Plan B (37 page)

“So do I,” I admitted.

“But I also feel good about us, and about myself.”

“So do I.”

“We finally feel good and we have to feel guilty about it.”

“That’s life,” I said. “If irony’s your bag, there’s never a dull moment.”

She smiled, took my hand, and we walked over to look at the pumpkins.

Dusk was falling when we returned to the Scholling house. Even before we rounded the last curve we began to see scattered cars parked haphazardly along the shoulder of the road. “Uh oh,” Lindsey muttered. The crowd in front of the house had grown significantly, probably since school was out for the day. There must have been over a hundred kids jammed into the small grass clearing on the shoulder of the road, many now in Halloween costumes. The theme, I noticed, was
Blue Angel
, with boys in leather jackets
and the wraparound shades Jack wore in the movie, the girls in sad clown faces, in tribute to the villain of the film. Somewhere, a boombox was blaring Stone Temple Pilots. A number of kids in rubber horror masks were leaning against the police barricades and posing for the cameras with a long sign that said “Come Party With Us Jack.”

“It appears our secret hideout has become Carmelina’s newest hot spot,” I said.

“You think?” Lindsey said.

As we pulled past the crowd, a number of kids crept under the barricades and ran into the street directly in front of us, leaving me no choice but to hit the brakes. “Oh, Christ!” Lindsey said.

“Where’s Jack?” shrieked one of the girls wearing a sad clown face. “What have you done with him?” Her friend, another girl dressed identically but with a happy clown face stood directly in front of the car holding up Jack’s picture. Before I could respond, there was an amplified squawk and Sheriff Sullivan pulled up from the opposite direction. The girls screamed gleefully and fled back under the barricades. Sullivan pulled up so that his open window was opposite my closed one. As he waited for me to lower mine, I saw that our little meeting had captured the attention of the crowd. “Good evening,” Sullivan said with a smile.

“Hello,” I responded. Someone from the crowd lobbed a raw egg, which landed a few feet in front of our car with a thin splat.

“Heard from your friend?”

“Nope.”

There was a musical chant coming from the crowd, the kind you hear at hockey games, which sounded something like
“Bust his ass, Sheriff, bust his ass”
Sullivan smiled. “Your fan club,” he said, indicating the crowd.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to disperse the crowd,” I said.

“Nah. They’ll get bored with it in a few hours,” he replied. “Besides, Halloween night these kids are usually up to all sorts of mischief. It makes my job easier, having them all right here where I can see them.” Just then there was another wet, crunching sound and Lindsey and I both ducked involuntarily as another egg hit our front windshield.

“Well,” I said, inching forward. “I’ll let you get back to your crime fighting.” Without waiting for a reply I made a sharp right and pulled up into the Schollings’s driveway. I could see in the mirror that the back of the sheriff’s car had been egged a few times as well.

Alison and Don were sitting on the porch sipping Diet Cokes, lazy spectators to the frenetic festivities going on across the street. “Getting crazy out there,” Don observed as I carried the pumpkin from the car.

“That’s one ugly pumpkin,” Alison said. Our last minute shopping hadn’t left us with too many choices, but what our pumpkin lacked in symmetry it made up for in sheer audacity, with misshapen lumps and wells marring its rough orange surface.

“It’s supposed to be,” I said. “You know, Halloween and all.”

“Right.”

I found Chuck and Jeremy inside, watching a Halloween
X-Files
rerun. Mulder and Scully were having one of their routine arguments in the front seat of a car as they drove through a cornfield. “Those two should just get a room already,” Chuck said.

“Ignore him,” I told Jeremy, plopping down between them, after carefully placing the pumpkin on the coffee table. “He’s a highly disturbed individual.”

“Where’d you get that pumpkin, Chernobyl?” Chuck asked.

“You think it’s scary now, wait till we get done carving it.”

“What’s Chernobyl?” Jeremy asked.

