Mallets Aforethought (32 page)

But then as a new thought hit me my mouth imitated Weasel’s and fell open, too: I didn’t need spikes. What I needed were the brakes, good timing, a bit of luck . . .

And a reason for Weasel to hit even harder, next time. So gazing into the rearview, I smiled my sweetest smile and let my middle finger send an unmistakable message.

Which infuriated him, as I’d expected. These guys, they take everything so personally.

Well, so did I. Gripping the wheel I watched Weasel roar up behind me again, waiting until the instant when I felt the first metal kiss of his big front grille on the rear of the truck.

Then I stomped on the brake. The impact whipped my head back, snap-ratcheted the seatbelt against my chest, and sent twin bolts of pain slamming through my knees as they slid forward and smacked the lower dashboard.

It also sent lobster traps sliding relentlessly downhill off the truck bed, right into the C-clamped windshield of Mister Future False Teeth of America’s junkyard-dog chase vehicle.

The C-clamps let go and then the windshield did. He tried swerving to avoid the traps, which sent him into the guardrail lining the side of this steepest part of the hill. The last thing I saw as I pulled away was steam rising out of the hood, as he climbed out.

Gosh, I wished I had a camera. And time to use it.

Instead, five minutes later I pulled the truck into the lot outside the courthouse in Machias. The building also housed the jail, the registrars of deeds and probate, and numerous other offices where people were in the habit of behaving soberly and respectably.

But respectable behavior had gotten me nowhere. It was time for a new strategy.

New and different; my only reason for thinking I could pull it off was that I had to. George’s life depended on it.

If he still had one.

The Washington County courthouse was a lovely old redbrick building on a narrow side street. Built when there were fewer inmates and far less litigation, its surrounding streets were jammed with traffic and parked cars.

The small lot near the front door was reserved for official vehicles. I pulled the truck in there. Leaning on the horn, I made sure that I would be noticed.

Then I got out. Fell out, actually. Yelling while I did it.

Clambering up, I spied two uniformed officers ambling from the sheriff’s office. Their long-suffering looks said I wasn’t the most disruptive drunk they’d met that day.

I’d soon fix that. Digging around in my bag, I pulled out the bottle of ipecac I’d taken from Will Bonnet’s medicine chest and swigged thirstily from it, then threw it as hard as I could. It shattered on a squad-car windshield.

The cops’ faces hardened; perfect. Now if I could just keep the ipecac down for a little while longer . . .

“Lady, you’re intoxicated. You need to come with us.”

As firmly as they could without actually lifting me off the ground, the two officers seized my arms and escorted me up the front steps, down the tiled corridor, and into the booking area of the jail.

Fussing and squalling, I let myself be propped in front of the officer in charge of accepting me into the county’s custody.

“Name?” he asked tiredly.

“Who wan’s tah know?” I gave him the old bleary-eye. His glance in return was the one you might give to the bottom of your shoe, while you are scraping something off it.

Oh, this was going fine. Or it was until the strangest thing happened. State Trooper Hollis Colgate stepped out of a side room, still talking to whomever he’d been visiting. I tried turning away quickly but it was too late.

He’d seen me. And recognized me. Now Colgate was headed toward me and whatever he did or said, it would cause a delay.

I couldn’t afford one.
Go away,
I thought at him. But he stopped right in front of me.

“Okay,” the booking officer said to the two cops still holding me. “Is there any ID on her?”

“None that we saw,” one of the officers replied.

And then in one of the most inexplicable events of my life, Hollis Colgate turned his back on me and walked away.

“Not on her, anyway,” the other cop confirmed, as Colgate went out through the front door of the building without another glance at me.

Baffled, I turned my attention from Colgate back to the matter at hand. They’d gone through my bag, as I’d expected they would. It was why I’d stashed my license and other ID items in George’s glove box, and why I’d had to swallow the ipecac syrup so dratted early. Any time now the syrup would produce the effect that made it such a useful, even lifesaving, first-aid remedy.

Which—abruptly—it did.

“Aw, Christ,” yelled one of the officers. “Horace! Get a mop out here, will you?”

