Page 165 of Hush
Eventually, they made it back to Willy’s truck. Villegas helped Mike and Tom in, and then one of Willy’s men tossed Barnes’s body into the truck bed beside them. His corpse stared, eyes wide and sightless, up at the canopy.
In the truck bed, Willy called someone on the radio, but his voice was muffled by the roaring engine and the bouncing of the tires as they rumbled over the dirt track. Tom huddled over Mike, holding him close, propped up between his legs, their hands laced together and folded across Mike’s rattling chest. Villegas sat beside him, shoulders pressed together, and he kept one hand on Mike’s arm, as though holding on to a lifeline.
Eventually, Willy parked his truck on an uphill dirt slope, twenty feet inside the thick tree line off the state highway. Few cars traversed that section of road. Tom eyed the trees, the isolation, the soaring mountains surrounding the canyon they were deep within.
Willy’s men hauled Barnes’s corpse out first, flinging it to the dirt and logrolling it up to the highway. Tom and Villegas helped Mike shuffle out of the truck bed. Mike’s eyes were barely open. Each breath was raspy, dangerously shallow. He leaned almost all his weight on Villegas and Tom.
Willy grabbed Mike’s face, holding his jaw in one hand. “Go get to living your life, marshal.” He nodded to Tom. “Get him to a hospital. He needs more antivenom. Goodbye, Brewers’ boy.”
Willy’s men skirted them and climbed back into the truck. The engine roared, the tires kicked back dirt and the truck bed fishtailed. Willy’s men stared as they roared away, their dark eyes burning through the forest long after the truck disappeared.
Stumbling, Villegas and Tom carried Mike up to the highway. No weapons, no cell phones, no gear. No cars, and likely not one for hours. They were all bleeding, and Mike was dying. He needed antivenom? The blood, it was snakebites? God, how many times had he been bitten? He was going to die in Tom’s arms.
They collapsed at the side of the highway, exhaustion and blood loss and the loss of adrenaline pulling their legs from beneath them. Tom rolled Mike into his arms, dragged him up, until their cheeks were pressed together and he could wrap his arms around Mike from behind. Villegas slid in beside him, holding one arm over Mike as well.
“Why are you here, Inspector Villegas?” Tom’s eyelids were heavy. He wanted to close them, but tried to blink them open.
“Winters tasked me to follow you. I put a tracker in your bag, that night I took over from Mike.”
“Why? Why follow me?”
“That’swayabove my paygrade. All I know is, Winters is working with Ballard.”
Fear made Tom freeze. Ballard and Barnes were close. Colleagues and friends. Co-conspirators? Again, he felt that nausea-inducing sense of vertigo, of standing above the edge of a dark chasm, and wondering how far the drop to the bottom was. How deep did the betrayals go?
“I hear something.” Villegas shifted and sat up. He frowned, as if he could force his ears to work harder. “Sirens. I hear sirens.”
A few seconds later, Tom heard them too. Sirens screaming up the highway, the roar of tires, brakes squealing around the hairpin mountain turns. “Willy. He radioed it in.” Tom sagged over Mike, watching the ragged rise and fall of his chest. He smiled, and let his eyes slide closed as Villegas struggled to his feet and waved down the cavalry.
Chapter 40
August 2nd
Tom went from the hazy nothings of sleep to adrenaline-fueled wakefulness in a split-second. Gasping, he surged upward, staring wildly around him. Where was he? What had happened? Where was Mike? He was in a hospital, in a private room. Monitors beeped steadily beside him, and an IV pole held a bag of fluids. A line went into one arm, a steady stream of who-knew-what pumping into his system. His other arm was in a cast, his shoulder wrapped in bandages and immobilized in a sling.
“Whoa! Easy, easy.”
Tom whipped around.
Dylan Ballard was rubbing his eyes, sitting up from a chair pushed next to his bedside. His suit was rumpled, jacket gone, button-down untucked, tie loose and the top buttons undone. He looked like shit, and Ballard never looked like shit.
He tensed. Was Ballard there to shove a pillow over his face? See how much he’d found out? Where was Mike?
Ballard sighed, scrubbing his hands down his face before holding them together in front of his lips, as if praying. “Jesus Christ, Tom,” he muttered. “Jesus H Christ.”
“What’s going on? Where’s Mike?” Tom coughed after he spoke, his voice raspy and dry. Ballard passed him a cup of water from his bedside table.
“Inspector Lucciano is in ICU. He’s… It’s not good. Between the stab wounds and the fourteen rattlesnake bites, it’s a Goddamn miracle he even made it out of West Virginia.”
The monitors beside Tom beeped faster, the tones spiking in time with his racing, pounding heart. “Is he—”
“He’s not going to die. That much I know. But everything else is being kept quiet.” Ballard sighed. “Medical privacy, you know. Only his family, his next of kin, can see him, or know any of the details.” Ballard swallowed. “Are you… his next of kin?”
Tom squeezed his eyes closed. The monitors kept beeping, a frantic, panicked pace. He breathed in, as deeply as he could, though his lungs seemed frozen. They didn’t work. He couldn’t breathe. He shook his head. They hadn’t gotten that far. Jesus, would he ever be able to see Mike? Who was taking care of him?
Would he be shoved aside, medically, legally, politically inconsequential in the eyes of the law, as far as he and Mike were concerned? Was he alone? Who was with him?
“Marshal Winters is acting as Mike’s health care proxy. His surrogate.”
