Bloody River Blues

TWENTY-FOUR

Pellam slowly stood, dizzy from both the fall and the pounding to his ears from the gunshots.

Reluctantly he looked across the room.

Ralph Bales had taken all three rounds in the chest. The chair had not toppled backwards but had turned forty-five degrees sideways under the impact. The man sat motionless, head down, facing the windows as if he were dozing in the weak sunlight.

Nina carefully unchambered the next round and extracted the clip. The empty gun, the slide locked back, went into her purse. She then stooped and began to collect the spent cartridges from the floor with impatient but fastidious care as if she were picking up socks from her bedroom carpet before vacuuming.

Pellam quickly uncuffed Ralph Bales's wrists, pocketed the cuffs, and wiped the chair free from fingerprints. He then hurried Nina outside and into the car. His fear of impending police was unwarranted, however; the gunshots had not been heard or, if so, had perhaps been attributed to the final scenes of Missouri River Blues. They drove to a nearby park on the river bank.

"You know where I got the gun?" Nina whispered. "My father kept it in his upstairs desk drawer of our house." She wiped her tearful eyes.

"Oh, you should have seen that desk," Nina continued. "It was a rolltop. Oak, I guess. Dark, with those thin yellow streaks in it. You unlocked it with a brass key that always needed polishing. There was such a wonderful sound when the lock turned. Then you'd lift up the top and there were dozens of these little compartments, lined with green felt. Some of the compartments had… Some of them had…"

She cried for a moment. Pellam made no gesture of comforting her.

"Some of the pigeonholes had little doors with knobs on them. We would go searching for secret compartments. We looked up under drawers, we tapped the back with hammers, listening for hollow spots. We found the gun when we were children, but we didn't think much of it. It had been years since I thought of the desk. Then last week I remembered it. I remembered the gun and I went over to my mothers and got it. I've been practicing since then. That brought back so many memories. The two of us looking through the desk. As little girls. Looking for toys, for paper clips, for-" The tears were strong now. "My sister and me…"

"Your sister," Pellam said, and finally he understood. "She was the woman with Vincent Gaudia, the one who was killed that night."

Nina said, "All the papers talked about was the cop who was shot and about Gaudia. Nobody said anything about Sally Ann. Nobody cared about her. The day after she was killed I stayed up all night trying to figure out how to find the man who'd done it. I thought I'd wait until the police caught him and then at the trial I'd shoot him. But that might take months and maybe by then I wouldn't have the courage to do it. So I decided to meet Donnie. I saw his wedding picture in the paper and it said he was in Maddox General. I planned to get to know him and see if he could tell me the killers name."

"And you met me instead. Your mother wasn't really in the hospital?"

"No. My sister was my only family. She was the relative who died I told you about in the camper, the funeral-when we were looking for that field. Not my aunt. That's why I started to cry."

"You overheard Donnie arguing with me. You heard him say I knew who the killer was."

She nodded. "I'm sorry, Pellam." There was sadness in her voice. But contrition? None at all.

"Why the job with the film company?'

"I knew he'd be looking for you. I thought sooner or later he'd find you."

"You had that gun with you all the while?"

"Some of the time."

That was why she had been so upset when she was attacked at the factory, she explained. She hadn't had the gun with her then; she regretted missing the chance.

The chance to shoot an FBI agent. Pellam didn't tell her this. "But her name wasn't the same as yours. Your sisters, I mean."

"No. Sally Anns name was Moore. It's her married name. She was divorced a few years ago. Pellam, was I wrong? I mean, think about it-the policeman was doing his job and he got hurt. And Gaudia was a terrible man and he got killed but all my sister did was go to dinner with him. She was innocent."

Pellam doubted whether going out with Vince Gaudia qualified you as a totally innocent human being. But he didn't think

Nina was wrong at all to do what she'd done. Why, he himself had been wandering the barren streets of Maddox with a gun for exactly the same reason-to get revenge for Stile s death.

"I wanted to kill him," she said. "I didn't want him to just go to jail. I had to do it myself."

Pellam said nothing.

He leaned forward and put his arm around her. He smelled the sour cordite in her hair from the gunsmoke. He rocked his head against hers. But this gesture was halfhearted. Pellam's thoughts were elsewhere.

They drove up the street for a short ways until they found a pay phone. Pellam stopped, climbed out of the car.

"Are you going to tell the police about me?" He looked at her for a long moment but said nothing. Her reaction was to pull down the car's visor, flip it open, and begin to brush her wispy blond hair.

Pellam consulted a card in his wallet then dialed a number.

In a slightly accented voice a man said, "Hello?"

"Mr. Crimmins, this is the friend that spoke to you last night." Pellam had called the man to tell him not to panic when he heard Peterson announce an impending arrest.

"Ah, well, yes. How are you?"

"Fine. You?"

Crimmins chuckled at the etiquette. "I'm great. I assume things've worked out."

"There's been a slight complication."

"Serious?"

"No, not really."

'That's good."

"But I wonder if your associate Mr. Stettle's free to help me for about an hour."

"I think that could be arranged."

"Tell him to meet me at the corner of Main and Fifteenth in downtown Maddox in half an hour."

"Is this a possibly risky situation?"

"I don't think so. But could you ask him if he'd bring some garbage bags?"

