South of Shiloh (31 page)

44

RANE NEVER DREAMED. THE INSISTENT HAND
rousing him from sleep was real. Blinking, he squinted at a shadow bending over him, backlit by the basement light coming in the doorway.

“Wake up,” said the shadow and materialized into Kenny Beeman, whose breath smelled like beer and cherry pipe tobacco.

“Huh?” Rane pushed up on his elbows.

“C’mon and get dressed,” Beeman said more urgently. “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

Rain turned the black asphalt of Fulton Drive into a glitter of reflected lights.

“Marcy Leets got beat up,” Beeman said, weaving in and out of traffic. “They just brought her into Emergency. Some people were coming back when the concert at the courthouse got rained out. Found her staggering from the alley behind her shop. Called 911.”

Beeman banged his horn, blew through a four-way stop, turned up Tate, and floored it toward 72. He slapped a red flasher on the dash, threaded through another light, turned west on the highway, and gunned the gas. The thirsty Interceptor engine surged.

“Joe Timms, sergeant with the city, responded, took her in. Called me en route.”

“How bad is she?” Rane asked.

Beeman heaved his shoulders. “Don’t know.” Then he retreated into his fierce driving. “Hold on,” he warned as he drifted into a turn; toe to brake to gas, straightened out. Tiers of lights loomed ahead in the rain, a sign.
MAGNOLIA REGIONAL HEALTH CENTER
. They shot through a parking lot full of cars, toward an ambulance parked under a portico.

Rane cleared his thoughts. When your heart is beating fast, the word
EMERGENCY
, stamped in red neon, looks like a frozen shriek in the night.

Beeman clucked his tongue, reflected, “Margie don’t like it when I go to Emergency on Thursday nights.”

Then he drifted in a four-wheel skid, slewed at an angle behind the ambulance, and jumped out. Rane followed Beeman, who was moving fast, his bare ankles showing above the worn moccasins. The cop had just tucked in the flannel shirt and buckled on his gun belt. He was no longer smiling; striding, his body coiled, hands and arms held in close.

A tall, handsome tanned man with styled blond hair stood by the door, smoking a cigarette, wearing a Memphis Marathon T-shirt, stone-washed jeans, and soft, orange, ostrich-quill cowboy boots. Beeman walked up to him and got right in his face, nose to nose.

“You got anything to do with this, you piece of shit?” Beeman said in a low growl.

“Not me,” the guy said, not giving an inch and flicking ash from his smoke. Some of the ash dribbled down Beeman’s chest. “I was out at my mom’s when Darl called, playing Monopoly with her, as a matter of fact. You can check,” he said casually.

Rane heard a car door open across the lot and saw a lean, fox-faced man heave up from behind the wheel of a sleek cream-colored Cadillac SRX, step into the rain, and smooth his flowing Hawaiian shirt a certain way. The pool shooter from the bar, the one Rane had clubbed in the throat with the pool cue. The guy in the ostrich boots dismissed Fox Face with a subtle wag of his cigarette, never taking his eyes off Beeman.

“Wanna push it, Dwayne?” Beeman asked softly, hands swinging loose.

“Not me, officer,” Dwayne Leets said in a level voice. “I’m here ’cause my sister-in-law’s been roughed up. Strictly family.”

“Uh-huh,” Beeman said, shouldering past Dwayne. Rane quickstepped to keep up as they went through the door, past an overweight security guard in gray and brown, who stepped back to let Beeman pass. More doors; Rane stepped over a bloody dressing on the floor. Figures in lime green scrubs moved through curtained bays filled with Stryker gurneys and muted plastic machines and the acute concentration of medics.

A willowy black nurse with wide, elegant Ethiopian cheekbones stepped in Beeman’s path. She raised a white, vinyl-sheathed hand.

“Whoa there, Peaches,” she challenged.

Peaches?

“Let me by, Sheba,” Beeman said. Rane noted that the nurse Beeman called Sheba wore on her scrubs a name tag that said
NOLA
.

Whatever her name was, Beeman firmly put his hands on her arms and moved her aside. Half a dozen hospital personnel in the immediate area paused a beat, and Rane concluded that when Beeman was in motion people made room.

“Where is she?” Beeman asked. Then, looking past the nurse, Beeman spied Darl Leets standing by the nurses’ station. Two scrubbed children stood quietly big-eyed next to Leets; the younger one held a stuffed kitty. The older one had an Atlanta Braves cap sideways on his head.

Beeman slowed and the smile was back. “How you boys doing,” he said, instinctively stooping to get on eye level with the younger boy.

