Day Into Night (39 page)

29

WHEN I COME TO, I’m not sure where I am. Or if I made it — I see a bright, beckoning light. Turns out it’s just the fluorescents in my hospital room. I try to get up and quickly find that won’t be happening — I’m hooked to a battery of tubes. My leg is bandaged but still there, so I lie back, let my thoughts float up through the lake of painkillers they must have given me.

Try to remember exactly what happened.

I remember trying to stand, Brotsky pushing me down. My radio out of reach. The rifle shot. Telson, whispering in my ear and then being outside, seeing that dreaded word painted in red on the old burner. A flash like a camera at a birthday party — something triggered the bomb. Maybe Brotsky wasn’t dead. Maybe it was Carl’s radio.

Then faces, distorted and leering but I think that must have been a dream —

I’m too woozy to think this hard; stare out the window. I’ve got a hell of a mountain view, which probably isn’t covered under my basic health care benefits. The mountains look close enough to touch ...

Sweet oblivion.

I wake hours later, sensing I’m not alone.

“You’re back with us,” says a nurse I recognize as having bandaged my sprained ankle eons ago. She’s young, with pale skin and red hair. An angel named Betty. This will be the second time Betty will be fitting me with crutches. She takes my blood pressure, her slim hand cool on my wrist as she monitors my pulse. “You’ve been away.”

“Soma vacation,” I mumble, my voice pharmaceutically calm.

“What’s that?”

“A Brave New World,” I tell her. “Savages.”

She smiles — another babbling patient. “You were out for a while. You had us worried.”

“How long?”

“Three days.” She smiles as if I’ve been at Club Med. “You lost a lot of blood.”

I’m hooked to a machine on an iv tower — it keeps beeping. I think that’s a good sign. On a side table are several bouquets of flowers; one, I can see from the card, is from my parents; I’m not sure who sent the others.

“Good thing they brought you in so quickly,” she says.

“The people who brought me in — are they okay?”

She looks puzzled. “Sure.”

“Christina Telson and Carl Mackey?”

“Your friends are fine. A few bumps and bruises.”

“Are they here?”

She shakes her head, pulls back the blankets and checks my leg. Removes the dressing. “We kept them overnight and released them. You on the other hand are a different story.” I glance down — a bad idea. It’s not that the sight of blood bothers me — just my blood. I lie back, stare at the ceiling. “You were lucky,” she says. “Some damage but the bullet passed through without hitting the major artery or breaking any bones. Half an inch to the right and you’d have bled to death.”

“That’s me — lucky.”

“Trust me,” she says. “I used to work Emerg in the city. How’s your pain?”

“What pain?”

She smiles again — a nice smile. “You’re on morphine. Can you wiggle your toes?”

I wiggle my toes. Betty is pleased.

“Were you here when they brought me in?”

She nods, massaging my toes. I may want to marry her.

“Did they bring in anyone else? Besides my friends?”

“Like who?” she says.

Brotsky — but like Hess there probably wasn’t much left of him. “Never mind.”

I try a few more questions but Betty has no answers.

“I’ll get you some breakfast,” she says. “The doctor will be around later to see you.”

Then I’m alone again with my mountain view. Down the hall, a machine sighs and grunts like someone on a stair climber. I doze. A different nurse wakes me with a tray of hospital food. I’m hungry enough that Jello and instant fried eggs look good.

Half way through the eggs I have breakfast guests — Rachet, Bergren, et al.

“Nice view,” Rachet says. “Better than what you’ll be getting used to.”

“You gonna eat that muffin?” says Bergren. “I missed breakfast.”

I protect my muffin. The Mounties make themselves comfortable. Rachet, being the senior, gets the only chair. Bergren and an older cop I’ve never seen before lean against the window, spoiling my view.

“We’ve been looking for you,” Rachet says.

“You’ve been a busy boy,” adds Bergren. “Taking out Petrovich, then Brotsky.”

I can’t believe they still don’t have this straight. But in my present state it’s hard to get worked up. When I talk it sounds like I’m narrating a National Geographic special on dung beetles. “I didn’t take anyone out. Talk to Mackey and Telson. Listen to the tapes.”

“What tapes?” says Rachet.

Carl didn’t give them the tapes. “It’s all on tape. Brotsky and his girlfriend. Whitlaw talking about Hess. It had nothing to do with the Lorax. Whitlaw wanted to stop Hess from talking union. He sent Brotsky and Petrovich to talk him out of it but they got carried away and killed Hess, then made it look like a Lorax bombing —”

All three cops are giving me a strange look.

“Brotsky grabbed Telson,” I say. “He wanted to trade her for the tapes.”

“You still have these tapes?” says Rachet.

“Carl has them. I left them at the ranger station.”

“I see.” Rachet is rubbing his chin. “Too bad we can’t find your friend Carl.”

“Talk to Whitlaw. Or Telson — she’s a reporter. She’ll tell you everything.”

