Nowhere to Run

14

Joe said to Marybeth, “I chanted your name for two straight days. It helped me to keep going.”

It was nearly midnight. Sheridan, Lucy, and April were back in the motel. Marybeth had come to say goodnight before she left to join them. She looked at Joe with sympathy and curiosity.

“And I’m so sorry about your horses,” he said.

“After the girls are gone, all I’ll have are my horses,” she said. “But you seem determined to kill them all off.”

He winced.

“I’m sort of kidding,” she said.

He squeezed her hand. “We’ll get more horses. I know you’re always on the lookout for good ones.”

“In fact,” she said with a sly smile, “there are a couple of fine little quarter horses down on this ranch in Colorado between Boulder and Longmont. ”

He asked, “How is my dad? Have you heard?”

“He’s failing fast.”

“Have you talked to his doctors?”

She nodded.

“Any hope?”

She shook her head.

After years of estrangement, Joe had become reacquainted with his father, George, on a case three years before, when he’d been assigned to Yellowstone Park by Governor Rulon. Days after they’d made contact, George had been severely beaten, because he’d made the mistake of holing up in Joe’s room and men who’d come after Joe had found George instead. He’d never fully recovered and had been in a senior care facility in Billings since. Joe and Marybeth had paid for George’s care with money they didn’t have. In addition to the injuries he’d sustained, George had dementia and his body was rotted by alcoholism.

“Maybe I can see him,” Joe said. “He’s here somewhere in this hospital, right?”

“Yes. But I don’t know if that’s a great idea right now in your condition-or his,” she said.

“Still,” he said.

“You chanted my name?” she said, changing the subject.

“It was my mantra. You and the girls. I said your names over and over again to myself. Like this: ‘Marybeth-Sheridan-Lucy-April.’ ”

“I’m touched,” she said, but he knew from her furrowed brow she was holding something back.

“What?” he asked.

“Joe, I’ve got to ask you, is something wrong? You seem different somehow. I’m more than a little worried about you.”

“In what way?”

She rose, took his right hand, and squeezed it with both of hers. “This thing you went through with those brothers. It seems to have affected you very deeply. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She breathed deeply and looked longingly into his eyes. “Not really,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

Said Marybeth, “The girls noticed it. They asked me if you were going to be all right. Sheridan especially said she thought there was something different about you.”

He waved it off. “Look, I’m hurting. I have holes all over me. I’ve been through quite an experience and I’m trying to sort it all out. I hate it that my daughters-and you-are saying these things.”

“Is it because they hurt you, those brothers?”

“I’ve been hurt before.”

“Then what?” Marybeth kneaded his hand and pursed her lips.

Finally, he said, “I guess I feel like I left a piece of me up there on that mountain. I don’t feel completely whole.”

“You’ll heal up.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

Joe shook his head. “I’m still sorting it out. I feel like I missed something obvious. Something right in front of my eyes. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it was. I feel like I asked them all the wrong questions, and I couldn’t see what was in front of my eyes. Not that I can see it now, either. But those brothers-they beat me at every turn. They were faster, smarter, and meaner. I was outgunned and outmuscled.”

Marybeth frowned at him. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Plus it doesn’t help that McLanahan and the sheriff in Baggs think I made it all up.”

“McLanahan’s an idiot.”

“There was a DCI agent here today,” Joe said. “Or someone claiming to be a DCI agent. He asked some pretty strange questions, and I felt he was trying to trip me up for some reason. And no one seems to have ever heard of this guy before.”

“That’s odd,” she said.

“To be honest, I heard some doubt in the governor’s voice, too.”

“Joe,” she said, “Rulon’s a lot of things, but he’s still a politician.”

He shrugged and winced.

“What did my mother say to you today? When the two of you were alone?”

Joe sighed. “She said it was time I put away childish things. Like my job.”

Marybeth’s eyes flared. “I knew it. I just knew she’d use this opportunity to try and get under your skin.”

Joe said, “I’m wondering if she wasn’t right.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why do you listen to her? I don’t.”

He tried to shrug, but his right shoulder screamed at him. “Ow,” he moaned.

