Easy Death (16 page)

“I’ve been better.” She opened her eyes. “Did you get him?”

“Got him good enough to make a difference.” I opened her coat and she was past shivering in the cold. So far past she never even noticed it.

It looked ugly.

Her left side, down under the chest, it was red and wet and still bleeding. Not pumping blood, which was a good sign not to see, but bleeding plenty fast enough.

“That was a damn fool thing you did, coming over here,” I said.

“It’s my job,” she said simply. “You said there was a civilian. Down in that car,” She stopped and took a breath. “It’s my job to protect visitors to this park.”

“Well, it ain’t your job to bleed to death.” I unbuckled the belt from her pants and slipped it out, then undid the heavy scarf from around her neck. “How the hell’d you keep from freezing to death out there?”

“It’s simply my job,” she said again, like it was important to her, and I guess it was. “When I heard him shooting at you, I reasoned he might be preoccupied, so I got under the Jeep.” She stopped to breathe again. “Not an easy trip. But warmer there,” she managed.

“Well it was still a damnfool thing to do, pardon my French.” I folded the scarf and put it against the wound, then looped her belt around it and pulled it tight. She made a little sound when I fastened the buckle to hold it. Not a pretty sound, either. “I mean yeah, you likely saved my life, coming up when you did, and—” My nose was running, from the cold or something, and I blew it on my coat sleeve. “I guess I’m glad you did it but you had no call to go killing yourself that way over the likes of me.”

“I’m not dead,” she said, “and I won’t be if you go about this properly.”

“Think I got the bleeding stopped,” I said. “Now I got to get you over to the truck there. It might hurt some.”

“I can move myself.”

“You try getting up and I’ll knock you flat again and if you don’t think I can do it, you just start.” I tried to sound mean enough to stop her just by talking. “You go dying now, and who’s gonna clean up all the mess around here? Now lie down and let me do this proper.”

I put her arms down at her sides, zipped her coat up, then grabbed her by the hood and started dragging her through the snow. And I’m here to tell you it wasn’t no picnic. Nossir. That woman was a lot of beef to be moving around. I had to grab onto her hood like a bible at a tent meeting, and lean way over, use all my weight to get her moving through the snow.

Got it done, though.

I hauled her to the truck under the tower there. It was closer than the Jeep and no one had put a bullet through the windshield, so I figured to use it getting out of here. And besides, I was going to need a truck for what had to be done. On the way there, I looked over at Scranton; I didn’t figure him to have bled to death yet, but he wasn’t moving any either.

Fine.

We reached the truck and I got in and it started up easy, which was a relief. I cranked the heat up as far as I could and put the blower on High. There was an olive-drab metal lunch box on the seat and I threw it in the back before I got out again and bent down to Callie there in the snow. “How you doing now?”

“A bit dizzy, I’m afraid.” She sounded tired, too. “Can you help me into the truck?’

“I can help you some,” I said. “Let’s get to it.”

Damn, that woman was heavy. Not soft-and-fat heavy, but solid heavy, like a big tree or a live cow or something. She helped some once we got her legs under her, and I got her in the truck okay, but I was winded and sweaty by the time it was done, and she kept making these little sounds, like she was trying not to scream with the pain of doing it.

“Much nicer.” She laid down across the truck seat and sounded kind of dreamy-like. I pushed her farther in, so her head was raised up a little on the driver-side door. “Thank you so much.”

“Very welcome.” I could feel warm air starting to blow from the heater in there, and I wanted to climb in and sit down beside her and rest my weary bones while I told her the sad story of my life. But there was work to do. I decided to split the difference and lit a cigarette and took a deep draw on it, feeling it kick my heart some and give me that false sense of well-being you get from having a smoke at the right time.

Then a thought hit me—and I mean to say it crossed my mind like a runaway train: I’d just lit a cigarette. And I was standing outside.

I looked around me. Sometime in the middle of all this, when I didn’t think to sit up and take notice, the snow had stopped and the wind quit.

That meant my time was going to start running out, and damn quick, too.

“You lie down here,” I said. “Keep yourself still. I got some things here need finishing up.”

