Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham) (10 page)

“No...
You sure you hit him? Maybe he's holding his breath or something.” suggested Barry.

“I hit him hard...
look, there's his blood on the railing, where he went over. Give me a hand dumping this garbage-roller off the front, then we'll clean up the blood. Nobody can hold their breath that long... we still don't see him, he's dead for sure. He'll come up in a day or two, but that's a problem for another day... we need to take care of this shit now!” replied Justin, with a tone of finality in his voice.

I was starting to think that I had run through all of my bad luck and might live to see another day.
They couldn't think of the underside of the boat as a place to hide, because in their worldviews, this boat was a flat thing that moved across the water, nothing more; nobody hid under boats. I could feel a spreading warmth inside my jacket, and the stinging in my chest shifting from an ache to a throbbing pain, and wondered how much blood I was losing; I briefly panicked about sharks before I got un-stupid again. The sound of the garbage-can dropping off the front of the boat almost made me shriek, which would have been poor form, but luckily my mouth was below water when it happened, as I was just breathing through my nose to keep as low a profile as was possible.

A minute later, talking quietly enough to themselves that I couldn't hear them clearly, they must have reached some decision, because the engine started.
I took a couple of deep breaths and as the boat started moving away in a wide arc back towards the boat landing, I dove down a couple of body lengths to avoid the prop as well as being seen. The negative buoyancy of my clothes and boots made it easy to stay down once I had gone deep enough. I stayed down until my lungs were burning and then another thirty seconds; long and deep enough so that I barely made it back up to the surface with all of the drag from my sodden clothes.

I came up with the top of my head facing the thrum of the motor. I stuck my nose out just enough to suck in some air after blowing out what remained in my lungs on the way up.
I hoped that my dark hair and the fading light of dusk would camouflage my head a bit if they were still looking. I kept anticipating the bullet splashing through the water and into my skull, but it didn't come. A few minutes later, I started to sink and sputtered my way to the surface. I couldn't see Justin and Barry, or the boat, at all. I held my breath and curled into a fetal position long enough to lose my boots and socks, took a breath, and then did the same with my pants, and then my shirt and jacket. Once these things fell away from me, I felt less as though some weird gravity at the lake-bottom was dragging me down, but I felt so tired, and my chest was screaming at me, drowning out even the ache of my pinky.

I swam for the nearby-ish north shore of the lake, broke a window in an attractive summer cabin with no discernible remorse or regret, and called Dorothy on the pre-
Cambrian rotary-dial phone attached to the wall in the kitchen. “Hi Dot, remember when you said to call if I needed anything. Well...”

TLAS, 8:41, 9/6/2012

“Hi Tyler... well... shit... uhhh... are we going to the hospital?” was how Dorothy greeted me when she pulled up in her little Suzuki SUV on the dirt road leading to the summer cabin I had her phoned from. I had been hiding in the woods, shivering and watching for Justin and Barry until I saw the familiar, narrow configuration of her lights, and stepped out to flag her down. She had laid the passenger seat all the way back, and draped a blanket (
possibly one that I had donated to the shelter
) over it. I settled gratefully on it and thanked her for coming.

“I'm sorry to do this to you Dorothy, but I didn't want to go the ambulance and police route.
I haven't bled to death or drowned in blood and I can sort of move, so I think not the hospital, but I might raid your supplies at the shelter if that's OK.” I had stolen two dishtowels from the summer cabin, packed them over the wound(
s?
)
awkwardly using my right hand which was increasingly ouchy each time I bumped it, and wrapped a twin sheet around my shoulder toga-style to keep it in place. I drank a quart of slightly pond-y tasting water from the kitchen tap that reminded me of summer when I was a kid (
thank goodness for caretakers not shutting camps down until the last minute
). I cleaned up the blood and mess that I could see before turning off the light, closing the door, and heading down the driveway to wait for Dorothy. I honestly believed that I might pass out at any point from the second Dorothy answered her phone until I pulled the door closed, banging my pinky... again... in the process.

“What's a friend for, if not to drive a getaway vehicle after you've been shot?” she quipped sarcastically.
I thought that, given the circumstances, it would have been rude, and possibly dangerous, to correct her, so I held my tongue. She drove, as always, slightly too fast for every road and each bump made me want to cry; given the sort of day I'd been having, I gave myself permission to do just that. She looked over and opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it, maybe out of pity. I don't think Spenser or Travis ever cried when Hawk or Meyer rescued them (
and Parker never needed anyone to rescue him
).

