Knowing (6 page)

“Blue light special? What whistle?”

“It’s like this bright, pinpoint of blue light that hovers in the air. And the whistle? Well, it’s more like a high-pitched sound I imagine only dogs can hear. It starts in my left ear and crisscrosses over to my right and then somewhere in the middle, it feels like something lights up or gets ignited. Like one of them butane lighters? It feels like I got me a tiny flame in the center of my head and then it begins. I start writin’ or doin’ things I’ve never done before. Just like in that hospital this mornin’? Grabbin’ the drugs, jabbin’ them with the needles?” He rooted through the bag. “Speakin’ of drugs, it looks like I picked up more than what I needed for my heart. I got me some Valium, Vicodin and some Oxycontin.”

Jane turned to him. “You stole Oxycontin? Jesus, Harlan!”

“
I
didn’t steal it—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He
stole it. Oxycontin? Well, add that theft to your growing list of felonies. That stuff is serious shit. It’s synthetic heroin.”

“No kiddin’? Wow. I bet it’ll make a good tradin’ item.”

“Trading? What are you, Amish?” She turned her attention back to his notebook. “People who barter for Oxy are not the people we need to hang with.”

“Well, I ain’t throwin’ it away.”

“Then do me a favor. Toss it in the glove compartment.”

Harlan complied. Sitting back in the passenger seat, he reached behind his neck. Using his thick first finger, he started digging his nail into a single spot directly under his hairline.

Jane glanced at him. “What in the hell are you doing now?”

“I feel like I got something stuck back there. Can you see anything?” He turned his large body in the seat.

Jane checked it out but all she saw was a lot of surface irritation and redness from where he’d obviously been rubbing and picking at it on a regular basis. “There’s nothing there, Harlan.”

“It don’t make no sense.”

“Well, neither does your notebook.” To Jane, it was like reading the mind of a mental patient who was on lockdown. The mysterious “R” framed in the diamond motif was repeated throughout the various pages. Another repeated drawing was a single circle with a dot in the center. Turning the first page, Jane found another rudimentary drawing of a human hand and wrist. On the inside of the wrist, Harlan drew what appeared to be a bird.

“That’s a dove,” he told her.

“Really? How do you know that?”

“I don’t.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I just do.”

Jane shook her head at his bizarre reply. She continued to scan the notebook, stopping at a sketch of a picket fence with an arrow pointing to the word “blue.” “What does this mean?”

“It means that if I’d had a blue colored pencil, I’d have colored that fence blue.”

“Blue picket fence…None of this makes any damn sense, Harlan—” Jane turned the page and took in a slight breath. There on one single page, were two numbers repeated over and over again, one on top of the other. It was the number seventeen with the number thirty-three below it, both with a single accent mark after the number. No line separated the two numbers; they just free floated up and down and across the page. “Explain this to me,” she said with a gruff tone, holding up the page for him to see.

“That’s weird, ain’t it? If I saw that in somebody’s notebook, I’d think they was one taco short of a combo platter.”

“It’s got to have meaning. You devoted an entire page to it.”

“Ain’t got a clue. And I keep tellin’ you that
I
didn’t do it.”

Jane flipped through the pages, stopping at a random spot. “Agna? Is that what you wrote?” She held the page up to him.

“Looks like it.”

“Did you mean the name Agnes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus, Harlan! Work with me, would you? Do you know someone named Agnes?”

He looked cornered. “I don’t think so. Should I?”

Jane thought for a second. “Maybe it’s the name of one of those women you told me you dream about?”

“Which one? The one with the big boobs? I don’t think anyone would name that sweet young thing Agnes. If they did, she’d change her name, pronto.”

Jane shook her head and put down the notebook. She stared into the grove of circling aspen trees. “Did you ever try to figure out who your donor was?”

“When I was in the cardiac rehab, there was this real nice nurse. She’d been with me in the recovery area the whole time. Her name was Stella. I
do
remember that name. Every single time I yelled ‘Stella,’ she’d come on over and ask, ‘What is it, Stanley?’ Poor gal had a hard time rememberin’ my name—”

“Is there a point to this story?” Jane asked, irritation building.

“I’m gettin’ there. I like to pace myself when I tell stories.”

“Pick up the pace. You got a lot of people after you and I’m trying to help you.”

“I had a lot of questions for Stella. I wanted to know when the next meal was goin’ to get served because I was always real hungry. I asked her why I got lucky and had a room right across from the nurses’ station. I asked her who that guy was who kept sittin’ on the left side of my bed the whole time I was in recovery. I asked—”

“Wait. What guy?”