“We’re fine, sir. It’s Ma got hurt,” the young boy said. Rane figured he was six; the taller one maybe eight or nine.

“But she’s going to be fine, right?” Beeman shot a look at Darl.

Rane watched Darl Leets’s face shift from pissed to concerned back to pissed. “That’s right, she just got banged up a little,” he said. He had a hand on each kid’s shoulder and he pulled them in closer to him.

Beeman stood up and before he could address Darl, a cop in a blue city uniform, sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve, stepped from a curtained alcove down the hall.

“Bee, leave him. Was somebody else,” the cop said. Rane floated, trying to be invisible, staying next to Beeman as Darl bent and said, “Boys, I want you to stand over there by the wall. Keep out of people’s way but stay where I can see you. I got to talk to the policeman. You hear?”

The two boys nodded solemnly and crossed the hall. Darl turned and looked Beeman directly in the eye. “Listen to Timms, Bee. Weren’t me…” But Darl had enough situational awareness to fix on Rane’s face. “You,” he said simply.

Beeman squinted at Timms, who held up a cellophane baggie that contained a plastic vial. Timms said, “She clawed the fuck out of his face. I got skin parings from under her nails.”

“What happened?” Beeman asked Darl.

“Swear to God, I don’t know,” Darl said. “I was home with the kids when they called.”

“What’s Dwayne doing standing outside?” Beeman demanded.

“Shit, Bee. I don’t tell him where to fuckin’ stand.”

Rane studied Darl’s face. No longer the laid-back, confident man he’d met in the state-line barroom, Darl was now keeping his anger in check with meat hooks of control.

Beeman turned to the city cop. “She say…?”

Timms shook his head and took Beeman by the arm. “Excuse us, Darl,” he said, walking Beeman down the hall, where he bristled when Rane followed. Beeman cooled him with a curt head shake. “He’s okay, he’s with me.”

“Was dark. She said this guy jumped her from behind, at her shop; in the storeroom in back. She resisted, he hit her, then she clawed his face and he ran,” Timms said.

“You been over there yet?” Beeman asked, looking up and down the hall.

“Got a team processing. They just called. Get this. They say there’s a bloody thumbprint on the door, bigger than shit.” Timms dropped his eyes, then looked up. “All the talk, boys are speculating we got a Mitchell Lee situation,” he said.

Beeman grunted, then asked, “How bad is she, Joe?”

Timms flexed his jaw, conjured his eyes back and forth. “Ain’t pretty. Took a bad one alongside her eye, ’nother on her chin; face all cut up, got some loose teeth. Tore her dress damn near off. Got bruises on her neck and shoulder and down her front. Could be a lot worse, I guess. But she caught him a deep one on the face. Got wads of tissue in this baggie.”

Beeman set off again, down the hall, with Rane keeping pace. The doorkeeper nurse was back, beside them. She put a restraining gloved hand on Rane’s elbow.

“He can’t…”

Beeman took Rane’s other arm and yanked him forward. “How is she?”

The nurse shrugged. “We’re cleaning her up, checked her vitals. She has multiple abrasions, contusions, and the bruises. We have some concern she might have lost consciousness. So the doctor might order an X-ray, possibly a CAT scan…”

The three of them stepped into the curtained cubicle where Marcy Leets sat on a raised gurney with the shreds of her dress hanging down her waist. A coppery-red residue of blood and Betadine disinfectant trickled from her swollen left eye and dribbled down her smooth neck and breasts and pooled in the crease of her stomach. A nurse was blotting a tiara of caked blood from the widow’s peak above her forehead with a disinfectant wipe. Heavy purple stripes of blood bruising raked her chest.

One of the blackest men in Corinth, Mississippi, looked up and furrowed his thick brows when he saw Beeman and Rane. “You will leave, please,” Doctor Durga Prasad ordered in precise, clipped English. Late of Calcutta, he was a vigorous stump of a man with a shiny bald head.

The nurse named Nola, addressed as Sheba, pursed her lips and turned to Prasad. “Doctor, you’re new here but we’ve seen this before. We need police on this, to talk to her. This is Deputy Beeman with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“Is my face damaged?” Marcy asked in a too-calm voice.

The other nurse was removing a blood-pressure cuff from Marcy’s arm as Prasad looked Beeman up and down, then raised a pencil flashlight and shined it in Marcy’s eyes.

“Doctor,” Marcy enunciated doggedly, “when the swelling goes down on my cheek, will my face be damaged?”

“Please. Can you open your mouth?” Dr. Prasad asked.