Horace was apparently the inmate on janitor duty that day but I never got to meet him. Instead I was hustled rather roughly through a door marked “Intake,” and into a small holding area.

“Think you’re gonna be sick again?” inquired the hard-eyed female officer in the holding area. She patted me down with brisk thoroughness; fortunately I hadn’t made a mess of myself, only the floor.

The officer was immaculately groomed and her expression said clearly what she thought of me: not much.

“I’m not really like this . . .” I managed.

“Yeah, sure. Until now, and all of a sudden you are. Take my advice, when you get out of here, get with the program. Come on,” she added, not unkindly. “You can sit in the sickroom while they finish your paperwork.”

“Am I going to jail?” I put the proper fear in my voice.

“Probably.” She escorted me toward another door. “If you were just intoxicated, maybe not. But now you got destruction of official property, disorderly conduct.”

I held back. “Who’s in there?”

She urged me along. “One guy says he’s dizzy, I’m pretty sure he’s faking but we’ve got a nurse coming. The other one’s getting over a big headache. Don’t worry, I’ll be there with you. That’s my job today—baby-sitting,” she added with a grimace.

Again just what I’d hoped for. The dizzy one, I figured, was Ronny. It’s what I would have done, faked a symptom, if I wanted to get in there with George.

In fact, it
was
what I was doing. But George must be the one with the headache so it sounded as if I had gotten here in time, albeit with my mouth tasting like the bottom of a bird cage.

There was a drinking fountain by the door. “Can I get some water first?”

She stopped impatiently. “Yeah. Hurry up.”

It was plain old city water and it tasted like champagne. “I mean it,” the officer went on while I was savoring it, “I’ll give you a card for some people who will help you.”

I raised my head as she unlocked the sickroom door. “Because after today, I really hope you’ll have learned a lesson. I don’t want to see you again in this condition . . . oh, son of a bitch.”

She crossed the room fast, removing her baton from the loop on her utility belt as she did so. She hit Ronny Ronaldson across the back with the weapon, and she must’ve had some serious upper-body strength because despite his impressive size Ronny went flying.

Then she yanked away the pillow that Ronny had been holding to George’s face. Placing two fingers on the side of his neck, she cursed again, then slammed her fist to the intercom button in the wall above the head of the bed.

“I need the crash cart and an ambulance. We have an inmate in cardiac arrest.”

Finally she turned to me, and I must not’ve looked quite as skanky as I had a few minutes earlier, because the four words she said to me then were the ones I’d hoped never to hear again.

“Do you know CPR?”

She was already beginning to perform it, and as I’d learned at Victor’s class it works better with two people doing it.

Even if one of them is me.

“George! George, are you all right?”

The two of us moved him to the floor. I knelt beside him with the heel of my hand three fingers’ width from the end of his breastbone: compressing, not gently at all, between the breaths she blew into his lungs.

“One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .”

I timed the breaths and chest compressions aloud as all the things Victor’s class had taught me whirled in my head.

“Leave her alone,” the woman cop snapped when someone tried replacing me. “I’m getting a pulse on her compressions. Let’s not fix what ain’t broke.”

Which meant my efforts were circulating his blood, while her rescue breathing—when the crash cart arrived she’d switched to a mask with an oxygen tank attached to it—put precious air in his lungs.

So he wasn’t blue anymore. But he wasn’t responding, either; every time we stopped compressions to see if he had any pulse of his own, he didn’t.

Someone led Ronny out. He’d been weeping, mumbling over and over again that he wanted to know if his mother was all right.

That, I realized with the tiny part of my mind that could still think, must’ve been what Will threatened him with: harm to his family.

“Ambulance is on the way,” reported one of the officers who’d brought me in. “But he says he’s got a ten-minute ETA.”

Estimated time of arrival, in other words. The room was full of people; even Horace the janitor had wheeled his cleaning cart in to observe. But they were a blur to me; all I could see in my mind’s eye was Ellie’s face, sweetly radiant with soon-to-be motherhood.

And all I could hear was Victor’s voice, dithering on about all the numerous ways that resuscitation could fail.