“Never found out. She said there wasn’t nobody there and I had no visitors but besides forgettin’ my first name, she also obviously couldn’t remember my friend—”

“Friend? Why would you assume that?”

“I was out of it but I could tell he didn’t mean me any harm. He was a big guy. Real muscular. Kinda thick in the arms and upper body, like he worked out every day.”

Jane focused on the words “muscular” and “thick.”

“He was like a cop or a bodyguard,” Harlan continued. “But he never talked so I can’t say for sure what his line of work was.”

Jane’s gut twisted. “Why would you need a cop or a bodyguard by your bed all the time?”

“Good question. It just felt like he was guarding me. I was pretty out of it when he was there.”

“Describe his face.”

“That’s the weird part. Every time I reach up in my head to bring down his picture, it fades away like vapor. It’s kinda like the same block I get with my nightmares. Every time I get to that door and start to turn the knob…”

Jane could see that Harlan was drifting far away. “Hey!” He jumped back to attention. “Did you ask her who your donor was?”

“I’m gettin’ to that. I felt so good, so fast that I wanted to know. Stella said she had no idea, that it was hush-hush. But…”

Jane waited. “But what?”

“I think she knew. Maybe not his name but she was there when I had the operation. I can’t imagine she didn’t see him, even for a second.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Rich. But it’s spelled different. I called her ‘Richy,’ ‘cause that’s how it looked on her nametag. But it was spelled R-I-C-H-E. Between Stella and Rudy, I was well taken care of in rehab.”

Jane made a mental note of Stella’s name. She checked the time. It was 2:30 and her stomach was rumbling from lack of food. “You hungry?”

“I guess. But I can go without food if I have to.”

Jane reckoned Harlan could live off his fat reserves for days but she couldn’t. However, figuring out how to skillfully find a food source and bring it back to their makeshift campsite was going to be tricky. She had enough water but the thought of eating another bag of pine nuts wasn’t appealing. Still, it was better than nothing. She got out of the Mustang and retrieved the Quik Mart bag from where she’d left it on the ground. Sitting back in the Mustang, she rooted through the bag.

“You know, if we need to, we can live off what we can scrounge for ‘round here.”

“Huh?”

“You’d be shocked how much nutrition is packed in the wilderness. I started really gettin’ into that about a year and a half ago. Bought me a bunch of field guides on wilderness foods—”

“Year and a half ago, eh?”

“Yep. Did you know that one cricket has thirteen jam-packed grams of protein? It’s true. Did you know that there are approximately one thousand, four hundred and sixty two edible species of insects? Mealworms, included. Like the sayin’ goes, ‘Red, orange, or yellow, kills a fellow. Black, green or brown, wolf it down.”

Jane regarded Harlan with a blank stare and a long pause. “And you know this because you’ve done this?”

“Once you get over the crunch of the cricket shell, it’s all gravy from there.”

“Gravy? You sure that wasn’t the—”

“I think eatin’ bugs was the gateway to my raw meat addictions.”

“Oh, just shoot me. It’ll be quicker,” Jane murmured.

“They say you shouldn’t even
touch
raw chicken with your fingers. Ha! I’ve scarfed half a raw clucker down and lived to talk about it!” He saw that Jane was not enjoying the conversational theme. “But I love
Italian
too and I never did before my operation.”

“Italian?” She dug into the plastic bag. “Well, all I can offer you is some pine nuts.” Jane handed him the bag.

Harlan regarded the bag in a quizzical manner. “Humph…” He took the pine nuts from Jane and then reached into his burlap sack. “That’s one of the first things I put in my own bag.” With that, he revealed the same bag of pine nuts. “I can’t begin to tell you how many bags of these I ate before it dawned on me that it might actually mean something.”

Jane was temporarily frozen.
What in the hell was going on?
Pine nuts are not what she’d call a common snack food and she could count on one hand how many times she purchased them.

“You okay?”

Jane reached her hand into the bag and pulled out
The
Q
magazine. “You got that too?”

Harlan effortlessly removed an older edition of
The Q
. “What’s goin’ on?”

Jane felt a shiver vibrate down up her spine. “I don’t know.” Her mind raced as a gradual electric prickle engulfed her. “I…” Her head began to throb and her mouth went dry.

“Hey. You okay?”

