Unhinged by Sarah Graves Page B

them; partly for his sake, partly on account of the darn lenses.
    “No crying in baseball,” he admonished me mock severely. He was half-drunk with anesthetic; a burn reddened his jaw.
    The bad part, though, was the bandage on his neck. Clearly, something had just missed some very important anatomy. And Ellie was right: this all went way beyond coincidence.
    “Wade, what happened?”
    The good humor left his eyes, which were blessedly unharmed. “Shell. I brought the lever down—”
    To compress the powder inside one of the shotgun shells he’d been reloading.
“Ka-boom,”
he finished simply.
    The nurse came back in, suggested it was time for us to let him rest. “Wait. What’s going on?” Wade demanded.
    He’d seen our expressions even through a haze of painkiller: Ellie’s especially, her gaze so penetrating they could have substituted it for one of the X-ray machines.
    But now he was nodding, sandbagged by the drugs they’d given him. “Whoever did it,” he muttered blurrily. “Rigged a reloading press. Righ’ un’er my nose.”
    So he thought so, too: that this was no accident. His eyes drifted shut. “Guy’s a real cowboy,” he murmured.
    Then he was asleep. Ellie led me back out to the corridor. “A cowboy,” she repeated, her green eyes glinting. “Cowboys are daring, determined, imaginative—”
    These were not qualities I wanted to find in my opponents. But Ellie seemed to relish the notion.
    “Whoever this cowboy is,” she declared . . .
Whoevah
.
    “. . . he just messed with the wrong Indians.”
     
     
    We spent part of the afternoon in the hospital with Sam and Maggie, who at her insistence were improving his time with the crossword puzzle from the
Quoddy Tides
. As the day waned we checked a sleeping Wade once more before going home, leaving George again in charge of guard duty; later, after feeding the animals and walking Monday, we confronted Harry Markle at his house.
    Or we tried. But Harry had other ideas. He was packing, throwing clothes into a duffel bag and toiletries into a kit. “I’ll have to give the dog back, Jake. I don’t know where I’m going. You should take her tonight.”
    Her stubby tail twitching uncertainly, Prill looked back and forth between me and Harry. She’d stationed herself between us as soon as I entered, as if protecting him.
    “Harry, you can’t leave. What about Samantha? Don’t you want to be here when she gets out of the hospital?”
    “Samantha’s not coming back. It’s touch-and-go, they had to resuscitate her on the trip, and they aren’t sure she’ll make it. If she does, they doubt she’ll dance again.”
    He tugged on his leather jacket. “That’s what she gets for hanging around me. That’s what everyone gets. Wade, Sam . . . I’m leaving now, before anyone else gets hurt.”
    He zipped the jacket. “Samantha was targeted because she was my friend. No other reason. I’m not going to stick around here so I can watch someone get killed.”
    He’d hauled out Harriet’s old newspapers, stacking the bundles in the yard to await pickup. The chicken bones were gone, too. But there the effort ended, and now it seemed his nerves were getting to him, to judge by the cup lying on its side atop his formerly pristine table, coffee staining the book he’d been reading:
Practical Homicide Investigation
by Vernon J. Geberth.
    A classic: Harry saw me looking at it, gave a bitter laugh. “Too bad old Vernon J. isn’t here, give me some pointers. Because I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know.”
    “Harry,” Ellie protested. “You can’t just run.”
    I wasn’t so sure. If he did go, trouble would go with him. But then my better angel kicked in. After all, Harry had pulled me out of some pretty bad wreckage, once.
    “I don’t deserve this,” Harry said bitterly with a wave at the window. “This . . . peace.”
    Outside, the pointed firs were purple cutouts on the orange sunset. The first stars poked through the