Triple Witch (31 page)

“That,” I informed Ned Montague, “is your tongue. Now get on that telephone, before I—”

“I’ll give the orders here,” Victor said. But his tone was meditative, and he wasn’t actually doing anything.

“Where were you?” I said it quietly.

“Sitting in an old house,” he replied. “Thinking.”

He kept looking at Peter Mulligan, seeing, I supposed, the other boy: the one who died on his operating table. If I’d had a cattle prod, I’d have zapped Victor with it to get him moving.

Also, I just wanted to hurt him. “I told Sam all about your heart attack,” I said.

That got him. “You
what?
I thought we weren’t going to—”

“Badmouth each other,” I finished. “I changed my mind.”

He wasn’t used to this sort of thing from me. “Look here, Jacobia, if you think you can make me do anything I don’t want to—”

But suddenly that was just what I thought I could do.
Victor had been manipulating me, counting on my view of myself as the good guy, as Sam’s protector. But what had I ended up protecting, except my fine opinion of myself?

The truth was that I’d been so worried about my own image, I’d let Sam walk right into an emotional munitions dump.

I opened my mouth. The words came out fast, as if they’d been waiting for the chance.

“I don’t care what happened to you in New York. I don’t care about the self-indulgent drama you’ve worked up over it. I don’t care if you drop dead right here in this basement. I’ll bury you where the coal bin used to be, and get on with my life.”

He stared at me, dumb with shock.

“You’re going to help this kid here right this minute,” I said, “or
I’ll
tell Sam what you did that time in Central Park.”

Victor winced; even he didn’t think making a homeless man sing for a dollar was very praiseworthy.

“How about it?” I demanded. “And then there was the time—”

“All right.” He frowned impatiently, trying to minimize what I was doing to him. “I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with you, lately, Jacobia.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s something wrong with him.” I gestured at Mulligan. “Get to it.”

Whereupon Victor gave in and thumbed Peter Mulligan’s eyelids open. “Look there,” he commanded, trying to regain some semblance of his dignity. “Tell me what you observe.”

“One of his pupils,” I said, “is larger than the other. Not much larger.”

“Not yet,” Victor agreed. “But it will be. Soon.”

Upstairs, we could hear Ned Montague gabbling into the phone. Ellie had gone up too; now she brought towels and a pan of water.

“I couldn’t think of what else you might need,” she said.

Peter Mulligan began making harsh, gasping sounds. Absently, Victor lifted the kid’s chin up, and Mulligan’s breathing eased. In the distance, a siren approached; Henahan, coming to confront his real-life demons.

“Victor,” I said urgently. “What’s going to happen?”

“If the pressure inside the skull isn’t relieved, the brain in there will get crushed to death. He could survive. But he would have the functioning potential of a rutabaga. I said,” he went on as if to himself, “that I wasn’t going to do this stuff, anymore. And under the circumstances …”

He glanced around at the primitive cellar, still stalling. “
Under
the circumstances, I doubt that anyone would fault me for sticking to my resolution,” he finished.

And that really was just the absolute final straw: Victor, looking down at this kid who might die and wondering how it would affect
him
.

“You never meant to do neurosurgery here, did you? Your idea of moving here—besides just annoying me—it was so you wouldn’t have to. You knew the hospital here wasn’t equipped for your kind of work. All your talk about it, that was just blowing smoke.”

“You don’t—” he began indignantly.

I ignored him. “Because your other patient died,” I said, “and you’re afraid it was your fault. Or worse, that people think it was. That’s why you don’t want to do anything, now. It reminds you of your embarrassment. And of your fear.”

He fell silent, his face expressing surprise that I knew.

“Victor,” I rushed on, “do you think there’s something special about you that means you’re
never
going to fail at anything? That you’re never going to lose anyone who might possibly have been saved?”

He answered slowly. “No, Jacobia. I know about
losing people. I just never knew that I knew it. Until,” he added quietly, “I came here and saw how happy you and Sam have turned out to be. And saw what I’d lost. When Sam faced up to me and made his case to me last night, that’s when it all fell together for me.”

He shook his head ruefully. “Sam’s his own man, now. He proved it. I won’t make him go to college if he doesn’t want to.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. To cover my confusion, I went right on being furious with him.