She pulled in to the TLAS parking lot a few minutes later and parked behind the dumpster around back.
She came around and helped me out of the car and up the stairs into their clinic area, where she pushed me back onto the wide and short stainless steel table that they use for cleanings and performing minor surgeries. My legs hung over from the knees down, which wasn't uncomfortable enough to prevent me from starting to fall asleep until Dorothy unwrapped the sheet, pulled the dishtowels and cut my shirt off. She made an onomatopoetic yuck sound and poured half a bottle of unreasonably cold Betadine all over me, from neck to nipple and out to the tip of my left shoulder. Then she grabbed me roughly by my hip and neck and turned me halfway around so as to pour the rest of the bottle on my back in the same general area. Then she let me lay back on a puddle of the stuff.

It occurred to me that she was treating me like she does the dogs and cats that come through the shelter like a revolving door; I'd even helped her before, but had never been on this side of her bedside manner during treatment.
She gripped my left shoulder and pulled the arm up, and swiveled it around roughly; it hurt because of the torn meat, but I couldn't feel the grating of broken bones. “You're lucky, it's just a flesh wound.” She commented. “On TV they'd call it a 'through and through', and you'd be doing pull-ups when we came back from commercial.”

“If it wasn't a 'flesh-wound', Justin would have missed, in which case I'd feel a whole lot luckier.”
But she was right... it seemed as though I had had some luck this night after all.

She put on a camping headlamp, clipped a magnifying lens onto one side of her glasses, and had me sit up while she checked the entry and exit holes.
She tweezed out a couple of bits of shirt and algae and such from each side, and then used a big squirt bottle of saline solution to really rinse out both sides of the wound; she seemed ok when I whined, but surprised when I cursed... not what she expects from the usual guests on her table. She drew the edges of the surprisingly small holes most of the way closed with strips of tape augmented with what smelled like crazy glue, covered it with gauze and more tape, and then moved my arm in a circular motion again; everything held... and it hurt like hell.

She unlocked and opened the meds cabinet and fridge
at the other end of the room. She got out a syringe and a handful of vials of pills and liquids. She loaded the syringe and asked if I was allergic to Penicillin. “What are you using, and no, I'm not allergic to anything that I'm aware of, but will I be barking or meowing at the end of this process?”

“Twin Pen, which is Penicillin G with Benzothine to get a bunch of antibiotics into your system quickly, to head off the creeping crud you must have from swimming in Lower Saranac with two holes in you.
After that I'm going to give you some Ultram, which is a post-surgical med we use for pain management; along with some Cephalexin, which is a broad spectrum antibiotic in pill form which you should take for two weeks, assuming you don't try to talk Somali pirates into killing you before the pills run out. I'm guesstimating the dosages a bit, as these are vet-meds, and I don't want to call the actual vet for guidance. As it is, I'm going to have to fudge our books a bit or klutz my way into 'dropping' a bunch of meds tomorrow morning when somebody else is in here to see.”

“I'm sorry Dorothy. I didn't want to get you mixed into this.”
I mumbled, and then yelped as she stuck me with the needle. She dropped the syringe into a sharps container on the wall, and pulled a coke out of the little dorm-fridge they kept in this room for people to keep their lunches and snacks. She brought it over to me with two each of two different types of pills; I washed them down gratefully with a swig of coke.

“Now that I know you're not going to bleed out, or pass out...
and if you're done crying for the moment, I'll take a look at that angry bruise on the end of your right hand, where your pinky used to be. While I'm doing that, maybe you can tell me a little bit about what the 'this' is that you've gotten me mixed up in, 'want to' or not.” She grabbed a roll of tape and a couple of what, in a doctor's office, would be called tongue depressors, but in a shelter were probably called something else. She gently prodded the joint where my pinky joined my right hand, manipulated it back into a slightly more natural position relative to the other fingers, taped it to a neighboring finger, covered both with a cut-down tongue depressor, and taped the stabilizing bit of wood to the fingers. I tried not to moan and whimper while she was doing this, but for the most part failed. I could see her thinking to herself that most kittens were tougher than me.

“Do you want the long or short version?
Also, bear in mind that some of what I did, and almost all of what the other guys did, was illegal. You knowing about it probably requires you to tell the police or face prosecution.”

“Gimme the short version in nice declarative sentences, but I reserve the right to circle back for additional info as needed.” she said.

“George Roebuck has been making Methamphetamine locally, for sale less-locally. Cynthia Windmere found out by 'big-brothering' the hell out of his computer usage at the library. She confronted him and his minions grabbed and then killed and dumped her in Lower Saranac Lake. I found out and stupidly confronted him also, with the same effect. I lived, so far, and called you.” I finished the coke and she grabbed another one for me.

