Lavender Beach (40 page)

She drove the
Bronco from Sandy Pointe to the cottage. Cautious in her approach, she slowly pulled up in the driveway she shared with the clinic.

Cooper got out of the passenger seat first before Eastlyn. But she caught up with him in time to spot Cord standing between the buildings, waiting. “There he is. The man said he was looking for you, Eastlyn. That’s why I called so late. Do you recognize who he is?”

Eastlyn couldn’t believe her eyes as she rounded the corner. “Yeah, I do.”

She saw a gaunt man with hair as black as a raven’s and big dark eyes to match. An exhausted Durke Pedasco leaned up against the railing of her little stoop looking as though he might pass out any minute.

She ran up to him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders in a hug and noticed he had a limp.

“Durke, how on earth did you find me?”

Durke let himself be hugged and then leaned his head on her shoulders. “I borrowed a guy’s cell phone at the bus station three days ago in Salinas. I sent a text message to my mom. She told me you were here. No one’s looking for me here.”

Durke’s forehead felt hot to the touch and she immediately saw that he was holding his side. “Is that blood on your shirt?”

“One of those sleazebags shot me. It’s healing up though. At least I hope it is. It bleeds every now and then. I don’t feel so good though. Could I sit down for a minute?”

Eastlyn turned to Cooper and Cord. “Let’s get him into the house.”

Cord spoke up. “I have a better idea. Take your friend into the clinic. I might be a veterinarian but I can still look at that side in a pinch until Doc takes a look at him tomorrow.”

Cooper dashed up the step to help Durke stand. With Eastlyn on the other side, they dragged the injured man up the steps and into the clinic.

Once Cord got him on the table, he took charge of the patient. He went to work ripping open the man’s shirt, saw a nasty, bulging wound where a bullet had entered a chunk of fatty tissue in the abdomen.

“This has been festering for weeks. It’s infected now,” Cord said as he unlocked a medicine cabinet. He took out a syringe and a surgical tray, and started an IV drip.

Durke began to murmur in short spurts, delirium setting in. “I cleaned the wound a couple times with peroxide, tried to dig out the bullet myself. Never could quite get it out.”

“Lie still now. I’ll take care of it,” Cord assured him. “Cooper, do me a favor. Go ahead and give Doc a call. This might be the worst wound I’ve seen lately.”

Cooper nodded and stepped into the other room to make the call.

Meanwhile, Cord turned to Eastlyn. “If you have any questions for your friend here, you’d better make it quick because I’m about to knock him out so I can dig out that bullet. If Doc’s not here by then, I’ll stitch up his gash and hope that we pump him with enough antibiotics to quash the bacterial infection.”

Eastlyn stepped over, took Durke’s hand. “What gives? Where’ve you been all this time? It’s been weeks. With this kind of injury why didn’t you get yourself to a hospital?”

“Whoa. Slow down there. Could I get some water? I’m really thirsty.”

“Sure, as long as you start talking.” Eastlyn took a paper cup from the water dispenser, filled it halfway full before holding it up to Durke’s lips.

Cord slapped on gloves, glanced over and shook his head. “Even though he’s dehydrated, just give him enough to wet his lips. No more than that. The IV drip will replenish what he’s lost.”

Eastlyn did as she was told. But as Cord began to get ready for the surgical procedure, the smell of blood mixed with the disinfectant odor brought her back to another time and place. Hit by a wave of images, like the ones she’d witnessed from the seat of a cockpit as her crew had helped the wounded, she felt woozy. The memory of her own injury suddenly made her feel like she wanted to throw up.

Cord took one look at her face and asked, “If you feel like you’re about to faint, let me know now.”

After a few long seconds, she shook off the lightheadedness. “The sight of blood usually doesn’t get to me like that.”

Cooper came back into the room just in time to overhear her comment. “It’s likely a flashback from that day you took your own hit. That’s my guess anyway.”

Cord bobbed his head in agreement. “Perceptive man you have here, Eastlyn. Combat does strange things to the psyche.” 

She gave Cooper an unassuming smile and decided to change the focus off her and back to where it belonged. “Will Durke be okay?”

Like any good doctor dealing with an emergency situation who was unsure of the outcome, Cord sidestepped the question. “Like I said before, if you want answers from him, either ask them now or wait until he’s out of surgery. Your choice.”

Eastlyn leaned down to where Durke could hear. “People back in Bakersfield told the cops you were a drug informant. The Feds denied it but no one was sure what to believe.”

“What? No. Not even close. How’d that rumor get started?”

“No idea. What happened that you thought you had to disappear the way you did?”

Durke licked his lips and closed his eyes. “It happened a few days after you got out of rehab. I’d closed up the bar, took the trash to the Dumpster for the night, set the empties outside just like I always do. I turned to go back inside and the next thing I know I hear this sound like someone’s beating the hell out of someone else. I look across the alley and down toward Nathan’s Donut Shop. I see these two dudes beating up Rona Simmons. You remember Rona.”

Eastlyn’s brows knitted together. “You mean Rodney? Sure. We went to high school with him. He’s transgender, right? Has been for most of his life. Wears those red dresses and black stockings everywhere no matter the event, looks pretty good in them, too.”

“Rona. She likes to be called Rona these days, Eastlyn. And she’s always been eccentric like that, but Rona’s always had a big heart. You know that.”

Eastlyn exchanged looks with Cord knowing the morphine would soon kick in. So she prompted Durke to get to the end of his story before that happened. “I do. Okay, Rona. You saw Rona getting beat up. What did you do then?”