While we watched the end of
The X-Files
, Alison and Lindsey prepared potato salad, corn muffins, and cranberry sauce while periodically checking on the turkey they’d stuffed and placed in the oven. Then Chuck got up to make a salad, which was always his job since he could cut like a Japanese chef, a fringe benefit of his surgical expertise. I would pass a vegetable and call out a number somewhere between ten and thirty. Chuck would repeat the number as he studied the vegetable for a second and then launch into a series of speed-cuts, the knife pounding the cutting board in a fast, steady rhythm while I counted out loud. He always fit in exactly the amount of cuts I had specified, and the vegetable was always cut with perfect symmetry. “Seven years of medical school,” Alison observed wryly. “That is one expensive salad.”

“It’s a gift,” Chuck said.

I hoisted a tomato and looked over to Jeremy, who was watching with awe. “Twenty?” I asked.

“Twenty-five,” he said with a smile.

“Amateurs,” Chuck grumbled. He made a show of studying the tomato and then attacked the chopping board.

“Cool,” Jeremy said.

“You should see me operate,” Chuck said through gritted teeth as he finished his dicing. “Next.”

Later, while Chuck and Don watched
Cops
, Jeremy and I used scalpels from Chuck’s medical bag to carve a face into the pumpkin. First we cut off the top and scooped out the “brains” and then set to work carving a jagged grin. We had just finished one eye when Alison took out the turkey, so we decided that a cyclops pumpkin was a fine way to go. I wedged a candle into the goop left in the bottom of the pumpkin and we carried it onto the porch, where Jeremy lit it. The effect was satisfying and we both stood there admiring it for a moment. “Pretty good, hey?” I said.

“Yep,” he said, smiling at me. I smiled back and it was a nice moment. You can’t smile at adults the way you can smile at a kid, with no sarcastic remark or shifted gaze to keep things from getting too personal. Out on the porch we were simply two people, connected by circumstance, sharing a smile as dusk fell. Three, if you counted the one-eyed pumpkin.

The first explosion caused us all to jump in our seats, and Lindsey, who was passing a bowl of potato salad to Don, dropped it onto the table with a jarring crash. “What the hell?” Chuck said. Don, who was on his feet before the potato salad hit the table, ran across the room and positioned himself to the side of the living room window, his back to the wall, his right hand resting on his shoulder holster. His pose looked extremely professional. “Everyone stay where you are,” he ordered. No one argued. A second blast rattled the window and then Don took a quick peek out of the corner. I saw his right hand first relax and then leave his shoulder holster altogether, which I took to be a good sign.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They’re shooting off fireworks,” he said, puzzled.

“Who is?”

“You got me. Someone in the crowd.”

We all got up from the table and joined him at the window, just in time to see a bottle rocket go up and burst into green and
red sparks. “Whoa,” Jeremy said, impressed. There was a series of rapid, machine-gun type bursts as someone set off a handful of firecrackers, and then a small explosion of red and yellow sparks that spun around on the ground like a twister. The crowd had moved to one side of the clearing, in order to watch the fireworks while maintaining some distance. Sullivan got out of his car, megaphone in hand, and began shouting a warning to the kids in the crowd, but his voice was drowned out by more explosions as two more bottle rockets were launched. The crowd applauded appreciatively as Sullivan put down his megaphone and began a purposeful walk from his car over to the crowd. We couldn’t see who was setting off the pyrotechnics because of the crowd surrounding them, but that meant they couldn’t see the sheriff approaching either. Suddenly there was a loud, hissing noise, followed by a short, muffled blast and a flash of green light and then the dull thud of an unseen impact. “That was too low,” Don said, concerned.

“What?” I asked.

“That explosion. It was in the crowd.” Before he even finished speaking, we heard some anguished shouts. “Oh, shit,” Chuck said, heading for the front door. “Call 911.”

They’d been using three lead pipes, each no more than two feet long, which they’d planted into the ground at various angles to launch the fireworks. Each pipe had an opening, cut into it right before the shaft disappeared into the earth, so that they could slide the fireworks into the pipe and still have access to the fuse. It was a crude launch pad, but it did the trick. The kids lighting the fuses were too caught up in their task to realize that each blast was rocking the pipes in the ground, loosening them, until finally one of the pipes had taken off with the bottle rocket it was launching. The charge had apparently exploded within the rusty pipe,
sending lead fragments shooting like shrapnel into the huddle of journalists who were covering the vigil, the largest piece ricocheting off one of the news vans and into the shoulder of the Fox News cameraman, where it embedded itself painfully. The bottle rocket itself, freed of the pipe, had pierced the throat of a young girl, whose heart Chuck was desperately trying to restart.

