“Well, I hope they need you around here,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“I’ll keep my eye out for you,” he said with a wink.
When he was gone, Sheridan said, “Creep.”
“I think your instincts are right on about that one,” Lucy said.
Sheridan tousled Lucy’s hair as they walked down the hall. “Just follow my lead, little sister.”
—
NATE’S ROOM WAS DIMLY LIT and he was the only one in it. An empty chair sat next to the bed with a paperback novel opened and turned facedown on the cushion. Probably where Dudley sat, Lucy thought.
Nate’s eyes were closed and a plastic oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth. The covers of his bed were pulled up to his chin. His face was bruised and there was a bandage on his right cheek beneath his eye. Dozens of tubes and wires snaked up through the sheets, leading to monitors. His head was tilted to the side. If it weren’t for the sounds of the machines clicking and the EKG screen that showed a heartbeat, Lucy thought he could have been dead.
He was a big man and he filled the hospital bed from end to end. Lucy had never seen him laid out like that.
“My God,” Sheridan whispered. “At least he’s still alive.”
Lucy nodded, but stayed near the door while Sheridan approached him. Lucy could hear him breathing, in and out, through the oxygen mask. It was clouded with condensation.
Her sister said, “Nate, it’s Sheridan, your apprentice. We’re all up here to see April, down the hall. Well, Dad isn’t here yet, but he will be.
“Look, you need to fight and get well. We need to fly falcons together someday, and you’ve got a lot still to teach me.”
Lucy looked down at her shoes. Her eyes stung. Her sister sounded strong and sincere.
Then she heard Sheridan gasp, and when Lucy looked up, her sister had her hands to her mouth.
“What?”
Sheridan turned. Her eyes were huge. “He winked at me.”
Lucy looked from Sheridan to Nate. He was just as still as he’d been when they’d entered the room. His head hadn’t moved a half inch.
“He winked at me,” Sheridan said again. “He opened his eyes and winked.”
Lucy didn’t respond.
“Really, he did,” Sheridan insisted. She turned back to Nate and said, “Do it again. Show my sister I’m not crazy.”
Nothing.
“Nate, come on. Please.”
After nearly a minute, Lucy said, “Sherry, maybe you thought you saw something. I believe you thought you saw him wink. But—”
“I did,” Sheridan said.
Lucy shook her head, her palms up. “I’m not going to argue with you.”
Minutes passed. Both Sheridan and Lucy studied Nate’s face for some kind of movement, some kind of recognition from him that they were there.
Finally, Sheridan said, “We better get back.”
Lucy agreed with her.
As they walked back down the hallway together toward the closed door, Sheridan said, “Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.”
“Okay.”
“He opened his eyes for a second and he winked at me.”
“Okay.”
“Or maybe I just wanted him to so bad, I thought he did it.”
“Maybe.”
Sheridan reached out and pulled Lucy close as they walked to the storage room to change back into their clothes.
—
TIMBER CATES watched them pass by through a half-inch opening of the maintenance closet door where he’d found the cart.
He recognized the older one, although she’d been behind him in school by quite a few years. The younger one he’d never seen before, but they looked so similar they had to be sisters.
What were they doing wearing hospital scrubs? And did the older one know who he was?
He had two brothers and so had only known brothers. The Picketts had three girls. They’d all grown up together in the same county a hundred and twenty miles to the south, but except for Dallas and April, the families had never interacted in any way. He thought how strange that was, but he couldn’t really come up with how he felt about it.
The things he did for Dallas, he thought.
Or more accurately, the things he did for his mother. Dallas probably didn’t even know he was out of prison.
Timber was assured that everything was fine and that he hadn’t been recognized when the sisters emerged from the storage room. They’d changed from their scrubs to civilian clothing and they seemed to be joking with each other, the younger one teasing the oldest. They were good-looking girls, he thought. In any other circumstance, he’d probably make a run at them.
The mother, Marybeth, met them in the hallway, and the three of them went into the room of his target.
The ceramic knife was in his sock, hidden by the baggy right pant leg of his prison hospital scrubs. He hadn’t even passed through a metal detector to gain entry to the hospital, so the precaution had been unnecessary. The prison ID, which he wore on a lanyard around his neck, looked similar enough to the ones they used at the hospital that it wasn’t getting a second look.
Hell, he thought, he could have brought a gun. But the knife would do.
He’d wait. They’d all have to leave the room eventually.
28
Plumes of snow sprayed out from the tires as Joe barreled down the mountain in the foul-smelling cab of Bull’s Ford F-250 meat wagon. Brass casings that had been ejected during the fusillade danced across the dashboard.
The snow wasn’t falling as hard as it had been and there were breaks in the clouds. The big spring storm that had been predicted didn’t turn out to be all that big, he thought, although it had dumped six to eight inches that would remain in the forest overnight and it made the road down the mountain slick and treacherous. He had less than an hour of light.
Joe had left his own pickup where Bull had shot it up in the elk camp. He doubted it could be repaired after being hit twenty to thirty times with high-powered rifle rounds.
He thought: Another one.
—
DAISY WAS ON the bench seat beside him and Bull’s lifeless body rolled around in the back. Joe had tried to wrestle the mass into the bed, but it was too heavy and ungainly. At one point, he’d sprained a muscle in his back while trying to lift Bull’s upper torso onto the tailgate far enough that he could release his grip and push the legs up and over the lip, only to have the body slide off into the snow again. Bull’s body was slick with blood. It was worse than loading a dead elk. At least with an elk, there were antlers to grab on to.
Rather than leave the body to the snow and predators, Joe had wrapped a chain around the legs and used Bull’s own game winch to hoist the body into the air. He was then able to swing Cates’s 280 pounds up and over the bed wall, where he lowered it into the back.
Despite the situation and the gore, Joe admired how well the game winch had been welded together. Probably Eldon’s work, he thought. Bull was useless.
Had been useless.
—
JOE’S SHOTGUN LEANED AGAINST the bench seat, muzzle down. Next to it was Bull’s Ruger Mini-14. It was still warm to the touch.
The inside of the cab reeked of sour, spilled beer and whiskey, bloodstains, motor oil, and rotting food in fast-food wrappers on the passenger-side floorboard. There was a long crack through the front windshield and a dead rabbit on the console that Bull must have shot along the way to the camp.
But the pickup ran well, and the tires gripped the slick rocks on the road better than Joe’s pickup had on the way up. He was making good time.
He knew if the dispatcher was trying to reach him he was out of touch, since Bull’s pickup obviously didn’t have a radio. Joe realized he’d left his handheld radio in his pickup back at the elk camp and he cursed himself for forgetting it.