“These two guys beat her up so bad it looked like they were killing her, so I ran back into the bar to call the cops. While I’m on the 911 call, I hear two more gun shots, then two more. I go back outside and realize these two guys have shot Rona. There was no need to do that to her, you know? They’d beaten her so that it was hard to tell what her face looked like. Anyway, while I’m standing there, one of them points their gun at me and the next thing I know, I feel this burning sensation in my side. They shot me just like they did Rona. So I charge out of there and take off running back to my car.”

“Did you recognize the two guys?”

He lifted his head off the table. “Sure. They’d just spent three hours in the bar giving Rona a hard time. It was Angus and Dolan Hardaway. At first I headed to the hospital, but they followed me there. So I took a few side streets toward home, but they showed up there, too, about five minutes after I got home. That’s when I ducked out the bedroom window with just the clothes on my back. I panicked, Eastlyn, plain and simple. I didn’t know what to do except take off, lay low, and hope the cops would put two and two together and arrest those two. But after four long months, mom says the brothers are still out there walking around free.”

“So where’ve you been all this time?”

“I thought Angus and Dolan might find me at the cabin so I headed east for a bit, realized that was a mistake and changed direction. This time I went north, ducked into the Sequoia National Forest, camped out for a while and then headed north again. I hitched a ride with a family headed to Merced and ended up in Yosemite. Then after talking to my mom, I decided to come here. It took all my energy to make it west.”

Durke closed his eyes again as the drug took over. “I don’t feel so good.”

And with that, Durke passed out for real. 

For most of
the night, Eastlyn and Cooper sat in the outer office at the clinic, waiting for news on how the surgery went. After Cord had removed the bullet, Doc had shown up to supervise Cord’s stitches. That’s all they knew until Cord, still dressed in scrubs, appeared in the doorway.

“Your friend’s condition is good, even though the infection spread to his stomach, which is the reason he’ll be on massive doses of antibiotics for probably two weeks. In about six hours Doc will assess his condition and make the determination then whether or not to move him over to his place, or not.”

Eastlyn stood up. “You did a remarkable job with him, Cord. Thank you. I don’t think he could’ve made it back home to Bakersfield.”

Cord turned to go, but stopped. “If he’d tried that, he’d be dead by now. By the way, if you’re curious I took out a .22 slug, kept it as evidence.”

“Good. I’ll give Brent a call at first light.”

Eastlyn angled her head to look at Cooper. “You look so tired. Why don’t you go take a nap for a few hours?”

“Only if you come with me.” He looked at his watch. “It’s four a.m. We could get three solid hours in.”

She grinned. “Okay. But we sleep. No funny business.”

Coop held up his hands. “Who, me? It’s you who has such a hard time keeping your hands off me. I’m the one who should worry. So yeah, no funny business.”

It wasn’t until
nine o’clock that they met with Brent inside his office. After Eastlyn’s initial call, Brent had spent the morning on the phone with the Bakersfield police department. After learning more about the case there, Brent had decided every word of Durke’s story checked out.

But Eastlyn still had questions. “Why didn’t they mention Rona’s murder to you back when they were probing into the missing person angle? I’m surprised the police didn’t think Durke was somehow involved in Rona’s death since it took place right outside the bar.”

Cooper added, “It stands to reason the cops would look at Durke as the one who killed Rona because he took off.”

Brent nodded. “That, and the first people the detectives spoke to ended up being Angus and Dolan Hardaway. The two brothers showed up at the police station and happily tried to point the finger at Durke right off the bat. The only thing that hung up their story was that the detectives couldn’t find a .22—which is the murder weapon that killed Rona and now seems to match the slug that showed up in Durke.”

“Ah. It’s all beginning to make more sense. We now know who started the rumor about Durke being a drug informant and that he’d gotten in trouble with a local gang of dealers.”

“It was Angus and Dolan who did their damnedest to make it look like Rona’s death was tied to drugs and then link it back to Durke. Funny thing is the police couldn’t make ninety percent of Hardaway’s story stick. It had so many holes in it, the detectives weren’t sure what to think.”

“If the cops couldn’t make the story stick then why didn’t they just arrest the Hardaway brothers back when it happened?” Cooper asked.

Brent leaned back in his chair. “Because it doesn’t work that way. Evidence didn’t point to anyone at that point. And besides, the Hardaways aren’t complete morons. The brothers likely got rid of the gun…somewhere. The fact is your friend witnessed a murder. This morning the authorities back in Bakersfield took what they had to the DA. He decided to finally issue a warrant for the Hardaway brothers. But it’s my guess that unless Angus and Dolan plead guilty, Durke will very likely be the only key witness and will have to go back and testify to what he saw. So how’s the guy doing?”

“Doc says Durke should be fine in a week or two. Until he’s ready to travel he’ll stay with me at the cottage until he feels well enough to go back home to Bakersfield.”

After finishing up, Eastlyn walked Cooper across the street to the Hilltop Diner to have breakfast.

“Something’s bothering you,” Cooper said. “If it’s about letting Durke stay with you, I’m fine with it.”

“That’s what I love about you—” A mortified look crossed her face when she realized what she’d almost admitted.

But Cooper downplayed the slip of the tongue the only way he knew how. He swung her into his arms and circled her waist, twirled her along the sidewalk in a dance. “That’s what I love about you too—your generosity of spirit. You didn’t hesitate to offer Durke a place to crash.”