Page 54 of Finding Basil
“Do it. Do it right away.”
They drove to the sheriff's station, and Herb took the few stairs up to the door two at a time. Once inside, he went straight to the desk, where Clay West was on the phone. He held up one finger to Juan and Herb while he finished the call, and once he did, he said to them, “I already have people looking for him, and I’m organizing a search party.”
“That’s great, but you could probably get the state police and more looking if he was a wanted man, right?”
Clay smiled crookedly. “Keep talkin’.” As Herb told him how he knew Basil was with Steve in the first place, seeing them coming out of his house, West said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” He got on the radio and sent out an All-Points Bulletin for Basil, and once he’d done that, he said, “Just so you know, you can drop the charges once we find him.”
“Thank you. And the search party, where will they look first?”
“Along the roads from here to Santa Clara, where the hospital is. There are about twelve roads that, some way or another, wind around from there to here.”
“Twelve?”
Juan said, “Basil doesn’t like the highways. He’ll take a road if he can, so show me all twelve on your map and I’ll likely pinpoint a couple he’d take, and also, we can get a jump on the search party.”
Clay took them to the county map, and next to it was a map of the seven counties surrounding it. He showed them three highways, which they discounted easily, then he went in on smaller roadways. “This one here is the railroad access, and these three are the highway access roads.”
“Access roads are always iffy. They stop in places, and you have to at least cross the highway on most of those. Here, what’s this one?”
He pointed to a thin blue line that wound around a few hills and past a lake. Clay West said, “Good eye. It takes an extra hour to go that route, sure, but it’s the prettiest.”
“Basil’s likely all daydreaming because of Herb, so he’d want a route that allowed him to do just that. We’ll take that one.”
They headed out on that road within minutes of leaving the sheriff's office. From the time he got on the road, he drove slowly, and with every dip in the terrain, they slowed more.
There was no sign of Basil broken down on the side of the road or run off of it anywhere, but they weren’t giving up until they got right to the hospital.
“Do you think he’d take the same route he took to get there?” Herb asked.
“Nah. He’d want the quickest route to get there, and one with the fewest stops. Steve has jumped out of moving vehicles before.”
“Damn. When Basil mentioned him, I never realized he was so bad.”
“I feel sorry for the guy, you know? Or I did before this. That shit…constantly taking you way far up and back down to the depths, it’s gotta suck. Basil, man, he fretted over that guy night and day. Pleaded with him to stay on his meds, but like I told him, you can’t make someone do something, even if it’s good for them. They got their own mind.”
“Exactly. I understand why he kept trying, though. And knowing it makes me feel worse for thinking…things. Basil doesn’t give up easily. He loves something or someone, and he sticks to it until he can’t.”
“Finally got that, huh? That’s my brother. I was always the opposite until I got married and had kids. I gave up fast if I didn’t like something or it was too hard. My wife cured me of that.”
“Did she? I’m hoping Basil can cure me of a lot of things.”
“He’ll do it. When we find him.”
Herb loved it was phrased that way.Whenand notif. All that was important to him at the moment was finding Basil.
The closer they got to the mountains, the steeper the drop-offs beside the road became. Some plunged down at least a hundred feet, and they pulled over on a turnoff dirt road, parked and walked full miles, sticking close to the guardrails.
Every foot of road they walked and didn’t see a broken guardrail was heaven to him. If he’d gone over the edge in any of those spots, Herb knew he wouldn’t make it.
They got back to the car and drove to another turnoff, doing the same, walking each step of the road. When they came to a part with no guardrail and two long blank lines from skidding tires, Herb’s heart was in his throat. “Is he down there?” he asked Juan, who was climbing over the guardrail that was intact. The tire skids just happened to be right where the guardrail ended.
Herb ran for the spot where the tire marks were, and he and Juan looked over the edge at the same time.
There, in the truck that was about twenty feet off the side of the road, Basil was slumped over the wheel, but that wasn’t the worst part. The truck was stopped precariously on the side of a narrow shelf on the slope. If the truck slid further, he was going to spin violently down to the bottom of the hill, which was a good hundred and fifty feet.
“Oh, fuck, Herb, what the fuck! Is he even alive?”
Herb had seen movement, though barely. “He is, but who knows for how long? Call the state patrol, call Sheriff West, whoever 9-1-1 will get on the dispatch with. Tell them we need a crane, helicopter, ambulance, and firemen, and tell them there’s not much time. If he comes to and moves…”
