I ripped off the shirt and rigged her up the best I could. I cut a hole in my belt so it would fit her tight, and I pulled the shirt up between her legs, tying it to the belt front and back. It would be like a crude chastity belt and would work about as well as that ancient device ever had.
I shoved the tampons in and it took the whole package to stop the flow in the front. The wound on the side had sliced through her flesh, but the entire layer was still hanging there. I laid it back and drew the shirt tighter so it would hold.
A work of art.
A waste of time and we both knew it.
Then I got on the radio. I called nonstop for two hours and had no idea if I was getting through.
I held her hand and told her to be brave. These were just words. Who the hell was I to tell her about bravery?
She slipped into a deep sleep. I was losing her.
Dawn was breaking as the helicopter came over the trees.
Now the medics had it. I had to get away from there: my guts were in turmoil.
I climbed the hill. The cabin rose up suddenly, the lights still blazing. A woman stood in shadow at the window.
Eleanor.
I clumped up the steps and walked in. One look at my face and she knew. She cried and I held her and I looked down the slope with its aura of death and its red lights flashing.
In a while one of the medics came up the hill. “They’re taking her off now,” he said. “She’s awake and she wants to see you.”
I asked him to sit with Eleanor while I climbed back down the slope. Someone had covered Rigby with a blanket and I stepped around him on my way to the copter. I got inside and sat on the floor beside the cot where Trish lay pale as death.
She didn’t say anything, just held my hand a moment. “We gotta get moving,” the medic said, and his eyes met mine and I knew what he meant. It was touch and go.
“You boys ride her easy,” I said. “She’s got a bigger heart than all of us put together.”
I met the second medic coming down the hill. I stood on the bluff and watched the copter rise slowly over the woods. In the distance I could see police cars coming.
I went into the cabin to look for Eleanor, but she was gone.
59
I was sitting in the precinct room on the perp’s side of the table when I finally met Quintana. He came into the room with a steaming cup in his hand, sat across from me, and doled out the evil eye.
“You dumb fuck,” he said after a while.
The coffee was for me. I drank it black, same as he did.
They interrogated me for two hours. His partner, Stan Mallory, brought in some Danish and we went till noon. Twice during the questioning Quintana let me phone the hospital, where nothing had changed.
At twelve-fifteen he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
He seemed to be talking to me, so I followed him out to the parking lot, where he shuffled me to the shotgun side of a late-model Ford.
“This is supposed to be my day off,” he said as he drove the wet streets.
I waited a moment, and when he didn’t follow his thought, I said, “There aren’t any days off, Quintana. Don’t you know that yet?”
He knew it. He was just about my age and going through the same brand of burnout that had made my last year on the job so restless.
“I hear you were a good cop,” he said.
“I was okay.”
“A damn good cop. That’s what they all say. I made some calls.”
“I put a few assholes away.”
“I hate to see a cop take a fall. Especially a good cop.”
He was up on the freeway now, heading north. But he dropped off on the John Street ramp. We drove past the Times building, where the clock on the Fairview side said quarter to three.
“We need to talk to Eleanor,” he said.
“You’ll never find her. She could be anywhere by now.”
“You remember where you left her car?”
“I think so.”
“Show me.”
We went north, and after a bit of double-tracking I found it. He opened the door and looked under the seat and took out the Raven she had left there.
“What do you think, maybe she took this out to compare it with the other one?” he said.
“I think that’s part of it. And some of it’s just what she said. She just loved having them.”
He touched the book with his fingertips. “Isn’t that a lovely goddamn thing.”
“Rigby was no slouch. They say Grayson was good, but there ain’t no flies on this.”
We drove back downtown. A voice came through his radio, telling us Miss Aandahl was out of surgery. Her condition was guarded.
“I got a guy at the hospital keeping tabs,” Quintana said. “We’ll know what he knows as soon as he knows it. If I were you, I’d get some sleep. Where’ve you been holed up?”
I looked at him deadpan. “At the Hilton.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said with a dry laugh.
Surprisingly, I did sleep. Six hard hours after a hard shower.
I came awake to a pounding on the door. It was Quintana.
“I didn’t say die, Janeway, I said sleep. Get your ass dressed.”
I asked what he’d heard from the hospital.
“She’s been upgraded to serious. No visitors for at least three days, and she won’t be climbing Mount Rainier for a while after that. But it’s starting to look like she’ll live to fight another day.”
He took me to dinner in a seafood place on the waterfront. It was superb. He paid with a card.
We didn’t talk about the case. We talked about him and me, two pretty good cops. He was going through burnout, all right, it was written all over him. At thirty-eight he was having serious second thoughts about decisions he had made in his twenties. He had been a boxer, a pretzel baker, a welder, a bodyguard, a bartender, and, finally, at twenty-three, cop. He was solidly Roman Catholic, a believer but unfortunately a sinner. In his youth he had studied for the priesthood, but he had repeatedly failed the test of celibacy. A guy could go crazy trying to do a job like that. Now, after spending a few hours with me, he was charmed by something he’d never given a moment’s thought. Quintana was the world’s next killer bookscout.
“This stuff is just goddamn fascinating,” he said.
“My world and welcome to it.” I didn’t know if he’d make the literary connection, so I helped him along. “That’s a line from Thurber.”
“I know what it’s from. You think I’m some wetback just crawled over the border? Walter Mitty’s from that book.”
“Good man.”
He had a leg up on the game already.
I asked if he had a first name.
“Shane,” he said, daring me not to like it.
But I couldn’t play it straight. “Shane Quintana ?”
“I see you come from the part of Anglo-town where all brown babies gotta be named Jose.”
“Shane Quintana.”
“I was named after Alan Ladd. Kids today don’t even know who the hell Alan Ladd was.” He deepened the Chicano in his voice and said, “Ey, man, Shane was one tough hombre, eh? He knock Jack Palance’s dick down in the mud and stomp his gringo ass.”
“I think it was the other way around. And Shane was a gringo too.”
“Don’t fuck with Shane, Janeway. I can still put you in jail.”
“That’s your big challenge in the book world, Quintana. Shane . Find that baby and it gets you almost two grand.”
We went to a place he knew and shot pool. Neither of us would ever break a sweat on Minnesota Fats but we took a heavy toll on each other. He had a beeper on his belt but nobody called him. I could assume Trish was alive and holding her own.
Late that night we ended up back downtown in the precinct room. Mallory was still there, two-fingering some paperwork through an old typewriter.