"Garbage bags?"

"He'll understand."

They went to the lounge and meeting her there, rather than in his room, replaced the evening with Nina as the best thing that had happened to Donnie Buffett for a year.

"You shouldn't smoke," he told Wendy Weiser as she lit her cigarette.

"I know." She inhaled three times and stubbed it out. That's all I smoke anyway. And just twice a day. Well, three times."

He nodded at the lie and looked her over. She was off duty today and had come in solely to meet with him. She wore tight, faded blue jeans and a leather jacket over a T-shirt imprinted with a slogan. He made her pull the jacket aside to reveal the words: "Once I thought I was mistaken. But I was wrong." He liked her earrings: A tiny gold fork hung from one lobe and a matching dinner knife from the other.

What was so good about the meeting was that he was no longer a prisoner. Or rather, he was not the same degree of prisoner. He had been in maximum security and now he had been upgraded to minimum. It wasn't yet straight time but that was okay. For the first time in almost two weeks he had a sense of motion-Buffett moved past things rather than being the stationary object. The breeze was stale and it smelled of antiseptic and steam-table food but it moved nonetheless and that was wonderful.

His maiden voyage in the wheelchair. He had insisted on piloting himself and Weiser hadn't objected though j she said it was against the rules. He had a feeling that Weiser knew what the hospital could do with their rules and probably told them so frequently. Buffett shoved off hard from the doorway of his room. But his arms were stronger than expected and he had lost control, caroming off a water cooler and a candy striper's backside before he got the feel of the chair.

They had wheeled, and walked, down the corridor, Buffett considering whether to tell Weiser about the night with Nina Sassower. It was the sort of thing that she probably ought to know; it might help with his therapy. But he kept mum. He hardly wanted Nina to get into trouble. Anyway, if he didn't blow the whistle there was always the chance she might come back again.

He wondered if he could do it three times in one night.

The lounge consisted of a dozen Formica tables, bright blue and chipped. Against one orange-painted wall were old, battered vending machines, for coffee and hot chocolate, for candy, for soda. Some bulbs in the soda machine were burned out. The front said, OCA OLA.

She asked what he wanted.

Buffett said he'd have an 'oke.

Laughing hard, she said, "I'll have an 'iet 'oke."

"How come? You got a great 'igure."

They laughed some more and she walked over to the snack machine. She bought a pack of peanut butter crackers. "Dinner," she said. And he almost asked her out then-casually, thinking he would just wonder out loud if sometime she'd like to grab a bite with him. But the Terror nuzzled him viciously and the opportunity to ask the question suddenly closed. Then she was at the table, lighting, inhaling on, and stubbing out the cigarette.

He was slightly disappointed when she took a manila folder out of her attache case. This made the meeting more professional, less social. She set it in front of her but did not open the file.

"Donnie, you're out of spinal shock now. There has been good restoration of sensation and control to many of your functions.

I think bladder and rectal control will be almost normal. And, as I told you, there's no reason that I can see that sexual functioning won't ultimately be fine…"

Buffett was clamping down on the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. "Ultimately."

"It's clear now that the most serious and permanent damage will be to your legs. There may be some improvement but most likely it'll be along the line of faint response to external stimuli. As far as walking again, on your own, well, it's the way I told you before, Donnie."

She offered him a cracker. He shook his head. She ate it then sipped the soft drink.

"There's a lot of research going on now in this area; most of it's trying to isolate substances-some are like hormones and some are structural proteins…"

He smiled to himself as he felt himself sinking into the brilliant quagmire of her brain.

"… that affect how the neurons reach and talk to their receptor cells-"

Donnie nodded and appeared, he believed, to be interested.

"… something called FNS."

"Feminine…?" He wanted to make a joke, but his mind went blank.

"Functional neuromuscular stimulation." Her eyes sparkled as they always did when she spoke about science and she explained about some contraption that you hooked up to your leg muscles to send in jolts of electricity to stimulate them in a certain order. Eventually, using this device, you could propel yourself in a jerky fashion by using canes or a walker.

She kept talking but Donnie Buffett stopped listening. He was deciding that whatever FNS was exactly he'd never get hooked up to anything like that. Buffett knew he could sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his Ufe and maybe cry sometimes and maybe scream and he could see himself pitching a lamp through the TV set after watching Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune one too many times. And he could picture himself wheeling out of the house and getting a job. Learning to do wheelies, learning to go over curbs by himself, developing huge, ball-buster arms and a fifty-inch chest. But no machines. Just like, if he were blind, he would use a cane but never rely on a dog. He couldn't explain what this distinction was exactly but to him it was real and it was the difference between his heart being alive and being cold dead.

He noticed that Weiser had stopped talking and it seemed as if she had asked him a question. He didn't feel like asking her to repeat it. He said, "Would you go out with me?" He added, "I mean, have dinner."

When she declined, as he had somehow known she would, it wasn't with a shocked or, what would have been worse, maternal smile. She looked at him with the intrigued gaze of a married woman at a party, propositioned discreetly by a man she finds attractive.

A pleasant regret, not an astonished surprise.

She added, "We should stay friends, you know."

And when she said that, the Terror nudged Donnie Buffett once, hard, bringing sweat to his forehead, but then it curled up somewhere inside him and, for the time being, fell into a deep, deep sleep.