A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(70)

“You going to operate?”

“Dr. Gimball has to get the bullet out. We’ll take him into the operating theater, prepare him for surgery, and then the anesthesiologist will make sure he stays asleep.” She explained all this as if she had done it twenty times today. I figured maybe she had.

“How long do you think it will take?” I asked her, my voice sounding stiff and odd to my own ears. Inside, I said, If he doesn’t live, I’ll kill you all. If I told her that out loud, she might not be more skillful, but she would sure be more shaky.

“At least an hour, maybe two,” Nurse Allen said. “There’s a lounge down the hall, opposite the operating theater.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I got to go do some things, but I’ll be back within an hour.” I looked directly in her pale eyes. “Don’t let him die.”

Those eyes widened, and I saw that she understood me.

“He’ll live,” she said, struggling to sound calm.

I raised my eyebrows to let her know he’d better. And I left the hospital.

When I got back to the courthouse, Mercer’s body was still there. He was for sure dead, now.

I went over to the statue. “You could have told us your song wouldn’t work on us,” I said. “Did you know that would happen?”

I didn’t really expect Moses the Black to explain this to me, and he didn’t. I wondered if he’d ever walk and talk again.

I was leaving the stolen-from-a-dead-man car, with its rear seat stained with blood. Nellie Mercer was standing beside it. She looked like she’d been dragged through a bush backward. She was scratched and disheveled. But she wasn’t armed.

I waited to see what she would say.

“We were wrong.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “You were right.”

“I am sorry about your father,” I said. I nodded to her, stepped around her, and left.

This day had been one surprise after another. I had expected Moses the Black to bring a sword. He had, but he had changed it into words that would alter the way people thought. I hoped that would last, but I wasn’t putting money down one way or another.

It was beyond my responsibility, and I was glad of that.

I reloaded my guns, got my rifle out of the trunk and put it under the front seat where I could reach it. Then I drove back to the hospital.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE


Eli came out of surgery about thirty minutes after I’d returned to the waiting room. There had been a few other people slumped in the chairs that lined the wall, and they’d all looked exhausted… but not too tired to give me a long stare.

I was past trying to pretend I was a Dixie woman, and our mission was over here.

After a nurse came out smiling to talk to him, a man with two children left. I figured he’d been waiting to hear about the woman giving birth. Beaming, he took the kids’ hands and off they went.

A white-haired man, slumped in the corner, had fallen asleep. No one but me was awake and waiting. It was black outside the window.

Harriet Ritter walked into the waiting room. She’d had a chance to clean up sometime recently. She had fresh clothes, her hair was done, her shoes were polished. Once again, she was wearing confidence like a dog wears hair.

“Why are you here?” I said.

“What do you mean? I’ve been looking for you. I spotted the car outside, so I walked around the hospital until I found you.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“Has something happened to Eli?”

I nodded. “They’re getting a bullet out.”

The Iron Hand agent looked as unsettled as I’d ever seen her. “I’m sorry for my part in this,” Harriet said. “When we took the job of watching your crew, we didn’t know what you had. We did know how the Ballards were, though. And our job was only to watch, because Mrs. Ballard wanted to know who was going to receive the chest, so she could take care of them.”

My brain wasn’t sparking after the long day, but a question drifted up. “You said you and Travis fired on the men attacking our car, after the wreck. Were you lying?”

“No. We took care of two of them, at least. We didn’t know if the Ballards had sent them, or someone else. No one told us not to interfere. So we did.”

“But… you went out to that awful house when Mrs. Ballard summoned you. What did you expect would happen?”

“We expected we’d get a chance to explain to Mrs. Ballard. By then we had realized what a mistake Iron Hand had made taking a job from the Ballards.”

I looked at her with some doubt. Harriet flushed.

“We got our payback for being stupid,” she said.

True enough.

“Sorry about Travis,” I said. I waited to see how she would take that.

Harriet looked like her face was made of iron. “I’m going to find that Sarah Byrne. I’m going to kill her slowly. After she cut Jake’s throat and grabbed the chest, she was spied by a man who worked for the Ballards. He told Holden, and Holden drove into town, picked her up, brought her and the chest out to the plantation. He paid her off big-time, asked her to stick around to help out. She was there when we arrived. She was waiting to get behind us with her gun.”

“You don’t need to look for her.”