As quickly as it began, it stopped. Jane tried to center herself. “Maybe you need to show me what else you have in that bag.”

Harlan dumped the contents on the dashboard of the Mustang. In addition to the bags of pine nuts, there was also an actual pinecone. A comical illustration depicting a Blue Heron walking tipsily across the road with a drink under his wing was next. A piece of lapis followed with a faux gold imprint of the Eye of Horus. Then came a dog-eared copy of
Autobiography of a Yogi
and a tiny bottle of sandalwood oil. An old cassette tape of a Patsy Cline album surfaced next on the dashboard, cradled in a ten-page newsletter with the name “Eco-Goddesses.” An ordinary key was the final item Harlan placed on the dashboard.

“Where’d you get the key?”

“I just found it on the street. I don’t think it opens anything because the teeth are too wore down.”

“So, we have a key that doesn’t open anything. That bodes well—”

“Wait, wait, wait. I forgot one.” Harlan pulled out a glittery greeting card with the Archangel Gabriel blowing his trumpet.

Jane felt that damned electrical shiver crest her spine again. The tacky card was the same one she saw at the Quik Mart earlier that day. “You buy that card at the store where you stole my car?”

“Nah. When would I have had a chance to do that? I picked this up about a year ago.”

It was just like the damn pine nuts, Jane factored. The odds that Harlan would have the same pine nuts she had purchased along with the identical greeting card she had just seen that day were ridiculously high. Her head throbbed slightly again. It was as though she felt herself being drawn into a web that she was powerless to fight. Part of her resented it and the other part welcomed the challenge. If anything, it might put off her original destination. And maybe that was for the best, Jane wondered. Maybe they weren’t meant to meet and that’s why this whole elaborate mess erupted. As soon as that inane reasoning swept into Jane’s head, she realized she actually was somewhat grateful for this deleterious detour. She picked up the comical illustration of the blue heron walking tipsily across the road with a drink under his wing. “Blue heron. Didn’t you tell me you met your friend, Rudy, at the Blue Heron Bar right before your life flip-flopped?”

“Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t you call that a drunk blue heron?
Blue Heron
?
Bar
? Jesus, Harlan, do I have to draw you
another
picture?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not clear on where we’re goin’ here.”

“Maybe this has
nothing
to do with…” Jane hesitated. “With your heart or your donor. Maybe this is your subconscious remembering that night after somebody drugged you?”

“And Rudy. Don’t forget about him. I’m sure he was drugged too.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what this probably is,” she cheerfully told herself, embarrassed that she actually entertained the remote possibility that this had anything to do with his heart transplant. “This is
you
!”

“Okay!” Harlan said agreeably.

“Yeah, you had a drink at The Blue Heron bar so you subconsciously found this illustration that represented that.”

“Exactly!”

“And then you picked up the bag of pine nuts because after your surgery you were told to eat healthier foods and that was one of their recommendations!”

“Nope! Not at all! In fact, I hate pine nuts. On the Harlan Kipple nut tree, they don’t even rank on the lowest branch.”

“And now you can’t stop eating bags of them,” she stated with defeat.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Oh, hell
. Moving back to the nuttier possibility that there really was some sort of weird connection between his heart and him.

Harlan leaned toward her. “And beer? Don’t forget how I can’t stand beer now.” He said with a wince.

Jane tucked the notebook in her leather satchel. “It all sounds crazier than shit.”

“You think?” he said, with dripping sarcasm. “So you understand now why I don’t really want to walk back into the police station and tell ‘em my story? You think they might just speed book me right through to a prison cell or maybe the nut house?”

He was right. He didn’t have a chance.

The hours passed and the sun moved closer to setting behind the Rocky Mountains. Jane felt bloated from two more bags of pine nuts and another bottle of water. Harlan seemed to be handling the food depravation pretty well. He was agreeable and almost childlike in certain slivers of moments. He was the kind of guy who makes the perfect victim. His hulking frame probably hadn’t won him a lot of female attention and his solitary, nomadic life driving a truck on the road surely didn’t secure a lot of tight friendships. With little education and a narrow view of the world, Harlan Kipple was fodder for anyone who needed a patsy. Even his name, Kipple, was easy to mock. It was as if he was born to be used, abused and then discarded while the plan was carried out with measured agony. Harlan trusted like a child trusted a stranger with a baby bunny. He was ignorance bathed in napalm. And when it all blew up for him, he probably said too much or not enough. Maybe he was so much in shock that he wasn’t even aware what he was admitting to? After all, he
was
found
nude and covered in the prostitute’s blood. Explain that. Did it make sense that he killed her in a bloody rage and
then
decided to shoot some ketamine in his veins to chill after the bloodbath? Yeah, Jane mused contemptuously, that’s the typical progression of sadistic killers. Go postal and then schedule a nap in the victim’s blood. The fact that his lawyer didn’t figure that one…Jane stopped herself in mid-thought. Yeah, his lawyer. The infamous Mr. Ramos. She shook her head. No, Harlan never had a chance.

