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:
And, he didn’t look the same.
Not at all.
When I first met Scotty McKey, he’d been in his thirties, and owned a large, well-sculpted body that had that male-model look to it. Six three or four, about a hundred and ninety pounds, tight skin the color of chestnuts. He sported a short afro back then and a big, ever-ready smile that he used a lot, with his dark eyes glittering, as he laughed a deep, infectious laugh over anything at all.
That had been in 1984.
Flash forward to 1991 to a VA hospital outside San Diego. Now in his early forties and wheelchair bound, with a huge upper body and withered little legs. His smile had been the same and his eyes still glittered. Only the laugh had lost some of its timbre.
And now, Scotty McKey, who’d saved my life, was lying on a high, narrow bed. His eyes, yellowed and dulled, were open wide and staring at me. His hair had gone gray and sparse, his dark skin had become patchy white, and his body shrunken.
He lifted a thin arm and gave me a wave as I approached, trying to keep the shock out of my face.
“Hey, buddy!” he said.
“Hey, Scotty,” I replied, taking his slightly trembling hand to shake. “It’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you too,” he told me.
I put myself on the edge of the bed next to him.
He shook his head at me. “Can’t believe you’re still in.”
“What else would I do?”
“Retire, for gosh sake. You got way more than twenty years in by now.”
“Way more,” I agreed.
“Lookin’ at thirty?”
I shrugged.
He sighed. “I would’a never stayed in,” he told me, but he didn’t explain why.
A sharp stab of pain struck him suddenly, his body stiffened, sweat stood out on his forehead, his teeth clenched.
“Damn,” he said, injecting himself. “Be okay in a minute.”
And a minute later the Demerol hit and cleared the sharp creases that furrowed his face. Then he got to the point of my being there.
“Reason I wanted to see you,” he explained. “A buddy of mine’s gone missing.”
“Oh?”
“Name’s Steensen. Ralph Steensen. He was here himself up till about a year ago.”
“He on wheels too?”
“No, but he had a screw or two loose. We called him Crash.” He smiled. “I know him from Nam. He was a chopper pilot too.”
“Uh-huh.”
He shrugged. “Anyway, like me, he had no family, and since Nam, he’s mostly just drifted around, but he’d always have some trouble and end up in one hospital or another. He was here, oh, about five years, I guess, before he left. He didn’t want to go, but they closed the nut wing here, so he was history.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The VA had a place for him at this new hospital in Atlanta, but Crash didn’t want that, so he just checked out and headed for the swamps. Ended up in this old cabin, outside a place called Polecat Springs, just south of Beauford.”
“That’s down near the coast.”
“Not too far.”
“But, you say he’s gone missing?”
“Yeah.”
He took some envelopes from the nightstand by his bed and showed me. They were addressed to a P.O. box, and had been returned to him with a no forwarding order on file label attached.
“He wrote me a couple of times,” Scotty continued. “Said he was doing good. Liked the swamps, liked living near the river. Liked being off by himself. Said he didn’t feel like no nutcase anymore cause there weren’t anybody around to make him feel like a nutcase.” He waved the envelopes at me. “Then the letters started coming back.”
“Those are almost a year old, Scotty.”
“I know,” he agreed.
“Maybe he’s in some other hospital.”
“Not a VA Hospital, ’cause I had the Red Cross check for me, and the VA stopped sending him his checks ’cause they started getting returned too.”
“Maybe he just started drifting again, Scotty.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe...”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Maybe, but I gotta know.”
Another shock of pain went through him, but he laid off the Demerol this time and just stood it.
“I take too much of this stuff now,” he told me through gritted teeth. “It won’t do me much good later when it’s bad.”
I didn’t ask him how good he thought it was now. I just sat there and watched him hurt.
It was longer than a minute this time.
Finally, he relaxed enough to continue.
“Thing is,” he told me in a whispery voice, “I — need to let him know. About my — about me.” He smiled. “About a year and a half ago — I don’t know when it was exactly — this insurance guy comes around here and offers us some term life insurance. We had to take a physical, and it wasn’t exactly cheap, but it isn’t as if guys like us here get a chance at life insurance every day, so I bought a policy, and so did Ralph. It was only for twenty-five thousand, but what the hell, you know?” He shrugged. “We named each other as beneficiaries.”
“I see.”
“So I — you know.”
“I know.”
“So he can collect.”
“I get it, Scotty.”
“I mean — maybe — whatever his problem is now, he could use the cash, you know?”
“Did you try the local cops?” I said.
“No,” he replied. “Crash and cops mix like fire and gunpowder. I don’t want to cause him any grief, you know? I mean, I want you to find him — but try and keep the cops out of it, okay?”
Right, I thought.
He pulled a folded map from the nightstand, opened it on his chest, and pointed. “Cabin’s not on any road. But it’s right here, by this waterway.”
“You know this place?”
“He told me about it.”
From the nightstand he handed me up an old Polaroid snapshot, saying, “That’s him. That’s Crash.”
I looked and saw a wild-eyed, redhaired, full-bearded, middle-aged man, sitting on the front step of tiny, gray-boarded cabin, and looking cross-eyed into the camera.
“He sent me that last year sometime.”
I nodded.
He nodded too, then smiled weakly. “They say I got six good months left, but the good part hasn’t kicked in yet.”
Right.
I put the map and the picture away and said, “Anything else I can do for you, Scotty?”
He shook his head and grinned. “You find Crash,” he told me, “you’ve done a real job.”
Which I began to get on with almost immediately, driving back to Fort Bragg, packing a bag, and then pointing the Explorer north and east on U.S. 64 to Polecat Springs.
Driving in a lashing rain that dogged me most of the way — a prelude, the radio informed me, to a hurricane named Amanda, which was just then raising hell off the Georgia coast. Not a long trip, but the weather dragged it out, so that I had a lot of time to think.
About friendships, their causes and obligations.
There was not a lot I wouldn’t do for Scotty McKey, including wild-goose chasing in the storm of the century. But I’d somehow neglected knowing where he’d been the past two years, which left me feeling rather sloppy.
And I didn’t like the feeling.
I got to Tarboro — north of where Polecat Springs showed on my map — around eight o’clock, too tired to do anything more than find a Motel 6, get a burger and fries for dinner, and get to bed.
I spent a lousy night of on-again, off-again sleep, full of cold-sweat dreams that left me when I woke at seven the next morning about as tired as I’d been to begin with.
And with that wild-goose-chase frame of mind I couldn’t shake.