And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(70)

He let her read to him for half an hour. She was more animated than he’d seen her the entire time. She moved her bandaged hand in the air while she read. Occasionally, she looked at him over the top of the book. After a while, he was lulled by the sound of her voice and the pictures it made in his head. The saddle of fat around his neck bulged between his chin and his chest as his head dropped.

“Emmett, are you tired? Do you want me to stop?”

“No, keep going.”

He sat up, smoked one more cigarette to wake himself up, and then told her it was time for bed. He got her more water to drink and dragged his chair out of the room.

“Can I keep these handcuffs on instead of the others?” she asked as he got ready to chain her to the wall again. She showed him her red, abraded wrists where the manacles had rubbed her skin raw.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. He unhooked the manacles from the wall chain and looped the end of the chain around the connector between the handcuffs she was wearing. He secured the chain with a padlock through two of its links.

“I feel like we made a deal earlier about the insulin and about Carl,” she said. “Do you want to shake on it?” She stuck out her good hand. Emmett grunted in agreement. Her small, soft hand curled around his rocky mitt. “Thank you for the insulin, Emmett. And the food and the book,” she said.

“All right then. Maybe you can read me more tomorrow.”

He locked the door to the pink room. It was dark out. Bugs attracted by the lights flew through the broken window in the basement door as he picked up the phone extension and called Carl.

“We gotta move the car tonight. I’ll be at your place just after midnight.”

“You said tomorrow night.”

“That was before a lady cop showed up here asking about the Gherlick boy.”

“The hell you say. How’d that happen?”

“He had a pill bottle with my name on it in his house. Cop came out here to ask me about it. That car’s gotta go now in case they decide they got more questions they wanna ask.”

Carl didn’t say anything for almost a minute. Emmett imagined his deep-sunk eyes flashing in the blue light of the television, his wife moving around the kitchen with a dishrag or sitting nearby with a basket of laundry. If she was anything like Myra, she had no idea the thoughts that went through her husband’s mind. She didn’t know the man sitting next to her at all.

“I’m coming over tonight,” Emmett said. “Midnight.”

He hung up before Carl could argue.





Chapter Twenty-Three


Packard texted Dan Gherlick again before he pulled out of the Sweet Pea parking lot. Asked him to meet him in the hospital lobby in ten minutes.

He parked in a spot for emergency vehicles and found Dan inside the double automatic doors holding two paper coffee cups in front of the canteen that was just closing for the night. A heavy-set girl with a red ponytail and a blue visor was turning a key that lowered the security gate over the shop’s entrance.

“Free coffee,” Dan said, extending one of the cups to him. “She said she was going to dump it out.”

Packard took a sip and tried not to flinch. The coffee was five degrees warmer than body temperature and had simmered into a sauce.

“How’s Patty?”

“She went home this morning. My sister-in-law is staying with her. I found a rehab center just north of the Cities for Shannon. They’re sending a van to pick her up first thing tomorrow morning.”

“She agreed to go?”

“She did. They took out her breathing tube and cut back on the medication earlier today. I told her about Sam when she woke up. She’s heartbroken and mad at herself for being out of it while he was trapped under the car. She thinks if she was awake she would have heard him calling.”

“You know as well as I do that if that car slipped off the jacks, he wouldn’t have had time to yell.”

“I told her. I tried to get her to talk to me about her drug use and what’s been going on in her life, but she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

They headed for the elevators. Further down the hall, a short old woman and her same-sized husband stood in front of the hospital’s pharmacy window. Packard pushed the button for the elevator.

He told Dan about the pills and the prescription bottles they found at Sam’s house, about connecting Sam to those people through Meals on Wheels. Dan stood frozen. Packard said, “I just found out tonight that Shannon works at the drugstore. There’s no way she’s not involved somehow. Being a dealer in prescription drugs and having a sister who works in a drugstore would be a missed opportunity. The fact that she’s a user is leverage he has over her. She has to help him if she wants him to help her.”

Dan ran a hand through his hair and held the back of his head. “These are my kids that I raised from babies. This is who they grew up to be?” he asked in disbelief. He sighed and shook his head. “So what did they do? How did it work?”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

The elevator came and they rode up. Packard saw himself drink his coffee in the blurry reflection from the steel door in front of him. “Damn, Dan. This coffee is terrible.”

“I know. Want me to find a microwave and reheat it?”

“God, no. What I want you to do is run interference for me with the nurses if necessary. I’m sure visiting hours are long over but I need to talk to Shannon tonight, especially if the plan is to ship her out to rehab tomorrow. I also need you to stay out of the room so I can talk to her alone. Can you do that?”