Winter of the Wolf Moon

CHAPTER TWELVE

When I opened my eyes, I saw white ceiling tiles and a fluorescent light that seemed a thousand times too bright. Then the faces of strangers with white masks on. They were doing something to my side. I felt a vague tugging in my ribs. Then I did not see them anymore and felt nothing but a dull ache all over my body that gave way to a soft rolling sensation like I was lying in a boat in the middle of Lake Superior on a calm day.

I saw Leon’s face for a moment. Then Vinnie’s.

I slept. When I opened my eyes again the room was empty. I looked over at the door. There was a window in the door, where anyone in the hallway could look into the room and see me lying there. There was a man standing there. He was watching me. He had a blue hunting cap on. The flaps were hanging over his ears. I tried to speak but I couldn’t.

I slept again. For an hour or a day or a year. This time when I awoke I felt like I was really awake for the first time since I had come to this place. The pain was stronger now. A lot stronger.

My head hurt, especially over my left eye. My mouth hurt. My legs hurt. More than anything else, my right side hurt. Besides the pain, there was something else. What was it? I lifted my left hand and reached across my body. There was a plastic tube there. It came right out of my body and ran to a machine that was sitting next to the bed. The machine was humming away, doing whatever the hell it was supposed to do to me. God, what was it doing? I felt the tube. It was hollow. It was…

Air.

The machine was pumping air into me.

I can’t breathe anymore. I’m hooked up to this machine because I can’t breathe on my own. Am I paralyzed? No, I can’t be. I’m moving my arm. How about the rest of me?

I moved my legs. I tried to sit up. Pain shot through my ribs.

“Bad idea,” a voice said.

“Who is it?” I said.

“I’m Dr. Glenn.” He appeared next to me, lifting the sheet to look at my right side. He was a tall man, with a beard and eyes that looked right through me. “And you, sir, should not be moving yet.” He measured out every word like it was another form of medicine.

“What happened to me?” I said. “Where am I?”

“You are in the War Memorial Hospital in Sault Ste. Marie. You have been here since yesterday afternoon.”

“Why am I hooked up to this machine?”

“Do not be alarmed,” he said. “It is just to help keep your lung inflated.”

“My lung…”

“You have two cracked ribs, sir, and a slightly punctured lung. You suffered a fifteen percent collapse. Anything more than ten is serious enough to use this machine. Right now, there is a balloon inside the upper chamber of your right lung. We need to keep the lung inflated for a couple of days to let the ribs heal.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“You also suffered a slight concussion,” he said. “As well as a cut above your left eye that required fifteen stitches.”

I felt the bandage on my eyebrow.

“In addition to all of these injuries,” he said, holding up an X ray toward the ceiling light, “were you aware that you have a bullet in your chest?”

“You found the bullet,” I said. “I looked everywhere for that thing.”

He looked down at me and smiled for the first time. The serious doctor routine was gone. “Seriously,” he said. “What the hell happened to you?”

“You mean with the bullet or with everything else?”

“Start with the bullet.”

“It was fourteen years ago,” I said. “I took three in the chest. The doctors left that one in.”

He nodded and looked at the X ray again. “Inferior media stinum,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been worth the risk to go get it.”

“That’s what they told me.”

“I’m sure they also told you that there will always be a danger of the bullet migrating closer to the spinal cord, right? Which is why you have a chest X ray every year to make sure it hasn’t moved?”

“Uh… I don’t seem to recall them saying anything like that”

“The hell you don’t,” he said. He looked at me and waited for me to confess. When I didn’t, he held the X ray up again. “I’ve never seen this in person before,” he said. “Around here, the gunshots are always hunters. They’re not little bullets like this one. What is that, a twenty-two?”

“Yes,” I said. “From an Uzi.”

“You must lead a very interesting life,” he said. “Now about this business-”

“Which business?”

“This business that brings you to my hospital with a collapsed lung and more braises than I can count.”

“I was sledding,” I said. “I hit a tree.”

He smiled again. “There are rope burns on your wrists and ankles,” he said. “Do you always have somebody tie you up when you go sledding?”

