Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (3 page)

At least the exercise kept me warm.

I drank from the spring, and when nature inevitably called, I did that in the stream a few feet before it tumbled out the wall. Then I went back to huddling in both comforters, as close to the waning heat of the stove as I could get. I gouged some splinters out of one wooden upright, but it wasn’t going to be enough to get me through the day, let alone another night.

I had to get out.

The windows were too small to crawl out of. The trapdoor was not giving way. I thought about it long and hard, while a can of soup heated in the stove near the hot coals of my next-to-last log. I’d popped a ragged hole in the top with my length of re-bar, and then pried up part of the top. Compared to Aunt Marge’s homemade masterpieces, it was garbage, but right then it tasted like heaven.

I stared upward. I either needed fuel enough to not freeze till someone found me, or I needed out. The trapdoor was too heavy to budge, and too sturdy for a piece of rebar to do much damage to. But I couldn’t give up. It wasn’t in me. Not yet.

I crawled up the ladder, and started attacking the floorboard parallel to the trapdoor. Sure, it was an old, thick plank. With luck, however, it might be more
old
than thick.

I fell off the ladder twice, and my hands were numb from the vibrations from the blows I struck, before I scraped up a handful of splinters and threw them in the stove. I drank some more water. It didn’t help.

I tried Plan B. That involved heating the tip of the re-bar in the coals and trying to burn the wood planks above me. I succeeded in leaving some black gouges.

Plan C was trying to hold a flaming log to the trapdoor long enough for the trapdoor to catch fire. It smoldered, and it blackened, but it did not burst into flame. Admittedly, setting fire to the cabin wasn’t my best option, but I was getting pretty desperate by then.

Plan D involved sitting by the woodstove watching the coals slowly cool and darken.

It was around noon when I went to the far wall and started attacking it with the re-bar. I’d shut the drafts on the woodstove and banked the remaining hot coals as best I could. If I got lucky‌—‌phenomenally, even-better-than-lotto lucky‌—‌I might hack my way out into the forest and at least have access to firewood. Then I could do something intelligent and hightail it off that mountain before dark.

When dark came, I was exhausted, my back and arms in agony from repeated strikes of metal on stone, and the cellar had gotten very cold. I ate a can of soup cold by the light of one of the two battery-operated lanterns. I’d turned off the other to save it. I huddled against the woodstove more for comfort than any warmth it had to give, and slept.

3.

I
ate the last can of soup the following morning. I ached all over, from cold, from weariness, from despair. The carpet burns on my feet, plus the long chill, left them both numbed and irritated. My hands weren’t any better. I was not really warm inside my cocoon of two comforters, but I wasn’t freezing, either. I tried for a few hours to hack at the far wall again, but the re-bar’s vibrations made my arms ache clear to my eyebrows, and I was becoming light-headed from lack of food. I loaded up on the spring water, and fell asleep. I dreamt I had been forgotten by Tall and Shotgun, and that this was the plan all along: let me die by slow inches in this cellar, instead of clean and quick in the open.

I started shaking before dawn, when the cold had settled in hard and fierce. I told myself to jump up and down to get warm, but my feet were blocks of wood even though I’d been curled up tight all night in the comforters. To get a drink, I had to inchworm along the cold stone floor, then stick my face directly into the water because I did not want to make my hands any colder by poking them out of the comforters.

I got back to my spot by the woodstove and dozed off again. I wanted to be awake. I wanted to get out. The problem was, I was finally warm again, and so sleepy my body shut down without my brain’s permission. I jerked awake three times, and the third time, I got to my knees. I crawled to the far wall and picked up the re-bar length. Just a hunk of some kind of steel or iron, as thick as my thumb, as long as my arm, that’s all it was.

It was Excalibur to me.

I made my hands curl around it to hold it, and I made myself thrust its tip between fieldstones and start working out mortar. I had yet to get one stone free, but I chiseled away in fits and starts until I fell asleep again thinking I was still working.

I woke to thumps and shouts. I was so cold I couldn’t think. Some part of me thought it was Tall and Shotgun, come to finish the job, and I picked up the re-bar. It took me four tries to get my fingers around it. Yellow oozed out of my carpet-scraped hands and bruised palms. When I bent my fingers, some of the thin scabs burst and the fluid wept out. The pain startled me. I hadn’t felt any for what seemed like days.

