Parts Unknown (12 page)

“Awake at last! How do you feel? Can you tell me your name?”

I answered her.

“What?” She leaned closer and I realized that what had sounded clear to me had come out as a faint mumble.

“Kirk. Devlin Kirk.”

“Good—that’s right. I want you to lie still and rest. The doctor will be right down.”

“Call Bunchcroft.”

“Please lie still, Mr. Kirk. You’re not supposed to move.”

“Call Bunchcroft.”

“You want me to call someone? You want me to let someone know you’re here?”

“My office. Call Bunchcroft.”

She finally understood and, fumbling through my wallet in the personal effects tray under the bed, found a business card and asked if that was the number. It was, and out she went, and I did too.

I woke again to a light burning into my pupil and a thumb peeling my eyelid back.

“Just lie still, Mr. Kirk. You have a slight concussion.”

The doctor’s hands went out of sight and I felt his fingers probe here and there with firm but gentle curiosity. While he was busily checking this and that, he asked me what year it was and the name of the president of the United States. Then the bearded face came back.

“You’re really a very lucky man, Mr. Kirk. I think the concussion’s the worst of it. Do you feel discomfort anywhere?”

“Shoulder.”

“Um hum.” The fingers began poking again and found where it hurt most. “That hurt?”

“Goddamn!”

“Um hum.” The fingers focused on the sorest spot and bore in for a moment. “We’ll take an X ray later, but I think you separated your shoulder briefly during the impact. I don’t feel anything out of place now, but the picture can tell us more.”

“Okay.”

“There are a couple people waiting who need to ask you some questions. I’ll check back in a while.”

The first and most important was a businesslike woman with a clipboard. She wanted to know who was paying for all this.

“Health insurance. Card’s in wallet.”

She fished it out, being careful to let me see everything she took from the wallet, and that she put it all back. When she was satisfied and her admissions form completed, my next interrogator came in.

“Mr. Kirk, how you doing? Want to tell me what all happened?” The highway patrol officer also wanted to see my driver’s license and insurance verification.

I told him about the truck pulling across the tunnel exit. “Did you find out who it’s registered to?”

“We found the truck down the canyon a ways. It was pretty beat up. Somebody drove it as far as it would go, looks like, and then walked, I guess. The owner claims it was stolen—he didn’t know it was gone until he started to go home after work.” The sergeant stuck a thumbnail between two crooked front teeth and thought a moment. “Did you see anybody in the truck at all before you hit?”

I closed my eyes and tried to bring back the moment, the rock walls that seemed to collapse around me, the truck swelling with nightmare swiftness as the Healey shrieked and tried to stop. “No. I can’t remember much except the truck. But I didn’t see anybody in the driver’s seat… . I’m sure I would have seen anyone there.” I ran the scene through memory once more: The driver’s window was empty. “Someone must have pushed it across the tunnel mouth.”

The officer nodded. “I see. Well, Mr. Kirk, we estimate your speed at around seventy miles per hour at the time of the accident. That about right?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t looking at the speedometer.”

“Well, your skid marks show you were going at least seventy miles per hour, and the speed limit there in that tunnel is forty. I’m going to have to cite you, Mr. Kirk.”

“Me? What about the guy who pushed the truck across the road? Doesn’t he get a ticket?”

He handed me a yellow copy of a speeding ticket that explained where I had to be and when, and what it might cost me in money and points. “If we catch him, sure. But tell you the truth, I don’t think that’s very likely. I’m inclined to think it was kids trying to do something funny. Except the truck was wiped clean—no prints at all where you’d look for them. That doesn’t sound exactly like kids, does it?” He waited but I said nothing. “Well, everybody nowadays knows about fingerprints, don’t they?” It wasn’t a question and I didn’t volunteer a nod. “You don’t have any idea who might have done it, do you?”

“No.”

“Kids. Some of them get pretty destructive, anymore.” He handed me some more forms. “You’ll have to fill out an accident report, and be sure and list your insurance carrier. Mail them or bring them by your nearest highway patrol office within the week, Mr. Kirk.” He started out and then came back. “Almost forgot to give you this, too.” It was another ticket for failure to wear a seat belt. “Have a good day.”

“What about my car? How bad?”

“Totaled.”

