Iron River

41

The nurses trailed along wordlessly as Hood and the doctor hurried through the ICU. Beth opened Mike’s room door and pulled back the privacy curtain. Hood looked at the chunks of plaster, some on the bed and some on the floor, some in the wastebasket, some pieces separate and some still attached by gauze. The girdle stood whole on the floor where Mike had apparently stepped out of it. Hood saw the dressing gauze ripped and wadded and strewn about the room. The collar and blood-smeared cranial rods were set in a corner. There were a few drops of blood on the floor. The catheter tube was tied around the bedrail uphill of the bag so it wouldn’t leak. The room smelled bad.

“Who was with him?”

“No one. He tore out of his cast and walked out alone.”

“Wearing what, a hospital gown?”

“Owens came yesterday. She brought him some new clothes, though I told her he was far from ready for discharge. She said she knew that, but maybe the clothes would inspire him. I thought that was fine. She had a Hawaiian shirt, a navy windbreaker, a pair of chinos, a pair of Vans slip-ons, underwear and socks, and a Padres hat. She put them all in the closet there. She used hangers for the shirt and jacket and pants. Later in the day, Mike asked me to show them to him and he said he hoped they weren’t too big, that Owens always bought a size too big. I thought it was endearing, a guy in a full-body cast worrying about the fit of clothes he wouldn’t be able to even put on for weeks.”

Hood looked at the closet, empty except for four metal hangers, the shoulder of one uplifted and caught on the shoulder of another as if a garment had been yanked off in a hurry.

“He walked out of the room to the nurses’ station,” said Beth. “It took them a moment to realize who he was. They ordered him back into his bed, but he politely refused. He thanked them graciously for all they had done, especially all the good books, and as soon as he left ICU, they called security. Security caught up with him in the lobby and he explained that his account was paid in full and that he was feeling very good. He did a little dance that left him with the toe of one shoe pointed up and his hands spread out. He smiled. Security said the smile looked weird. It was probably because his jaw is still wired shut. Outside he got into a black Mercedes convertible possibly driven by his daughter. I have the plate number.”

“You’re telling me he ripped out of that cast on his own?”

“Yes. Nobody could have helped. Nobody can get past the station without being seen.”

“Why the blood?”

“From the cranial rods. The flesh heals over them, but when they’re removed there’s bleeding. You see, there isn’t much blood here. About right. The hat would hide those wounds.”

Hood squatted and picked up a piece of plaster cast. It was slightly concave and roughly the size of a paperback book and ragged on all four sides. White mesh dressing clung to the inside and extended past the torn edges of the plaster. It smelled of unwashed cotton and an unwashed human being. Hood turned it over and saw the sweat-stained gauze and the four crushed indentations where Mike had torn away this section of solid plaster as if it were a piece of bread.

“I wouldn’t believe a single word of what I just said except I saw half of it,” said Beth. “The other half I believe because I know these nurses.”

“It was the strangest thing I ever saw in my life, deputy,” said one.

“When he came through that door all dressed and I realized who he was, this giant cold shudder went through me,” said another.

“He really did manage to smile,” said another.

Hood stood and tossed the piece of plaster onto the bed. “Nurses, doctors, security, cops, deputies, marshals, and two thousand Guardsmen, and he walks right out.”

“We can’t keep him,” said the first nurse. “We can’t hold anyone against his will. That’s what you do.”

Hood parked across from Owens Finnegan’s El Centro home just after three o’clock. The desert lay darkening beneath the stacked thunderheads, and a heavy wind had picked up. Her garage door was open, but the black Mercedes convertible was gone.

He knocked at the front door and waited but she didn’t answer, as he knew she wouldn’t. The door was unlocked. Hood walked in and closed it behind him and stood for a moment in the empty living room, then walked through the empty kitchen and down the hall to the once beautiful bedroom into which he had been invited, and this was vacant now, too. The bathroom was cleaned out, but on the counter was a wedding absinthe goblet, and beneath the goblet were two sheets of paper. Hood moved the goblet and looked down at a drawing. It was done in charcoal, masterfully rendered, sharp true lines and deep smudges of shadow pierced by light. It depicted Bradley Jones inside the Pace Arms manufacturing bay, dressed in his smart Explorer uniform, examining the newly born firearms as he walked along the workstations, his face locked in the exact speculative, lost-in-thought expression that Hood had seen that night through the window.

Exactly as I saw it, thought Hood. Every detail, every mood.

In the bottom right corner, the name Mike was written in a neat, forward-slanting draftsman’s hand.

I can hear what they think and see what they see. Sometimes very clearly. It’s like hearing a radio or looking at a video.

Hood slid the drawing to the side to see the paper under it. It was a note written in the same neat hand:

Charlie:

I took from you. Next time, and there will be a next time, I will give back. Something you desire, something you need.

MF

That evening when Hood finally got to Mike Finnegan’s apartment across from LAX, he pulled up, saw the FOR RENT sign in the window, and kept on going all the way to Bakersfield.

He sat with his mother in his boyhood home and they talked until late and he slept in the same bed he had slept in as a high schooler. He woke up early and left a note for his mother and father, then drove home as the darkness evaporated. As it often had been in his life, the passing of time and miles was a comfort to Hood, a man navigating an iron river, adrift with blunt instruments and crude charts.