The Last Call

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Emergency rooms are possibly my least favorite places to be. Aside from funeral parlors, that is.

It was 12:20 a.m. in Wichita Falls, Texas.

I suppose I’ve been lucky most of my life. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t hurt so many people in life, but then again, you never know. My mother used to say I should count my blessings. I suppose if I ever do get back to saying my prayers again like I did as a child, then I’ll include a special thanks for watching over me during that week of hell. And for that night of the storm.

Hank was still in the operating room. I kept my hands clenched the whole time. The young lady doctor with the drab-green scrubs and elongated neck had said that it depended upon whether or not the second lung collapsed, and how much he bled. If he pulled through this one, his life was going to be a little slower for awhile.

I had an eleven-year old on my lap, trying to go to sleep. Her name was Jessica, and I was already smitten with her.

Julie sat up on her E.R. bed. Fortunately she only had a few contusions. Her hair looked like a chopped up sort of butch all the way around where it had to be cut away from the electrical tape. It would grow back. I found myself hoping that if everything with her and me and the law resolved the right way that maybe the two of us would also have a chance to grow back together. Foolish of me, I know.

So there I sat, holding her hand and looking into those enchanting eyes. She had an alcohol-soaked rag in her other hand, doing her best to remove the remaining patches of tape glue that were still there around her cheeks and mouth. The alcohol vapors must have been getting in her eyes because they were tearing up. Or maybe it was something else.

There were the tips of black cowboy boots pacing slowly back and forth just the other side of the privacy curtain. Sheriff Thornton, probably.

Another set of boots walked up and there was a brief, whispered exchange. I caught one bit of a sentence, though, and I liked the sound of it: “…thinks he’s gonna pull through.”

“Julie,” I said. “Sounds like Hank’s gonna make it.”

She started crying.

“Don’t cry,” Jessica said. She got up from my lap and put her arms around Julie. I stood up from my chair and sat down next to her.

I waited until the sobbing subsided. She leaned into me and I held her.

So much death, so much suffering, I thought. Why is the beauty in our lives tempered with such sadness?

“Anything you want to tell me before you have to tell everything to the Feds?” I asked her.

“Be with me,” was all she said. “Both of you.” I guess she said it loud enough to be overheard outside the curtain. The two pairs of boots turned and walked away.

“We’re here,” Jessica said.

You don’t just pull a magic trick and switch bags with a fellow who is carrying home two million dollars. That kind of stunt requires careful planning, follow-through, quick-thinking, and terrific dumb luck. Fortunately Julie had each of these elements going for her the night Archie Carpin was paid off in a small town of seven hundred souls five miles north of the Red River, just across the state line in the furthest southwest corner of Oklahoma and only fifteen miles from the Carpin ranch.

El Dorado was a farming town dependent for survival upon two things: the muddy waters of the Red River for irrigation, and upon keeping the kids who were graduating high school from moving off.

The heart of the town centered around Jill’s Diner, where a farmer and his family could stop by on Sunday for the buffet and expect to eat about as well as they could expect to eat at home. Jill’s was a greasy spoon, in the noblest tradition of that label. The air was laden with the scent of deep-frying oil-possibly in need of a change-and cigarette smoke.

One the Sunday afternoon that Archie Carpin stopped in to have dinner and meet with his Oklahoma City friends, the crowd inside Jill’s was thick and the pretty yet slightly pudgy waitress-whose heart was firmly set on running off to college in Kansas City and becoming a Forensic Scientist-was serving as fast as the plates came through the kitchen window.

Carpin didn’t bother to sit. He ordered the buffet and iced tea, but was told that the buffet-a steam table affair in the family room just around the corner inside the dimly lit place-had run dry.

No problem. They’d fix him up a fresh plate, special.

Carpin sat. He glanced at his watch.

At ten minutes till one, the Oklahoma City boys came in and took a seat at the table with him. They demurred when the waitress asked them if they wanted anything. Instead they exchanged a few words with Carpin, shook hands and left.

There on the seat across from him was the bag. An old country doctor’s medical bag, from the age when doctors carried such and made real house calls on their patients. It was a bit of an inside joke and Carpin sat there for a moment, chuckling to himself. Among his distribution buddies he was known as “The Doctor” because of his skillful method of taking moonshine and flavoring it so that it could pass for most any label of brand-name whiskey.

He regarded the bag across from him, and continued to regard it even as his food arrived and he began to eat.