A good day indeed.

Sometime during the night I was moved from intensive care into a semiprivate room. That’s what my insurance allowed for, though the businesslike lady did suggest that for a few dollars extra I could have the luxury of private accommodations. The health care business might have been overbuilt, but it wasn’t going to surrender profits without a struggle. Neither was I. My roommate, who had the window bed, lay silent behind drawn curtains with his television flickering and only occasionally shuffled past the foot of my bed to the bathroom, where he spent a long time. I lay and watched the half-open door to the hallway and waited for Bunch. Just after the nurse brought breakfast on a plastic tray holding tiny portions of equally plastic food, Uncle Wyn, leaning heavily on his cane, tapped on the door and was followed in by Bunch.

“Jesus, Dev, you eat this crap?” Bunch asked.

“Not because I want to. At least there’s not much of it. What have you found out?”

“I found out you got a concussion and a few bruises, and you might get out later today if the doc figures everything’s okay.”

“I already knew that much.”

Uncle Wyn lowered himself gently into one of the two chairs, his arthritic knee supported by the cane. “We also learned that the Healey’s in worse shape than you are, and I learned that it probably wasn’t no accident. Want to let your old uncle know what the hell’s going on?”

“What did Bunch tell you?”

“Not damn much.”

Uncle Wyn was my closest family—all of it, in fact—and he had given me the capital to get Kirk and Associates started soon after my father’s death. But the interest on the loan hadn’t been the real reason he backed us. It was for something to fill empty-nest days as well as for an echo of the competitiveness and excitement that had been the routine pace of life during his professional baseball years. Though I often discussed cases with him, I tried to avoid the ones that might hint of danger to the only son of his deceased only brother. But there was no avoiding what the man could see plainly, so I told him as much as he needed to know.

“The motorcycle gang? You think they did it?”

“Somebody set me up. Who else?”

Bunch wandered restlessly along the curtain separating me from my cellmate. “We’re going to have to square things, Dev. If we don’t, they’ll just keep coming at us.”

“I thought you were planning to snatch their dog?”

Uncle Wyn shook his head. “It’s not good, Dev. First assault, now you’re talking escalation. Preventive strikes. Whatever. I wouldn’t’ve given you the money to start this business if I knew it was going to lead to World War Three. You’re goddamn lucky. You know how goddamn lucky you are? You could have been dead twice over—shot at, booby-trapped in a goddamn tunnel. It was damn dumb you went out there alone in the first place!”

There was no answer to the question or to his anger. Bunch finally asked, “What’d the cop say about the bullet hole in the Healey, Dev?”

“He wasn’t looking for it and I didn’t help him find it. As far as I know, he never noticed it.”

“That’s good. I had the car towed to Archer’s.”

Archy didn’t report bullet holes to the police. “What the hey,” he told me once, “they don’t pay no repair bills.” I asked, “Did Archy say anything about her?”

Bunch shook his head. “Just a long, sad whistle.”

Which could have been the car’s dirge. I hoped not. There were only a few of the Austin-Healey 3000s still around. You saw them every now and then taken out of storage for a
cours d’élégance
or an old-timers’ rally on a sunny day in summer. But there weren’t many, and none for sale at a price I could afford. So a lot depended on what wizardry Archy could do with the pieces that were left. “I hope he can do something. She’s a good car—the only one I could fit in.”

“If he can’t, I don’t know who will.”

We talked over the variables of the attack until Bunch’s restlessness drove him to the doorway. “I’m going out and around, Dev. These places … .” His hand included all the life-support equipment. “If you’re not sick when you come in, you get sick looking at it.”

Uncle Wyn listened to the heavy tread of Bunch’s shoes fade down the corridor. “I knew a lot of guys like that—big guys, afraid of nothing except catching a bug.”

“I think the hospital reminds him of Susan.”

“Yeah, probably. It’s hard to get over something like that.” Uncle Wyn, too, stood and braced himself with the cane. “First he gets his goddamn leg nearly chewed off, now you get busted up. This line of work you guys are in, Bunch better get used to hospitals. Listen, that offer’s still open. You know—going into business with me. I’d really like that.”

“Thanks, Uncle Wyn. It may sound funny from a hospital bed, but I’m doing what I want to.”

