The sheriff leaned out the window and yelled. “Riker, if you still want to talk to Travis, you better come quick. He wants to make a confession. The doctor says he’s not gonna last all day.”
“We’ll talk later,” said Riker in a low voice.
“Maybe I’ll see you at the hospital,” said Charles. “I think I’d like to visit Alma Furgueson.”
“Good idea.” Riker walked across the grass toward the sheriff’s car. The passenger door was hanging open.
When the car was out of sight beyond the trees, Charles heard the basement door open and close behind him. He turned around, not really surprised to see Mallory standing there. But he was unsettled by the changes in her. The running shoes had been replaced with boots, and she wore a flowing white blouse from another era. A dark bandanna covered her throat. There was nothing to cover her gun. A heavy belt dipped low on her right hip with the weight of the revolver – in the best tradition of a gunslinger.
When they had cleared Augusta’s yard, the sheriff’s car pitched into a lake of rainwater flanked by trees. The wheels turned while the car went nowhere.
Riker leaned over to light the cigarette dangling from the sheriff’s mouth. “You don’t think it would have been easier to leave the car at Roth’s place and walk to Augusta’s?”
They were rolling forward again.
“Yeah, but I do like to annoy that old woman. She thinks she’s got her place locked off from the rest of the world. So I come through in the car every now and then, just to thumb my nose at her. Most days she yells at me, and it’s a lot more fun. You know small towns. We’re all so easily amused.”
Yeah, right. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“Oh, my deputy tailed you out to Augusta’s.”
“The deputy was on my tail?”
“Well, yeah. Real early, she caught on that you’d seen her, so she started to follow Henry instead, just to throw you off. Then she let Henry lose her so she could double back and pick up on you again. Don’t let it bother you, Riker. She did say that for a city boy, you did a good job of staying with Henry. I understand he took a real snaky route.”
Now Riker had to wonder if the deputy’s act in the bar had been a double blind. The sheriff was that convoluted.
“So Travis is dying,” said Riker. “You’ve been waiting for this a long time, haven’t you?”
“Seventeen years. I thought that little bastard’s heart would never give out. Glad to have you with me, Riker. I need a witness if that deathbed confession is gonna carry weight in court.”
The car turned onto the wide highway.
“Oh, by the way, Riker.” The sheriff was grinning. “When you see your old friend’s foster daughter, you tell Detective Mallory she can have her pocket watch back anytime she wants to come and get it.”
Riker slumped down in his seat and stared out the window. “Okay, you got me.”
They rode in silence for another mile. There was a comforting monotony in the endless fields of sugar cane, the flat landscape with nothing higher than a tree. No surprises out there.
“Professional courtesy, Riker, cop to cop? Is Kathy a good detective?”
“She’s as good as it gets. You’re not half bad yourself, Sheriff. I suppose you ran Markowitz through the back door – a warrant call on a New York car registration?”
“Yeah, but that only told me he was a dead cop. I got the rest from Jeff Mckenna in Missing Persons. You know him?”
“Sure. That old bastard’s been around for a hundred years.”
“I met him eighteen years ago when I was hunting a runaway. I knew the boy was in New York, so I called Mckenna. He found him a month later when the kid got picked up in a drug sweep. I met the man when I went up north to fetch the boy home.”
“So you called Mckenna and asked after your old friend, Louis Markowitz, who you never met in your life.”
“That I did. And Mckenna breaks the news that old Lou is dead. Then I asked what became of Mallory, and he says she’s still on the force, and she’s got a detective’s shield now.”
“And then you asked about me?”
“Oh, he had a lot to say about you, Riker. Yeah, good old Mckenna – memory like an elephant. He even remembered the name of the boy he tracked down for me. We were lucky to get the kid back as quick as we did. He was sick as a little dog, but no holes in him bigger than a needle, thank God. Interesting town you got there, Riker. Children getting stoned on drugs, people pissing on the walls, perverts cruising Forty-second Street, looking to buy little boys. Must get you down after a while.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But now I’ve found the Lord in Louisiana.”
The sheriff smiled. “I heard you were drinking with the New Church roadies in Owltown. Pick up anything useful?”
Riker pulled a crumpled pamphlet from his pocket, held it out at arm’s length and read from it. “ ‘You are on a long journey over perilous ground. You can take the tortuous road, or buy a miracle and fly.’ ” He wadded the pamphlet and tossed it to the floor of the car to join the debris of empty beer cans. “I don’t get it. A religion based on fortune cookies and airline commercials?”
CHAPTER 20
The walls had been painted the color of an orange Popsicle in a cheerful attempt to brighten the hospital room. But the framed pictures of budding spring flowers were a bad joke on Deputy Travis, who lay dying. Yet he seemed to play the good sport. His mouth was set in a grimace of pain that passed for a bizarre smile.
His skin was sallow and filmed with sweat. The tubes in his nostrils tied him to an oxygen unit in the wall. More tubes were plugged into his body, running down from an IV pole where Riker counted six hanging plastic bags of fluids. The lead wires for the pacemaker were sutured to the man’s skin. His breathing was labored, and his erratic heartbeat was graphically displayed by three waveforms on a monitor screen. Cross-wired machines were gathered near the bed like consulting physicians in discussions of lights, beeps and lines.
The smell rising off the body was earthy and dank. Decay prevailed over the medicinal smells from the collection of bottles on the bedside table. Over the past thirty years, Riker had become something of an expert on the smell of death.
On the opposite side of the bed, a young man with a stethoscope and a white coat was talking in an arrogant, high-pitched Godspeak, explaining to the sheriff that this interview was against his professional advice. He had counseled Travis to cancel it. He was sworn to protect his patient at all cost, and his authority superseded the law’s. So he must insist that the sheriff collect his friend and go. Now. That was an order.
The sheriff moved closer to the doctor, who was a smaller man with narrower shoulders and no gun. Tom Jessop explained, in a somewhat larger voice, that the younger man had best back off. Now. That was a suggestion. Or they might need to roll Travis over to make room for the doctor on that hospital bed.
Riker watched the doctor’s face go slack and noted the general shakiness in the younger man’s stance – all the signs of a virgin mugging victim. The doctor glanced at his patient, reconsidered his oath and backed off to the far side of the room to slump against a friendly orange wall.
Riker checked Travis’s chart for recent doses of painkillers which might void his confession. Rules of evidence demanded lucidity. He also scanned the dates and times for a series of resuscitations by violent shocks from a crash cart. And now Riker wondered if the young doctor had ever read this chart. Above another physician’s signature was a shaky scrawl that must be Travis’s own hand. It said, ‘No more.’ And another doctor had signed her name after the words ‘no code,’ the instruction not to resuscitate one more time.