She was blonde and beautiful, and twenty years ago (Who are you kidding, old man? More like thirty years ago) he would have flirted with her, told her the green of her eyes reminded him of a beautiful jade ornament he once saw while he was traveling around East Asia during his Army days.
“He going to live, Mary?” a voice asked.
Hank glanced up at John Miller. Thirty-five, handsome, and not at all out of shape. His suit was tailored, and there wasn’t a speck of dirt on his dress shoes despite the gravel parking lot he would have had to walk through just to reach the diner.
“He’ll be fine,” the pretty girl, Mary, said.
She stood up and pulled the surgical gloves off her hands. For someone wearing drab black paramedic clothes, she still managed to cut a fine figure, and Hank once again wished he was much, much younger. Mary was five-five, but she only went up to the bottom of Miller’s chin. He towered over her and literally looked down at Hank.
“He looks terrible,” Miller said.
“Feels like twins are trying to push their way through my leg,” Hank said.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Mary said and rolled her eyes. “She clipped you. You’re lucky.”
Right. Lucky. That’s one way to look at it.
“You need me for anything else?” Mary asked Miller.
“You done with him?” Miller asked.
“Nothing else I can do here. He needs to go to the hospital and get it properly sutured. But for now, those bandages should keep him from bleeding to death. Not that he was really in any danger of that. Like I said, he’s real lucky.”
“Then I guess you’re done.”
Mary looked back at Hank. “See you around, Lou.”
I wish, he thought, and managed a half-smile. “Thanks, doc.”
“Not quite there yet.” She smiled back (Be still my heart) before leaving him with Miller.
Hank looked down at his leg dangling over one of the booths at the back of Ben’s Diner. There was a lot of blood over the parts of his pants that Mary had cut away to get to his wound and bandage it. The diner had almost entirely emptied out except for the three of them, with four or five people still in the parking lot with some of the uniformed state troopers that weren’t busy taking witnesses to the hospital.
“Wrong place, wrong time, huh?” Miller said.
Hank turned back to him. “Story of my life. Did you find my.32?”
“Uh huh.” Miller pulled an evidence bag out of his blazer pocket. The snub nose was inside. “What were you doing with it?”
“I got a permit, kid.”
“No, I mean, what were you doing at Ben’s carrying it?”
“I carry it everywhere. Hence the permit. Can I have it back?”
“Did you fire it?”
“No.”
Miller handed it back to him and Hank shoved the gun, still in the bag, into his pocket. “We’ve processed it, so no harm in letting you have it back.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Miller ignored the sarcasm, said, “So what were you doing here when it happened?”
“What do you think I was doing here? It’s a diner. I came here to dine.”
Miller pursed a smile, and Hank thought, What’s the matter, kid? The old fart’s giving you a hard time? Well, tough shit.
“You were in the bathroom when it went down?” Miller asked.
“I was taking a leak, yeah.”
“What happened then?”
“Don’t you already have enough statements from the other witnesses?”
“I do, but I also have an ex-cop at my disposal, and I’m banking on his version of the story being more thorough, more helpful.”
Hank grinned back at Miller.
Flattery will get you into an old man’s good graces, you little shit.
“I was in the bathroom when they came in,” Hank said. “No one fired a shot — at least, not yet — but there was plenty of screaming. From them, from the customers, and I think Rita, too.”
“Rita’s one of the waitresses?”
“Uh huh. Anyway. I bided my time while they cleaned out the place. First they collected the cell phones, then the money, wallets, and whatever valuables people had on them. By then I was at the door and could see two of them moving around up front. I thought there were just two of them. My mistake.”
“There were three.”
“Yeah. The woman.”
“Where was she?”
Hank nodded at the kitchen in the back hallway. “Just my luck, never knew she was there until, well,” he said, nodding at his bandaged thigh. “After she shot me, she put her knee on my back and told me not to fucking move.”
“She said those words? ‘Don’t fucking move?’”
“Something to that effect.”
“Have to be specific about everything, Hank; you know that.”
Hank grunted. “Look, kid, I already told one of the troopers everything and you got two bullets for ballistics — the one that went through my leg and the one she put into the floor next to my head. I can come in later and give you another statement if you want, but right now my leg is fucking killin’ me.”
Miller nodded. “I’ll get one of the troopers to take you to the hospital.”
“Who says I’m going to the hospital?”
“You heard what Mary said—”
“She’s just a kid; what does she know?”
“Hank…”
“My leg, my choice,” Hank said, and got up and limped to the door.
He grimaced the whole time, as if someone was stabbing spears into his groin with every single step, but at least his back was to Miller and the little shit couldn’t see how much pain this little show of rebellion was costing him.
Or, at least, he hoped Miller couldn’t see.
“Problem?” one of the men had said.
“No problem,” the woman had answered.
“Looks like a problem to me,” the second one had butted in, before adding, “Heroes get dead, right?”
“No,” the woman responded.
That single word. No. As if she wasn’t afraid of anything.
Of course, she had a gun — the same one she had shot him with, for fuck’s sake — and that was a hell of an equalizer in any situation.
And yet, the way she had responded to the two guys, with no fear whatsoever…
Who the hell are you, lady?
That question bounced around inside Hank’s head for the entire seven miles back to his place. The interstate flew by, along with the occasional squad car going back and forth in front of Ben’s Diner. The nagging question helped to keep his mind off the pulsating pain, though as soon as he pulled his beat-up Bronco into the trailer park and climbed out, it was back with a vengeance.
“You okay, Hank?” a voice asked from behind him.
He looked over at Mrs. Haines sitting on her front porch next door. The woman had all five of her cats sleeping in a semicircle at her feet, which was nothing new, since the animals rarely journeyed beyond the property or Haines herself. Hank used to wonder if it was possible for animals to be as morbidly obese as their human counterparts; he had his answer after meeting Mrs. Haines.
“Fine. Why?” he said, and flashed his best put-on smile.
“You’re limping,” Mrs. Haines said, gesturing with her freshly manicured hand. “Is that blood?”
“Oh yeah, that. Just a little accident.”
“Looks painful.”
“Nothing a little spirit can’t lift.”
“I hear that,” Mrs. Haines said, producing a bottle of Jim Beam from behind her.
Hank grinned, wondering if she ever fed any of that to her kitties. Probably not. Ol’ Jim was a lot more expensive per bottle than all those cans of tuna she had stacked up in the pantry inside her place.