I tried to get to my knees, but I was too wrapped in my comforters. I fell, and landed on my poor hands when my feet refused to do their job. Stars exploded in my head. I lay gasping, spinning, suddenly very hot. A small voice in my head told me I was in much bigger trouble than the rest of me knew.

There were more thumps and then a loud bang. I held onto the re-bar awkwardly. It was like trying to hold onto a needle while wearing mittens.

A flashlight’s white-blue beam cut across the cellar. The battery-operated lanterns had died out the previous night. I hadn’t realized how gray the cellar was until that flashlight came to blind me.

I heard a shout, and an uneven tread that nagged at memory. I knew that walk. Step-thunk. That was Punk Sims, who’d lost one leg at the knee in a car accident. He’d gone on disability, but he’d missed cop work enough to agree that being my part-time deputy was a new lease on life. Good man, Punk. Strange name, but good man. Who, I wondered, not for the first time, would wish the first name Purdy on anyone? No wonder he preferred Punk.

Punk got down on the floor next to me and took my pulse. His face was white as the snow. He bellowed, “Tom!” at a volume I’d never known him capable of. A moment later, Tom’s round, red face was there, too, floating incongruously around like a demented moon. “Lil!” he cried hoarsely, and then snarled at someone behind them, “Get a stretcher and some rope!”

To me, Punk said, “Lie still, okay? Just lie still. Let the paramedics do it all. We got you, Lil.”

That sounded nice. I asked, “Boris?”

“He’s fine, Bobbi’s got him.”

I smiled. Then I went back to sleep.

***^***

I woke up‌—‌again‌—‌in the big university hospital in Charlottesville‌—‌again.

These things really have to stop starting that way.

First time around, I’d gotten a wicked knife cut across the ribs from a nutjob small-time drug dealer. Second time, a Collier ran me off the road. Third time…

I
hurt
. I mean I hurt like a broken rib or a knife cut couldn’t hurt. I thought my hands and feet were on fire. Live coals for bones and flames for flesh. Tears came out of my eyes without my permission. “Sweet Jesus!” I said through my teeth.

Aunt Marge‌—‌again‌—‌wailed, “Oh, Lil!” and informed me that I was completely and totally idiotic, shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper, and all the usual sort of lecture I’d gotten from her before.

“Hurts,” I informed the world.

Roger kindly pushed a button near my hand. “It’s going to, for a while,” he said helpfully. Dear Roger. Ex-military, and don’t ask what it was he did, because you’ll never find out. He paints amazing watercolors in his retirement, and helps Aunt Marge run the Littlepage Eller Animal Sanctuary just outside town. She named it for me, and gets a peculiar grin whenever she tells the story of how I gave up my accidental Eller inheritance to build it. As she often says, it’s good to have
one
building with both Eller and Littlepage above the door.

A few moments later, the firestorm backed off to mere pain. “God A’mighty. What happened to me?”

“Hypothermia,” said Roger, still handing tissues to Aunt Marge. She was for once not toting a large bag full of clanking thermoses of the soups and juices she made. Aunt Marge had been a dietitian, and still considered it her mission in life to nourish the world.

I tried moving my feet. Holy Heavenly hosts, did that hurt. It hurt like eighteen toothaches in every toe, with some raw blisters thrown in. Roger nodded with sympathy. “Good news is, feeling it that much means there’s not likely permanent damage. Bad news is, it hurts like that.”

I squeaked in my throat. I’d tried to move my hand. The left one wasn’t bad, but the right one was doing a fair imitation of raw hamburger all the way to the elbow.

“Infection,” Roger supplied. “You’re on antibiotics.”

I yawned enormously. I considered my options. I fell back asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was to a yowling, howling aria of woe that made Pavarotti sound like an amateur hack. Only one creature on the face of the earth makes that noise: an unhappy cat.

I shot up in bed. “Boris!”

Bobbi bustled in. Behind her came Rajiv Vidur, her hubby and Crazy’s new veterinarian. An Ohioan of Indian descent, Raj had fallen hard for Bobbi, and they’d married the previous October, to mutual joy and much local consternation. Raj was Boris’s vet. By default, since Dr. Mitchell refused to ever treat Boris again. I didn’t blame him. He’d neutered Boris for me. Boris took it badly. To the tune of Dr. Mitchell getting stitches. Raj had a more lenient view of feral rage, and he held the carrier in both arms despite the fact Boris was rocking it back and forth in his fury.