I looked at my wrists. The ropes had left a three-inch band of red, raw skin. “I need to talk to the sheriff, Doctor.”

“He was here. I’ll call him, have him come back, now that you’re awake. There were two men here, too. The two men who came here with the ambulance.”

“Vinnie and Leon,” I said. And then I remembered the face I had seen, or thought I had seen, in the doorway. “Doctor, were there any men with hunting caps out in the hallway?”

“Hunting caps? You mean with the flaps? I don’t know. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. A lot of men wear hunting caps around here.”

“How long do I have to stay here?”

“It’s going to be at least two days before we take you off that machine,” he said. “Then at least another day after that We’ll do X rays every day to see how the ribs look.”

“That’s great news,” I said. “I’ve always loved hospitals.”

When the doctor left, I sat there listening to the machine for a long while. Now that I knew what was happening, I could feel the balloon inside me. For a moment the thought of it was too much and I had to fight the urge to rip the tube out. But then the balloon would still be inside me. In fact, if I pulled out the tube, what would stop me from flying around the room as the air escaped from the balloon, just like in the cartoons?

A nurse came and gave me some pills. When I took them, the pain in my side started to soften again. I took another little ride in the clouds. When I woke up this time, Leon was sitting in a chair next to the bed.

“Hey, partner,” he said.

“What time is it?” I said. “How long did I sleep?”

“It’s about five P.M., ” he said. “You’ve been here about twenty-four hours now.”

“What happened?” I said. “Where did you… How did you… The last time I saw you, we were both at Mrs. Hudson’s house. You were on your way home.”

“You told me you were being followed,” he said. “So I decided to investigate.”

“You followed me home?”

“I followed the men who were following you,” I said. He pulled out a notebook. “Jeep Grand Cherokee, dark green…”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “The guys who were following me were driving a green Taurus.”

“Two Caucasian men,” he said. “Late forties, wearing hunting caps

…”

“One red, one blue,” I said. “That’s them. I helped them get their car out of the snow. They must have wised up and switched to a four-wheel drive.”

Leon looked at me. “You helped them.”

“Yes.”

“Get their car out of the snow.”

“They were stuck,” I said. “It was the neighborly thing to do.”

“And you got a good look at them,” he said. “I like it, partner.”

“Leon…,” I said, but then I didn’t have the strength to finish the sentence. “Just tell me what else happened. What did the two men in the car do?”

“I followed them all the way into Paradise. They pulled into one of those little tourist motels on the south end of town, the Brass Anchor. You know it?”

“Yeah, I think I’ve seen the owner around town,” I said. “Those two guys are staying there?”

“It makes sense,” he said. “North of you, it’s a dead end. All they have to do is sit and wait for you to come down that road, then pick up the tail again.”

“So then what?”

“So then after I watched them go into the motel, I came up to your place. I figured you’d want to know. Your truck was there, and the door was open, but you weren’t home. I saw a lot of footprints in the snow, and the snowmobile tracks. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but it didn’t look good. I tried calling the sheriff on my cellular, but it wasn’t going through. When the regular phone lines go down, all the cellular channels get jammed. Anyway, I went back down your road, saw Mr. LeBlanc pulling into his place. I tried calling the sheriff again, finally got through, and then we both came back. That’s when we heard the snowmobiles. They were pulling you back down the trail. Vinnie grabbed a big stick. I pulled out my revolver. I still have the carry permit. From before, I mean, when I thought I was a real private investigator.” He looked down at his hands.

“You are,” I said, “You probably saved my life.”

“I panicked, Alex. Vinnie knocked that guy off the snowmobile, and I just stood there watching him. The other snowmobiles came back. I didn’t know what to do. I just fired the gun into the air. Vinnie yelled at me not to shoot him. I fired the gun in the air again. The men turned around and drove away. I was aiming my gun at them. I could have shot them. One of them, anyway. The guy who was dragging you behind his snowmobile. I could have shot him. But I didn’t.”

“You did the right thing,” I said. “What else were you going to do? Shoot him in the back as he drove away?”