“You thought your way out of the problem in a way that didn't work for him, same with Cynthia...
Lord save us from smart people who don't get the way that the rest of us think and act.” She smiled at me as she said this, but this was something we'd talked about before... she called it my 'reality gap'.

“QFMFT!”
I replied, using a frequent (
and favorite
) response of hers. “The question is, what do I do now? I like my life here, I've finally managed to install a map of the places and people, and know how to make things work here. I don't want to start over in a new place and re-map, remake, my whole world... again”

“Are you ignoring, or ignorant of, the bigger issue?
That motherfucker tried to kill you, and almost succeeded. We need to take him out, burn his house down with him inside it, and piss on the ashes!” She flushed as she said this, not from embarrassment and self-consciousness (
as I would have
), but with feeling, I think.

“Tell me what you really think Dorothy, don't stifle your feelings, it'll eat you up inside.
I can't kill him, I'm not an assassin. He might have family or pets with him in the house; I'm not burning it down. I don't want to end up in jail at the end of all of this.” She turned and started to say something, but stopped herself when I started up again.

“Besides, I think that with his guys failing to kill me, I can convince him that he made a mistake in trying the first time around, and that my original idea can still work.” I said in a reasonable voice.

She goggled at me, as though I was speaking in tongues, and nearly yelled, “Even forgetting the fact that it was fucking idiotic the first time around to tell the drug-dealer that you knew what he was up to, and give him a chance to whack you... which you seem to be doing
AGAIN
... moron... even forgetting all of that... which I can't… not even for a second... he killed Cynthia! Even if there was some valid argument that he would buy into for not killing you… which by the way, there isn't… he still killed Cynthia... your friend... Cynthia! Did you forget? He can't do that and get away with it. I didn't even like her, and it's not OK with me. In the words of Old Jack Burton, 'son of a bitch must pay'. You talk about balance and logic; you've got to kill him and his guys to bring balance and logic back to the universe.”

She took my pensive silence for dumbstruck silence. To be fair, the two look pretty similar when I haven't intentionally assigned my face an expressive position.
She snapped her fingers and threw another attempt at persuasion at me, “Those crime books with the guy Parker?”

“The Parker novels, written by Richard Stark, who's
agent knew him as Donald Westlake, until he died on New Year's Eve of 2008?” I offered.

“Whatever...
that guy... what would Parker do? Like those silicone bracelets everyone wore a few years ago, except Parker instead of Jesus?” This last idea made me giggle a bit; I don't always understand the rest of the world's sense of humor, nor is mine often in line with theirs, but this thought struck me as funny. I stopped giggling after a moment though, and stood up/off of the surgical table to stretch and walk and think a bit, it occurred to me that while her argument was needlessly retributive, she was, at least partly, correct.

I had originally hoped to restore order to my world by returning Cynthia to the library and ignoring the issues that had brought about her disappearance. That was now impossible on two separate levels: she was dead, and George knew that I knew about both his business and murdering Cynthia (
either of these was obviously adequate reason for him to kill me
). I therefore couldn't worry about restoring balance in the way that I had originally (
and in hindsight foolishly
) hoped to do. But, I could try to preserve what was left of my world; this had to include preserving my life, both corporeally and the life that I had built for myself in the Adirondacks. I had rewritten my world after my parents died, and although what I had now was not what everyone had, I liked it. I didn't want to start over again in a new place almost as much as I didn't want to die. I had explored my new world, pushed back the unknowns day by day, and person by person, and new place by new place; I had fought for the Adirondacks, and didn't want George to win them from me.

I had to kill George Roebuck, it occurred to me, him and the two thugs who had tried to sink me in the lake next to Cynthia and whomever else had bothered them enough to earn that boat ride over the years.
Not for revenge as Dorothy posited, but simply to preserve my place in both the universe and my own little corner of it. I didn't know how I was going to do it, or if it was even possible for me to do it, but I once again (
perhaps over-optimistically
) had a vision of the future. It was of me in Smart Pig and the local environs, in a world with no George Roebuck (
or Justin or Barry
) in it.

I turned to Dorothy, nodded once, and said, “Parker would kill them all, and that's what I guess I have to try and do...
in a couple of days... after you help me get out to my camp and into my hammock to hide out and try to come up with a plan that leaves them dead and me alive, without Frank having to arrest me before I go to his house for dinner next Monday”

Dorothy’s face contained an odd mix of impressed and hopeful and grim and biting back laughter; I would have to settle for that as the best that I was going to get.