Dead Level (28 page)

The point is, though, that maybe if in the past couple of hours I hadn’t been shot at, half drowned, firebombed, and drained of a lot of blood—not to mention scared half to death—it might’ve dawned on me sooner that my husband never forgot such things and neither did Mr. Propane.

But I had been, so it didn’t.

CHAPTER
10

F
or an awful hour at the hospital, Wade and Sam couldn’t get anyone to tell them what was happening to Bella, because everyone who knew anything was too busy working on her. So the two stood awkwardly in the corridor, too far from her room to hear anything meaningful but near enough to know things weren’t going well.

But then, suddenly, they were. A young guy in a green scrub suit came out, stripping off latex gloves. Behind him came two nurses, one pushing a cart with a lot of empty glass ampules and vials on it. The other carried a shiny basin heaped with medical instruments and the plastic packaging they’d come in.

“Well, that was unexpected,” said the scrub-suited guy, who turned out to be the doctor on duty; the hospital in Calais was too small to have more than one MD present this late at night.

Or, rather, this early in the morning; by the clock at the nurses’ station, it was 3:35 a.m. Guiltily, Sam felt another wave of fatigue wash over him; if he hadn’t been such an idiot last night, he wouldn’t be so completely wiped out and exhausted now, would he?

“But she’s okay,” added the doctor, whose name was Munson and who was, it seemed to Sam, way too young to be in charge of anything, much less an entire hospital full of sick people. “The upshot, though, is that some of the medicine we were giving her didn’t agree with her.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” It came out harshly, more so than Sam had intended. But now that he wasn’t terrified, he was angry. “I guess you should’ve been more—”

Careful
, he was about to finish, but before he could, Wade shot him a look that conveyed very clearly just who needed to be careful here, and it wasn’t this young physician.

“Sorry,” Sam mumbled. Boy, he was just racking up the points in the good-behavior department lately, wasn’t he?

But the young doc had dealt with anxious family members before. “Don’t worry about it. Anyway, we’ve got her straightened out now. I want her to rest, but if you feel like just going in for a minute—”

“I’ll go,” said Wade. “So she knows we’re here for her. You go on, wait in the lobby for me, okay?”

Nodding, Sam bit his lip. How Wade had intuited that Sam was on the verge of a sudden, ridiculous fit of tears, Sam wasn’t sure, but he was glad to leave the brightly lit hospital corridor behind. Out in the silent lobby—Bob Arnold had been summoned away by a radio call just as all the excitement had erupted—Sam could be alone to collect his thoughts, at least, and try to get a handle on what he was feeling.

But as he exited the ward, he spotted a familiar dark ponytail. Its owner sat in one of the upholstered chairs in the waiting area, flipping through a glossy magazine’s pages without looking at any of them.

He stared in disbelief. It was Carol, whom he’d last seen on her way out of the room at the Motel East with Richard. She got up and turned in appeal; shaking his head, he strode past her.

She caught up to him. “Sam, please.”

“Don’t talk to me, okay?” He kept walking.

“Sam, I’m not here to get anything from you. I just want to say I’m sorry. I made a huge mistake. If I can make up for it somehow, I will. But if not …”

He stopped just short of the big glass doors leading outside, still not looking at her.

“If not,” she finished, “then I’m just … sorry.”

“Why aren’t you in jail?”

He shouldn’t be giving her any kind of opening at all. But he’d had to say what she’d just said so many times, himself, that he’d become a sucker for an apology, he supposed.

“Richard told them that it was all him, that I didn’t have anything to do with … well. With anything.”

So Richard wasn’t a complete bastard, then. Or more likely, Carol knew something she could hold over Richard’s head, Sam thought cynically.

“I’m supposed to bail him out tomorrow after the hearing,” she added.

Right
, Sam thought, so that’s why Richard took all the blame—so there’d be someone on the outside who could get cash together for him.

“They let you take the car? Walk out of jail, just drive away?”

Something about this still wasn’t adding up. A lot, really, and hadn’t Bob Arnold said that there were warrants out on both Richard and Carol?

Sam glanced back at the empty waiting area, then out at the parking lot. “How’d you even know I was here?”

She looked at the floor. “I followed you,” she confessed. “I was on my way back to the motel in case you were still tied up in there, and I
saw the big blond-haired man go into the room. Then, a little later when you both came out …”

His face must’ve betrayed his feelings: confusion, mistrust.

“I was going to get you out of there myself,” she went on, “but he got there first. I just wanted so much to say how sorry I am, that I—”

Suddenly her arms were close around him, her cheek warm against his neck, her hair softly perfumed. “Oh, Sam, please help me. I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do now.”

He let her rest her head on his shoulder. Her shape in his arms felt fine, like it was meant to be there.

Not that he believed her. Once the pleasure of having her in his arms wore off, nothing she’d said would make sense. It didn’t now, even.

But it would serve her right if he pretended not to know that a while longer. It was what his father would have done.

Then he looked up, and in the black reflectiveness of the glass doors saw—

That nightmare face. “Dad?” he whispered. It
couldn’t
be, but—

And then it wasn’t. Carol turned her head to look up at him questioningly when she felt his arms tighten around her, holding her. Outside the glass doors, Bob Arnold frowned as he recognized the woman locked in Sam’s embrace, and started in.