By the time he finished his cherry cobbler he knew that something wasn’t right. It started first with his hearing, which had taken on a muted and tinny quality. After a minute of sitting and studying on it, it came to him as a shock that his hearing was beginning to fade out completely. His vision, likewise, began to grow dim along the periphery. As he watched, the periphery began to shrink, to close in on the center of his vision.

He slammed his fist on the table in an effort to get some of his awareness back, but only succeeded in knocking his iced tea glass off onto the floor where it shattered.

In another ten seconds he was out.

In small towns an ambulance is a rarity. Response time in such places is usually from half an hour to half a day. That Sunday it took the ambulance mere moments to respond. None of the patrons there at Jill’s gave it a second thought. Their attention was on the excitement: Archie Carpin, a bit of legend in those parts, had had a heart attack in their very own diner.

The two EMTs, unaccountably short fellows, had a time getting Carpin onto the gurney and had to have help from among Jill’s patrons.

Finally, they got him loaded and out the door, not for a moment forgetting to take the physician’s bag.

Of the long ride to the hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas, Carpin would later remember very little.

He did however, from a sea of lurid, tortured dreams, feel the ambulance jerk to a stop in Quanah, Texas, eight miles south of the Red River. He felt the cool breeze on his skin when the rear door to the ambulance swung open, and although there were words exchanged and the distinct lilt of a female voice which he would never be able to piece together, one thing was unmistakable, and would immediately surface in his mind when he woke up an hour later with the worst headache he’d ever had in his life: the scent of Giorgio perfume.

It had been a stormy evening, much like the one we had just experienced. Carpin was on his way home from the hospital with a bag full of confetti. He was going to kill somebody.

Jake Jorgenson had, in his own fashion, been in love with Julie since the moment she put in an appearance at the ranch. Nobody seemed to realize it but Julie, who would have nothing to do with him. That night Jake got a call from his boss that he was on his way home. He had instructions to round up Julie and lock her in the closet until he got there. Apparently Jake hadn’t liked the sound in the older man’s voice. He’d told Julie that it was a sound like blood and powder.

When Jake told her that he would protect her from Carpin, if she’d only get in the closet as he’d said, Julie demurred. Instead she wracked Jake up pretty good with a well-placed kick that took him down to the floor. She left him there, holding himself and leaking spittle. Then she grabbed the physician’s bag with the latest Oklahoma City payoff, and started looking for Jessica. Something had gone wrong. Archie was not supposed to have awakened until late that night. She had been counting on that and the hospital’s propensity to keep him for observation and monitoring of his vital signs while she got everything ready and made her break.

She went to Jessica’s room to fetch the girl, but she was gone. With one look out the window from the main house Julie found her. She was down past the horse stables, as always, and playing in the rain.

Julie took the bag and her purse and high-tailed it down the lane toward the stables.

By the time she had Jessica by the hand she saw the glow of headlights coming over the hill past the house. Archie Carpin was home.

The stables were deserted, except for the men down in the still. But there was nowhere to run.

Her eyes settled on the manure pile and on the concrete cylinder rising just inches above the refuse.

She ran to the manure pile, stepped shin-deep into the manure and gave the rusting lid a shove. It didn’t move. She looked around. There was a manure shovel close by, leaning up against a mesquite tree. She grabbed it, took careful aim on the ancient lock and brought the shovel down on top of it with all she had.

The lock and the hasp shattered.

She gave the lid a second push. This time it opened with a screech of metal on concrete.

She dropped the bag into the blackness of the shaft, pulled the lid closed, took Jessica by the hand and made for the barbed wire fence and the woods beyond.

And they made it.

They spent the night in a hunter’s blind deep in the woods, shivering and shaking and starting at every sound.

The next day they cut across country, hiking until they found a road. From there they thumbed a ride into town.

Later that next evening, Julie put the kid on a bus to her real grandmother’s house in New York City, paying for the fare in cash. She’d had the presence of mind to take one stack of bills and stuff them into her purse the night before. And by the time she met me, all she’d had left were three pathetic-looking hundred dollar bills.

She ran from Childress, Texas, and into the arms of Carpin’s chief enemy, Ernest Neil, a hundred miles east of Austin.

Jake and Freddie tracked her there and Jake killed Ernest Neil with a bullet to the head at three-hundred yards. It was impossible to know whether or not he’d been aiming at Julie or at Ernest. I had it figured that in the moment he had her lovely head and face in the cross-hairs of his sniper-rifle, Jake couldn’t bring himself to do it. Whether from misplaced affection, unrequited, or from anger, I believe he moved the cross-hairs a few hundredths of a degree, took careful aim at Ernest Neil, and fired.

