Dock had said that.
I shivered. It was cold and I was shaking.
“What?” I almost screamed it at him.
“I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Hurts…like…hell. But I ain’t gonna give up yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Emergency rooms are possibly my least favorite places to be. Aside from funeral parlors, that is.
It was 12:20 a.m. in Wichita Falls, Texas.
I suppose I’ve been lucky most of my life. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t hurt so many people in life, but then again, you never know. My mother used to say I should count my blessings. I suppose if I ever do get back to saying my prayers again like I did as a child, then I’ll include a special thanks for watching over me during that week of hell. And for that night of the storm.
Hank was still in the operating room. I kept my hands clenched the whole time. The young lady doctor with the drab-green scrubs and elongated neck had said that it depended upon whether or not the second lung collapsed, and how much he bled. If he pulled through this one, his life was going to be a little slower for awhile.
I had an eleven-year old on my lap, trying to go to sleep. Her name was Jessica, and I was already smitten with her.
Julie sat up on her E.R. bed. Fortunately she only had a few contusions. Her hair looked like a chopped up sort of butch all the way around where it had to be cut away from the electrical tape. It would grow back. I found myself hoping that if everything with her and me and the law resolved the right way that maybe the two of us would also have a chance to grow back together. Foolish of me, I know.
So there I sat, holding her hand and looking into those enchanting eyes. She had an alcohol-soaked rag in her other hand, doing her best to remove the remaining patches of tape glue that were still there around her cheeks and mouth. The alcohol vapors must have been getting in her eyes because they were tearing up. Or maybe it was something else.
There were the tips of black cowboy boots pacing slowly back and forth just the other side of the privacy curtain. Sheriff Thornton, probably.
Another set of boots walked up and there was a brief, whispered exchange. I caught one bit of a sentence, though, and I liked the sound of it: “…thinks he’s gonna pull through.”
“Julie,” I said. “Sounds like Hank’s gonna make it.”
She started crying.
“Don’t cry,” Jessica said. She got up from my lap and put her arms around Julie. I stood up from my chair and sat down next to her.
I waited until the sobbing subsided. She leaned into me and I held her.
So much death, so much suffering, I thought. Why is the beauty in our lives tempered with such sadness?
“Anything you want to tell me before you have to tell everything to the Feds?” I asked her.
“Be with me,” was all she said. “Both of you.” I guess she said it loud enough to be overheard outside the curtain. The two pairs of boots turned and walked away.
“We’re here,” Jessica said.
You don’t just pull a magic trick and switch bags with a fellow who is carrying home two million dollars. That kind of stunt requires careful planning, follow-through, quick-thinking, and terrific dumb luck. Fortunately Julie had each of these elements going for her the night Archie Carpin was paid off in a small town of seven hundred souls five miles north of the Red River, just across the state line in the furthest southwest corner of Oklahoma and only fifteen miles from the Carpin ranch.
El Dorado was a farming town dependent for survival upon two things: the muddy waters of the Red River for irrigation, and upon keeping the kids who were graduating high school from moving off.
The heart of the town centered around Jill’s Diner, where a farmer and his family could stop by on Sunday for the buffet and expect to eat about as well as they could expect to eat at home. Jill’s was a greasy spoon, in the noblest tradition of that label. The air was laden with the scent of deep-frying oil-possibly in need of a change-and cigarette smoke.
One the Sunday afternoon that Archie Carpin stopped in to have dinner and meet with his Oklahoma City friends, the crowd inside Jill’s was thick and the pretty yet slightly pudgy waitress-whose heart was firmly set on running off to college in Kansas City and becoming a Forensic Scientist-was serving as fast as the plates came through the kitchen window.
Carpin didn’t bother to sit. He ordered the buffet and iced tea, but was told that the buffet-a steam table affair in the family room just around the corner inside the dimly lit place-had run dry.
No problem. They’d fix him up a fresh plate, special.
Carpin sat. He glanced at his watch.
At ten minutes till one, the Oklahoma City boys came in and took a seat at the table with him. They demurred when the waitress asked them if they wanted anything. Instead they exchanged a few words with Carpin, shook hands and left.
There on the seat across from him was the bag. An old country doctor’s medical bag, from the age when doctors carried such and made real house calls on their patients. It was a bit of an inside joke and Carpin sat there for a moment, chuckling to himself. Among his distribution buddies he was known as “The Doctor” because of his skillful method of taking moonshine and flavoring it so that it could pass for most any label of brand-name whiskey.
He regarded the bag across from him, and continued to regard it even as his food arrived and he began to eat.
By the time he finished his cherry cobbler he knew that something wasn’t right. It started first with his hearing, which had taken on a muted and tinny quality. After a minute of sitting and studying on it, it came to him as a shock that his hearing was beginning to fade out completely. His vision, likewise, began to grow dim along the periphery. As he watched, the periphery began to shrink, to close in on the center of his vision.
He slammed his fist on the table in an effort to get some of his awareness back, but only succeeded in knocking his iced tea glass off onto the floor where it shattered.
In another ten seconds he was out.
In small towns an ambulance is a rarity. Response time in such places is usually from half an hour to half a day. That Sunday it took the ambulance mere moments to respond. None of the patrons there at Jill’s gave it a second thought. Their attention was on the excitement: Archie Carpin, a bit of legend in those parts, had had a heart attack in their very own diner.
The two EMTs, unaccountably short fellows, had a time getting Carpin onto the gurney and had to have help from among Jill’s patrons.
Finally, they got him loaded and out the door, not for a moment forgetting to take the physician’s bag.
Of the long ride to the hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas, Carpin would later remember very little.
He did however, from a sea of lurid, tortured dreams, feel the ambulance jerk to a stop in Quanah, Texas, eight miles south of the Red River. He felt the cool breeze on his skin when the rear door to the ambulance swung open, and although there were words exchanged and the distinct lilt of a female voice which he would never be able to piece together, one thing was unmistakable, and would immediately surface in his mind when he woke up an hour later with the worst headache he’d ever had in his life: the scent of Giorgio perfume.
It had been a stormy evening, much like the one we had just experienced. Carpin was on his way home from the hospital with a bag full of confetti. He was going to kill somebody.
Jake Jorgenson had, in his own fashion, been in love with Julie since the moment she put in an appearance at the ranch. Nobody seemed to realize it but Julie, who would have nothing to do with him. That night Jake got a call from his boss that he was on his way home. He had instructions to round up Julie and lock her in the closet until he got there. Apparently Jake hadn’t liked the sound in the older man’s voice. He’d told Julie that it was a sound like blood and powder.