Suddenly she caught on. “Let
go
of me, let … help! Someone, help me, he’s crazy! Help, I’m … you
bastard
!”

Rearing back, eyes blazing and teeth bared in a grimace, she reminded him of a wild animal in the moment before Bob Arnold reached them. A weasel like the one out at the lake, Sam thought, and why, he wondered, was he thinking about that right now?

Bob crossed the lobby, popping the handcuffs from his belt. He snapped them onto Carol’s wrists as Sam gripped her arms, pushing them down carefully so as not to hurt her.

“All right,” Bob said to her, his voice low and calm, almost soothing. “Let’s try it again, and this time there’s not going to be any escaping from anyone’s custody, so save your energy.”

Sam watched her face change as she opened her mouth to lie, to argue and try to bargain her way out of this. Suddenly she was an innocent young woman again, caught up tragically in some awful misunderstanding.

Just then Wade came up to them. “What’s going on?”

Carol’s head swiveled. “Please,” she begged, eyes filling with tears. “Whoever you are, please, this is a mistake. You’ve got to—”

“Save it,” Bob rapped out, and she shut up, reddening as if slapped. “That radio call I got?” He angled his head at her. “Girlfriend here sweet-talked somebody into letting her use the john by herself, at that rest stop on Route 9 on the way over to Bangor. God knows what she told him, but it worked.”

Sam wasn’t sure, but he thought he sensed Carol preening faintly at this description of how well she’d conned even a cop.

Bob went on. “Next thing he knows, he looks around and she’s gone, must’ve gotten a ride back this way from someone out on the highway. Stole another car in Eastport, followed you up here …”

Bob stopped, looking disgusted. But Sam got the point. One thing she’d said
was
true, then: with Richard out of the picture at least temporarily, she
had
needed help.

Money maybe, a place to lay low. And she’d thought that to get it, she’d be able to fool Sam again. That was how dumb she thought he was, the impression he’d given her.

“You’ll be
sorry
,” she spat, twisting in Bob Arnold’s expert grip as he guided her toward the glass doors.

“Yeah,” Sam said. Yeah, he already was. Bob took her out.

“Hey,” Wade said. From the cafeteria entrance now came warm smells of cooking; though it was not yet 4:30 a.m., the earliest morning staffers were already trudging in for their shifts.

“Everything okay?” Wade asked.

“Fine,” Sam said. “I’m good.” In the cafeteria, a big rosy-cheeked woman opened the tray line by sliding a grate up.

“Then how about we check on Bella and your grandfather once more, then get breakfast and take a ride up to the cabin?”

“Great,” Sam agreed. The night wasn’t ending too badly after all, he thought, by the time reached Bella’s bedside.

She opened her eyes, panic filling them at her first sight of the unfamiliar surroundings. But then she saw Wade, and her fear subsided.

Sam took her hand, forced back tears at the bony feel of it. “Hey,” he whispered, and nearly did cry when she gave his fingers a squeeze. “Hey, you look just great to me, you know that?”

She did, too; funny, he thought, how a skinny old woman with dyed red hair and a face that pretty much defined the term
battle-ax
could be so … so
pretty
.

Wade took his phone out, laid it on her bedside table. “You keep this,” he said. She didn’t have one of her own. “Don’t use it until they say you can,” he added cautioningly, and she moved her head up and down a little to show she understood.

“It’ll make her feel better just having it,” Wade explained when she was asleep again. They made their way back out along the corridor. “Because you know she wouldn’t use the one the hospital provides.”

“Right, because it might have germs on it.” Back home, her über-cleanliness could be a trial.

But now not so much. In fact, by the time he sat down at the cafeteria table with Wade, who was already digging into his eggs, he felt almost cheerful.

Still, he couldn’t stop wondering about one detail. “Hey, Wade?”

The big man looked up from his meal, his broad, craggy face mildly amiable now that no one seemed to be in any immediate danger. He wore his usual uniform of a dark sweatshirt over a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots; Sam thought that at his age, he ought to be less comforted by Wade’s presence. But he was very glad he didn’t have to do all this alone.

“Earlier, in the lobby,” he began, not quite knowing how to phrase the rest of it. So he finally just blurted it all out: about the nightmare face in the bilge water, and the other times he’d seen it, ending with the most recent hallucination.

“So what I want to know,” Sam added hesitantly, because if just
one person saw something, that was one thing. But more than one was entirely another. “What I want to know is this,” he said, and then he asked Wade: had
he
seen Sam’s dad, too?
Had
he?

Wade put his cup down, considering the question seriously.

And after a moment, answered.

To store electricity from the solar panels at the cottage, we used a deep-cycle marine battery, plus a converter to change the direct current from the panels to alternating current. That way we could run ordinary appliances on it instead of having to buy special ones.

But not just any household appliances. Fluorescent bulbs for the lamps were mandatory, so as not to waste power, and we didn’t bother even trying to operate electricity hogs like toasters. I’d kept planning to rent a gasoline-powered generator and bring it here along with a vacuum cleaner, and give this place a serious cleaning. But I hadn’t done it, which was why the cabin’s braided rug had so much dog hair embedded in it.

I knew it did, because I’d been lying on it for an hour when light began peeking through the burnt spots of the bed linens nailed up at the windows.

“You’re sure those decking boards are the way we want them?” I whispered.