“Victor, you do what you have to for this kid on the floor, and you do it right now or I’ll make you sorry.”

I thought hard for a second. “I’ll tell Sam about the time you FedExed your mother a fetal pig with a wooden stake in its heart, because she wouldn’t stop sending me birthday cards after our divorce.”

A little rueful smile played around his lips, reminding me of the old days when I’d first met him, before I was hip-deep in his pathology and only knew him as bright and charming.

“Playing hardball, huh? Same old Jake,” he said, kneeling by Mulligan.

As he did so, a shiny object peeped from his pocket, and it occurred to me suddenly that something else unusual might have happened, the night before. Sam had said that he’d looked in on his father, that Victor had been sleeping like the dead.

“What woke you up?” I asked. “Last night, when you got up and went out …”

Victor laughed oddly. “Why, I rolled over onto this.”

He put his hand in his pocket, and I knew what was coming.

He brought out the silver teaspoon. “Did you put it there? In my bed? As a sort of joke, or something?”

“No.” I stared at it. “It must have fallen into the laundry.”

That was an unlikely explanation, but not as unlikely as the truth, which I had no intention of offering.

“Just do what you have to for Mulligan,” I said, taking the spoon from him as Montague came to the top of the stairs.

“Right.” Victor turned back to the business at hand. “Ellie, spread those towels over here. Montague, run and get my shaving kit. Make sure you bring along the straight razor.”

Everybody leapt to obey as he bent over the injured boy; his name isn’t Victor for nothing.

“You,” he snapped as Arnold appeared on the cellar stairs. “You somebody official?”

Arnold nodded, bemused at Victor’s tone.

“Get that helicopter from the airfield over here,” Victor ordered, “tell ’em we’re going to Portland. Tell the guy from the ambulance he’s going, too.”

Montague hustled back with the shaving kit. Swiftly, Victor began removing Mulligan’s hair. “I’ll need an IV setup for this kid, and an oxygen tank. Move it. We haven’t got all day.”

Moments later, Victor had exposed Mulligan’s scalp. “Get in here,” he told Ellie, “with one of those towels.”

She complied: looking like a flower does not prevent her from having the tensile strength of steel cable, in emergencies.

Swiftly, Victor made a cut with the straight razor, producing a wash of blood, then probed delicately with his finger. “Uh-huh. Well, I guess there’s no doubt about it.”

He checked Mulligan’s pupils again, and saw, apparently, what he expected to see. Then he looked up, searching for something.

“There it is. Jacobia,” he ordered, and when I saw what he was looking at my stomach took a lurch. But he was definite about what he wanted.

“Jacobia, hand me that power drill,” Victor said.

46
“Good golly bejesus,” said Ned Montague for the fifteenth or twentieth time, sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer. “Did you ever see anything like that before in your life?”

Arnold had accompanied the ambulance to the airfield and supervised loading the helicopter. But he’d said that he wanted to hear Ned’s story as soon as he got back, and that if Ned told it properly—no hiding things, no embroidering—Arnold would see that Ned didn’t get into too much trouble over it. Stay put, Arnold had told Ned firmly.

So Ned had obeyed, but Arnold hadn’t returned immediately, as I’d expected. Probably one thing had led to another as it often did in Arnold’s busy—too busy, lately—day. As a result, Ned had been hanging around for hours; I hoped he wasn’t expecting to be invited for dinner.

Speaking of which, it was nearly time for it and Sam wasn’t home yet.

“Ellie? Did you ever see anything like that?”

“No,” Ellie replied shortly to Ned. “I’m going to find George and fix him some supper,” she told me.

“Send Sam home if you see him,” I called as she went out.

Ned took a swallow of his beer, looking satisfied. Watching him, I had the feeling that I ought to be asking him something. But the experience of holding Mulligan’s breathing passages open while Victor drilled a hole in the top of the kid’s head had wiped everything else out of my own.

With the relief of pressure in the skull, Mulligan’s pupil size had equalized. This, Victor had said, was a good sign, but it didn’t guarantee anything. Victor had also informed me that if Mulligan died after Victor drilled a hole in his head with a power drill, Mulligan’s parents could sue Victor for everything he had.