“It’ll sound even funnier on your tombstone.”

E
VEN A SHORT
stay in the hospital is one of those intense and all-encompassing changes of environment that leave one’s sense of time distorted. Coming back to the familiar office late in the afternoon, I felt … not distant, exactly, but placed at a slightly different angle to the routine life that had gone on without me. The accumulated mail was an indication of that routine, and I spent the rest of the afternoon winnowing advertisements and bills, many of which I had finally caught up on, while I telephoned here and there for leasing information on a car to replace the Healey. “Replace” wasn’t the word and I felt a pang of disloyalty for even thinking it. But either necessity overrode or I would walk. To make up for the pang, I called Archer’s Garage to check on the victim.

“This is Devlin Kirk, Archy. How’s my girl?”

“She ain’t no virgin no more. Ain’t much of nothing else, neither.”

“Can you put her together again?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. Even if I can find the parts, it’ll cost like hey. Why don’t you get yourself a Hyundai or a Yugo? You waste one of them, you ain’t out so much.”

“How about seeing what parts you can find, and let me know what it’ll cost?”

“All right. It’ll take some time, but I’ll put it on the wire. You want I should look for another Healey in case this one’s kaput?”

Talk about fickleness! But with a sigh I fell victim to the temptation. “See what you can find.”

“Probably be cheaper to do that. Oh, yeah, I found the bullet. It was in the fire wall on the rider’s side. Son of a gun just missed the gas tank. Went through the deck lid, the rider’s seat back, and halfway through the fire wall. That dude must of been firing a cannon at you.”

“Bunch or I’ll be by to pick it up. Thanks, Archy.”

One of the envelopes tucked away between mail order catalogs for electronics gear was from Warner Memorial Hospital, a response to the inquiry from Kirk and Associates Medical Underwriters about the treatment of services provided one Nestor Calamaro. The statement of account was accompanied by photocopies of the health insurance claim form and a standard-treatment form with its list of services and their diagnostic and procedure code numbers. The block for “Med. Emergency, Office” was checked with a dollar amount following; “Immunizations and Injections” noted a tetanus shot and its fee; a scribble under the “Sutures” section indicated that Nestor was sewn up. Farther down, columns of code numbers without labels had checks and amounts marked here and there. I matched them against the procedure code in the Blue Cross/Blue Shield physician’s manual and put together an impressive list of diagnostic tests. Nestor’s treatment involved an extensive battery of blood tests that seemed far beyond the needs of a simple cut. Apparently the hospital’s billing office was sensitive to the requirements for those services too, because a photocopy of the doctor’s order asking for them was appended. The doctor was Morris Matheney.

“Dev—you should have called me! I could have picked you up at the hospital.”

“That’s okay, Bunch. Uncle Wyn gave me a ride.”

“And a lecture?”

“The one about ‘consider the future.’ ”

“I’ve always liked that one. You all right? Head cleared up?”

“I feel a little dopey—and no comments, please. The doc said it was the result of concussion. And my shoulder’s touchy. But I’m a hell of a lot better off than the Healey.”

“That car’s no loss, believe me. I talked to Dave Miller in vice and narcotics. He didn’t know anything about the Wilcox farm people, but he said he’d ask around DPD.” He added, “Your uncle was right, you know—you really were dumb to get suckered that way.”

“Naw, I figured it for a setup, Bunch. That’s why I went out there early.”

“Well, that’s one way to check it out—stick your head up and see if they shoot. That the way the Secret Service taught you to do it?”

“ ‘If all else fails … .’ By the way, Archy found the bullet. It went through half the car before lodging in the fire wall.”

“Yeah. That figures. It was a high-velocity weapon they used on us at the farm, too. You know that hard crack they make?”

“Believe me, I do know.” Another envelope held something of interest to Bunch and I handed it to him. “You’d better see this.”

“What is it?” He read and then looked up. “They can’t do this—it’s my goddamn leg and my goddamn dog bite!”

The letter was from the city and county health department. It warned Bunch that unless the dog that bit him was located and tested, he could be subject to rabies shots. If he had established a religious exemption from inoculation, he was to call a certain number. If not, he was to call either the referring physician whose name appeared below or the health service, number supplied, and make arrangements to start the inoculations.