Ground Money (26 page)

T
HE FIRST THING
he felt was the cold. It was black added to blackness and wanted to finish overwhelming the last sentient fragment somewhere at the base of his skull. That final speck of resisting warmth was pinched between his arced neck and his tight, clenched shoulders, and if he could hold on to it long enough, the cold would stop pushing. But even as he grew aware of that struggle, he felt a searing convulsion in his chest, and by themselves his lungs clenched hotly against whatever tortured them and he felt his body twitch as he retched and rolled to his side and vomited a burning spray of liquid.

“Take it easy—you’ll be OK. Don’t fight it, man, just let it go.”

He was wrapped in something soft and warm and somebody was holding his shoulders up and away so he wouldn’t spew back into his own lungs.

His leg hurt. And his elbow. And ribs all along the right side. And now he could feel his muscles, pulled like cold rubber, begin to ache, and despite himself he groaned through the retching and tried to suck a clear breath deep into his still-burning lungs.

A spate of shivering began, starting somewhere deep in his back and shaking his whole body with a snap that made the ache in his forehead rise into pain.

“He’s shivering,” said another voice. “That’s good. It means he’s fighting the hypothermia.”

Wager squinted through the ache of his head and the heavy shakes that seemed to jam his very bones together with a dry, grating rub. In a narrow range of vision that seemed curiously dark at the edges, he made out a soggy orange life vest a couple of feet away flung against a beached rubber raft.

“Jo?”

“What?”

“Jo—where’s Jo?”

A bearded face hung down to gaze at him. The man’s tongue wiped across the smear of pink lip balm, and he finally said, “I’m afraid he’s drowned.”

Wager tried to shake his head, but the spasms of his flesh and the tightly clenched muscles of his neck and back wouldn’t let him. “Not him. Not him—her. Josephine.”

“Who?”

“Josephine. Fabrizio. A woman.”

There was a long silence, and Wager fought to twist his stiff neck up so he could see the four quiet figures tall and lean and dark against the glare of sky.

“We only found one. I’m sorry.”

The sheriff met him at the Rimrock clinic, where a nurse messed around and tried to act cheerful until the doctor could make it the hundred or so miles across the county. Despite its small size and lack of equipment, the clinic reminded Wager of the hospital where he had last seen Tom. He remembered the man telling him once that he hated hospitals. Despite all his broken bones and sprains and assorted abrasions, he said he only stayed overnight in a hospital once—“That’s where you go to die, Gabe. Damned if I’ll let them tote me to some place where you go to die.”

Tom was right, it turned out; but hospitals weren’t the only places to die. You could do that anywhere.

Wearily, he pushed that thought somewhere into the back of his mind. They had searched, Wager and the others, back up through the rapids, along the cliffs and snarls of tortured rock, downriver as they rowed the burdened craft. She was dead, and that was a fact as solid and cold and unmoving as one of those boulders ripping the river. She was dead, and that’s all there was to it, and now a police officer stood waiting to fill out his report on another death. That’s what happened when you died before you were supposed to—you made paperwork for cops.

This one was a short man who wore a heavy, cropped mustache to give his narrow face some weight. Beneath an equally narrow chest, his stomach swelled out in a tiny pot that reminded Wager vaguely of an ant’s abdomen. But there was nothing antlike about his attitude—no darting hurry, no busywork, no nervous fiddling with his hands. Instead he sat calm and unmoving on the end of the next examining table while the doctor, still tight-lipped with hurry from his last case, aimed his little light into Wager’s pupils and peered this way and that.

“I’ve notified Sidney’s parents, Mr. Wager. You don’t have to talk to them if you’re not up to it.”

“I can’t tell them much.”

“I know. But for some reason, folks seem to want to know everything about what happened.” He paused. “I guess you’ve run across that in your line of work.”

“Yes.”

The nurse took a syringe and a tiny bottle of clear liquid from one of the steel-and-glass cabinets that crowded the room.

“We’re going to give you a tetanus shot just in case, Mr. Wager,” said the doctor. “It’s a good idea when you’ve been in water where cattle are. Those are some pretty deep cuts along your leg.” He pushed the needle into the neck of the bottle and gradually filled the syringe. “This won’t be anything like what you’ve been through.” He smiled and pinched the skin at the back of his arm and a moment later said, “There.”