I’ll give her this: she laid down like I told her to. But she said, “The man down in the car. Can you get him up here by yourself?”

“Hadn’t thought about it,” I said. “Guess I’ll have to, anyhow.”

“Use the—” she started, then winced with pain a couple seconds before she could get on with it, “—the Jeep. Get rope from the truck if you need more. Then use the Jeep. ”

“Thanks,” I said, wondering what the hell she was talking about, ‘use the Jeep.’ “You just lie here a spell, and try not to bleed any more than you can help it.”

I took the rope from the back of the truck and it was stiff from cold but useable. And there’d be more in the Jeep, which is where I headed.

On the way back over there I looked in on Captain Scranton again. He was coming right along, lying there in the snow, reeking from the spilled gas all over him. His left hand was pressed up to his shoulder where I’d shot it, and he had his mostly limp right arm down at his leg, pressing hard as he could up to the hole I’d put in it. I guess he’d stopped the bleeding some but we both knew he couldn’t keep it up long.

“Git some bandages on me, you dayyam yankee.” Again with the corn-pone talk. Maybe I couldn’t blame him was that the best he could do, come a time like this. “You gotta stop this bleeding ’fore you take me in, damya!”

I stood there and looked down at him a minute.

“Y’all gonna let me freeze to death?” He snarled it out like he was giving me orders. Maybe he was.

“They say that’s an easy death,” I said.

Then I took a last drag off my cigarette and tossed it down onto his gas-soaked coat.

December 20, 1951

2:47 PM

Officer Drapp

Back at the Jeep I tried to figure what that crazy ranger-lady meant when she said
use the Jeep
. Didn’t make sense, from what I could see. A few years later they put winches on a Jeep which you could mount on the front and haul stuff up to it—or more likely hook to a tree and pull yourself out when the tires won’t do it. But that wasn’t invented yet back when I’m telling this, so I guessed she was just talking fever-talk. I looked in the back anyway, though, to see was there a clue in there maybe about what she said.

Nothing there but more of that rope I used before to tie the money bags together. Lots of it, coiled up nice and neat like they teach you in the Boy Scouts. So much I wondered did she put it there for something and just now thought to tell me about it. Must have been near a half-mile just of rope.

I got it.

I picked up as much as I could and hoisted it over my shoulder.

Then I grabbed some more and headed back down the slope to the wrecked car, mostly by sliding and falling.

The guy inside was still kind of just staring off into space, but he looked a little sharper. I barked his name.

“Walter! Hey Walter! Over here!”

Slowly—and I mean real slow—he looked over at me with blank stupid eyes.

“Whuh?”

So he still wasn’t much for conversation.

“Walter, wake up,” I said. “I gotta get you out of here, Walter, and it’s going to hurt.”

“It hurts,” he said like that idea come to him for the first time right this minute. “Cold. Hurts.”

“Yeah I know,” I said, “that’s why we gotta get you out of here. Can you move your legs okay?”

I waited a half-minute while he got his mind around the notion of moving his legs, and then he actually started moving them. Maybe like frozen molasses, but he was moving. Good sign.

“Good job, Walter.” I got him out and away from the car and laid him down in the snow.

Callie was right. He was too heavy for me to get up that slope and he sure wasn’t going up there on his own.

“Walter,” I said, “this is going to hurt some more. Can you take it?”

That bucked him up a little. He looked at me kind of like it was a challenge, but all he said was, “What’s that noise?”

“It’s the wind.” I looped the rope under his arms and tied it off good and solid in a bow line knot: the kind that makes a loop that won’t tighten, and I still had plenty more to play with.

“Sounds…” He squinted, like maybe he thought squinting would make him hear it better. “Sounds like somebody screaming.”

“Yeah,” I said, “it does, kind of.”

I hand-hauled the rest of the money bags out of the car, dragging them out lined up in the snow. Then I threaded the rope through the handles—like I was stacking keys on a chain, with Walter there at the bottom. I looked over at him, lying in the snow with a rope around his chest.

“How you doing there?”

“Burns.” He said it high-pitched from the hurt of it. “It burns. Why they burn me?”

