The Searcher(117)

The kid hovers for another minute, watching him and fingering her lip. Then she heads abruptly to the freezer and starts rummaging. While Cal waits for the bleeding to stop, he pulls up his pants leg and checks out his knee. It’s purple and inflating, with a darker purple line scored right across it, but after some experimenting he’s pretty sure it’s not broken. His collarbone is at least cracked: it shoots out pain whenever he moves his shoulder. When he probes very carefully along it, though, the line is straight. It shouldn’t need setting, which is good. Cal would much prefer not to explain any of this to a doctor.

Trey dumps two plastic bags of ice cubes on the table in front of him. “What else?” she asks.

“I’m gonna need a sling,” Cal says. “That sheet over the bathroom window, that’s long enough that we can cut off a strip at the bottom. Scissors in that drawer there.”

Trey goes into the bathroom and comes back with a length of cloth, which she fashions into a dirty but serviceable sling. Once they have Cal’s coat eased off him and the sling fixed on, she pulls herself up to sit on the countertop, where she can keep an eye out the kitchen window.

Cal’s nose has stopped bleeding. He tests it, trying not to let the kid see him flinching at each touch. It’s swollen to twice its size, but the line of it feels much the same as it ever did. His shaking has ebbed enough that he can clean up his face, give or take, with a corner of the towel dipped in the bowl of water. In the mirror, he looks just about how he expected: his nose is the shape of a tomato and he has two black eyes coming, although his are nowhere near as impressive as the kid’s.

Trey is watching him. “Look at us,” Cal says. His voice sounds just as muffled and blurred as it did through the towel. “Pair of beat-up stray mutts.”

Trey nods. Cal can’t tell how much this has shaken her. Her face still has the hard, intent focus that he heard in her voice across the yard and the gun. It seems wrong on a child. Cal feels like he ought to do something about it, but right this moment he can’t work out what.

He leans back in the chair, settles one ice pack on his knee and the other one on his nose, and concentrates on slowing his body and his mind so they can work right. He goes back over previous beatings he’s taken, in order to put this one into perspective. There were kids in school, a few times. There was the idiot who came after him with a piece of pipe outside a party Cal and Donna were at in their wild days, because he thought Cal had looked funny at his girlfriend—Cal still has a dent in his thigh where the end of that pipe dug in. That guy was aiming to kill him, and so was the guy jacked up on something or other who charged out of a back alley when Cal was on patrol and wouldn’t quit till Cal broke his arm. And yet, somehow, here Cal still is, sitting halfway across the world in a back corner of Ireland, with yet another bloody nose. He finds this strangely comforting.

“We had a beat-up stray mutt one time,” Trey says, from the counter. “Me and Brendan and my dad, we were going to the village, and we found him on the road. All scraped up and bleeding, and a bad leg. My dad said he was dying. He was gonna drown him so he wouldn’t suffer. But Brendan, yeah? He wanted to fix the dog up, and in the end my dad said he could try. We had that dog six more years. He always had a limp, but he was grand. He usedta sleep on Bren’s bed. He died of being old, in the end.”

Cal has never heard her talk this much, especially for no apparent purpose. At first he thinks it’s tension coming out as babble, but then he looks at her looking at him, and realizes what she’s doing. She’s using what she’s learned from him: talking about whatever comes into her head, in order to soothe him down.

“How old were you?” he asks.

“Five. Bren said I could name him. I said Patch, ’cause he had like a black eye patch. Now I’d think of something better, but I was only little.”

“You ever find out where he came from?”

“Nah. Not from round here, or we’da known about him. Someone dumped him out of a car on the main road, probably, and he crawled from there. He wasn’t one of them fancy dogs. Just an aul’ black-and-white mutt.”

“Best kind,” Cal says. “Your brother did good.” He tests out his knee, which is working OK, now that the initial shock has worn off it. “Tell you something, I’m feeling better’n I expected to right now.”

This is pretty much true. He’s throbbing in various places and feels mildly nauseated from swallowing blood, but overall, he could have ended up a lot worse off. He would have done, if Trey and the Henry hadn’t interrupted.

“Thanks, kid,” he says. “For saving my ass.”

Trey nods. She reaches for Cal’s bread and sticks a couple of slices in the toaster. “You figure they woulda kilt you?”

“Who knows,” Cal says. “I’m fine with not finding out.” He doesn’t want to take anything away from the kid, but he doubts he would have wound up dead, unless someone screwed up. He knows the difference; this beating wasn’t intended to kill. Just like he said to Donie, the Dublin boys don’t want the attention that a dead Yank would draw. What they wanted was to get their message across.

Now that Trey’s gone and shot one of them, that might change. It depends on how level-headed this Austin guy is, how persuasive Cal can be, and how strong a hold Austin has on his crew. Cal is in no frame of mind to make that phone call tonight, but it needs to happen tomorrow morning, as soon as Austin can reasonably be expected to be awake.