“They were trying to kill you,” he said. “They were trying to kill my partner and I let them get away.”

“Leon, I don’t tell many people this, but when I was a police officer in Detroit, my partner and I got into a… well, a bad situation. Both of us got shot. I survived, but my partner didn’t. I’ve replayed that day in my mind a million times, and I always end up feeling responsible for his death. I probably could have drawn my gun in time to stop it. But I didn’t.”

“That’s where the bullet in your chest came from?”

“Yes. The doctor and I were just having some fun with that. Anyway, the difference is, I failed, and my partner died. You didn’t fail. I’m alive. So let’s knock off all this shit about you letting them get away, all right?”

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you for telling me that.”

“It’s probably just the drags I’m on,” I said.

We both stopped talking for a while. There was only the sound of the machine pumping air into me.

“They were here,” I finally said. “At least one of them was.”

“Who, the guys who are following you?”

“I think so,” I said. “I can’t say for sure. I was pretty delirious.”

“When?” he said. “Where?”

“He was out in the hallway,” I said “I think it was last night.”

Leon sprang out of his chair as if he could still catch up to him. “Those bastards. We’ve got to find out who they are.”

“You know where they’re staying now,” I said. “Go check ’em out.”

He looked at me and smiled. “You know, Alex, I’ve been thinking. Remember how I was saying that we could call ourselves McKnight-Prudell? You know, with your name first?”

“What about it?”

“Well, the more I think about it, I think Prudell-McKnight sounds better. What do you think?”

“I think you’re pushing your luck, Leon.”

He raised his hands. “Just think about it.” He picked up a brown paper bag and put it on the table. “Here, I brought you some stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Some books and magazines. Private investigator stuff. You might as well make good use of your down time.”

“Get out of here,” I said. “Go do your thing.”

“You got it, partner,” he said. “Leon Prudell is on the case.”

I watched him leave, a two-hundred-forty-pound whirlwind of flannel and snowboots.

Look out, world.

I spent the rest of the day lying in bed, drifting in and out of a codeine haze. I couldn’t get up because of the machine. I couldn’t even roll over. The nurses came in to check on me or to give me more drags or to empty my bedpan. It was not a fun day.

I could see just enough of the window to know that it was snowing again outside, then it was dark and I tried to sleep. I kept waking up every hour as a new pain announced itself. The stitches over my eye started to hurt, then my right hip, then my right shoulder. All the while the ache in my ribs was a constant background.

In the morning I saw the doctor again. He unhooked me from the machine just long enough to do another set of X rays, then had me wheeled back to my room. Bill Brandow was there waiting for me.

“How ya feeling?” he said when I was back in bed.

“Never better,” I said. “You got my note?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m working on it”

“What have you got?” I said. “I gave you the description of the two guys who’ve been following me. I gave you the license plate number. Although now they’re driving a different vehicle, sounds like. A Jeep Grand Cherokee. I can even tell you where they’re staying now. They’re at the Brass Anchor in Paradise. Leon tailed them.”

He sat down next to me. “Leon Prudell? That clown who used to be Uttley’s investigator?”

“If that clown hadn’t showed up yesterday,” I said, “Bruckman would still be dragging my ass behind his snowmobile.”

“About that,” he said. “What can you tell me? Start at the beginning.”

“You know the beginning,” I said. “I thought he had taken Dorothy. But now, I’m not so sure. He wanted me to tell him where she was. And he wanted to know where the bag was.”

“What bag?”

“A white bag she had with her.”

“You don’t know where it is?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Bill, are you going to tell me what’s going on or not? Are you still looking for Bruckman? And what about those two other guys? Did you run the plate?”

“Alex, I told you I’m working on it. On both of those things. I’m not going to sit here and talk about what I know and what I don’t know.”

I looked him in the eye. “You’re starting to sound like Maven,” I said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“I mean it. What are you doing to me here?”

“I want you to promise me something, Alex. I want you to promise me that you’ll let me take care of this, okay? Just relax and get better. Let me do my job, all right?”

“Will you call me when you find out who they are?”

“Promise me, Alex.”

