He would have a drink. Toast the name. Then move on. Possibilities were endless. Choices were his. Horizons were clear.
Intense pain followed by a cloak of drugs to hide it. Looking up into a bright, unforgiving light. Counting backwards. Sleep. Awaken. More pain. A steady drip from an IV. Pain fading, like the volume on a stereo being turned down. Again sleep.
Then awakening to something that went beyond a mess and touched on felony. When Susan Terry emerged from her postoperative fog, she was glad to be alive. Maybe.
A nurse came into her hospital room, opened up some shades.
“What day is it?” Susan asked.
“Thursday morning. You came in on Tuesday.”
“Jesus.”
“Are you in pain?”
“I’m okay,” Susan replied. Clearly she was not.
“There are a lot of people who want to speak with you,” the nurse said. “There’s a line that starts with the state police. Then your boss back in Miami. And there’s this young couple that has been in at least a half-dozen times, but you’ve been out of it each time.”
Susan leaned back on the bed. There was a slight smell of disinfectant. She glanced over at the IV tube running into one arm. The other was encased in white wrappings. “What am I getting?” she asked.
“Demerol.”
Susan breathed in. “Great stuff,” she said. She gathered some inward strength and spat out: “But I can’t have it. I have an addiction problem.”
The nurse’s eyes opened wide. “I’ll get the attending,” she said. “Talk to him about it.”
What Susan suddenly wanted more than anything else was that drip. She wanted to luxuriate in the fog of morphine-based painkillers. She wanted to let it coax her into half-sleep and forgetfulness. She wanted it to keep all the people who wanted to talk to her at bay-maybe even prevent them from ever talking to her.
She also knew that it would kill her-probably more effectively than propane and gasoline tanks exploding in a homemade bomb could.
Susan gritted her teeth together. “Send in the attending, please,” she said. As soon as the nurse turned her back, Susan yanked the IV needle out of her arm. It was, she thought, the best she could manage right at that moment.
41
Of course, they weren’t completely believed.
In fact, they were barely believed at all. There were contradictions in their stories, aspects that raised questions instead of answering them, a few outright lies that created numerous doubts and suspicions, and, when they had each completed being interviewed, so many holes that it would have taken a grave digger with a backhoe hours to fill them all.
But Massachusetts State Police investigators had no obvious reason to detain them any longer. The detectives knew there were crimes involved-but they couldn’t see what the three of them had done that broke the law.
Andy Candy had been given a particularly difficult time.
Investigators figured that she would be the weakest link. She was the youngest. She was the only one uninjured, although Moth’s burns were healing rapidly and not, it turned out, significant. Her connection to the man in the exploding trailer seemed the most tenuous. Consequently, her questioning had been harsh-ranging from the typical “We’re your friends” to “We know you are lying to us and we want the truth” to “You understand that withholding evidence in a murder case is a felony and do you really want to go to prison to protect your boyfriend and some suspended prosecutor?”
She’d replied: “What do you think I’m protecting them from?”
They’d persisted: “So, why are you here?”
Andy surprised herself by maintaining an irritating calm that frustrated her interrogators and sticking to her half-assed story: “The man in the trailer maybe had a connection to Timothy Warner’s uncle’s death, which was a suicide, but questions have arisen, and we were here to try to get some answers but before we could ask any, the whole damn thing went up. I think it’s because the guy in the trailer saw the uniformed cop outside and figured it was a drug bust and he was going to prison for the rest of his life, so he blew himself away and set the whole thing on fire just to say ‘Fuck you’ to all you guys. That’s what I think. Wish I could be more help.
“Really. I do.”
But she didn’t.
Delta Air Lines upgraded them all to first class when the woman at the ticket counter saw the cast and sling encasing Susan Terry’s right arm.
They were quiet most of the flight south to Miami. Susan popped over-the-counter Tylenol with regularity, which only did a little to control the gnawing postsurgical pain. She was proud of herself for avoiding instant junkie-hood, although she would have preferred a prescription for Tylenol laced with codeine. She thought she could use the throbbing sensation in her pinned-together arm to help her through the addiction battle. Every time she didn’t take a narcotic it reminded her that she was sober, which on balance was a good thing. She ignored the pain shooting through her arm and the sweat dampening her forehead as best she could.
Shifting about in her seat, she looked across the aisle of the plane to Andy Candy and Moth. It was dim in the cabin; the engines droned steadily. The man next to her had dozed off. It was uncomfortable for her to move but she leaned toward them.
“Do either of you think the man that died back there was the man you’ve been hunting?” she asked bluntly. She omitted the phrase the man who busted me to my own boss and totally fucked up my life.
She wanted it to be him. She wanted it to be finished. She wanted to be able to go in the next night to Redeemer One and face all the other addicts and say, “It’s over,” and be able to reboot her life. She didn’t believe this was possible.
She was unable to see that she had blended this anonymous killer together with moving forward, regaining her position at the state attorney’s office, becoming again the hard-nosed prosecutor who used trying bad guys as a substitute narcotic. But, just as it was for the cops in Massachusetts they had left behind, everything was still in doubt. All of her training in criminal law told her there simply had to be a rock they could turn over that would expose something that might be formed into an answer-but she didn’t know how to find it.
Andy Candy didn’t immediately reply to Susan. Instead, she looked across Moth, out the window into the black sky. Its emptiness seemed a lie.
Moth looked over first at Andy, then at Susan. “I wish it was,” he said. “If it was him that would make everything easier.” He was silent, before adding, “I’ve never been that lucky.”
“Lucky?” Susan asked.
“Yeah. You have to be lucky to get simple answers to complex questions.”
This reply made Andy Candy smile. That, she thought, is Moth in a nutshell.
He continued, speaking past her to Susan. “What do we do? Wait until they’ve finished that autopsy and done some DNA tests-if they even can? Suppose we never know.”
That was a possibility that terrified him. He did not know precisely why, but uncertainty seemed to him to be the sort of trigger that would pitch him back into drink.
“What will you have, young fella?”
“Scotch on the rocks and a heart filled with doubt, bartender.”
He didn’t speak this conversation out loud, but he guessed that both Susan and Andy Candy knew he was having it.
Instead, he said, “We need to find a concrete answer.” This, he realized instantly, was much easier said than done. He turned away from the others, following Andy’s gaze out into the black sky beyond the window. Five hundred miles per hour and I’m wishing I could reach out and grab the right thing to do.