Somebody jostled Horace’s cleaning cart and swore as the contents of its top shelf fell. “Damn it, Horace, get out of here and take this crap with . . .”

“Wait.” Among the fallen items was a box of baking soda, used here I supposed just the way I used it at home: to deodorize garbage cans, drains, and the inside of the refrigerator.

But when I spotted it something pinged in my memory. Baking soda.
Bicarbonate
of soda. The stuff, Victor had said, that your blood uses to keep from being too acid.

Because if the blood is too acid, resuscitation won’t work. The fact printed itself in boldface on the front of my brain, superimposed somehow atop a mental picture of Sam, pouring that antibiotic powder into an injured turtle years ago.

“Pour some under his tongue,” I heard myself saying. “The soda bicarb.”

I waved at the box, went back to doing chest compressions as all the faces around me creased in skeptical looks. All but the female cop doing the rescue breathing, that is. She gave me an odd glance, then spoke up.

“If the ambulance people were on scene now, they’d be giving IV bicarb, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah,” I gasped in reply. Chest compressions are strenuous, and my hands were killing me. “But they’re not. Here. Giving it.”

She eyed me again. “You weren’t drunk, were you?”

“Give the little lady a round of applause,” I grated out. “You can hear all about it later. Now are you going to, or not?”

“Do it,” she snapped at one of the hovering cops. “Open his mouth, pour some in. Do it fast so I don’t miss any breaths.”

The officer obeyed, dumping a bunch under George’s tongue where it began dissolving. Then we went back to the same rhythm we’d been in before.

Push, push, push, breath. And again.

“You need relief?”

I shook my head. My arms were aching, my back was on fire, my knees felt as if iron spikes had been driven into them, and my torn hands were bleeding onto George’s shirt. But I would stop what I was doing when he responded positively or when hell froze over, whichever came first.

“So what makes you think under the tongue will work?” she asked.

“My son used to do cocaine. When his nose bled and he didn’t have anywhere left on his arms to skin-pop, he’d put it under his tongue.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Pause,” she said as an ambulance screamed up outside. She checked George’s pulse. “Nothing.”

Black misery hit me. I put my hands on his chest again. But then . . .

“No, wait,” I heard her say. “It . . . I think I got something.”

She repositioned her fingers on his neck. “Pulse.” The hard look faded from her eyes, replaced by something like wonder.

“Hey, he’s got a . . .”

George’s chest shuddered wheezily up. He took a hitching breath and then another. And then he coughed hard and moaned.

The female cop who’d been ready to send me to AA jumped up and flung her arms around me as the EMTs raced in and took over.

“Jeez,” George complained thickly as they lifted him to a gurney. “What’s a guy gotta do, get some rest in here . . . hold his breath till he turns blue?”

Then his eyes found me and focused. “Will,” he said, and struggled, trying to get up. Apparently Ronny had felt the need to talk during his try on George’s life.

“Now, George,” one of the EMTs soothed him, “I’m going to need you to cooperate a little bit with me, here.”

Whatever Ronny had said, it had been enough to clue George in. Not to the why, probably. But to the
who
.

“Where is Will?” George added, not sounding cooperative in the slightest. Then he got a look at me, all cut up, bloody and disheveled, and a wry little gleam came into his eye.

“I told you to be careful with power tools, Jacobia,” he said.
Powah:
the Maine way of pronouncing it.

I began weeping.

“Wade,” I said urgently into the phone. I was in a squad car, speeding toward home. “Don’t let on that it’s me.”

He performed beautifully. “I’m afraid she’s not here now. Is there a message?”

Not a quaver, bless Wade’s devious little heart. Trees and road signs went by in a blur. At the tops of the hills the tires didn’t quite fly up off the road, but they almost did. “Bonnet’s our bad guy,” I said. “Is he there? And Ellie, too?”

When they couldn’t find me they’d congregate at my house to decide what to do next. Or I’d hoped they would, anyway.

And they had. “Yes,” Wade replied. “He’s here.”

We roared into a curve, careened through it, hurtled across a bridge; any faster and we’d have needed a flight plan. “Good. I’m two minutes away,” I said. “Don’t let him leave.”