I had my phone on the seat beside me. It had been a couple of hours since I'd gotten a signal, but at the top of a big hill about fifteen miles from the northern end of Route 9 I noticed that two of the little signal bars were lit up, so I pulled over and called the hospital in Calais.
"I'd like to speak to one of your patients," I told the lady who answered the phone. "First name Rosario. Last name Colón, he was in there with a collapsed lung. Can you ring his room for me?"
"I know who you mean, sir," she said. "I'm afraid he's not in this hospital anymore."
That seemed an odd way to say it. "Not in that hospital? What do you mean? He didn't croak, did he?"
She cleared her throat. "I'm afraid I don't have any more information, sir. If you would like to give me your name and phone number, I could have someone get back to you
."
Yeah, right. I broke the connection, sat there thinking about it. She already had my phone number, or could probably get it easily enough. I didn't think that mattered too much, it's not a crime to make a phone call. Plenty of people must have seen the two of us together, anyhow, when they brought us in. The question was, what had Rosey done? He must have pulled something at the hospital, and it had to have been something good, too, because that woman on the phone was not going to tell me about it.
Fucking Rosario. I should have known that he couldn't take the waiting. God, all he had to do was lie there. I had figured on him being sick enough, I thought that would override his paranoia and keep him safe in bed. I had left him there with no money and no clothes. What else could I have done? Tie him to the bed? He couldn't trust me, though, so he had gone looking for an edge. I knew it.
Bookman would know what had happened, but I didn't want to talk to him. I tried Louis's number but there was no answer, not that I'd expected one. Louis was probably down in Machias trying to atone to Eleanor for his sins. She would forgive him, I was sure of that, she loved him too much to do otherwise, but I was also sure that she'd make him work for it. I called Bookman's house, talked to Mrs. Bookman for a few minutes, but Nicky and Franklin were out somewhere, and so was her husband.
I got out of the van and stomped around in the weeds for a while, cursing my luck. An eastern mockingbird flew up to the top of a dead tree and sang to me. He was loud, man, and he was into it. As I stood there watching he spread his wings and jumped straight up in the air, singing, flapping his wings and then settling back down onto his roost without missing a note. Damn, he had nothing to worry about but singing, that and driving the other mockingbirds out of his territory. No wonder he was happy.
Who the hell could I call? Eastport and Lubec were far away enough from Calais that most people there would probably not have heard about, or paid much attention to, whatever had gone down at the Calais hospital, so it probably wouldn't do me much good to try Hobart or Roscoe or any of the other people I knew.
I'd left the motel around seven that morning, and I'd been on the road for about five hours. I still had time, though. It might cost me an hour or so, but I could head west instead of east when I got to the end of Route 9, go up and talk to Mrs. Johnson. Maybe she'd know somebody.
* * *
It wasn't all that far from the end of Route 9 up to Mrs. Johnson's house in Grand Lake Stream. At least it didn't seem so to me. It took me about thirty minutes to drive it, not bad when you compare that to the duration of a subway ride from Park Slope to midtown. You take Route 1 north, and you turn off of that onto a narrow two-lane strip through the woods to get there, and it seems like a longer drive than it is because you don't pass much of anything besides trees once you've made the turn. It's almost like you're going back in time, or maybe that's not it at all, maybe you're going sideways, somehow, journeying to some separate place that's only distantly related to the world you came from. The tires on the minivan made a hypnotic thrumming noise that silenced the debating team inside my head. I passed that first sign after a while, the one that says "You Have Just Entered," and still nothing, just more trees, then a while later I passed a camp back up in the woods, and finally a bridge across a stream, and the tackle store, and not a hell of a lot else, a few scattered buildings that catered to the fishing addicts who fly in periodically for their fix.
There was a scar on the pine tree I had hit with the Subaru, but not a big one, considering the damage I'd done to Hobart's vehicle. A piece of bark was missing, maybe ten inches wide and two or three high, the exposed wood just a little punky from the impact, weeping sticky pine sap. I parked the minivan next to a GMC pickup in Mrs. Johnson's front yard. A tall kid came out of the house, he was a couple of inches taller than me, but skinny, long dark hair, dark eyes, ropy, corded muscles in his arms. "Hey," he said, extending a hand.
"Chris Johnson?"
"Yeah."
"Your mom around?"
He blinked at me in surprise. "She went on downstreet," he said. He was curious, I could tell, but he didn't ask. "You want me to go get her?"
"You think she'll be long?" I said. "Is it okay if I wait?"
"Sure," he said. "She should be back in a few minutes. Get you a cup of coffee? Beer?"
"No, thanks. I'm good. They told me you were up in the Allagash, but nobody told me what it was."
"Allagash Wilderness Waterway. You never been?"
"Never even heard of the place."
"Oh, man," he said. "You should go. Little crowded, right now, we seen other canoes almost every day we was up there, but still
" He shook his head. "I got pictures. You wanna see 'em? Better than me trying to tell you what it's like."
We were still looking at the pictures when Chris's mother came walking up the road. She just glanced at the minivan, but then she saw me talking to her son. "Hey, Coyote," she said. "You come back to tell me some stories?"
"I came back to ask you a question. I owe you some money, too."
"That's right, you do. Some businessman I would make, huh?"
Chris glanced at me, then at his mother. I guess he thought his mom and I were an odd combination, and maybe we were. He shook his head, suppressing a smile. "I'm going back inside," he said. "Nice to meet you, Manny."
"Same here. Thanks for showing me the pictures."
* * *
I told Mrs. Johnson about Rosario leaving the hospital.
"He's that man you carried out of the woods," she said. "Do you still have that cell phone?"