Jane drew herself into a tight ball on the front seat of the Mustang while Harlan struggled to wedge his fat frame in the small backseat. She’d found two Bronco stadium blankets in the trunk and gave one to Harlan, along with a pair of ski gloves.

“You’re like a boy scout,” Harlan complimented Jane. “Always prepared.”

“Yeah. I’m a boy scout. A boy scout with O.C.D.”

Harlan tried to figure it out. “That would be a…”

“Very annoying boy scout,” Jane translated.

The night grew increasingly colder forcing Jane to occasionally turn on the ignition and allow the heat to warm them for a few minutes. But the last thing she wanted to do was run out of gas, leaving them stranded. She wasn’t tired and neither was Harlan so she struck up a conversation. “Tell me about that charge against you for prescription drug trafficking.”

“You make it sound like I knew what I was doin’! I had no idea there were drugs in those boxes. I just picked up the shipment from the same storage unit my brother-in-law always sent me to before I headed to Florida—”

“Wait…what? You agreed to transport cargo that wasn’t accounted for?”

“Yeah. I didn’t see no harm in it. Besides my brother-in-law gave me five hundred bucks cash for every round trip. That gave me a little extra cash so I could take my wife out for a nice dinner more often.”

“Wife?” Jane hoped Harlan couldn’t see the shock percolating inside her. “You were married? When?”

“Almost twenty-two years ago. High school sweethearts. I was attracted to her walk and she told me she liked my hair. We had a pretty good run until that tiff with the law. When she found out I’d agreed to help her brother with the interstate deal, she said that was it—that I was no better than her worthless brother and she wasn’t going to stay in a marriage like the rest of her worthless family. I was sort of hopin’ that she’d reflect and realize that after nearly nineteen years at that point of a fairly predictable life that I was not, nor would I ever be just like members of her worthless family—”

“Harlan! Can we get back on point? Why would you take the hit for your brother-in-law? Why didn’t you rat him out?”

“Hey, I was takin’ five hundred bucks from him every time for doin’ it! I didn’t know what was in the boxes, but I
did
take that money. So, the way I looked at it, my hands weren’t exactly clean.”

“You could have explained all that to your counsel at the time and—”

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s all in the past. My brother-in-law made a mistake and I helped him out. And it paid off. When I really was hurtin’ and in the hospital, he told me that he’d pay for my operation, seein’ as I didn’t have insurance no more. And being that he’s so damn rich—”

“He’s rich? So jockeying up the money for your surgery would be like me buying you a coffee? He bought you and you allowed it.”

“I wanted to live. Was I supposed to say ‘no’?”

“He obviously survives off the backs of others who do his bidding.”

“He knows people in high places. He’s the one that got me in with that doctor of mine. I was in bad shape, Jane. I got so bad off, I would have had to perk up just to die. So, my brother-in-law come to see me at the house and saw the state I was in and said that because he owed me one for the rap I took, he was going to call in a favor and hook me up with the best transplant doctor in the business! And he told me I didn’t have to worry because my number was going to come up real quick. And it was like he was a TV psychic because my number
did
come up real fast after that. The problem was that the doctor that did my surgery wasn’t the same one he hooked me up with. The doctor I was supposed to have was sick or somethin’ and so I got his wingman.”

“Wait…that’s how you got your heart?”

“Yes, ma’am. Quite a story, don’t you think?”

Jane’s head spun. “Yeah. It is. You got preferential treatment. And maybe somebody didn’t like that.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“But eating half a raw chicken because that’s what your donor had a craving for makes sense?”

“Somebody set me up and wants to kill me ‘cause I cut in line? I hope you plan on comin’ up with somethin’ just a little better than that.”

“You said everything changed right after the operation—”

“Changed
inside
me. Not outside me. For nineteen months, nothing much happened. Rudy helped get me some steady work, I was payin’ my bills on time, life was regular. Well, except when the nightmares started. I don’t know what’s behind that dark door but every time I reach down in the dream to open it, this cold sweat just covers me and I know if I open that door, I’m dead. Thank God for Rudy. He always talked me through it. Told me it would pass and gradually it’d all get back to normal.