“All right, all right. I promise.”

When he was gone, I had nothing to do but lie there and think about it. I took more drags. I used the bedpan. I can’t take much more of this, I thought. I am going to lose my fucking mind.

Vinnie came by around dinnertime. They had just rolled in a tray with some sort of meat in some sort of sauce with some sort of vegetable and a separate compartment of green jello. “That looks almost good enough to eat,” he said.

“You’re welcome to it,” I said.

“No thanks,” he said. “I had a steak at the Glasgow. You know, with that brandy sauce that Jackie makes?”

“You’re a cruel man,” I said.

“I’m keeping the road clear,” he said. “I’ve been using your truck. And I’ve been taking care of the cabins, although a few guys left already. I don’t know if they paid you in advance or not.”

“They never do,” I said. “But don’t worry about it. Thanks for helping me out.”

“No problem,” he said. He stood there looking at the floor for a long moment. “I’m sorry, Alex.”

“For what?”

“For the way I was talking to you the other night. After we went to see Dorothy’s parents.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I should have been a little more understanding.”

He looked at the machine. “Is this thing really pumping air into you? What happens if I turn this dial up all the way?” He made a fake for it. I flinched.

“Ow! Goddamn it. Vinnie, I’m so glad you came by.”

“I had him, Alex,” he said. “I had him right here.” He held his hands up and looked at the space between them.

“Who, Bruckman?”

“I wasn’t going to let go,” he said. “But then Prudell started shooting. I was afraid he was going to hit me.”

“He wouldn’t hit you,” I said. “Don’t forget, he’s holding a ten-thousand-dollar bond on you. I don’t know the rules exactly, but I’m pretty sure he loses the bond if he kills you.”

“The bond,” he said, like he was sorry I brought it up.

“When’s the trial?” I said.

“Next week.”

“Now that they know more about Bruckman, they’ll have to go easy on you, right?”

“I don’t know. They still don’t like it when an Indian attacks a cop. No matter what.”

“The tribe will represent you, right?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at the floor again. “They will.”

“Dorothy is still one of you, isn’t she?”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s still a member of the tribe, even though she’s been gone so long?”

“Of course she is.”

“So what’s the tribe doing about her? Aren’t they trying to find her?”

“I think they are, yes. I can tell you one thing. If I ever have my hands on him again, I’ll kill him. I’ll choke him to death, Alex. He’s evil. I could see it in his eyes.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw it too.”

“Well,” he said. He seemed to pull himself back from somewhere far away. “I got a shift at the casino. I’m glad you’re okay. I mean, all things considered.”

“I’m glad you came by,” I said. “It means a lot to me.” The drags had me talking mushy again.

When he was gone, I tried to read for a while, but it made my head start to throb. Trying to watch television was even worse. The drags again, or the concussion, or God knows what. I lay in the bed and thought about baseball, for some reason. I replayed a couple games in my head. How long ago was my last game? It was a triple-A game in Columbus, September 1972. I remembered my very last at-bat, a well-hit ball to left field. It settled into the outfielder’s glove, five feet away from a home run. My whole career in a nutshell. It seemed like forever ago, and yet as I looked at my hands I could still see the protrusions from playing four years behind the plate, all the fastballs and foul tips.

And below those old scars, the new wounds on my wrists. The ropes were so tight. In my mind I was there again, sliding through the snow. My heart pounded. I was breathing hard. I could feel the balloon in my chest, this alien thing inside me.

Easy, Alex. This is exactly what you don’t need right now. Just take it easy.

I put my head back on the pillow, forced myself to relax, to think about nothing. I remembered what an old teammate had told me, that the secret to thinking about nothing is not trying to stop thoughts from coming into your head. Instead, you let them come and then slip right through your head. In one ear, across the slippery floor, and then right back out the other ear. But then, this was a left-handed pitcher talking, and everybody knows that lefthanders are crazy.

The nurses made their rounds. Later a man waxed the floor in the hallway. The machine kept pumping air into me. From outside I could hear the sound of the wind.

