Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006
- Автор: Бетанкур Джон Грегори, Jr. William J. Carroll,
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines/Crosstown Publications
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 51, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2006». Краткое содержание книги:
“My name!”
“Of course. You were South America. Six continents, six victims, six boxes for the body parts.” He paused and then said, “Come on, I’ll take you home.”
“Home, hell! Take me to the station. I’m the lead item on the eleven o’clock news!”
An hour later she sat there with Hayes Merritt at her side and stared at the camera. “Good evening. This is Beth Valparaiso, reporting live on the capture of the Boxing Day killer.”
Bad Weather
by William J. Carroll, Jr
The body in the wall began to sag outward as the whole cave started to sink around me, so I didn’t have time to pay it any final respects.
All I did have time for was a mad, semi-panicky scramble to the cave opening — and I made it — the mud walls oozing together behind me — just in time to feel the hurricane hit like the hammer of God.
Because this was, finally, the real Amanda — the real horrific deal — the night before being just a mild prelude — and I’d never seen anything like it.
Flying sheets of water and mud and vegetation flailing around me. The wind so fierce I had to crawl or be carried away. And the noise so loud I wanted to cry.
Some morning.
It was two hours until sunrise, and I couldn’t see a thing, having dropped my flashlight back in the cave, but the good news was that whoever shot me wouldn’t be around.
No one would.
So, aside from the hurricane, I was safe.
I slipped-slid down onto the rocks at the foot of the mud hill, where I got battered by the surging river, and fell I-don’t-know-how-many-times, but somehow dragged myself around the headland to the swamp.
Where the wind was a micron less fierce, but where I couldn’t find the trail back to the highway, because not only could I not see, nothing was as it had been.
So, with my head low, I stagger-walked in waist- to neck-deep water for what seemed like hours, until the water shallowed and I walked into a mangrove tree, a nasty curved branch jamming into my shoulder. That started it bleeding again, so I decided I was done for a while, and just hunkered down on the leeward side of the mangrove’s trunk, closed my eyes, and waited.
Not thinking I was too old for this, because I’d never been young enough; not thinking I should have had second thoughts about coming to look for the body with the hurricane hovering just off the North Carolina shore, because the damn thing must have changed direction.
And not thinking about who might have shot me, as much as what to do about it.
Not that it was much of a wound — just a groove in the skin below the shoulder, but it stung and kept me angry. Angry enough to want to do something about it.
So, that’s what occupied my thoughts until the storm passed and left me in a soft but persisting rain.
Which, in the relative calm, is when I got out my cell and made two calls.
The first, as I trudged back toward the highway, to the police, though I knew I wouldn’t be a high priority on their list of things-to-do-when-a-hurricane-hits.
And then, when I was finally sitting in my rented Explorer, which had been rolled off the road and into a ditch, I made the second, to Scotty McKey.
Who’d started it all. Two days ago, at the Fort Bragg BOQ.
I had just recently returned from a wasted TDY to Bosnia, and I was a day into a two weeks’ leave, which I was spending doing nothing whatever — and liking it. Scotty had left a message on my machine while I’d been away, and I’d intended to call him, but just hadn’t gotten around to it.
There was a new waitress at the Officers’ Club with whom I’d been semiflirting, and who for the moment had a lot of my attention. In fact, I’d been just about on my way to the club, with full-fledged flirting on my mind, and some wishful thinking for the days ahead, when Scotty called again.
“Virginiak, you cretin,” he said, when I answered, “don’t you ever return your calls?”
“Hey, Scotty, what’s happening?”
“How’re you doing pal?”
“I’m doing fine, Scotty,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’ve done better.”
“Where are you, man?”
“New place near Raleigh,” he told me. “Cormier Memorial.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Been here a couple years now.”
I felt like sudden death.
“It’s a dump, actually,” he went on, “but it’s country, and better than most, you know?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Reason I called,” he said, “I wonder if you could drop down to see me.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m on leave right now, as a matter of fact. How about next week?”
“Look,” he said, after a small hesitation. “I think you’d better come now. I don’t know how I’m gonna be, you know? I have good weeks and bad.” He laughed. “I may not even be around next week.”
“You heading back west?”
“No,” he told me with reluctance. “I’m kinda sick, you know?”
Oh Jesus, I thought.
“So,” he said. “What do you think?”
What could I think? What else could I do?
I told him I’d be there first thing in the morning.
Which pretty much bollixed up my vague plans, but in a way it was the price of my being alive today, or being in one fully functioning piece, at least, so I paid it.
Made an early night of it, got up at dawn, gassed my rented Explorer, and then headed down toward Raleigh.
Remembering Scotty McKey — Captain Robert R. McKey — and Honduras, 1984.
We’d been stationed at a forward staging area, supporting Contra forces in Nicaragua. A mission that was a waste of material, time, and lives that embarrasses me now to even think about — but, we were there.
Scotty was a veteran chopper pilot, and myself an area security officer. We’d spent some long drinking nights together in sundry Tegucigalpa bars and had gotten to be pretty good friends.
As good as friends became in the Army, anyway.
But then, on a routine supply mission on which I’d gone as courier for some sensitive material, we took a partial hit from a SAM in the tail rotor and spent a miserable twenty minutes trying to get back across the border.
With the cockpit smoked up and the aircraft wobbling all over the place, it was a miracle Scotty kept the thing in the air as long as he did.
All the way, in fact, to the Rios Coco — where he had the kicker and me drop into the river; but with no open ground on which to land and no way of landing the thing safely anyway, Scotty tried just letting the aircraft down into the water — but the thing spun away from him at the last minute. The aircraft hit a rock, the main rotor breaking free and hard-dumping the chopper upside down on the river bank.
Breaking Scotty’s back, and leaving him with a life without legs.
Because of other various related medical problems, he’d spent his life in a number of VA hospitals over the years. Though I’d visited with him from time to time, it never felt like I’d done enough.
I made it down to Raleigh the next day as promised and found Cormier Memorial easily enough, getting to the old ramshackle institution around noon. As VA nursing facilities went, I suppose, Cormier was better than most, but I can think of better places to be.
An ancient, wooden, rambling facility, it looked more like an old high school campus than a hospital.
I parked in a lot that was adjacent to an overgrown baseball field, nodded hello to some vets on wheels sitting on a shaded porch by the entrance, and after a bit of ducking in and out of corridors, found the critical care ward where Scotty McKey was bedded.