“Hell, that’s a good sign.” I hoped so, anyway. “It’s the cold burning. Means you’re gonna be all right.”

“I don’t want ’em to burn me.” He sighed it, kind of dreaming or something.

Well, I had work to do.

It was a long trek back up the slope, playing out the rope behind me, but I made it up to the tower and under one of the round metal legs, then over to the Jeep where I tied the end of the rope to the tow hook in back. Tied it solid.

And then I got in the Jeep and angled it just right, down what was left of the tracks that car had made going down the slope, set it in low, let out the clutch, and jumped out just as I felt it start to move down the slope.

Worked like a wonder dog. The Jeep went down, tugging the rope out as it went, Walter and the money bags came up, pulled by the weight of the Jeep, and I was there to cut everything loose when they got where I wanted them.

Then I looked down and saw the Jeep hit the back of that car down there and push it past whatever it was hung up on at the edge of the lake. I watched as the car cruised out onto the ice, slipping sidewise, and then I saw the snow over the lake start to shake and shift and then the car just disappeared under the ice.

About time something came my way easy today.

Walter got into the truck mostly on his own but I had to lift Callie’s legs up since she was still lying across the whole bench seat and set him under her bent knees. I couldn’t see that she’d bled any onto the seat, and I figured that was likely a good thing.

I made introductions. “This is Park Ranger Callie Nixon. Callie, this is the guy from the car down there. The one you told me how to get him up here.”

She cleared her throat, winced some from the hurt of it, and said, “Welcome to Boothe National Park.”

“Ummah-gummah,” he replied.

She looked up at me. “You said he was in the car down there.”

“That’s right.”

“But that looked like a police car.”

“And I’m a policeman,” I said. “See how it works?”

“But he’s not a policeman.”

“That’s right.”

“He was in the car, though.”

“I’ve got things to do,” I said, “I’ll be back in a minute and tell you all about it.” I was just about to get away when she grabbed my sleeve.

“What was that awful noise?” she asked.

“It was the wind.”

“It’s stopped now.”

“That’s right.” I looked over at the traces of smoke and steam still rising from the black smudge in the snow where Captain Scranton used to be. “It’s stopped now.”

December 20, 1951

3:15 PM

Officer Drapp

It took some doing, but I finally got us rolling. We were in the truck with Callie’s head on my right leg and her knees bent across Walter’s lap and eleven bags of money loaded in the back of the truck.

Nice work, but it wasn’t going to be real easy pushing through snow all the way to Bootheville General Hospital, which was where we needed to go did I want to keep that woman on my leg alive.

That woman on my leg. She moved a little and looked up past my elbows at me.

“I’m not sure how long I can stay awake, and I need to tell you this.” Her voice was still refined and classy, but it sounded far-off.

“Better just rest,” I said. “Tell me later.”

“I’m not completely sure I may be here later. And I’m quite certain you won’t be.”

“Don’t talk dumb,” I said. “You’re going to be fine and we’ll have plenty of time to talk it all over once I get you to the hospital.”

“No, I’m not dying; dying is a sign of weakness, and I’m not about to permit it, but when I wake up I rather think you’ll be gone.”

“How come?”

“Because you’re the bank robber, you know….”

“Sounds like you got your brains froze out there,” I said, “I’m Officer Drapp, Willisburg Police.”

“No,” she said, “you’re the bank robber.”

“There wasn’t any bank robber,” I said. “Those guys I was after, they hit an armored car. So they’d be armored-car robbers.”

“You said that back at the Office and I told you then it was neither here nor there, and it’s in rather the same place now.” She stopped to take a breath. “Bank, car or Cracker Jack box, I believe you’re the robber.”

“I still say your brains is froze.” I slowed for a curve, easing up on the pedal and working the clutch, which wasn’t real easy with her big ugly head on my leg. “But how you figure?”

“It seemed a bit odd, back at the office when you arrived in a farm truck, you’ll admit that.”

“Yeah, I told you it was better for—“

“Better for driving in the snow, you said that.” Even on a half-tank of blood she ran right over what I was saying. “And then you didn’t call for other police officers when you should have.”