Strangers (24 page)

My work here was finished.

*   *   *

No, dammit, it wasn't.

Not bloody yet.

*   *   *

I had just finished showering and changing into my next-to-last clean shirt and slacks, and was brushing desert grit off my coat, when my cell phone went off. Cheryl. I clicked on, saying, “Cheryl, I was just about to call you—”

“Bill? Bill?”

Something funny about her voice—vague, disoriented—that put me on instant alert. “Yes, it's me. Are you all right?”

“Bill, I … I…”

“What is it? What's happened?”

“Oh God, I can't … think…”

“Where are you?”

“Where? Here … I … home…”

Faint thud in my ear, as if she'd dropped her phone. The line was still open; I could hear its hum. I said her name three times, almost shouting it the last. No response.

I struggled into my coat and ran out to the car, the cell pressed tight against my ear. The line stayed open, but she still didn't respond. It was raining harder now, the streets slick; I took the motel exit onto Main too fast, nearly sent the car skidding into traffic. Somebody let loose with a series of angry horn blasts. But I had the car straightened out by then, going as fast as I dared, the wipers making clacking, squeaking sounds on the windshield that scraped on my already raw nerves.

Out Yucca past the rodeo grounds and across the UP tracks, only half braking at stop signs along the way. Down Northwest 10th to Cheryl's house. Her wagon was in the driveway under the portico. I swung in behind it, ran first to the side door because it was closer. Locked. Around to the front door. Latched but not secured; I went in calling her name, not getting an answer.

The fringe-shaded lamp in the living room was lit. Something had happened in there, something bad; one sweeping look from the doorway told me that. The sofa had been thrust out of position, the chrome-and-glass coffee table leaning sideways on two of its legs and a glistening red blotch on one edge. But the room was empty now.

Kitchen. No. Cheryl's bedroom—

Jesus!

She was on the bed in there, half turned on her right side, legs bent and knees drawn up in a caricature of the fetal position. Eyes closed, body twitching with involuntary spasms. But it was the side of her face and forehead that made my stomach clench, a cold fury rise inside: they were smeared with blood, bright, still fresh. More blood stained a wet hand towel on the counterpane beside her.

Her dropped cell phone was on the carpet next to the bed; I almost stepped on it getting to her. When I leaned down I could see the sources of the blood, a two-inch gash just under her left cheekbone and a second cut, smaller, amid a darkening bruise at the hairline above her right temple. Both wounds were still bleeding.

Conscious? I couldn't tell. I said her name, didn't get a response, and tried again, louder, laying my hand gently on her arm. The twitching stopped and her eyelids fluttered, then popped open into a widening, unfocused stare. Fear shone in them; she cringed away from me.

“No! No, don't…”

“Cheryl, it's all right, it's Bill.”

“… Bill? Oh God, Bill?”

“Yes. I'm here now, I'm here.”

My voice, as calmly reassuring as I could make it, took the terror out of her eyes. But they remained unfocused, cloudy with confusion. That and the disoriented speech and the bruised head wound meant concussion. Smacked around in the living room, knocked down and hit her head hard on the edge of the coffee table. The way it looked, she'd made her way in here after her attacker was gone, wet the towel to clean off some of the blood, sat down on her bed with the towel and the cell phone, then lost consciousness a few seconds into the call to me. But had she called nine-one-one first?

I asked her that, had to do it twice before she responded.

“… Nine-one-one?”

“The emergency number. To ask for help.”

“I … no. No. My head … couldn't think … still can't…”

Too disoriented to remember a three-digit number. What she must have done was to hit the redial button and my number was the last one she'd called previously.

I ran into the bathroom. Blood drops on the floor in there, more on the vanity. I turned on the cold water tap, tossed another face towel in the sink, and while it was soaking I made the nine-one-one call, told the dispatcher that a woman had been injured and where. There was a pause before the female voice said, “What was that address again, sir?” And when I repeated it, “The incident has already been reported and an EMT unit dispatched. It should arrive shortly.”