“Don’t do that. Are you in pain? Do you want me to call a nurse?”

He shook his head no.

“Joe,” she said. “You’re tired. You need some sleep. We can talk about all of this tomorrow.”

He said, “How are we affording the motel? How much are you paying per night?”

“Don’t worry about that. We can afford it.”

“But. ”

“I said not to worry about it, Joe,” she said with authority. “You need to rest and not worry about things. You’ll be back at home in no time, rested and healed.”

He nodded. “Yup.” He told her about being placed on administrative leave.

“And pay no attention to my mother. I can guess what she said because I know her. Joe-” Marybeth released his hand and brushed her fingers across his lips. “You are the man I married. I knew what I was signing on for. I’ve never been resentful or angry with what you do for a living, and I know you’re not the kind of man who could give that up. You do what you do because you’re hardwired for it. You get yourself into situations because you have a certain set of standards that are simply beyond her. So pay no attention to her. She’s crazy and without scruples. She doesn’t understand me, or us. So just put her out of your mind. I thought you’d done that years ago.”

“I thought I had, too,” he said. “But she got to me because I was thinking along the same lines.”

“Only because you’re in a hospital bed and you’re confused by what McLanahan told you,” Marybeth said. “You’ll think differently when you’re recovered.”

“I hope so.”

She paused. Then: “I hope you don’t think you need to go back up there after them. The sheriff down in Baggs will catch them. They’ll eventually find them and bring them to justice. You don’t have to make this a personal quest.”

He nodded, but he didn’t mean it.

She kissed him goodnight and ignored the nurse filling the doorway and looking at her watch as a means of advising them visiting hours were over.

Before she left the room, he said, “Thank you for what you said.”

She smiled painfully and said she’d be back in the morning.

At 3:15 A.M., Joe slid his legs out from under the blankets and eased out of the bed. His leg wounds were tightly bound, but the movement caused sharp needle-like pains that zapped up into his abdomen and belly. He paused at the doorway to get his breath back and pulled on a pair of boxers so his buttocks weren’t bare out of the back of the duck-covered cotton gown.

The hallway was quiet and dimly lit. The nurse station was to his right, so he padded left in his open-backed hospital slippers. Hugging the wall so he couldn’t be seen by the night nurse, he slid along the slick block wall to the end of the hallway and the elevators. Two floors up was ICU.

George Pickett was in room 621. Joe paused before going in and tried to gather strength and resolve. He had no idea what he would find inside.

He eased into the room and stood with his back to the wall near the door, out of sight in case a nurse or aide walked by and glanced in.

Dim blue-white neon lights lit George on his bed. Dozens of tubes curled up and away from his body into the gloom. Bags of clear liquid hung over him. It was as if his father were a long-forgotten potato gone to root in a dark pantry.

Joe shuffled closer. His father looked like a skeleton wrapped in loose latex, as if his yellow skin could slough off of the bones into a pile on the linoleum if he were jostled. Joe froze in mid-breath when George’s eyes shot open and his father’s head turned on his pillow toward him.

“Dad?”

George said, “What I could really use right now, son, is a drink.” His voice was reedy and dry.

“Hello, Dad. How are you doing?”

“Give me a drink.”

Joe reached out for the water bottle on the tray table and his father’s face folded in on itself in a grotesque scowl. “Not that! I said I wanted a drink!”

“Ah,” Joe said.

His father’s rheumy eyes looked at something above and to the left of Joe, but the scowl remained.

“I can’t,” Joe said.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Joe.”

“Joe? I had a son named Joe.”

“That’s me,” he said, feeling his heart break.

“You’re my son, but you won’t give me a drink?” George rasped. “Then what the hell good are you?”

And with that, he died.

Joe heard an alarm burr at the nurse station, and he stepped back and aside as an emergency team rushed into the room and surrounded George’s body, which seemed to have deflated even more. Despite the chatter of the attendants, he could hear the pneumatic cack-cack-cack of his father’s death rattle, and he couldn’t shake the thought that his dad was getting in one last laugh.