When she was finished with her story, she sat there for a time, drying her eyes.

I picked up Jessica and set her down on the bed next to Julie. She was a darling kid and her eyes seemed to watch my every move.

“You watch out for her, will ya, kiddo?” I said. “I’ve got to check on Hank.”

“Okay,” she said, and smiled.

“Mom,” I heard her say as I walked around the curtain and across the floor. “Everything is gonna be great.”

“I know, honey,” Julie said.

I had been warned.

The doctor had said he might not wake up for some time. That he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

I was just sitting there in his room watching little green blips of light surf peaks and valleys, each peak accompanied by that damned sound that means the same thing in any language. I watched my friend’s heart beat. Watched him breathe.

I haven’t had many close friends in my life. I think exactly three. If that was true, then Hank was definitely one of them.

Two hours and just a little over, before he awoke.

I watched nurses pass by out in the Critical Care Ward. Then I heard a “hmm.”

It was Hank. He was looking at me. There was no telling how long he’d been watching me. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d looked up at his face. Really, I had had one hell of a night myself.

I stood up, walked over to him.

He tried to raise his hand toward me.

I took his hand in mine, two old buddies meeting after a long absence and just shaking hands.

“Don’t try to talk,” I told him. “You took one in the lungs.”

“Julie? The little girl?”

“They’re fine,” I said. “None the worse for wear.”

He shook his head.

“Dingo?” he asked.

“Hey. You don’t listen, do you? You’re supposed to shut up.” I suppose the relief on my face was not enough to discourage him.

“Tell me,” he rasped.

“Dingo’s gonna be fine. She’s at a veterinary clinic down the block. Feds took her there. She took a bullet through the neck, but she’ll live. Her bark will never be the same, though.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Either one of us.” His voice was a breathy wheeze, like a teakettle that was trying to come to a boil. He coughed once, softly. It was a weak cough, but it was a sound that I didn’t like.

“Easy, Cowboy,” I said. “Don’t you ever shut up?”

His eyes were on mine. “I’m gonna be fine,” he said. “But… I do have to tell you-”

“What?”

“McMurray.”

“Oh,” I said.

Hank nodded.

“The IRS guy. Hank, you don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t anyway. To tell the truth, I don’t think I can stand the thought of you going from a hospital to a jail.”

“I’m… too old, I think,” he said, his voice hardly better than a rasp.

“There’s no such thing as too old for prison.”

He waved a weakened hand. My turn to shut up.

“You don’t understand,” he said softly. “It was… self-defense.”

“Why would an IRS agent try to harm you?” I realized the stupidity of the question the moment it tumbled out of my mouth. “I mean physically,” I said.

“You might, too, if I had the goods on you the way I did… on him.”

Things clicked into place in my head.

“Um,” I began.

“Yeah,” he said. “Remember? I was about three million up in unpaid taxes. Even after everything settled down I had to pay in a third of that.”

“I remember,” I said.

“McMurray was the only agent who knew about it. He wanted his share… And a plane ticket to South America.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I got his demand on tape. He came after me.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“‘S truth,” he said. “Remember, I disappeared for about four months. That was after. He cornered me…in the parking lot of a truck-stop in Killeen. Pulled a gun. I grabbed for it. Got a bullet through my shoulder, but not too bad. The next bullet… Murray ate.”

“Jesus, Hank,” I said. “What-I’m not sure I want to know this… But what did you do with the body?”

“Bottom of… Lake Belton. Wrapped a tow-chain around him. I let the bottom-feeders have him.”

“You still got that tape?”

“Yep,” he said. “Made copies. The original was in the glove-box of my Ford. I reckon the government has it now.”

I thought about it. We’d left Hank’s Ford Fairlane parked across the street from Julie’s demolished duplex, along with Dock’s dead body.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure they have it.”

“Yeah. It’s what Agents Bruce and Cranford didn’t mention. They’ll be asking about it soon.”

He coughed again, this time it didn’t sound good at all.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough. Time to shut up. I mean it.”

He tried to speak again.

I leaned forward, putting my ear close to his mouth.

“Bill,” he wheezed. “I was… supposed to remind you…”

I turned and looked at his eyes, up close.

Why did I feel like crying?

“What?”

“Bill, you did just fine.”

And that’s how I felt as I walked out into the early morning sunshine for what seemed like the first time, as if I had just been born with the rising of the sun.

Not perfect. Not apt.

Just fine.