him lucky.”

“Maybe. One thing I’ve learned from this job is you can gauge a man’s judgment by the condition of his body. So my guess is you might want to stay away from him, find a new friend to play with.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Gale.”

“Somebody’s got to look after you. I’m serious, though, Mac. Stay away from him, okay? Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“I’ve got to get back upstairs. You caught us on a bad night. There were two other car crashes right before yours, and some high school girl was raped. They brought her in a half hour ago. So bear with us.”

She touched my shoulder with her left hand. I remembered living for her visits to my room, living for the moments during her shift when she would stop and talk with me about really nothing at all.

I looked up at her face now. It was tanned and finely lined, showing her age. I nodded once. I hated the things in both our lives that made my feelings for her so ridiculous.

“I’ll see you, Mac.”

She turned, pulled open the curtain, and left. There was something about the way she moved that made me think of a person running away. With the curtain open and her gone, I was left again in clear view of the two waiting uniformed cops.

***

 

It took an hour for the doctor to make his way to me. He was young, new, didn’t know me. He barely looked at my face. I was stitched up, all the while being questioned by the cops for what was the tenth time. I had to speak in a full voice just to be heard over the chaos of the ER.

After the doctor was done and I was questioned a few more times, I was taken back to the Hansom House in a patrol car. The uniformed cop driving kept looking back at me in the rear view mirror. I didn’t care about that. I had lost track of Augie in the confusion and didn’t know if he was still at the hospital or not. I figured since I hadn’t seen him that the cops had released him with orders not to talk to me till I was questioned. I’m sure he went straight to Frank to tell him what had gone down.

The cop dropped me off outside the Hansom House. I walked up the path through the rain to the porch. The stairs were just inside the entranceway, to the left, and I went up them to my rooms. I picked a dry pair of jeans and T-shirt out of the dirty clothes pile at the foot of my bed, then went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the streaked piece of mirror. I peeled back the bandage and checked the stitches in my scalp. My face was hidden behind smudges of dried mud. I reapplied the bandage, washed up and changed, then grabbed a nearly empty bottle of Beam from the table by my unmade bed. I sat down on my living room couch and poured myself a glass.

The muffled sound of a reggae bass was coming up through the floorboards. With it was the sound of a trumpet being played by someone who had listened to his share of Chet Baker. I didn’t feel up to going downstairs, facing George and the women who came for his free drinks. I didn’t want to hear that the woman from this afternoon had come back, or was back, waiting in a dark corner for me. I wanted nothing to do with anything.

I lay back on the couch and took a long gulp of Beam, feeling it burn my chest as it went down. I needed the warmth. I still felt jittery from the fight, from that moment when I thought Augie and I were going to die. It wasn’t long before I started thinking of the kid, Vogler, bleeding to death on that rainy street.

I drank several glassfuls and then slipped into unconsciousness. It was like being underwater, down deep, the whole workaday world, silent and out of sight, far above me. It was the only peace I knew.

Sometime later I was conscious again. I was still on my couch, still in the dark. I had no idea how much time had passed, and I wasn’t certain why I had been awakened. But then I sensed that someone else was there in the room with me. I sat up fast and switched on my bedside lamp, then grabbed it as a weapon. The light threw drastic shadows across the room.

I felt the same riot letting loose inside of me, the same animal instinct to save my life at any cost. It ran through me like a fever. But then my eyes caught something and the fever suddenly ceased.

Standing at the foot of my couch, casting the largest shadow of all the shadows in that room, was Augie Hartsell.

“Easy there, partner,” he said.

I didn’t realize that I was holding my breath till I found myself letting out a sigh. I waited a second, then put the lamp back on the tabletop. The brightness of the sudden light made my eyes ache. I was still lit from the Beam and half asleep. I could barely sit up. I couldn’t help but recognize the fact that if it had been anyone other than Augie at the foot of my couch, I would have been deep in some serious shit right now.

“What are you doing?” I muttered.

“I came to check up on you. How are you feeling?”

I shrugged. “You?”

He nodded toward the bottle of Beam on the coffee table. “I might feel a little better if I had some of that.”

“I thought Frank didn’t hire drinkers.”

Augie smiled slyly. “It’ll be our secret.”

“Help yourself.”

He poured a few inches of amber into my glass, then picked it up by the rim. Holding it between his thick index and middle fingers, he downed its contents in two gulps.

He placed the glass back on the table and said, “You heard that a cop bought it tonight.”

“Yeah.”

Augie looked around my disheveled living room, then reached into his field jacket and removed an envelope. He dropped it on the coffee table beside the bottle of Beam. It landed with a solid smack.

I looked at it, then up at him. “What’s that?”

“It’s from Frank. He said to tell you he doesn’t normally pay in cash, but he thought you might not have a bank account. You that far off the grid that you don’t have a bank?”

“I have a bank. I just have nothing in it.” I didn’t take my eyes off the envelope.

“I’ll give one thing to Frank,” Augie said. “He takes care of his men. He paid both our hospital tabs, and he’s over at Village Hall right now telling the Chief to instruct his boys to cut you some slack, that you’re working for him now.”

Augie was looking around my living room again as he said this. The curtains on my three front windows were ratty and smoke-stained, the hardwood floor splintered and dusty. The coffee table on which the money and the Beam sat wobbled like a game horse. He nodded at what he saw, as though it made some sense to him.

“You like living like this?” he said.

“I don’t really think about it.”

Augie nodded again. “So, tell me, why are the cops not all that fond of you? I’ve heard some talk. But I’d like to hear your side.”

“I guess I made them look bad on occasion.”

“How?”

“I found a few people they couldn’t.”

“You’re good at that? Finding people?”

I shrugged. “Just lucky. And maybe I looked a little harder than they did. The people who come to me for help are usually on the wrong end of the tax bracket, if you know what I mean.”

“Things still like that here?”

“You’re from Southampton?”

“I left thirty years ago. I haven’t been back for all that long.” He paused. “So is it still like that here?”

“It depends who you’re talking to. It seems like that for some people.”

“Let me ask you, Mac, do you think the chief of police is on the take?”

“I don’t have any proof. And if I did, what could I do about it.”

“Frank seems to think he can do something about it.”

“Is that why you work for him? The two of you going to clean the place up.”

Augie didn’t answer. I looked at the bottle on my table, and the empty glass beside it.

“If you want a drink, pour yourself one,” he said. “Don’t be shy because I’m here.”

When I didn’t make a move for the bottle, he leaned down and pushed the glass toward me. I thought about it for a moment, then poured myself a few inches. I downed the bourbon in slower gulps than Augie had, then placed the emptied glass by the envelope of money.

“It’s amazing what gossip gets around, the things you hear,” Augie said. He was looking at my scratches. “For example, I’ve started asking around about you, and there’s more than one story on how you got those.”

I said nothing.

“It’s even more amazing what doesn’t get around,” Augie continued. “The secrets some people manage to keep while others aren’t so lucky. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, as far as I can see. It’s a random thing, like sunken treasure from some ship lost at sea centuries ago. For every treasure chest found, there’s maybe hundreds that go unrecovered.”

He watched me for a moment. I pretended that I had no idea what he was talking about, but of course I did.