“So I hope you’re happy, Jacobia,” Victor had said
tightly, which was when I knew that the aberrant little moment of normal human feeling we had shared was exactly that: an aberration.

Outside, the sky was brightening in a last blast of sunset brilliance: high, puffy cumulus clouds the exact same pale yellow as french vanilla, each with a heart of ripest pink.

“You know,” I said, “Sam really ought to be home by now.”

Wade put his hands on my shoulders. “Hey, it’s not like Sam doesn’t know his way around town. He’ll show up any minute.”

“Yeah. But …”

I’d made some calls. “Tommy Daigle’s mother says Tommy dropped Sam off down at the dock. But Dan Harpwell says he hasn’t seen him, that he’s not on the
Eric
. And that was hours ago.”

Montague watched us interestedly, his eyes beginning to get a little bleary with the beers he had consumed.

“Golly bejesus. Did you ever—”

“See anything like that. No, Ned, actually I haven’t.”

Worry made me snap at him, but it didn’t faze him. He just took another sip of his beer.

“I saw Sam and Tommy earlier,” Wade said. “The two of ’em, when we were all still wondering where Victor was. Probably,” he added reassuringly, “Sam got interested in that big cruiser, the
Triple Witch
. Maybe talked her crew into letting him aboard like he planned. Now he’s forgotten what time it is.”

That sounded reasonable; Sam would have killed for a close-up look at the
Triple Witch
. Maybe he’d seen Victor too, and knew he was okay.

But when he heard Wade’s theory, Ned looked uncomfortable, downing the rest of his beverage in a single tip-up.

“Ned,” I said to him as the look on his face came into focus. “What do you know about this?”

He stared innocently at me. “Nothing. How would I know about it? I mean, know about what?”

“The
Triple Witch
. When Wade mentioned it, you looked like somebody poked you with a pin.”

His gaze skittered guiltily to the phone. “Nothing,” he repeated, sounding frightened.

And then I understood. “Wade,” I said slowly, hearing my own voice as if from a distance. “Did the guys at the dock find out who that cruiser belongs to? When they were trying to move it?”

Wade shook his head.

“Because you can tell them,” I went on without waiting for him to reply further, “that I know who the owner is.”

I couldn’t even feel my feet touching the floor, but somehow I got across the room, leaning over the kitchen table to confront Ned Montague sitting there like some evil little toad.

“You didn’t just call the ambulance, did you? When Victor sent you up here, you called someone else, too.”

“No!” His face was ashen.

Now I understood why he’d obeyed Arnold’s order to stick around with only perfunctory complaining: it suited his purposes. He’d been told to stay by someone else, too, to keep an eye on us.

“Mulligan was about to say something more when you hit him. What was it, Ned? Why did you take the risk of clobbering him?”

“He was going to shoot me!” Ned whined.

“No, he wasn’t. Another second, and Ellie would have had the rifle. You hit him to keep him from saying something about you. Something about what happened when Hallie died.”

Unnerved by our emotional voices, Monday sat up and barked.

Then I had it. “You,” I told him quietly. “What Peter said was partly true. Hallie
was
arguing with someone else, when he came along. You’re the “older guy” she
was seeing. Hallie was arguing with you, because you stole her drug stash from where she hid it, out of Ken’s old junk car.”

Cornered, Montague got all blusteringly defensive. “You can’t talk that way to me!” He made as if to get out of his chair.

I reached out and pushed him hard. “Sit down and shut up. I hear another word out of you, I’m going to shoot you with this.”

I took the little weapon out of my sweater pocket. In the suddenly silent moment that followed, it looked ugly and deadly.

Like the orders Ned Montague had been following.

“You called Willoughby. Right after you called the ambulance, you called him and told him what we knew.”

Wade came back from the phone alcove where he had been making a call himself. “Registration for the
Triple Witch
is in New York State,” he said. “Principal owner Baxter Willoughby.”

His gaze still fixed on Montague, he went on. “The guys at the dock say the
Triple Witch
weighed anchor, half an hour ago.”

Turning, he saw the gun in my hand and stopped. “Well,” he murmured. “I see there’s been a development.”