Beth Petty and Police Chief Gabriel Reyes sat on either side of Mike Finnegan’s bed. There was one window to the north, and Hood could see the distant hills corrugated by centuries of rain now shaded to blue by a great white cloud. He noted the stack of books on a stand by the bed, not one title the same as last week. And a fresh stack of magazines with the latest Scientific American on top. Finnegan’s new head bandage revealed slightly more of his face, but the rest of him was still encased in plaster, and his head was still immobilized by the steel skull clamp and rods.
“Come in, Charlie,” said Finnegan. “They’re interrogating me about the bullet.”
Petty smiled at Hood, and Reyes nodded. They were both in street clothes. Hood had never seen Beth Petty without a white doctor’s coat and a stethoscope. A nurse rolled in a chair, and Hood sat at the foot of the bed.
Finnegan’s eyes were blue and his nose and cheeks were freckled. An orange stubble covered his face. His lips were full, and Hood thought they might be swollen still from the accident. He saw the clench of the wired jaw and the difficulty with which the man spoke.
“There is some problem with the age of the thing,” said Finnegan.
“He means the bullet,” said Petty.
Reyes looked at Hood. “It was manufactured sometime between 1849 and 1862.”
“A cartridge can remain viable for centuries,” said Finnegan. “This idea confounds Chief Reyes.”
“What confounds me is how the bullet got into your face,” said Reyes.
“Isn’t that self-explanatory?” Finnegan smiled fractionally, a labored maneuver of lips and stationary jaws.
“He said he was shot by his lover,” said Reyes. “He said she just happened to be packing an ancestor’s thirty-one-caliber Colt repeating revolver.”
“Percussion repeating revolver,” said Finnegan. “Which was introduced by Colt in 1849. It helped settle the West.”
“Why did she shoot you?” asked Hood.
“Failure to leave my wife. The bullet was deflected by a stout grapevine. Cabernet Franc. Marie was plotting an al fresco suicide scene, I realized later. At any rate, after hitting the vine, the bullet flew with reduced velocity. It knocked me ass over teakettle, but I righted myself and kept running. I made it to a fire station and they took me to a hospital. The doctors believed it would be more dangerous to take it out than to leave it in. That was thirty years ago. In the wilder days of my youth.” Finnegan chuckled.
“The FBI told me that bullet is over a hundred years old,” said Reyes. “You don’t find 1849 thirty-one-caliber Colts just lying around. You find them in museums and collections. Nobody carries them.”
“Marie dug it out of an old trunk,” said Finnegan. “There are thousands of old trunks in this world. And don’t forget that a good gun is eternal. There are harquebuses and snaphaunces still every bit as deadly as they were the day they were forged. In gun years, our history is much shorter and condensed than any of you seem to realize.”
Hood stood and leaned over the bed and on Finnegan’s cheek found the scar attributed by Owens to a Napa vineyard mishap. The little man stared at him.
“No, you misunderstand,” said Finnegan. “The bullet entered from behind. I was running for my life.”
Hood looked into Finnegan’s clear blue eyes. The light that had shone from behind the layered gauze was still as lively now as it was when the darkness had amplified it. He remembered what Owens had said about learning to read the insanity in Mike’s face, but if such a thing was possible, Hood saw none.
“You said Marie was the whore I reminded you of,” said the doctor. “At Wyatt Earp’s saloon in San Diego.”
“Is that so?”
“Charlie was in the room.”
“I think you can solve this mystery, doctor. We’re talking about women living roughly a century apart.”
“Two Maries.”
“You’re a sly one.”
“I think almost everything you say is a lie,” said Reyes. “You’re just making it up.”
“I didn’t make up the bullet,” said Finnegan.
Reyes shook his head, then looked at Petty and Hood and back to Finnegan.
“I don’t mean to exasperate law enforcement,” said Finnegan. “And back to the other night, Gabriel, you must offer all the love you have to your son. All sons need a father’s love. He needs it more because he is a homosexual and the world has little love of them. But you are his father.”
“I never told you he was homosexual.”
“I listened carefully.”
Reyes sighed. “We got to talking a few nights ago.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” said Finnegan.
“No, there isn’t. But if that thirty-one-caliber slug entered from the back of your head, it had to pass through your skull and brain to get where Beth found it.”
“I like the way you chew on things,” said Finnegan. “Good lawmen are always good chewers. But it’s common for a foreign object to migrate through the body over the decades.”
“No, really,” said Reyes. “Your X-rays should show a hole where the bullet went through.”
“I’m sure they would,” said Finnegan.
“I’ll get them,” said the doctor.
A minute later, she was attaching them to the reader that hung from the wall. She clipped a series of three across the top and stood back. Hood looked at the contours of Finnegan’s skull, the gradients of light and dark and density.
“There,” said Petty. She pointed out a very faint circle of darkness on the anterior left side of the skull.
“What do I win?” asked Finnegan.
Reyes stood and stepped up close to the X-ray film. “Are you sure that’s a bullet hole? Kind of faint, isn’t it?”
“The bone will heal over time if the wound is small. What we see here is probably regrowth.”
“How much time?”
“I don’t know exactly. Years.”
“What about damage to the brain tissue?”
“There is some evidence of disturbance. It appears slight. See the pale finger here?” She tapped her own finger to the film.
“Only slight damage from a speeding bullet?” asked Reyes. “Account for that, doctor.”
“I can’t. But there must have been very little brain damage to begin with because brain cells don’t replicate. The brain is a miraculous organ in the sense that we can live without relatively large parts of it. The compensatory powers are impressive. People live normal lives with bullets and other objects lodged deep in their brains. I’ve seen it.”
Reyes looked at the little man, then back to the film. “You’ve got the worst luck in the world, but you’ve got the best luck, too. You get shot in the back of the head, bullet goes through both skull and brain and should have killed you, but instead the hole heals up just fine. Then you get hit by a two-ton Mercury doing sixty. It breaks your neck and half the other bones in your body and messes up your lungs, kidneys, and liver. It breaks your skull and batters your brains, but you crawl a half a mile through the desert. Now ten days later, you’re offering me advice on how to talk to my son. You’re a strange man.”
“I like you, too, Gabe.”
Reyes took another long look at the X-ray, then turned to the doctor. “So, Beth, how is Mike’s overall recovery coming along?”
“Very well. The swelling was a setback and I can’t account for it.”
“You told me his resting pulse is seventy and his blood pressure is in the normal range for a twenty-five-year-old man in good physical shape.”
“Grandma called that an iron constitution. She said it was fresh vegetables, low salt, no tobacco, prune juice.”
“You subscribe to all that, Mike?”
“Don’t ask me about food. I haven’t eaten real food since I got here. Even prune juice sounds good. I’ve never smoked anything in my life.”
“I’m going to ask you about that ninety grand again,” said Reyes. “Where’d you get it?”