High Country- Pigeon 12 (6 page)

"Let's go," she said.

"Pretty impressive."

The voice, so close, startled her. Scott Wooldrich, the assistant chef, stood in the shadows not six feet from them. With half his face catching the light, he looked different, menacing.

"You're a real take-charge kind of gal, aren't you?" The menace had leeched into his voice. Then he smiled and was himself again. "I like that in a woman. You seemed to have everything under control. I just hung around in case you needed any heavy lifting."

"Thanks," Anna said and meant it. Having him close was both comforting and exhilarating. Maybe because he ran interference for her when Wither was on a rampage. Maybe because of the sheer unremitting maleness of him.

"Hey! Get a move on," the chief ranger called again, and Anna was rescued from having to think about it.

"Ranger Knight, Nicky's having a little respiratory distress as well," she said to keep the girl near her.

"Bring her." Lorraine left the dining room.

Anna and Nicky looked to Tiny. Lorraine might be chief ranger but Tiny Bigalo was empress of the dining hall.

In the second miracle of the evening, she said: "Go, then." Anna thought Tiny would have expected employees to die on the job out of loyalty to the company.

"Respiratory problems," Lorraine said to the waiting EMTs. One of the rangers dropped back to look at Nicky. "We'll put you in the ambulance. Do you . . . ?" Before she could ask any of the diagnostic questions, Nicky was backing away.

"No. No. I'll come in my own car. I'm okay. I just. . . I might . . . I might need to see a doctor."

"You want me to come with you?" Anna asked, remembering the panic in the Nicky's eyes.

"No. You go. Please. Please. I'll get my car. I'll be right behind you." This last was delivered over her shoulder as she hurried from the dining room.

Since the busgirl wasn't to be carried out feet first after all, Anna thought Tiny might make her finish out her shift, but the headwaitress had already retreated into the kitchen, no doubt calling back the shift that had just clocked out. Anna glanced at her watch. The wedding party was late. Tiny hated that. Anna was glad she wasn't going to be around to collect the fallout.

"She going to be okay?" the EMT asked of Nicky.

Anna had seen no signs of difficulty breathing, disorientation, sweating or any other symptoms. "I guess so," she said. "I think she's mostly scared. Still, she'll need to be checked out."

"Yeah. They do that at the clinic."

Anna heard the huff in the ranger's voice and wondered at it till she realized she'd spoken not like a middle-aged, divorced, down-and-out waitress but as if she were the woman's district ranger. America's caste system was not immutable or state-sanctioned, but one did exist. Waitresses were frowned upon if they spoke with force or confidence regarding anything but the daily special. Inadvertently Anna had behaved as an equal, and the ranger was offended.

"Let's go," Lorraine ordered. "It'll be tight in the ambulance. You ride with me," she said to Anna. This time conscious of her place in the pecking order, Anna humbly followed the chief ranger, walking a half step behind as befitted her reduced circumstances. There was some satisfaction in knowing she'd earned this lesson in humility. Unthinkingly, she'd perpetrated the same subtle form of snobbery more times than she was comfortable remembering.

The clinic was small but well equipped. The staff was comprised of men and women who'd chosen this remote outpost in which to practice medicine not because they couldn't compete for jobs in the open market, but because they preferred the glories of Yosemite to the monetary rewards of the cities. Cricket was put on oxygen and the doctor was called from his home. By the time he arrived, Cricket was resting more easily and seemed out of immediate danger.

The rangers who'd responded to the 911 call told the doctor what they could of the incident. Anna once again chafed on the sidelines. When she could stand it no more, she bulled her way into the conversation to tell them she believed Cricket had been using an inhalant, probably marijuana or crack, and had suffered an adverse reaction either to the drug or to some additive of the drug. Her news was listened to politely but only taken seriously by Lorraine Knight.

Because of the life-threatening nature of any ailment that compromised breathing, it was decided Cricket would be transported to the hospital in Merced, an hour and a half southwest of the park.

What with one thing and another, forty-five minutes passed before Anna noticed Nicky had never arrived at the clinic.

CHAPTER 4

There were plenty of reasons Nicky might have stayed at the dorm: sloth, addiction, aversion to doctors. The only one that concerned Anna was collapse from respiratory arrest. She looked around for Lorraine. Through the windowed half-wall between the waiting area and the "No Unauthorized Persons Allowed" zone of the clinic, Anna saw her talking with the doctor.

In her present guise Anna couldn't very well barge in and report. One of Lorraine's law enforcement rangers chose that moment to walk past. Anna grabbed her.

"Nicky, my roommate, never showed up. She said she was coming. Whatever Cricket was into, Nicky did the same stuff."

For the briefest instant the ranger looked blank, and Anna feared the NPS was going downhill. The information jelled, the woman's eyes focused and she said, "I'll give you a lift."

It wasn't waitresses whom emergency-response people looked down on; it was anybody who wasn't them and/or wasn't in need of them, tunnel vision born of seven parts necessity and three parts arrogance. One on one, the caste differences disappeared.

The ranger's name was Diane, but that was all Anna learned during their short ride to the employee dorms. She talked a blue streak. A listener by training and inclination, Anna was uncomfortable doing all the talking. An indefinable power was lost. When one opened one's mouth, learning, seeing-the kind of seeing Anna was good at, seeing behind faces to the gears within that drive human emotion and action-was lost. Still, she persevered, telling Diane of the out of control hilarity, loss of balance, confused spatial relations, the sudden wedding party-every detail she could remember. It was her hope the ranger would repeat the information to Lorraine. What good it would do, she didn't know. There was nothing in it relating to the four missing kids, but it might help in diagnosing Cricket or, if they were unbelievably lucky, in finding the source of whatever it was Cricket and Nicky were using.

