Shelter Mountain (Virgin River #2)(61)

“Yeah,” Jack said.

“Jack, I’m sorry. I let you down.”

“Nah. I don’t feel let down. I feel really bad for you, but not disappointed in you. You’ve done pretty good with this, all things considered. Now we have to figure out a way for you to get your life back, both of you, before it gets even worse.”

“No matter what you come up with, Jack, I’m never getting that life back. And neither is Liz.”

As Jack came out of the kitchen into the bar, there was a man seated at the end. He wore a western hat, a shady brady, and as Jack entered the bar he lifted his dark eyes. It took Jack less than five seconds to recognize him as a man who’d been in his bar a few months ago and tried to pay for his boiler-maker with a hundred-dollar bill peeled off a thick wad of bills, all of which carried the skunklike odor of green marijuana. Jack wouldn’t take his money.

If that alone wasn’t enough to give Jack a bad feeling about the man, he was also the one who had lain in wait for Mel at her cabin to take her out to some hidden grow back in the hills where a woman was giving birth. For that, Jack felt an urge to go a few rounds with him to be sure he knew better than to ever try that again. Instead, he wiped down the bar in front of him. “Heineken and Beam, isn’t it?”

“Good memory,” the man said.

“I remember important things. I don’t want to get in the habit of comping you drinks.”

The man reached into his back pocket and pulled out a thin leather wallet and withdrew a twenty, laying it on the bar. “Freshly laundered for my fussy friend,” he said.

Jack set him up his drinks. “How you getting around these days?” he asked. The man’s eyes lifted swiftly to Jack’s face. “I came across your Range Rover,” Jack said. “Off the road, down the side of the hill. Totaled. I told the deputy where.”

The man threw back his shot. “Yeah,” he said. “My bad. I didn’t make that turn. Must have been going too fast. Got a good deal on a used truck.” He lifted his beer, took a long pull. “That everything?” he asked, indicating he’d rather not have a conversation.

“Not quite,” Jack said. “There was a birth back in a trailer somewhere….”

The man put down his beer rather sharply, glaring at Jack. “So much for medical confidentiality.”

“The midwife is my wife. That can’t happen. We straight on that?”

The man’s eyes widened in surprise, his hand tightening around his cold beer.

“That’s right, cowboy. She’s my wife. So. Are we clear? I don’t want her taking those kinds of chances.”

He made a lopsided smile. He lifted his beer and took another pull. “I doubt I’ll ever find myself in that spot again.” Jack stared, hard, into the man’s eyes. “She wasn’t at risk, but you’re right. She probably shouldn’t do that.”

After a moment of quiet, Jack said, “Clear River might be a better place for a drink.”

The man pushed the shot glass across the bar. “Quieter, anyway.”

Jack served him up again, then took the twenty to change it, indicating the man was done here. Then Jack went to his own end of the bar and busied himself wiping it down, straightening glassware and bottles. He lifted his head as he heard the stool scrape back. The man stood, turned and walked slowly out of the bar without looking at Jack. A glance showed Jack he hadn’t left any money behind and, in spite of himself, he chuckled under his breath.

Then he went to the window to see what kind of truck it was. So—he’d lowered his standards a little. A dark Ford, jacked up, lights up top, tinted windows. He memorized the license plate, but knew that wouldn’t matter.

It was only a minute before the door opened again and in came Mel. Her jacket stood open and her belly protruded slightly. She wore an odd expression.

“You see that guy, Mel?” Jack asked her. She nodded. “Did he say anything to you?”

She got up on a stool. “Uh-huh. He gave me a long up and down look and said congratulations.”

“You didn’t talk to him, I hope.”

“I asked him how that baby was. And he said, they have everything they need.”

“Aw, Mel…”

“That man never scared me, Jack. There might be lots of scary people out there, in those hidden grows, but something tells me he’s not one of them.”

Eleven

After two weeks in the hospital, two weeks in a rehab facility and two weeks with his mother, Mike Valenzuela was stir-crazy. He was still crippled in one arm and totally out of his mind with cabin fever. Not to mention shook up by how long it had taken for his mind to come back. Nothing scared him quite as much as memory loss and not being able to find the right word, or looking at the right word and thinking it was wrong.

Physically, he was getting by, but there was pain. Most of it was in his shoulder, arm, neck and scapula, and at night it could get so fierce he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move. At those times, he could barely get out of bed, and the only thing that worked was a big ice pack and a pain-killer. The other pain was still stiffness and weakness in the groin area, and that kept getting better, but he was using a cane for left-sided weakness when he walked.

When he looked in the mirror he saw a thin and wasted body where a toned and muscled one had been. A man stooped slightly because straightening hurt his groin, his abdomen. His right arm was bent at the elbow and held protectively against his midsection, the hand curled inward and too stiff and weak to open all the way. A head of thick black Mexican-American hair that had been shaved on one side of his head to remove a bullet was barely growing back. A man who, at thirty-six years of age, was retired from the police department with a one-hundred-percent disability. A man staying in his mother’s house because he’d given houses to two ex-wives and given up his rented apartment when he was shot.