I got it out of the car and gave it to her. She made some calls, speaking, as she had done the first time, that strange language. All I understood were the names and an occasional sentence in English, like, "Oh, no, John, are you telling the truth?" I had no choice but to wait, so I leaned back against the van and tried to relax. There was a bunch of cedar waxwings feeding in some juniper bushes across the road from Mrs. Johnson's house. At first I saw only a couple, and I thought they were female cardinalswaxwings have a similar crest and a sort of subtle reddish tan coloringbut the longer I looked, the more of them I saw, there had to be twenty or thirty of them, and cardinals never flock together like that. Waxwings do, though, certain times of the year they forget their territorial impulses and get together to feed in bunches. I wonder if they do it because they enjoy each other's company. Ornithologists and other scientists will tell you that's bullshit, that birds don't enjoy or not enjoy, for them there's only instinct. I'll tell you something, though, they don't know, either. They're just giving you their best guess.
Mrs. Johnson shut the phone off and handed it back to me. "Do you remember my friend, the doctor?"
"Yeah," I said. "Absolutely."
"Well, he told me that your friend is crazy. Yesterday morning your friend got up out of bed, disconnected himself from the tubes and machines, went down to the hospital loading dock, and stole a station wagon."
"Station wagon?"
She shook her head. "My doctor friend told me that they have a walk-in cooler down behind the dock, and when someone dies in the hospital, they just put a shroud over them, tie a tag on their big toe, wheel them in there on a gurney, and leave them there. When the man from the funeral parlor comes to get them, he just backs his station wagon up to the dock, goes inside to fill out the paperwork, then brings his gurney into the walk-in box, and they flop the dead person from the hospital's gurney onto his, and he loads up and goes away. Just like someone picking up a load of frozen hamburgers."
I waited for her to go on, but she didn't, she just stood there looking at the ground and shaking her head. Rosario on the loose. It was a good thing Nicky was with the Bookmans. "So what happened? Rosario stole some undertaker's van?"
"Oh," she said, looking up. "Sorry. The man from the funeral parlor had his wagon all loaded when your friend found him. Your friend had a knife, and he made the man drive around the block, and then he stole the poor man's clothes, left him standing there in his boxer shorts. And then he left the dead person in the McDonald's parking lot. The police found it there, the gurney with the body on it. Oh, and I almost forgot. You remember that Russian, the one that hit his head on a rock? They found him dead in his hospital bed. My friend says it looks like he was strangled." She clucked her tongue. "What do you think happened to your friend, Coyote? Did he lose his mind?"
"No." I looked over at her. "Did you ever know somebody who was so sure that everybody was going to screw them that they almost made it happen?" She nodded. "Well, Rosey is like that. He's so afraid, he thinks so much about everything bad that could go wrong, that he winds up doing something so crazy that it seems to attract bad results. It's like if you have to buy tires for your car, but you're so sure the tire guy is going to screw you, you go in there and treat him bad, you yell about every dollar it's going to cost you, you force the guy to screw you just to cover himself. You know what I mean?"
She was nodding. "He calls up the evil spirits. You believe in spirits, Coyote?"
"No."
"Don't be so sure of yourself. So what is he going to do now?"
"He's looking for something he can hold over my head. He thinks he's going to have to force me to give him his money. And the only thing up here that I care about is my son Nicky."
"You'd better go get him, then," she said.
"He's in a safe place."
She shook her head. "Go get him."
"I'm on my way. Listen, I figure I owe you four hundred bucks, let me give you that."
"I only took you out one day. That's a hundred."
"Yeah, but you sat with me two days in the hospital, and if you hadn't known that doctor, my life would've gotten a lot more complex. So I owe you for three days, plus you gotta get a tip."
She was shaking her head. "A hundred dollars," she said firmly.
"Mrs. Johnson?"
"Yeah?"
"Please."
She stared at me for a minute. "All right. But you've gotta come back and tell me how this comes out."
* * *
I was surprised, the minivan broke one hundred, no problem. I kept my foot on it all the way back to Route1. I passed only two other cars, they were going in the opposite direction, and they seemed to be crawling. It was much tougher going once I got southbound on Route 1, there was lots of other traffic. Not too many tourists, though, mostly Maine plates, cars and pickups and a lot of pulp trucks hauling big logs. Then, of course, everybody had to slow down to go through Calais, and there were some traffic lights and so on. But I don't think it mattered. If I had been able to keep my speedometer needle buried the whole trip back, it still would have taken too long. Once I got through Calais, though, Route 1 followed the St. Croix River on its way to Passamaquoddy Bay, and it's only a two-lane road, without a lot of places to pass. I got stuck behind a UPS truck, which was a good thing, I suppose. The guy was moving pretty fast, not fast enough for me, though, but a state cop passed us heading north while I was still looking for a space to get by. It got me thinking that Bookman might be the county sheriff, but he wasn't the only police authority up in this place, they have staties and even some town cops, so I cooled out a little bit and stayed behind the UPS guy.
I could understand Rosario sweating about his money. I could even understand why he would want to wax the Russian, especially after the hurt that the Russian had put on him. And it was not in Rosario's nature to trust anybody, not even me. He might be able to do it for a couple hours or a half a day, and if the two of us had a job going, he might even restrain himself for a couple of days, long enough for us to be able to do what we needed to do, but that was the upper limit. Even after I had saved his ass, carried him out through those woods, he just knew I was going to screw him unless he had a stick he could hit me with. Or it could have been that he was just more comfortable that way, I don't know. I read someplace that LBJ was like that, that he wouldn't trust you unless he had a gun stuck in your ear.