“Ron Honeycutt wants to talk to you, too. He owns the raft company—he wants to find out what happened.”

“All right.”

“We’ll be out in the lobby. Take your time.”

The doctor, stethoscope folded into the side pocket of his white jacket, smiled again. “You’re healthy. No concussion, but you’re going to be sore for a while. I’ll write a prescription for something to fight any infection in those cuts. They should heal all right without stitches, but if they pull loose again, you might check with your own doctor when you get home.” He scribbled something on a tablet and pulled the leaf off and handed it to Wager. “Take a couple of aspirin and get some sleep. Take it easy for a few days, too—you want to give your system time to get over the shock, OK?”       “Right.”

He closed the door after him, leaving Wager to change from the medical gown to his clothes. He tugged on the jeans that a wet-eyed Dee Volker had brought earlier, and winced as he bent to pull his boots over his sore foot.

The rafting party that had found him, face up and floating like the rest of the river’s scraps in a large eddy below Boulder Field, had found Sidney, too. Except that he wasn’t face up. Jo’s body, one of them finally said, was probably wedged under something on the bottom. There wasn’t anything anybody could do now. But later, maybe, when the river went down …

They put him in the raft, still shaking and gagging occasionally as a breath stung something in his lungs, and rowed hard downriver. Sidney, deep cuts and scrapes seeming even fiercer in his bloodless flesh, was covered with a sleeping bag and tied to the after thwart.

It was a silent crew that took turns on the oars, the joy and excitement gone from their trip, and they didn’t hide their relief when they spotted a riverside ranch and could beach and call the sheriff. Two hours later, Wager was rolled into the examining room in a wheelchair; the sheriff, efficient on the telephone, had called everyone concerned. Now they sat in the clinic’s small waiting room.

Mrs. Hennon perched on one of the Naugahyde chairs, her husband on one side and a tall man in jeans and a khaki shirt on the other. Wager guessed that was Ron, Sidney’s boss. Sheriff Akridge’s mustache lifted and fell briefly. “You look a lot better, Mr. Wager.”

“Thanks.” He shook hands with the others, trying not to read the accusation in the woman’s eyes.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hennon—Sidney’s folks. Can you tell them anything about what happened?”

Wager told most of what he remembered, stressing that Sidney had done everything he could and had even tried to rescue Jo after the raft went under.

“But why him? Why couldn’t you reach her?” The boy’s mother stared at him with hot eyes. “Why him? Why Sidney?”

“I did try,” said Wager.

“Sharon, it’s not Mr. Wager’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault—it’s the river.”

“It is somebody’s fault! It has to be somebody’s fault! It’s just not fair!”

The sheriff glanced an apology at Wager, and Ron Honeycutt stood silent and face down waiting for her to turn on him.

“He was so young—he was going to college …” The last word in a high whine that turned into a stifled wail, and Mr. Hennon, his arm around her shaking shoulders, guided her toward the twilight outside.

Wager and the others stood in uncomfortable silence until finally the sheriff cleared his throat. “We—uh—we got to hold an investigation into the accident, Mr. Wager. You know, get the facts and all. It’s best to do it as soon after as possible. You want to do it here or would you like to come down to the office?”

“I want to get the hell out of here.”

On the drive over to the small white box of an office, Akridge said, “She don’t really blame you, Mr. Wager. Nobody does. You know how women are—if they lose something, somebody stole it; if they have bad luck, somebody caused it.”

The sheriff’s words buzzed somewhere at the edge of understanding, held back by another surge of icy blackness even deeper and colder than those before: Jo was dead. She was dead. Dead.

“Women just can’t help it. You know what I mean, Mr. Wager?”

“Right.”

In the office, the sheriff took a few minutes to look over some paperwork and radio a message to Bob about serving papers. When Honeycutt arrived, he reached into a bottom drawer of the scarred wooden desk and pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club. Without asking, he set three glasses on a heavy corner and poured stiff drinks. The whiskey burned a cough out of Wager, but for the first time since he waked to the cold at the side of the river, he felt warmth begin to glow and loosen the sore muscles clenched around the center of his torso. And, at the heart of that more profound cold in his mind, he felt, too, the first tiny stir of rage.