I held out my bandaged hands. “Gimme!”

Raj set the carrier on the foot of the bed. A nurse hurried in, harried, flustered. “We don’t allow animals!”

Bobbi gestured. Raj turned and started talking to the nurse about the invaluable nature of a companion animal in recovery from trauma, and got her out of the room, shut the door behind them. Bobbi opened the carrier. “There you go, you big baby,” she told Boris, who lurked in the depths. “What a pain in the butt,” she told me. “Complain, complain, complain, it was like having Ruth to supper.”

“Boris!” I cooed. “Boris, c’mon, sweetie!”

It’ll tell you how good a friend Bobbi is that I will coo to my cat in front of her. And that she’d put up with him.

It’ll tell you about Boris that he slunk out of the carrier, ears flat, eyes huge, fur fluffed, until he had crawled safely near my face. Then, having sniffed me all over, he voiced a long series of indignant chirps and growls before he head-butted me bruisingly in the chin. Honor satisfied, he flopped across my chest, and started making happy starfish-paws into my shoulder, his mismatched eyes glowing one gold, one green as he purred.

Arms curled around him, I sighed. “Thanks, Bobbi.”

“No trouble. He’s fine, by the way. He was bouncing off the walls at your place, and Raj thought it’d be best to keep him with us till you came home.” Her smile wobbled. She gave me a gentle half-hug. I felt her tremble. “Oh God, Lil, what we were thinking…”

If I hadn’t been heavily and pretty happily drugged, I’d have asked a lot of questions. Instead, I said again, “Thanks. For bringing Boris.”

Bobbi reached out and tickled Boris’s chin. The tag on his collar jangled. It was a five-pointed star, just like a deputy’s star, that Aunt Marge had long ago gotten him. “Hon,” she said, “what makes you think he gave me a choice?”

***^***

The nurse chased out Bobbi, Raj and Boris, but not without a fight. Boris twisted, squirmed, wriggled, yowled, howled and wailed his way to the elevator at such a volume I thought he’d rupture something.

Worn out, I lay dozing until Tom arrived, bringing with him Punk, and, to my surprise, the county police chief from one county down and over, Kurt Danes. I’d met him in passing, which is to say, we’d traded phone calls a few times to exchange information on this or that law-breaker. He was a sand-colored guy: hair, eyes, weathered skin. Affable. But his smile never hit his eyes.

“Now I know where I was,” I said after we’d greeted each other. “So maybe you can tell me who had me there.”

Tom and Punk traded glances. They nodded to Kurt, as the one who had jurisdiction. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, though that could’ve been the pollen count from the gigantic arrangement Maury Morse had sent on behalf of the town. It had gladiolus, fern, baby’s breath, and a dozen bright flowers I had never seen a name for. Even I had sneezed, and I don’t have allergies.

“It’s like this, Lil,” Kurt said in that soft-drawling way he has that is a complete lie. The man was a drill instructor in the Marines before he came home. “We only found you by a bit of luck, and it was strange at that.”

Not words to make me feel warm and fuzzy all over, but I didn’t get picky. Alive was alive. “I’m grateful no matter what.”

“Give credit where it’s due, your boys put it together.” Kurt waved his hat at Tom and Punk, who blushed identically. “They asked me if I knew anyplace someone could hide a sheriff, and we hit every one I could think of. It’s luck that I knew about that particular one.” To my amazement, Kurt turned pink around the ears. “It was my grand-daddy’s before the feds took the land. Otherwise…” He gave a shrug. “Well, it’s a helluva good set-up for a still.”

Okay, I was on some good drugs, but I wasn’t that out of it. “Wait, how’s that ‘strange’?”

Tom deferred to Punk, who also got a little red around the edges. What ailed those boys? “Well, I know you got no close neighbors on Littlepage Road, but I figured it was worth asking Missy. You know.”

I did. Missy Campbell was a military widow with three kids and a marginal income from working at the Food Mart. She saved her husband’s pension for the kids’ education, and made up the differences by entertaining men in the wee hours. None of us made a fuss about it. She did what she had to do, and from what rumor brought to my ears by way of Aunt Marge and Bobbi, she was smart enough to do it with condoms.

“Turns out, her younger boy’s all about cars right now,” Punk went on earnestly, “and I figured maybe if there’d been a strange one they’d have seen it. Turns out he did. Kid’s got a mind for cars like I don’t know what. Like one of those savants or something.”