The door to the room she shared with Cricket and Nicky was closed. To Diane it meant nothing. In Anna tiny alarms went off. To her unending annoyance, the girls never closed the door. They were party animals who craved the incessant noise and constant comings and goings of their fellows.

Anna pushed the door open. The lights were off.

"Nicky?"

A squeak came from the darkness on Cricket and Nicky's side of the room. Nicky-or something-was alive and awake.

"It's Anna. I'm going to turn on the light, okay?" Without waiting for an answer, she flipped the switch by the door. For reasons she'd never been able to fathom, institutional light came in only two forms: dim and creepy like the leavings of a brownout, or harsh and glaring. The overhead lighting in the Ahwahnee dorm was of the former variety. The dirty wash of feeble illumination gave the room the look of a tenement building in a Eugene O'Neill play.

Nicky was on her bed in her waitress uniform, down to the small black apron she'd apparently forgotten to take off. The ticket book was sticking out of the pocket. She leaned against the wall, hands loose at her sides like a broken doll, face simultaneously blank and afraid. Anna wondered if she'd slipped into a drug nightmare and couldn't tell whether the demons she battled were from within or without.

Followed by Diane, Anna entered the room but didn't crowd too close to Nicky. "It's me, Anna," she said again soothingly. "This is Diane. She's one of the EMTs who came when you called. You never showed up at the clinic and we got worried."

"Is Cricket okay?" Nicky asked.

Anna relaxed, shoulders she'd not realized she'd tensed dropping, the small bones in her neck cracking softly. Nicky was in and of this world and able to think of someone beside herself. Good indicators of health and sanity.

Diane took over. Anna let her. While she asked Nicky the standard EMT questions and the pale, clearly shaken girl answered, "I'm fine, I'm good," in an unvarying monotone, Anna looked around the room. Nothing was amiss. Clothes were hung neatly in closets or folded away in drawers. Shoes were in regimental lines, books and magazines squared up in tidy stacks, cosmetics tucked in plastic carry-all baskets. Having left the place not two hours earlier looking like a pigsty populated by a herd of teenage clothes horses, Anna found the pristine order unsettling.

"The place looks nice," she said guardedly.

Nicky shot her a frightened look and clamped her lips shut so tightly their childish plumpness was reduced to a thin line of white. Until Diane, with her badge, gun and uniform, was gone, Nicky wasn't talking. Maybe not even then.

Blissfully unaware of the currents of unease, the ranger satisfied herself that Nicky was in good health and left. Moving for the first time since Anna had returned, Nicky sprang from the bed with an energy startling after so prolonged a stillness. She closed the door behind the ranger. She didn't slam it as if angry, but closed it softly and firmly as if attempting to muffle the click of the latch lest some evil being hear and come to investigate.

Anna sat on her bed and kicked off her shoes. "What gives?" she asked.

To Anna's annoyance Nicky flopped down on the bed next to her and began to cry. Uncomfortable with weeping women, even when it was she herself doing the weeping, Anna sat rigid with her shoe in her hand. The nonsense nursery rhyme "diddle diddle dumpling, my son John . . . one shoe off and one shoe on," rattled through her head.

She removed her other shoe to quell the rhyme. Since Nicky was still sobbing and gulping on the mattress next to her, Anna patted her head as if she were a dog and muttered, "It's okay, it's okay," wondering what "it" was and sincerely doubting it was okay.

Minutes passed. Rather than subsiding, the crying grew more breathy, more shrill. Nicky was working herself into a fit.

"Stop it," Anna commanded. "My nerves are getting frayed." Nicky cried harder. "Stop it now," Anna ordered and gave the girl a whack on the shoulder, not enough to hurt her, just enough to get her attention.

Nicky flinched and cried out as if Anna had struck her with a tire iron.

"Shit," Anna hissed. With great gentleness, she moved the prostrate girl's long hair, exposing Nicky's neck. A bruise, so new it had yet to lose its angry red color, was forming there. The shape and placement indicated the heel of a hand and a thumb. On the front of the shoulder Anna knew she would find the corresponding finger marks.

In the brief time she'd been gone, an hour and fifteen minutes at most, someone had come into the room and forcibly held Nicky facedown.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Anna muttered. "That does it. Sit up. There you go." She helped Nicky up and saw that her feet were planted firmly on the floor, lest she flop over in defeat again. "Look at me now. Here. Let me." Using the tail of the girl's shirt, Anna dried her face, then pushed her hair back over her shoulders. "Three deep breaths. No more weeping and wailing tonight. The son-of-a-bitch doesn't deserve it. What's needed here is a lust for revenge."

Nicky smiled at that.

"Good girl." For no reason except that it felt right, Anna got a brush from the dresser and started brushing Nicky's straight brown hair, gently working out the tangles. The sobs subsided to an occasional outbreak.

Having set aside the brush, Anna again tucked Nicky's hair behind her ears so she could see her face, and said: "Do you want a drink of water, blow your nose?"

Nicky nodded. Anna fetched a box of Kleenex and a plastic bottle of the newly fashionable Yosemite Water that stood half empty on a night stand.