“Rudy sounds like a fucking saint.” Jane was starting to question Harlan’s supportive little buddy. It was one thing for a woman to take on the role of a caregiver but men weren’t typically genetically inclined toward that predilection. In this dog eat, dog eat world, a male with a penchant for propping up another man with words of constant encouragement and tactile therapeutic assistance tends to look like he has a one-way schoolboy crush. Outside of that possibility, he was overly attentive because he wanted something from Harlan. But it certainly wasn’t an intellectual desire or financial strategy since Harlan lacked both attributes. Jane had a picture in her mind of Rudy, from his waiting white bread grin down to his buoyant optimism that was akin to Shirley Temple on crack. Why did Rudy
really
pay so much attention to Harlan Kipple? Between his brother-in-law who pulled the strings and pushed him to the front of the line and his chipper friend who was a little too cloying, the whole thing was beginning to feel surreal and yet strangely meaningful. Somehow, Jane strongly felt that these two individuals were connected to the outcome. “Your brother-in-law put you in the system by making you take the rap. And that prior you had made it easier for the cops when they nailed you for the working girl’s murder.”

“So, if I wasn’t in the system, they would have let me off for the girl’s murder?”

Jane stared straight ahead. She didn’t want to look at him at that moment because the expression on her face would have melted glass. She explained it again to him but he still couldn’t understand why Jane felt animosity toward his brother-in-law. Jane wasn’t crazy about naïve victims and Harlan was as much of a sucker as anyone she’d met on the job. She was still attempting to wrap her head around the fact that he was married. Seeing as his wife made her decision based on his hair told Jane all she needed to know about the woman. A few hours passed and their conversation became more sporadic as Harlan started to doze.

“Hey, Harlan?” Jane reached in the back seat and nudged him gently.

He stirred, creaking one eye open. “Yeah?”

“What were you planning on doing before I showed up?”

“Runnin’. Just keep runnin’.”

“What were you going to do when you ran out of your medicine?”

“I didn’t think that far.” He adjusted the Bronco blanket over his body.

“You got your sweatshirt on inside out. Did you know that?”

“Yeah. I ain’t a Giants fan. The guy I stole it from must have been one though.” He shifted in the seat and lifted the sweatshirt a little bit so Jane could see the front. “It’s one of them celebration sweatshirts. Super Bowl forty-two. Giants win over the Patriots. Final score, seventeen to fourteen. Leading receiver was Plaxico Burress.”

“What was Plaxico’s jersey number?”

“Seventeen.”

Jane shook her head. “Figures.”

Harlan drifted off to sleep, his fleshy chest heaving up and down the further he fell into slumber. The snoring started shortly afterward; the kind of snoring that would make Gandhi reassess his pacifist bent. It was going to be a long, horrible night, Jane told herself. Reaching into her leather satchel, she pulled out a manila file. Rooting around under the passenger seat, she found her flashlight and lit up the first page in the file. It was a document Hank helped her score. The top of the page had the prison name in New Mexico and below that a booking photo of the dirty blond women with the vacant eyes staring back at Jane. Wanda LeRóy was her name. Jane knew the accent over the “o” was added as a dash of sophistication by Anne LeRóy, Wanda’s mother. Wanda’s father was named Harry Mills, a dashing gent who loved the ladies and paid particular attention to Anne. The only photo evidence she had of Anne and Harry was the 1967 black and white one paper clipped to the file. There was nineteen-year-old Anne with her lips pursed toward the “tall drink of water,” standing in front of the Hayloft restaurant and bar in Midas, Colorado. Jane had memorized and digested every dot in that tiny photo for the last few weeks. Even though she’d somewhat accepted the fact that the tortured mother she always knew had lived a much wilder life prior to meeting Jane’s father, she still couldn’t believe that the tryst in 1967 between Anne and Harry produced a daughter. Jane had been the oldest member of her small family, looming over her brother, Mike, who was four years younger. But now there was an older, half-sister and as much as Jane didn’t want to see any similarities in her sullen booking photo, she had to admit that Wanda and she shared similar eyes and mouths. Given up for adoption when she was two and living in an orphanage, Wanda probably never remembered her birth mother but she retained the name of LeRóy, possibly because it was erroneously believed to be her middle name and subsequently added on her adoption papers.