“Already reported? By whom? When?”

“Ten minutes ago. The caller refused to give his name.
Your
name, sir?”

I told her and immediately broke the connection. I twisted water out of the towel, took it into the bedroom. Cheryl had shifted position so that she was lying all the way over on her side, her eyes closed, the blood still flowing from the gash on her cheek to stain her clothing and the counterpane. So damn much blood I'd looked at today, so damn much violence. The wounded deputy was bad enough, but he'd been hurt in the line of duty. Cheryl … like this … it sickened me.

Gingerly, I lifted her head and got a pillow under it. I dabbed up as much of the blood as I could, then folded the towel to the clean side and laid it against her cheek and pressed her hand against it to hold it in place. There was nothing I could do about either of the wounds; that was EMT and doctor business. And where the hell were the EMTs? They should be here by now. The county hospital was only a couple of miles from here—I'd passed it more than once since I'd been in Mineral Springs.

“Cheryl? Can you hear me?”

Her eyes opened. As confused and unfocused as before, but without any of the fear. “Bill,” she said.

“Help's on the way. Any minute now.”

“Help.…”

“Yes. Who did this to you, who hurt you?”

Memory, or painful fragments of it, made her shudder. “Oh God, he just … when I wouldn't he … hit me.…”

“Who, Cheryl? Was it Matt Hatcher?”

“Matt? He…” There was more, but the words came out muttered, garbled. Her vision seemed to dull; the eyelids fluttered shut. Then the muttering stopped and the twitching started up again.

And outside, finally, I heard the oncoming siren.

The ambulance slid to a stop at the curb just as I opened the front door. Two EMTs, one male, one female carrying a jumpbag, came hurrying out and up the walk—a different pair than the ones who'd removed Rick Firestone's body yesterday.

The man took one look at me and said, “Hey, you're that detective.”

The woman said, “Is Mrs. Hatcher the injured party?”

“Yes. Bedroom. I'll show you.”

“What happened here?”

“Somebody beat her up.”

“Somebody?” Glaring, a chill in her voice.

I glared back. “Somebody. Not me.”

“You the one who called in?” From the male when I stopped in the hallway to let them get past me.

“No. The man who hurt her must have done it.” Anonymously and belatedly, the son of a bitch.

“Yeah, sure.”

The two of them vanished into the bedroom. I didn't follow; I would only be in the way. I went back into the living room and paced around, paced around. After a few minutes that seemed like an hour, the male EMT reappeared, threw me a dour look, and hurried outside. I tailed after him. There were people out front now, neighbors milling around. The fat man from next door yelled something at me that I shut my ears to.

The EMT opened the back doors of the ambulance, dragged a gurney out. I said to him, “What's Mrs. Hatcher's condition?”

“Don't ask me, ask the ER doctors at the hospital. Concussions are tricky, and she's got one. Must've been hit pretty hard.”

“I'm not the one who did it.”

“So you said. None of my business. You want to ride to the hospital with her?”

“No. I've got something else to do.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Hatcher. Matt Hatcher.

 

24

His home address was in the notebook I always carry. I'd copied it in there from Tamara's e-mail, along with the couple of others I didn't already have. I got the GPS out of the trunk, ignoring the stares and voices of Cheryl's miserable neighbors, and programmed in the address before backing the car out of the driveway. If Hatcher wasn't home, I'd keep looking until I found him if it took me all day and half the night.

But he was home. At least, the ass end of his Ford Ranger was visible inside an open detached garage next to his small board-and-batten house. This was an older neighborhood on the west side; Hatcher's place and the others on narrow lots along the street were of a characterless sameness, like lines of tired old men huddled in the rain. A gaunt yucca tree in the front yard thrust limp, sword-shaped leaves into the wet, leaden sky.

Up on the porch, I could hear a television turned up loud inside. Sunday afternoon pro football game: the determinedly excited voices of play-by-play and color announcers, cheers and groans from the crowd. The anger I felt, on low heat all the way over here, bubbled up again. What kind of man beats up a woman, leaves her hurt and bleeding, then drives home, makes a nine-one-one afterthought call, and sits down to watch a bunch of three-hundred-pound behemoths beat the crap out of each other?