“We’re looking for Whitlaw. As for Telson, she went back to the States.”

Suddenly, I want more painkillers. “What about Brotsky’s girlfriend — Carmen?”

“Oh, right.” Rachet is wagging a finger at me, as if making a point he’d forgotten until now. “She’s considering charges against you for kidnapping and aggravated assault. Says you tied her up in her own house and threatened to kill her. I’m willing to bet the teeth marks under those bandages on your hand match her bite imprint.”

“She’s in on it,” I say faintly. “She switched the resumé.”

Bergren chuckles. “The non-existent resumé?”

“You don’t have any idea what happened?”

“We’ll figure it out,” says Rachet. “We’ve got you. And you’re not going anywhere.”

They’re all staring at me, frowning, as if waiting for me to crack and confess. My head feels like rubber from the drugs but I still sense there’s something wrong here. How could it be that with so many people involved, they still haven’t figured it out? How could they just let Carl and Telson go like that, without getting the full story? Telson’s a reporter — she wouldn’t leave a story this hot if it killed her, which it nearly did. Then something Nurse Betty said clicks — her puzzlement when I asked if the people who brought me in were okay.

“You knew,” I say quietly. “You knew all along.”

Rachet and Bergren exchange glances.

“Not all along,” Rachet says. “Far from it. But Mr. Mackey did give us the tapes. He also told us your knife was stolen a week before Petrovich was killed.”

“So I’m not a fugitive anymore?”

“Not officially. But we’ll want to talk with you some more later.”

My relief must be obvious because Bergren laughs. “A Kodak moment.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“We wanted to hear the same story from you.”

“And Whitlaw?”

“We picked him up yesterday.”

There’s a pause, filled with the beep of my morphine monitor. I’m thinking about the old mill and the explosion right after we got out. Since we never really had a chance to use the radios, I’m wondering how the Mounties got there so quickly. “You knew about Telson,” I say, looking at Rachet. “You knew Brotsky had her at the old mill.”

Rachet looks uncomfortable, shifts in his chair.

“You knew and you let me go in there anyway.”

It takes Rachet a lot of beeps to answer. “Yes,” he says finally. “But not until the very end. We had Whitlaw’s line tapped, after you told us your theory about the union, and we picked up your phone call with that bit of tape you played. Then we picked up a call from Whitlaw to Brotsky, telling him he’d just received a call from the ranger station.”

“But you didn’t catch Brotsky’s call to us?”

Rachet shakes his head. “We didn’t have a tap on that line.”

“But you knew something was going down.”

“Sure. But we didn’t know where or exactly what. We suspected it would be a trade of some sort but we didn’t know what Brotsky had to trade. Until someone thought to check on your friend Telson. Even then, we didn’t know for sure if he had her. Then we got Carl Mackey’s call about monitoring the radio.”

Makes sense. I wonder if it would have come out differently had the radios worked.

Yeah — I might have blown us to bits.

“How did you ever find us?”

Rachet smiles, somewhat reluctantly. “Luck. All the training and experience and sometimes you just get a lucky break. We found Mackey’s truck parked behind the bottle depot. Then it just made sense that it would go down at the old mill.”

I think about Brotsky shooting me in the leg. Pulling his knife.

“Why didn’t you go in?”

Rachet raises his hands. “Honestly — we didn’t know what we were up against. We deployed and waited, monitored the Forest Service frequency. When we had some indication of a hostage and what we were up against, we were prepared to go in.”

“We could have been dead by then.”

“You could have come in long ago instead of playing phone games.”

Maybe that makes us even.

“But you’re still alive,” Rachet says, leaning forward in his chair, giving me his best scowl. “You were very lucky. Next time, maybe you won’t be so lucky. Next time, maybe I won’t go so easy on you. There’s still about a dozen statutes under which I could charge you. Keep that in mind before you decide to investigate this Lorax any further. I suggest you stick to forest fires.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “I’m done with the Lorax.”

They disconnect a few tubes and I’m somewhat mobile. I shuffle to the bathroom, towing my iv stand, frighten myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve got a long crescent of stitches on one temple — Brotsky’s parting gift — bruises the colour of damaged fruit. I do a lap down the hall to test my leg but am apprehended at the nursing station, sent to my room. This little adventure exhausts me and I take a nap, wake to find a nurse changing the dressing on my thigh. This nurse is in her fifties, with the dehydrated complexion of someone who’s spent too much time under fluorescents, but she’s friendly enough.

“On a scale of one-to-ten, how’s your pain?”

“Seven point three,” I tell her. “If I was a masochist I’d be in heaven.”

“We’ll give you a little something but we’re going to back you off the morphine.” She points to a button on the gadget connected to my iv stand. “You know you can self-medicate. The machine is set on minimum but you can increase the frequency up to a limit.”

Now they tell me. I press the button. The machine sighs. So do I.

“All done,” she says, pulling the blanket over my leg. “You have a visitor.”

“More cops?”

“No cops this time. A mountain man.”

