10

The rain is pelting down like machine gun fire, the wind trying its best to wrench the truck doors right off their hinges as we bundle inside. Makes me wonder if this is the Reverend’s ‘boss’ gathering his fury, preparing to blow us all to whatever the alternative hangout is for the kind of deities that would consider Hill a valued employee.

I’m still too scared to believe this is over. It’s an ugly feeling I know well, and can only hope will abate as soon as we have Carla at the door of the good doctor, provided she lives that long. As I gun the engine into life, and look at Kyle, who’s wiping the condensation clear and peering out at the rain, it occurs to me that if this is really the end of the nightmare, I have no idea what to do with myself. There won’t be any glorious sunshine through my window in the morning, marking the equally glorious beginning of a new chapter of my life. I’m still a murderer; there’s still the guilt, and there’s my son, who thinks I’m dead and doesn’t mind. All that will really change will be the venue into which I bring my suffering. I don’t imagine next Saturday I’ll be at Eddie’s. Instead I’ll sit at home without those faces to act as mirrors for my own self-loathing.

I guide the truck out of the parking lot, careful to avoid the other cars, and turn out onto the road that will bring us to town, and to the doctor who I know won’t take too kindly to being roused at this hour of the night, especially to tend to an injured whore with needle marks parading up her emaciated arm.

“Faster, she’s not looking too good,” Kyle says, looking over his shoulder as if he’s been peeking in on my thoughts. “Think the baby’ll make it?”

“Hope so.” I resist the urge to remind him what Cobb said about her chances.

It’s damn near impossible to see anything beyond the glass, the high beams like swollen ghosts staying three steps ahead of the grille. I’m going fast, aware that at any time I might inadvertently fulfill my obligations to the dead Reverend and run somebody over, or mash the truck into some poor drunk driver’s car as he struggles to make his way home.

“C’mon for Chrissakes, she’s bleeding bad.”

It isn’t a long drive, but the storm buffeting the truck and Kyle’s endless needling make it seem like hours. Lightning turns the world to rainy daylight as I turn off the main road onto Abigail Lane, where the good doctor has his home.

Hendricks’ place used to be a farmhouse, through the windows of which long gone farmers watched the world fall victim to the voracious appetite of progress. Mining companies bought out the land for the families of their employees, and people got greedy. Then the money ran out, and so did the people. Hendricks, an M.D. from Alabama who claimed he was “just passing through,” saw no reason to move on when he caught sight of the sickly state of those who’d stubbornly refused to leave Milestone in the great exodus of ‘79, and when he heard the asking price for a house nobody wanted.

As we pull into the drive that slopes upward to the block-shaped two-story house, there are no lights in the windows, which doesn’t come as a surprise. I find myself wondering, if we had kept going instead of turning into Hendricks’ drive, how long it would have taken us to come upon the twisted wreck of Eleanor Cobb’s Taurus.

Despite the forbidding darkness of the house that looms over the car, Kyle’s already hurrying to get the girl out. Not the smartest move considering the Doc might not even be here, so I leave him to his grunting and trot to the door.

Knock, knock. No sound from within.

“Leave her there,” I call back to Kyle, who’s as good as invisible behind the car’s lights.

“What?”

“I said leave her be. If Hendricks doesn’t answer, what good will dragging her out in the rain do?”

“What else can we do?”

“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that if and when– ”

“Sheriff?”

The front door is open; the storm deafened me to the approach of the bespectacled man now standing there squinting out. “That you, Tom?” He’s a reed-thin man and heavily bearded. I’ve always suspected that, just like the deceased Reverend, vanity has driven the doctor to dying his hair to keep from looking his age. And though in this light he doesn’t look much healthier than the girl in the back of my truck, I’m glad as hell to see him.

I summarize the situation as calmly as I can. It doesn’t sound calm in the least by the time it reaches my lips, but Hendricks steps back, his face a knot of concern. From upstairs, his wife calls out a demand to know what’s going on. The doctor turns on the hall light. It’s the warmest looking light I’ve seen in quite some time, and the shadows it casts are gentle. “Bring her in. I’ll see what I can do.” He reaches the stairs and yells up, “Queenie, I’m going to need your help down here.”

