But for some reason-maybe the thickness in his head-he found he couldn’t concentrate for long on the reason for the trip. It made his headache worse.
Getting into Steinbeck country, he rolled down the car window to Gilroy and the smell of garlic. The sun was higher now, though there were still wisps of mist over the occasional patch of water. It was getting on toward ten o’clock.
A sign at the town limits told Hardy that Gonzalez was the home of the Tigers. “They sure kept the move from Detroit a secret,” he thought as he passed the one-story high school with its faded billboard.
His destination was a square concrete emergency clinic painted an institutional yellow, set two streets back behind what passed for downtown.
Sheriff Muñoz greeted him at the door. With a head of balding gray hair and a deep soft-spoken voice, he had all the authority of the small-town cop with, apparently, none of the arrogance. Maybe he’d been in the job a long time. His uniform was lived in, his body solid and big but with no flab. The face was square, clean-shaven and worried. “Is this your card?”
Hardy nodded.
“It’s the only thing we had tying him to anything.”
“No wallet?”
Muñoz just looked at Hardy-not glared, looked-but his eyes were saying that they’d already covered that.
“Is he still alive?”
“Physically. He hasn’t come up yet. He’ll come around. Now he’s sedated.”
There were only two rooms behind the open reception area. Steven Cochran was in the second one.
Hardy swallowed hard, remembering the vision of the brother, Eddie, less than a week ago, on a similar gurney. Jesus, they look alike, he thought. He hadn’t noticed it before-Steven had initially struck him as much thinner. He forced himself to look. Maybe because the damage appeared so similar. The right side of Steven’s face was covered with bandage, his right arm in a sling with a bandaged hand sticking out of it.
“What happened?”
“Do you recognize him?”
First things first. Muñoz was right. “We gotta call his folks,” Hardy said.
“If you don’t mind, sir, what’s your connection to this boy?”
They were in the other empty examination room, drinking 7-Eleven coffee brought in by the nurse receptionist. Hardy’s headache was gone. He explained how Steven had come to get his card.
“Funny that’s all he had.” It was a statement, not meant to be accusatory.
“Where was it?”
“Front pocket.”
“Maybe he lost his wallet.”
The sheriff nodded. “Maybe.”
“Listen,” Hardy said, “I’m not any kind of official, but you mind if we talk about it? I’ve got a reference you might…”
Muñoz struck Hardy as a thorough cop, so it didn’t surprise him much when he got up to make the call to Glitsky’s home number. When the sheriff returned, he seemed satisfied. “Okay,” he said, “you think this is related to what you’re working on?”
Hardy drank some coffee and asked him what exactly had happened.
Muñoz had his elbows on his knees, hands out in front of him holding the nearly full Styrofoam cup. His black sunken eyes focused unblinking on the wall over Hardy’s head. Hardy thought they were about the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.
The sheriff said, “Lady named Hafner grows ’chokes maybe six miles south. She and the family were on their way up to the farmer’s market in Salinas. They usually leave before dawn and try to get a good place, you know. So they’re turning onto 101 and one of the kids sees what he thinks might be a deer by the road. Anyway, that’s food, you know, so Momma stops and it’s… Steven’s the name, huh?”
“Steven.”
“So she got here and the doc called me.” There was a long pause, as though Muñoz was trying to fathom how things like this could happen. “I figure-and the doc says it makes sense- he was thrown from the vehicle already unconscious. That’s probably why he lived, he was so loose. Just pretty much peeled the right side of his body, broke his arm, collarbone, couple of foot bones.”
“Could he have just fallen? Bounced out of the back of an open pickup maybe?”
“Yeah, he could’ve. He didn’t, though.”
Hardy waited.
“He was,” Muñoz paused, “sexually molested. Maybe the rest of the injuries-that look a hell of a lot like a beating-maybe they could have come from the impact hitting the ground at sixty, but the one…”
“Got it,” Hardy said.
“Just once I’d like to catch up with somebody does something like this. Not after a trial or anything, but catch ’em red-handed.”
“It would be a great joy,” Hardy agreed.
“Your friend Glitsky in the city, he gonna call missing persons, you think? Let ’em know?”
Hardy thought that he probably would-Glitsky believed in following through, but Hardy didn’t feel right making the commitment for him. After all, Glitsky dealt in homicides. Lost and found children were not his problem, and if somebody in San Francisco had the bad grace to get killed on this fine Saturday morning, it’s possible he might forget.
“It wouldn’t hurt if we called,” he said, though he let Muñoz do it officially.
Warm and drowsy. Smell of fresh linen. Had Mom finally made his bed?
Steven tried to open his eyes. They didn’t seem to work. The eyelids were too heavy, his whole body too weak.
Well, just a few more hours’ sleep. Can’t hurt. It’s the summer, after all.
But that jarred some memory. Leaving the house, striking out on his own, riding in the truck with those two guys heading for L.A., but in no real hurry. Mostly, they’d said, into partying, into cruising. That sounded okay.
It began to come flooding back, and involuntarily he groaned. They’d accepted him right away, including him when they stopped for a few road beers before they’d left the city. The beers didn’t taste very good, but Steven wasn’t about to let on. This was part of being an adult, and he was tired of being treated like a kid, or, worse, a nothing. So he’d act like an adult, go along, be cool.
He got a little more worried when the joints came out, but knew he was just being uptight. Lots of guys in school smoked dope all the time. It just hadn’t been his thing. But it wasn’t as though it was any big deal, or really wrong. It did make him cough, though, and the guys had laughed at him a little, but he could tell it was all in fun. They coughed, too, only not so much.
After that, in this blurry haze, they’d stopped for something to eat-maybe in Gilroy?-some really fantastic burgers that they took to this “special spot” for a picnic. And then things got scary kind of, with the two guys starting to tickle him and other stuff. Then really rough.
If he hadn’t been so dizzy and messed up, he probably could have outrun them, but when he pulled loose and tried that, his coordination was gone. And after they caught him, he thought he remembered other things, but the drowsiness was still there, and it was too hard to think about.
And where was Mom, then, if the bed was made? Just in the other room probably. God, it’d be great to see Mom. He called out for her.
That was a sound. Hardy, waiting for Muñoz to return from his phone call, ran around the corner to Steven’s room.
The boy lay, still unmoving. This was the hostility kid, he remembered-switchblade, fuzzed-out television and all. He shook his head. Talk about a bad week for the Cochrans.
Had Ed’s death somehow precipitated this, driven him over the edge of his own despair? Or was there some more immediate link? Like, might Steven have known something he shouldn’t have?
Hell, he’d find out when Steven came to if he had known his assailants. Or, more particularly, if Hardy knew them.
Big Ed looked anything but big.