I took the paper from him and looked at it. Four names, four numbers. His ex-wife and three children. “One more thing,” I said. “Where is Orcus Beach, anyway?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“It’s not on my map,” I said. “I’m wondering where it is.”
“You’ve got no reason to know that,” he said.
“It’s not a secret, is it? All I have to do is go buy a better map.”
“McKnight, let me be clear on this.” He stood up and looked me in the eye. “You have no reason to go to Orcus Beach. Go home and make your phone calls. If I need you again, I know where to find you.”
I don’t know how long I stood leaning over the railing. Thirty minutes at least. Maybe an hour. I looked down from the top floor of the parking garage at the outpatient entrance. I watched patients come and go. A woman came rolling out in a wheelchair, a bundle in her arms. A man took the bundle from her and strapped it into the special car seat, moving in slow motion. Some orderlies came out and smoked with their backs to the wall, then went back inside. There were no emergencies. No ambulances racing to the doors. No accident victims holding bloody towels to their foreheads. It was a quiet day at the hospital.
My stomach made a noise. I looked at my watch. It was just past noon. I had been awake for eight hours, going on nothing more than coffee. I took the stairs down to the street level, walked east down Michigan Street, found a fast-food place, and ate a hamburger without tasting it. Then I found a bar with nobody in it but a bartender washing glasses and a woman watching a soap opera on the television. The bartender set me up and then went back to his glasses. The woman never even looked at me.
I watched the soap opera for a while, because there was nothing else to draw my attention. A woman in an expensive dress kept pacing back and forth in an expensive office, going at some guy in an expensive suit. I gave up on the soap opera and went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. I dried myself off without looking at my face in the mirror. Then I threw some bills on the bar on my way out.
I walked back to the hospital. The security guard jutted his chin at me as I passed him. I pushed the elevator button, waited for the car, got in and pressed five. The Intensive Care nurse wasn’t at her station when I walked by it.
The county man was still sitting on his chair outside Randy’s door. He folded his arms when he saw me.
“You again,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About before. You’re just doing your job here.”
“And having so much fun,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for this.”
“I was a police officer,” I said. “For eight years.”
“That so.”
“I had to do this kind of stuff,” I said. “I know how it is.”
He just nodded at that.
“What do you make of this Rudiger guy, anyway?”
“The chief with the big hair?” he said. “What a horse’s ass. You ever been to Orcus Beach?”
“Never have,” I said.
“One stoplight,” he said. “They used to have a furniture factory there, but that closed. So it’s a ghost town now. Chief Rudiger’s the only full-time officer left.”
“So he said.”
“Anywhere else, they’d disband the force and contract with the county sheriff. But not Orcus Beach. Rudiger must have everybody hypnotized or something.”
“Gotta be the hair,” I said.
The man laughed at that. “He’s got enough oil on his head, they better not let him go in the lake. What was that ship? In Alaska?”
“The Exxon Valdez?”
“Yeah, that one. That’s what you’d get in Lake Michigan.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Hey, any chance of me seeing my friend for a minute?”
He stuck his tongue in his cheek and looked down the hall. “Make it quick.”
“I appreciate it.”
I stepped into the room. The heart monitor was beeping. The ventilator was contracting, blowing air, releasing, again and again. I moved closer to him. His eyes were closed. There were bruises on his face. The breathing tube was taped into his mouth.
And then the bandages, all over his neck, his shoulders. He was wrapped up like a mummy, and looked just as still. Like he’d never move again.
“Don’t die yet,” I said out loud. “I want some answers first.”
The monitor kept beeping. The machine filled his lungs with air and then released.
“Besides,” I said, “I want to kill you myself.”
CHAPTER 12
I looked at the piece of paper the chief had given me. Randy’s ex-wife, Sandra Van Buren. Randy and Sandy. They must have heard that a lot. Van Buren was either her maiden name or else she’d remarried. Either way, I wondered how she’d react to me calling her. I was about to find out.
I was back in my truck, in the parking garage. I dialed Sandra’s number on the cell phone I keep in the truck, an old analog piece of crap that I don’t use very often. The call didn’t go through. I tried again. The connection crackled and gave out. I threw the phone on the seat.
I got out of the truck and went down to the street, then back to the same bar. The bartender had finished washing a few more glasses. The woman was still watching her soap opera. She didn’t look up at me this time, either, even when I walked right past her. I had noticed a pay phone in the hallway by the bathroom, with a battered phone book sitting on a wooden chair. I put the phone book on the floor and sat on the chair. It creaked like it was going to give out and then decided not to.
After I keyed in my calling card, I dialed Sandra’s number. Over two thousand miles from where I was sitting, her phone rang. After four rings, she picked up.
“Ms. Van Buren,” I said. Up to that moment, I hadn’t even thought about what to say to her. “My name is Alex McKnight. I’m a friend of Randy’s.”
There was a long silence; then she cleared her throat and spoke. “Yes?”
“I’m just outside the hospital,” I said. “I saw him in the Intensive Care Unit.”
“What do you want?” she said.
There was a low humming on the line, riding back and forth across the country. “I just wanted to tell you,” I said, “that I spent a few days with Randy last week. He came all the way out here… well, partly just to see me, I guess. That’s what he said. And we…”
We what? What did we do? What could I say to her?
“It was the first time I had seen him in almost thirty years,” I said. “We played ball together back in 1971.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t know anything about what had happened to him since then,” I said.
“What do you mean, happened to him?” she said. “Nothing happened to him. He happened to us, Mr. McKnight. He destroyed everybody around him.”
“I understand that,” I said. “Now that I know, I mean… I just wanted to tell you one thing, because I have to. When I was with him last week, all he kept talking about were your children.”
“Stop right there,” she said. “Don’t even say that.”
“It’s true,” I said.
“If he said that, he was feeding you a line. Why do you think he came out there, anyway? You think he came out there just to hang out with his old baseball buddy?”
“I obviously don’t know Randy as well as I thought I did,” I said. “But I swear to God, he talked like a man who was very proud of his kids. You can’t fake that. Nobody can.”
“The policeman told me he was looking for a woman,” she said. “What do you think he was going to do when he found her? Tell her how proud he was of his kids?”
“I didn’t know why he was trying to find her,” I said. “I mean I thought I did, but…”
“It figures,” she said. “He had to go back thirty years to find somebody who’d still believe him.”
“Ms. Van Buren…”
“It’s Mrs. Van Buren,” she said. “I’m married to somebody else now. I try not to think about the past, okay? I didn’t need that policeman calling me up today, and frankly, I didn’t need this call, either.”