Page 34 of Fish in a Barrel
Jackson shook his head no. “Hotel room,” he said. “Shitty kind, use cash. Cody and I both need to wash up, I need some doctoring, and Cody….” He bit his lip. He hated this part. “Cody needs to fix,” he said, looking Henry miserably in the eyes. “We can’t put him on the stand puking with withdrawal.”
“We can’t put him up there stoned, either!” Henry retorted, dismayed.
“Yeah, but he’s been using for a while. We’re going to have to help him walk the line.” Jackson let a whimper escape. “And yeah, I really fucking want some disinfectant and some fucking anesthetic and some fucking stitches. But if you take me in with a knife wound, I’ll bestuckup here. Let’s get me wrapped up and bandaged, and you can take us both to Med Center. If we can keep him from going into withdrawal right now, I bet they could give us a clinical dose of methadone so he’s all legal. But once he starts the process, it’s going to take it out of him, and he won’t be able to take the stand for Zeke. We have to spring this on the prosecution, Henry, or me and Cody will be too busy fighting off an assault charge to do Ezekiel any good. Just until tomorrow.”
“Then we’re going where, Cody?” Henry asked sternly.
“Rehab,” Cody said gruffly. “That’s a promise.”
Henry nodded. “Fair enough. Jackson, grab a towel from the back so you don’t get blood all over Jennifer’s seats. She might get pissy, and you know, the old girl’s been a real friend tonight.”
“Good girl,” Jackson murmured, doing what he needed to get settled as Henry killed the lights and started creeping out of the campground in total darkness. On the other side of the rise, they could see the slashing beams of Maglights, and Jackson imagined that Freethy and Brown were busy making sure McMurphy and Goslar were still alive. There had possibly been more than the four of them—the parked SUV had beensomebody’sride back, but Jackson figured if Henry could get out without drawing any attention and they could make it back to I-5, they were home free.
“Jennifer,” Jackson said quietly, trying to find a way to get comfortable on the seat, “this is Cody. He’s had a super shitty month. I know you don’t owe him a damned thing, but he sure could use some sweetness about now.”
“Wh-who are you talking to?” Cody asked from the back seat. Jackson noticed that the tiny black dog—and Henry was right, it was a Chihuahua mixed with something equally small and delicate to produce a five-pound wonder-mutt—had curled up in Cody’s lap while Cody stroked him with a shaking hand.
Jackson remembered what Annette Frazer had said about Cody’s reluctance to see a dog get shot—or the person holding him—and while he felt bad for the old man who’d lost his dog, he felt like maybe Cody had needed the dog just a little bit more on this awful night.
“The car,” Jackson told him, trying to keep his mind on what was necessary. With a grunt, he leaned forward and tried to grab the power cord they kept plugged into the dash, and it took him a moment to realize that the task was so hard because his hand was dripping with blood from the wound on his back.
“Fuck,” he muttered, getting control of the cord and plugging his phone into it. Then, purposefully, he wiped his bloody hand on another of the towels Henry had brought to the front of the van. His back, his ribs, the soft flesh of his flank—all of it was lit like a wildfire from pain, and in the humid heat coming from Jennifer’s vents, he could feel every last place a punch had landed or his body had hit the ground.
His ankle, he realized, felt like it had swollen twice its size, which was what he got for rolling it while running in the middle of the wild kingdom.
And still Henry crept over the dirt track, the car bouncing and squeaking unmercifully. Jackson saw figures in the rain, ragged, lost, looking for shelter in the brush, in the campground layout, and he knew from his and Cody’s jog through the rain that most of the campgrounds had been flat, on packed hardpan, with no shelter of any kind directly above from the rain.
“Jesus,” he said, trying to shove his brains back in his head. “They just… just relocated them out here and left them. Do you see the buses?”
Far off in the distance, going up the hill after the dirt turned to pavement, they could see the brake lights of the now-empty buses.
“Are they going to spot us when we turn on the headlights?” Henry asked.
Jackson shook his head. “They’ll think we’re the SUV—I think there was a cop on each bus, and the SUV came to take everybody home after they’d dropped off their passengers. Get to the road and go before they get back to the SUV and we’re safe.”
“Not too safe,” Cody said from the back, his voice chattering. “They made you.”
“Yeah.” Jackson shuddered, knowing it would pull at the wound on his back but unable to stop. “But you’re still testifying, right? We’ll get you from the courthouse to rehab with a guard. I promise.”
“I believe you,” Cody mumbled. “If you can keep me alive and lucid, I’ll do whatever you need. The only way out of this is to fight through.”
“Copy that.”
Jackson shifted in the seat and let out what he thought was going to be a grunt, but it came out more of a whimper. At that moment, Jennifer’s front tires hit the pavement with a thump, front and then back, and Jackson let out an actual moan of pain.
Henry turned the lights on and accelerated. Not fast enough to peel out, just fast enough to let Jackson know his need for speed was appreciated.
“Ibuprofen,” he asked.
“Island,” Henry said tersely. “There’s a bottle of water in there for you too.”
“Oh thank God. I swear, I almost regret not drinking the coffee.”
“I thought the coffee was drugged?” Henry asked, surprised.
“It was,” Cody mumbled. “But not enough.”
“My mouth’s been dry since I got on board the bus,” Jackson explained, rummaging through the console compartment and coming back with the jumbo bottle of ibuprofen and a bottle of water. He chased one down with the other and tried to take stock.