Marcy opened her mouth with some difficulty. Prasad peered, probed gently with the pencil light and a wooden tongue depressor. His gloved finger and thumb quickly tested around her teeth, tongue, and the roof of her mouth. “You have a few loose teeth, cuts inside the cheek, and we’ll want X-rays,” he said to the nurse. “Run an IV, one milligram of Ativan.”

“No drugs, please,” Marcy mumbled.

“Just to take the edge off, honey; get you calmed down,” the nurse said, her fingers busy with a bright needle and plastic tubing.

“I guess,” Marcy said, her eyes gliding, sitting up straighter as the nurse screwed a syringe in the IV, pressed the plunger. “What I mean is,” Marcy said, “will I need stitches for my cheek? Will I be…disfigured?”

Prasad’s exact eyes studied the swollen, liverish cheek. “No, this is abrasion, some quite deep, and swelling. You’ll have a…black eye,” he said, knitting his prominent eyebrows.

“Doctor, I am very concerned about my face,” Marcy said.

“We will see X-rays,” Prasad said. Then he nodded to the other nurse at the table. Deftly, the nurse stripped the torn blue dress down around Marcy’s hips. Sheba stepped forward to assist. The two nurses gently lifted and turned Marcy so Prasad could examine her back.

“You two out. This woman deserves privacy,” Prasad insisted as Marcy was disrobed.

Beeman and Rane stepped back as the curtain was pulled in their faces.

“What do you think?” Rane asked Beeman.

“Don’t know. Don’t like it Dwayne’s here.”

The curtain swept open. Now Marcy wore a shapeless purple gown with a faded floral design. Little daisies.

She looked up and seemed to recognize Beeman for the first time. She plucked the loose material of the smock with her thumb and forefinger, let it fall, and attempted to smile, showing red-rimmed teeth in swollen lips. “They musta washed it with purple…”

Beeman stared at her, then turned to Dr. Prasad. “Can I talk to her alone for a minute?”

Prasad diplomatically looked to Sheba, who nodded.

“One minute. She must go to X-ray,” the doctor said.

As the doctor and the nurses left the cubicle, Beeman put a hand on Rane’s arm, signaling him to stay. Then he drew the curtain. When they were alone, Marcy experimentally explored her teeth and puffy lips with her tongue. Carefully, she spit bloody saliva into an antiseptic wipe, used a clean corner to blot her lips. Then, wincing, she motioned with her head for Beeman to come closer. As he leaned forward, she whispered through tiny bubbles of blood, “Watch yourself, Bee, he ain’t acting this time. He’s really crazy out there.”

“I need something, Marcy; anything?” Beeman asked.

Marcy shut her eyes, shivered, fought a rush of tears, and then nodded imperceptibly. In a barely audible voice, she whispered, “Billie Watts.”

“What about Billie?”

“He’s got his dumb ass mixed up with Dwayne and Mitchell Lee. Now he’s scared shit, hiding out at Pickwick in his condo…” Her eyes pleaded: no more.

Beeman nodded and said gently, “Okay. You got my cell. You call, hear.”

Marcy shut her eyes and nodded.

“That’s all,” Dr. Prasad said with finality, stepping back in, “you go out of my ER. Now.”

Beeman and Rane sidestepped a wheelchair and retreated down the corridor toward the admitting desk. Darl Leets, standing with Sergeant Timms and the two kids, narrowed his eyes at Beeman and Beeman returned the look; a fast negotiation Rane could not track.

They kept walking, and Sheba appeared beside them. Beeman took her aside by the arm. “Take good care of her.”

They looked at each other. Sheba moved in close and said quietly, “We can take care of her. We’ve done it before. Somebody should take of
him
.” She was muttering, squeezing her gloved hands so tight the rubber squeaked.

Rane watched them continue to stare at each other. Then the nurse said, “We gotta talk. Outside. I’ll just be a minute.”

Rane braced himself going back through the door, expecting Dwayne Leets and his driver to be waiting. But the Caddy was nowhere in sight. So he stood under the portico, listening to the rain beat down. An after-scent of blood and Betadine clung to him in the humid air. The pain, fear, and adrenaline rickets he’d felt coming off Marcy Leets did not have a specific smell. A soundtrack, maybe, of gentle Southern voices smoothing over violence. Then Rane realized he was hearing faint snatches of music from a car radio drifting across the parking lot through the rain; they sounded like “Tupelo Honey.”

Sheba came through the door, peeling off her gloves. Watching her approach he considered a professional question. Did black pigment hold passion tighter to the features?