I laid into the bell the way I had at Zastroy's apartment. Didn't take long for Hatcher to respond; he yanked the inner door open, peered out at me through a screen door.

“Oh, it's you. What do you want?”

“You, Hatcher.”

“Me, huh? What for?”

“Suppose we do this inside,” I said. “Face-to-face without a screen between us.”

“Do what, for Chrissake?”

“Talk. Cheryl.”

“I got nothing to say to you about Cheryl.”

“Yeah, you do. Are you going to let me in?”

“Why the hell should I?”

“If you don't, I'll rip that screen door right off its hinges.”

The tone of my voice told him I meant it. He hesitated, muttered something under his breath, and then flipped off the hook latching the screen. I went in, letting the door bang behind me. Living room, more orderly than most bachelors' living quarters, the TV blaring away opposite a big leather recliner. Too warm in there when Hatcher shut the inner door against the chilly dampness outside; he had the heat turned way up. The stink of cigarette smoke made it even more close. From the look of him, he'd settled in for the day. Gray sweatshirt, Levi's, slippers. Hair rumpled, beard stubble on his cheeks and chin—he hadn't even bothered to shave today.

“All right,” he said, “you're in. Now what's this about Cheryl?”

“You're some man, you are. Why'd you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Don't play games with me. You know why I'm here.”

“Like hell I do. What am I supposed to've done?”

“Just what you did. Put her in the hospital ER.”

He gaped at me.
“What!
She's— Hospital?”

“Gave her a concussion when you knocked her down and she hit her head. You must have known she was badly hurt or you wouldn't have made the nine-one-one call.”

“Knocked her down? Nine-one-one call?”

“Big man, tough guy. Beating up on women—”

“I never beat up on a woman in my life! You're crazy if you think I did something like that to Cheryl. I been here the whole damn day.”

“Can you prove it?”

“I don't have to prove it. I haven't seen Cheryl in two days—ask her, she'll tell you. Listen, I'd never hurt her. I love her. I'm not ashamed to say it—I love her and she knows it.”

The denial and the declaration were so strong, the look on his face of mingled outrage and concern so apparently genuine, that for the first time I began to have doubts. Acting? He wasn't the type to pull off an innocent pose and expect to get away with it. And his hands … big, work-roughened, but free of any fresh cuts or abrasions. No man his size could hit a woman as hard as Cheryl had been hit and not have damning marks of his own to show for it.

“How badly is she hurt? Concussion, you said. What else?”

“Gash in her cheek. Bruises.”

“But she'll be okay?”

“If the concussion isn't too severe.”

He'd been standing stiff and flat-footed; now his shoulders slumped and he moved away from me to shut off the blaring TV, then sit on the armrest of his chair. “I knew something like this would happen,” he said. The dull resignation in his voice, the hunched posture, quelled the anger inside me. No, he
wasn't
the one; I'd jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“How did you know?”

“Just knew it would, sooner or later.” He reached for and fired one of his cancer sticks. “Where'd they find her?”

“I found her. Her house.”

“Her— That's where it happened?”

“Yes. Signs all over the place.”

“Ah, God, she never took any of them home before, on account of the kid. Not that he didn't know anyway, or give a shit. But with him in jail, I guess she couldn't resist. I get my hands on the bastard, he'll wish he was never born.”

“I'm not following. Any of who?”

“Her men, her goddamn one-night stands.”

“… What the hell, Hatcher? What're you saying?”

“What you think I'm saying? You know she's a tramp.”

“Cheryl? I don't believe it.”

“No? Well, it's the plain shitty truth. Men, any man, dozens over the past four years. Locals, strangers, married, single … don't matter to her who they are or what they look like.” Bitterly, then: “Town tramp, town punchbag. Crawl in the sack with anybody except the one guy really loves her.”