I slept. Finally, a good night’s sleep. In the morning the doctor came around again. We did the X rays again, and then he asked me if I wanted him to take the tube out.

“Is that a trick question?” I said. “Pull the damned thing out already.”

He gave me a local before he pulled the tube out. On the end of it there was a deflated balloon, covered with whatever that stuff is that coats the inside of your lung. He stitched up the incision in my side and told me to just lie there for a couple more hours until he got back before I tried standing up. When he left the room, I waited all of one minute before I swung my legs around to the floor. Very slowly, I stood up. It felt good, in a violently sick-to-my-stomach sort of way. I was ready to try it again about an hour later.

Leon stopped in around lunchtime. “Where’s your breathing machine?” he said.

“I’m flying solo,” I said.

“Great, where are your clothes? Let’s get you out of here.”

“Leon, it still takes me fifteen minutes to get up and go to the bathroom.”

“Well, I’ve been busy, at least. Your two friends are definitely staying at the Brass Anchor Motel. They have a unit on the end with a window overlooking the main road. With you in the hospital, they haven’t had much to do, I guess. I did see them leave one day and drive around the reservation.”

“What, you’ve been watching them the whole time?”

“Off and on,” he said. Now that I thought about it, he did look tired. “I couldn’t think of any good way to inquire about them at the motel desk. If it got back to them, they’d know somebody’s on to them.”

“I don’t know what else we can do,” I said. “Except call Brandow again, see if he’s gotten anywhere.”

“Cops don’t play ball with private eyes,” he said. “It’s an unwritten rule.”

“Leon, you should really listen to yourself sometime. ‘Cops don’t play ball with private eyes.’ For God’s sake. This is Bill Brandow we’re talking about. He’s a good guy.”

“Not when he’s wearing the badge, Alex.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

“Now, about the Bruckman situation…”

“What Bruckman situation? He didn’t take Dorothy.”

“Are you sure?”

“The more I think about it,” I said. “Nothing else makes sense if he did.”

“Then who took her?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the two guys who are following me?”

“But if they have her, why are they following you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they have Dorothy but they don’t have the white bag.” I gave him the quick rundown on the white canvas bag that Bruckman wanted so badly.

“No matter who those guys are, or what they want,” he said, “we still have to find Bruckman. He’s our only source of information, number one. Number two, don’t we sort of owe him something now? After what he did to you?”

“Give me a couple days before I have to think about that, okay? It’s all I can do to get up and take a piss.”

“Where do you think he is?” he said. “Right now.”

“Who knows, Leon? He could be anywhere.”

“Think, Alex. What did he say?”

I ran the night through my head, trying to remember what he said. Or what his teammates said.

“One of his guys called him Captain Fuckhead,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“Okay, so he has some dissension there,” Leon said. “What else can you think of?”

I kept thinking. “Well, let’s see. They beat the hell out of me. He wanted to know where Dorothy was. He wanted to know where the bag was. Then they carried me outside, beat the hell out of me again. Then they dragged me behind their snowmobiles for a while. Then they stopped…”

“Yes?”

“They argued,” I said. “The guy who called him Captain Fuckhead, he asked him if they were going to drag me all way back over the river.”

“The river,” he said. “The St. Marys. They’re in Canada.”

“Yes,” I said. “They must be.”

“They’re hiding out over there. Something must have happened.”

“And the only reason they came back over,” I said, “was to find that bag.”

“What do you think is in it?” he said. “Drugs?”

“I don’t know what else it could be,” I said. “Although if that’s true…” I didn’t want to complete the thought.

But I couldn’t escape it. Even when Leon was gone and I spent my last night in the hospital, I couldn’t stop asking myself the same question over and over.

I knew Dorothy was in trouble. She was mixed up with some bad people, and she came to me because she didn’t know what to do next. She had obviously made some mistakes, but beyond that I thought she was just an innocent victim. That’s the part that got to me that night. It’s what made me feel so bad when she was taken from my cabin. It’s what drove me to go out looking for her. But if that bag she was carrying around was full of speed or coke or God knows what, then what did that say about her?

And after all I had been through in the last few days, what did that say about me?