And in what seems like a heartbeat, the doctor is bent over the girl where she lies prone on the couch and swaddled in comfy looking blankets. The towels wrapped around her head make it look as if she’s being prepped for a massage, nothing more. The blood running between her eyes spoils that illusion though. She’s shivering, which is good. Means she’s still breathing. “Lost a lot of blood,” Hendricks says, pressing the cup of his stethoscope to her chest. “You said an auto wreck?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else hurt?” He appraises Kyle and me. “How about you guys? You look pretty shook up.”

“We’re fine,” Kyle says. “She going to be all right? She’s pregnant, you know.”

Hendricks frowns.

“She told us,” I add quickly, covering Kyle’s blunder. “Right before she passed out.”

I can’t tell whether or not he’s buying it, but he says nothing, just presses that stethoscope to the girl’s breast and breathes through his nose. His wife stands off in the corner, arms folded over her dressing gown. She looks pissed, and I can’t blame her.

When at last the doctor looks up, his face is grave. “I’m sorry to say I don’t think there’s a whole lot I can do for her, boys. The baby’s gone. That I can tell you right now for certain, and it’s only a matter of time before she follows. I’d have to open her up to say for sure, but my guess is she’s busted up pretty bad. Judging by that blood and the way she’s breathing, seems she’s got a punctured lung too. Pupils are dilated. Head’s cracked open almost clean through to the bone. Frankly I’m amazed she’s not dead already.” At the looks on our faces, he continues, “But you fellas did real good. Wasn’t much more you could have done for her. She’d have appreciated it, I’m sure.”

Another life lost. For nothing. Though at least when I dream of this one I’ll know it wasn’t entirely my fault.

“Uh…Sheriff?”

I look back at Hendricks.

“You just going to leave her here?”

I’m about to argue with him, but it slowly dawns on me that he’s right, that I’d have asked the same question. Hendricks, unlike me or Kyle, still has a life, and I don’t reckon we should leave a dead whore on his couch to remind him why we’re different.

“Sorry, Doc. We’ll take her back to Eddie’s.”

Hendricks looks confused. “Eddie’s? Why there?”

“Because it’s quieter than any graveyard. Most of the time. We can bury her out back right next to Eddie himself. I figure he deserves the company after all the shit we’ve done under his roof. Besides,” I move close to the girl. “We’ve got some burying to do anyway.”

“Who else died?” Queenie asks, her first words to us since we arrived.

“The Reverend.”

“Oh.”

I smile at the lack of emotion on her face. “Yeah. Ticker gave out on him while he was preaching to us about the evils of drink.”

Hendricks shakes his head. “Man had way too much time on his hands.”

“You got that right, Doc.”

We stay for a while, exchanging the kind of uneasy banter unique to folks who’re waiting for one among them to die. Kyle paces, torn between refusing to accept that the girl is gone, that we couldn’t save her, and eager to be in a room larger than Hendricks’ parlor so he doesn’t have to be within touching distance of me.

At last there comes a single hitching sigh. The girl frowns, as if in her dreams she’s stumbled upon something dangerous, then she shudders once, and that’s the end of it.

No one says anything for a moment. We all just stand there, trying to read the story of the dead girl’s life from the lines on her face, the punctuation marks on her arm, the commas at the corners of her mouth from too much time spent grimacing in pain. I reach down and brush a strand of hair away from her face.

“C’mon, Kyle.”

For the second time that night, we load the girl into the truck. I imagine she feels lighter, that the soul, or whatever leaves us when we die, has weight, and hers is somewhere better now, somewhere no one can touch it, and use the stains on it against her.

Our drive back to Eddie’s is a silent one. There’s plenty that could be said, but no need to say it.

At least, not until we see the fire.

“Aw Christ no…” Kyle says and is out of the truck and running before I have time to draw a breath.

***

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