Jolene had remained mostly quiet. Now she turned and studied Allen’s face, which looked haggard, with a day’s growth of beard.
Anticipating her question, Allen said, “Someday, when this is over, when the money is in the bank, when Hank is in the ground, and you and Earl have worked out the terms of your relationship-perhaps we could see each other.”
Earl snickered. “C’mon, you guys, let’s keep it clean.”
They were gone, out of his range of vision, somewhere else in the house to where they’d taken Amy. It was just about over. For Amy, for Broker, for him. It infuriated him that Allen, Jolene, and Earl were going to win.
Hank’s thoughts were just embers, but the thing that was coming for him was clearer now. Almost distinct.
But at this moment he was riveted to the story unfolding in front of him.
Allen’s patient courtship of Jolene was based on bad math. Allen had factored in three deaths: Amy’s, Broker’s, and, eventually, Hank’s.
The expression on Earl’s face corrected the arithmetic. When the time was right, Earl would add Allen to the total.
And Jolene was the catalyst, the fire, thought Hank, that we have all swarmed to. And being a drunk, she would always backslide to Earl in moments of crisis.
Hank had heard everything since they came inside. He could not see Amy and Broker, but he understood the play. He had glimpsed Allen, Earl, and Jolene through lidded eyes as they caucused in front of the fire at the foot of his bed.
Allen was very thorough on details and methods, but he should have stayed with working inside immobile, drugged bodies. The outsides of alert moving bodies were still beyond his aptitude. Allen wasn’t ten words into his brilliant plan when Hank realized that Earl was going to kill him. Earl, who knew a good thing, would assist Allen in staging Amy’s suicide and leaving Broker out in the cold. He’d watch approvingly while Allen destroyed Hank’s eyelids. He’d wait until Allen had outlived his usefulness, presumably after the malpractice case was resolved, and after Allen had quietly finished the job of murdering Hank in a medically plausible way.
Then Earl would make Allen disappear.
And at the every end, Jolene would figure out a way to pension off Earl and seize the last, highest grip on the situation-eagle claws.
Too bad. Jolene, Earl, and Allen held great potential as characters if only he could script them before Allen came at his eyes with the needle.
Of the three, the only one he held any hopes of redemption for was Jolene. Of course, he was biased.
Allen came back from the bathroom down the hall where he’d emptied two square lactated plastic ringer bags. After he passed them through the fingers of Amy’s right hand to acquire her fingerprints, he hung the bags from a handy tine on the left antler of a European-mounted twelve-point white-tail deer rack on the wall over the bed.
He took two long, glistening lengths of plastic tubing from his bag. Again the trick with the fingers, like she was handling them. They were jointed and each had a blue clip with a white wheel. Then he did something with needles, hooking one tube to the other at a joint.
“The hard thing is starting your own IV,” Allen said. He took out a strip of rubber tourniquet and he tied it around her arm above the elbow. Then he turned Amy’s left hand, evaluating the network of now-plump blue veins feeding between her knuckles. As her fingers spread open a tightly folded piece of paper fell on her lap.
Allen paused to unfold it.
“It’s the alphabet thing,” Jolene said.
“Crude,” Allen said, smoothing the paper on Amy’s jeans. “All wrong. The letters shouldn’t be arranged in normal sequence. They should be grouped according to priority of which letters are most frequently used in speech.”
“Well, it worked good enough,” Jolene said.
Allen folded the paper and slipped it in his pocket.
Agitated, Jolene said, “Allen, for Christ’s sake, she’s waking up.”
Amy moaned softly, her eyes revolved as Allen placed his needle, checked his blood back-flash into the IV, removed the actual needle, left the IV stent in place, and hooked it to the tubing.
“She’s semiconscious, she won’t really be aware. Because-” he opened a bottle containing a white liquid and poured it into the bag on the left-“she’s about to really relax with five hundred cc’s of Propofal in a slow drip.”
The white stuff dripped down the tubing and Allen raised Amy’s right hand and used her fingers to thumb the wheel on the blue roller clamp.
Amy sighed and rolled her eyes up into her forehead. Allen pursed his lips and patted her leg. In a remote voice, he said, “You won’t feel a thing. I couldn’t let them shoot you, could I?”
Then he held up a glass ampule full of clear liquid and swiftly cracked it open between the two red lines on its nozzle and deposited the contents in the bag on the right.
Jolene, watching his nimble fingers, was reminded of someone who was adept at assembling things that came in boxes, good at reading instructions.
“Now, this is one hundred cc’s of Fentanyl, a very potent narcotic and the anesthetist’s drug of choice. They’re famous for abusing it and miscalculating their highs, so a lot of them OD on the stuff,” Allen said. “We leave the clamp closed on this drip for right now, let her loll around in the induction agent, then I’ll open this clamp all the way, it’ll feed through the port into the other IV tube, and in a minute she’ll be apneic.”
“Apneic?” Jolene said.
“Stop breathing.”
They left the bedroom, put on their coats, and joined Earl on the front porch. Earl had rummaged around in Broker’s travel bag and replaced Broker’s boots with tennis shoes. He found a light fall jacket on the coat rack by the door and pulled it loosely over Broker’s shoulders. Broker was turned over on his back and he kept instinctively cringing into a fetal position in an effort to keep warm.
Seeing that, Jolene looked away.
“I managed to get a third of the bottle into him,” Earl said. “But I think the drug is wearing off. What if he wakes up?”
“We don’t want him totally overdosed. He’s got to drive, remember?” Allen said. “Now, go bring our cars down here, transfer Hank’s bedding to the van, and then put Broker in the Jeep. You can drive him,” he said to Earl. “I’ll follow in my car.” He tossed his car keys to Earl, who handed them to Jolene.
Broker flopped back and forth on the porch, Ketamine going out, the scotch coming in.
“See,” Allen said. “It’s like he’s drunk. You can probably coax him to his feet and walk him to the car.”
This last idea genuinely excited Earl, who began to address Broker in a deeply sympathetic tone. “Come on, buddy. Time to get up. We gotta go feed the ostriches.”
“Cut the shit,” Jolene said.
“Aw, why? I kinda like the idea of him walking to his reward. Better’n me having to carry the sucker.”
The two of them managed to get Broker to his feet and walked him down the steps. Allen watched them stagger off toward the Jeep. Then he went back inside and stood for a moment, warming his hands at the fire. He turned and found himself staring directly in Hank’s very open, alert, angry eyes.
“Well, hello,” Allen said, curious.
Very deliberately, Hank cocked his left eye at Allen and winked.