Akridge poured another one for him; Ron Honeycutt shook his head no and the bottle tipped briefly over the sheriff’s glass.

“Better than anything the clinic’s got.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll have to arrest myself for practicing medicine without a license.” He corked the bottle and shoved it into the drawer and leaned back and sighed heavily. It was time for business. “You say the raft had a slow leak in it?”

Wager took a deep breath and hauled his mind back from where it had been. “That’s what Sidney said. I pumped it up this morning.” This morning. The words didn’t seem real. There was something wrong with them. This morning he and Jo had been sleeping together and waking slowly to the early sunlight on the cliffs across the calm ripple of the river. This morning they had the whole clean day ahead of them. A whole lifetime. That had been this morning.

“Mr. Wager? I was asking if you noticed anything else wrong with the raft.”

“No. Except for losing a little air, it was in good shape. Sidney wouldn’t have tried the rapids if he thought something was wrong with it.”

“I know he wouldn’t!” Honeycutt spoke for the first time. “He was careful and he knew the river—he wouldn’t take chances, dammit.”

Taking chances was a relative term. Sometimes chance and accident took what they would. And sometimes chance had help.

“Did—uh—did Sidney drink anything before? You know, a beer or some such?”

“Only soft drinks. Jo and I had a couple of beers, but he didn’t have any.”

“Ron? You said you had some questions.”

Honeycutt fished in his shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes and stuck one in the corner of his mouth. Frowning, he lit it with a match scraped alight by a thumbnail. “I just don’t understand why the raft behaved that way. I’ve never—never!—heard of a raft popping its seams like that. Even if one chamber went down, Sidney would have been able to steer it through.”

“How did the raft act when it went down, Mr. Wager?”

“The whole rear end folded under in a couple of seconds. It broke both spare oars.”

Honeycutt shook his head, tangled brown hair catching in the light of the desk lamp. “And you say it felt like something tearing underneath?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you see any logs coming down? Anything that could rip her open?”

“No. There was one log, but it cleared the rapids before we started.”

The cigarette crackled. “It just doesn’t make a bit of sense. I don’t know, Sheriff, I guess the river does some weird things, but this just doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The sheriff wet his lips with his glass. “There’s not much chance of finding that raft.” It wasn’t a question.

“Not till the river goes down, and then maybe never. We might find pieces of it, but …” Honeycutt trailed off in an awkward silence.

“Yeah,” said the sheriff quickly. He jotted something in a notebook. “No broken oars or anything like that before you had the trouble?”

“No. Sidney was looking at the tube just before we swamped. So did I—it was wrinkling. Then the whole stern folded under.” He saw it again. “We hit a rock and something ripped—I felt it in the tube I was leaning on—the port tube. It went, and then we were over.” And Jo reached out for him but he wasn’t there.

“I just plain don’t understand it,” said Honeycutt.

Wager offered nothing.

“The only reason any raft would act that way is if it was cut.”

Leaning forward, the sheriff studied Wager. “You think that might have happened?”

“I don’t know. We hit a lot of times before it sank. Some of the rocks were pretty sharp. I guess they could have cut it.”

Honeycutt shook his head. “Rocks wouldn’t have cut all the tubes at one time like that. I mean if somebody had cut the raft on purpose, she’d act just like that. But Jesus, Sheriff, that’d be murder! Sid and Miss Fabrizio … that’d be murder!”

“Don’t go jumping all over some conclusions, now, Ron. We don’t know what happened to that raft.”

“But it’s the only explanation why it went down! My rafts are in good condition—I check them out every week and after every trip. None of my rafts would go down like that unless somebody tampered with it.” Honeycutt stood and took a last hard drag on his cigarette and jabbed it out in the sheriff’s ashtray. “That raft had six individual flotation chambers, four in the tubes and two in the thwarts. And a twenty-four-ounce laminated skin. There’s no way on earth the rocks could make all those tubes pop unless somebody monkeyed with them.” He looked at Wager. “But who?”

“It wasn’t anybody on the raft.”

“It wasn’t anybody at all that we know of,” said Akridge.