The crowd was deathly silent as Chuck worked on the girl, pumping and counting as he tried to breathe life back into her. As he breathed into her, he gently moved the stem of the rocket, still stuck in her throat, out of his way, taking great pains not to dislodge it. He worked with rhythm and determination, oblivious to the crowd around him. Sheriff Sullivan leaned over the wounded cameraman, calming him down and wrapping him in a blanket, while Sally Hughes sat on her knees, her hand on his chest. She was bleeding from a nasty gash on her left temple, although she didn’t seem to have noticed it yet.

A number of other kids had been hit by flaming debris from the rogue missile, and Don, Alison, Lindsey, and I moved between them, assessing their injuries as best we could. They all had suffered some mild burns, but nothing that looked very alarming, so we just calmed them down and Don procured some ice from one of the media vans to apply to the burns until they could be treated.

Carmelina had only one ambulance and when it arrived the two paramedics took in the scene and for a moment they seemed overwhelmed by the crowd. “Over here,” Chuck called to them. “I’ve got no respirations.” As Chuck spoke, the medics pulled open the girl’s shirt and began placing electrode stickers on her chest. “She’s got a puncture and burn at the base of her neck,” Chuck said through grunts as he continued to press down on her chest. “Just above the sternal notch.” The monitor the medics set up came
alive with two loud beeps and Chuck automatically turned to look at it. “She’s in V tach, let’s hit her with three-sixty.”

I turned away as the paramedics placed the paddles on her and yelled “Clear!” There was a small, popping sound and the faintest smell of smoke, and then Chuck said, “We’ve got a pulse!” There were scattered cheers from the surrounding crowd as Chuck and - the paramedics worked to stabilize the girl and move her onto the stretcher. I found myself filled with admiration for Chuck, for his expertise and confidence. I wondered what it felt like to be so adept at something, to be able to walk fearlessly into such a horrifying situation and know how to make it better.

A few minutes later they loaded the girl into the ambulance, followed by the wounded cameraman, and the ambulance took off. Chuck looked over the three kids who’d been burned and, determining that they were in no serious danger, sent them off to the hospital with Deputy Dan. Sullivan patted Chuck on the back and gave him an appreciative nod before wading into the crowd to determine who was responsible for the fireworks. It was then that Chuck saw Sally Hughes leaning against her news van, pressing some blood-soaked paper towels to her wounded temple. “Who says there’s no god?” he whispered to me with a smile, before heading over to examine her. “You’re going to need a few stitches,” he told her with a frown. “Why don’t you come into the house and I’ll take care of you.”

“Will you tell me about Jack Shaw?” she asked weakly.

He smiled incredulously. “You’re losing blood and all you can think about is how you can use it to get a story?”

“You’re going to use it to get a date, aren’t you?”

“Touché,” Chuck said, and, offering her his arm, led her across the street.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Alison said.

“Come on, cut him a break,” Lindsey said. “He was great out there.”

“He was,” Don agreed.

“And she is of legal age,” I pointed out.

“Okay, okay,” Alison smiled. “Let’s just get inside. It’s freezing out here.”

Chuck worked on Sally Hughes from Fox News in the kitchen, while the rest of us sipped hot apple cider in the living room. Don got a fire going in the fireplace and we all sat back to warm up. In all the confusion of the last half hour, none of us had realized how cold it was outside, and only once we entered the relative warmth of the house did it occur to us that we were freezing. Jeremy, who had been ordered to stay in the house when we all ran out, had been watching anxiously from the window, and he insisted on full details, which we gave in bits and pieces as we all relived what we’d seen. A little while later Chuck joined us with Sally, who now sported a gauze bandage on her temple, and introductions were made all around.