Carl comes in, wearing moccasins and his fringed buckskin jacket. The room fills with the odour of wood smoke and perspiration. I’m surprised they didn’t decontaminate the jacket before letting him into the hospital. “How you doing buddy?” he asks. “You up for a game of soccer?”

The nurse wags a finger at me. “You stay in bed.”

She leaves and Carl takes a seat, fidgets. “How’s the leg?”

“Not bad. Bullet passed through without hitting bone.”

“Always a bonus.”

“How’s that fire by the river going?”

“It’s being held. It’s smaller than we thought.”

I nod and there’s a pause. It’s going to be tough getting past small talk.

“Has Christina been in to see you yet?”

I try to look unconcerned but I’d hoped she would be here when I woke up. Asleep in a chair maybe, holding my hand. “They told me they held you both overnight.”

Carl nods. “That was a long night. I hate hospitals.”

“I know what you mean,” I tell him. “Full of sick people.”

He’s reading the cards that came with the flowers. “She brought you lilies.”

Lilies. I wonder if there’s some meaning behind that.

“If you wait a minute,” Carl says, “I’ll run outside and grab a handful of dandelions.”

I picture Carl on the lawn, ripping out dandelions, impressing the maintenance people.

“No thanks. It’s the thought that counts.”

“Can’t say I didn’t offer.”

There’s a lull in conversation, Carl glancing out the window.

“What happened?” I ask finally. An open question. It takes him a while to answer.

“I got stuck in the log infeed,” he says finally. “Slipped in the dark and got my leg jammed between two rollers. You should see the bruises.” He’s rubbing his leg, just above the knee, as if to assure me the bruises are really there. I’m not sure I want to find out if they are. Despite everything that’s happened, he came through in the end. Maybe that’s all you can ever expect of anyone. “I heard the shot,” he says quietly. “But with the echoes in there I couldn’t tell where it came from, and when I got myself unjammed it took a while to get into position.”

“Well, thanks,” I say. “I’m glad you were there.”

He waves it off. “You’d have done the same.”

We attempt small talk again but it seems cheap. Carl fidgets with the fringes on his jacket.

“I gotta go, Porter,” he says. “I’ll pop by later.”

I’m left with my thoughts and the view. I don’t want to think too hard about Carl right now. Maybe later, when there’s some distance to my perspective. I need loud music and a long drive but neither is on the program. Instead, I reach for the remote control, turn on the overhead television. It’s on a swing arm and has a screen the size of a cigarette pack. I doze, wake sometime the next morning. I’m rescued from a rerun of a mash episode by Cindy and the kids.

Cindy looks beautiful. The kids, carrying model Styrofoam airplanes, commence to toss them back and forth at each other over my bed. When I was a kid, I was frightened of hospitals and would have sat in the corner, trying to be inconspicuous. Cindy’s kids watch emergency room procedures on tv and seem right at home. For them, an old guy with bruises is pretty tame.

“Oh my God ...” Cindy examines my bruises. At least someone feels sorry for me.

I flinch. “Don’t worry, they’re worse than they look.”

“Don’t be a sissy. Hold still —”

A model airplane gets stuck in the iv hanger and three kids scramble after it. I grab my iv lines so they’re not pulled out. Cindy orders the kids out of the room. Despite her diminutive stature, she has the voice of a general. The kids march into the hall, their enthusiasm undiminished.

“Sorry about that, Porter.”

“Nice to be surrounded by family.”

“I would have come sooner but I was on vacation.”

“Look, I want to thank you for that —”

She waves it off; she’s not good with praise. “Don’t mention it.”

“Really. I mean it. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

She looks away for a moment, self-conscious. In the hall, the kids hoop and holler.

“How far did you get?” I ask.

She smiles. “California. I’d always wanted to see it.”

“Do any surfing?”

“No. They turned me back at the border. I wasn’t blonde enough.”

Cindy tells me about her trip. I don’t tell her about Brotsky and the old mill, don’t want to worry her anymore; she’s done her share already. In the background, the tv mumbles, kids shout in the hall, respirators sigh and hiss. I’m content to lie still and listen.

“I’m staying at a motel here in town,” says Cindy. “Until you’re out.”

I imagine the kids in a small motel room. “Thanks, but you don’t have to.”

“It’s no problem,” she says. “I’m on vacation, remember? And the kids haven’t seen the mountains before. They don’t get outside enough as it is. I’ll take them for picnics, go on little hikes. It’ll wear them out. They’ll sleep like logs.”

She’s holding my hand. “Thanks,” I tell her. “That’ll be nice.”

After she’s gone, it’s just me, the mountains and the television. I watch a local channel — old file images of a forest fire. There’s a provincial fire ban: no open fires under any circumstances. High winds and low humidities are expected for the next few days. The Forest Service advises against backcountry camping, the announcer suggesting we stay at home, watch television. No problem on my end. I switch channels, fall asleep during an old Charles Bronson movie.