Page 26 of So Far Gone

“Uh-huh,” Joanie said.

“Asher,” Leah said. “That’s enough.”

Asher knew Leah didn’t like it when he questioned church teachings out loud. She didn’t believe everything the Blessed Fire

taught, either, but she got mad when her brother talked like this. She liked to say what Pastor Gallen’s son, David Jr., had

told her: your faith was personal, and God did not need you defending Him.

David Jr. had told her (and she told Asher) that his divinity professor said it was pointless to use science to argue against the Bible, because if scientific principles governed the universe, then they were, by nature, designed by God.

In other words, if it was true, then God was its author, since God was truth .

And if He was all-powerful, why couldn’t He be the one who hung the stars millions of light-years apart? What would time

matter to Him? And why couldn’t He be the one to light the spark to the Big Bang? What was thirteen billion years to the Creator

of the universe?

Asher had to admit, these were hard points to argue.

Brian came inside then. He avoided eye contact as he marched to a back bedroom and emerged a moment later with a long brown

leather bag strapped over his shoulder.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Joanie stepped between him and the door, hands on her hips. “Where are you going with that?”

“Joanie, don’t start with me—”

“Me start? You’re the one walking through the house with a rifle!”

“These people Rhys has got himself balled up with—”

“Rhys got balled up, not you!”

“I’m just going to follow him into town, so he can return the man’s truck and his cell phone. Then we’ll come right back here.”

“I don’t want you involved in this, Brian.”

“Well, I’m involved, Joanie.”

“No. Not like that.”

“He needs my help.”

She reached for the soft rifle case. “He doesn’t need this.”

Brian pulled the case back toward himself. “Joanie, please. Can we not talk about this here? In front of them?” He pulled

her by the arm back to the bedroom, the door closing behind them.

Grandpa Rhys came inside then. He lingered at the bar, took a half sandwich from the plate Joanie had prepared, and looked

from Leah to Asher. “How are you guys doing?”

“Fine,” Leah said. Asher noticed that Leah hadn’t had much to say since they’d left the Rampart. She sometimes got into moods like this. Their mom said it was “adolescence,” but sometimes he thought Leah was just kind of a b***head.

“You won’t tell Mom, right?” Leah said to Grandpa Rhys. “About what I told you?”

“What did you tell him?” Asher asked.

Leah spun on him. “Asher! It’s none of your business!”

Yes, Asher concluded. Leah was being a total b***head.

“No, I won’t say anything, Leah,” Kinnick said. “Don’t worry. Right now, Brian and I are going to run into town to check on

my friend at the hospital. You two stay here with Joanie. We’ll be back in a few hours, and tomorrow, we’ll go get your mom.”

Leah opened her mouth to say something but stopped.

“Why does Brian have a rifle?” Asher asked.

“For turkeys,” said Joanie. She was coming out of the back bedroom, Brian behind her with the rifle case. “It’s spring turkey

season. You kids like turkey?”

“Not really,” Asher said. “I like—”

“Asher—” Leah said again.

“I do like pressed turkey slices ,” Asher said. “In sandwiches.” And then, as if he couldn’t help himself, “But I like ham better.”

“Well, he’ll try to shoot a pressed turkey,” Joanie said. “Or a ham.”

Brian nodded at Joanie, who mouthed some words to him.

“Love you, too,” Brian said. Then: “You ready, Rhys?”

Grandpa Rhys nodded. “Yeah. Okay.” He looked back at the kids, as if there was more to say. “Okay,” he said again, then turned

for the door. “Okay.”

***

Kinnick stepped warily through the double sliding doors, half-expecting to see Sheriff Glen Campbell, or the dismissive Spokane police sergeant, or maybe a full SWAT team ready to arrest him for kidnapping his grandchildren.

Instead, he smelled hospital and immediately thought of his poor mother ( embolism postsurgery, only forty-four ), and years later, the claustrophobic and helpless feeling of coming to various emergency rooms as a parent.

( Bethany at six, falling off a slide at school and needing five stitches, at thirteen, coughing up blood for no apparent reason,

at seventeen, a broken clavicle from a car accident with friends .)

Every chair in the Sacred Heart Emergency Room waiting area was filled with some manner of suffering—twitching addicts and

bleeding head wounds and people struggling to simply breathe. Just inside the doors, a triage nurse was helping a skinny barefoot

girl with a screaming, thrashing toddler, who was trying to squirm out of his footie pajamas, or maybe out of his skin. The

child let out a harrowing scream as Kinnick stood there, unsure if he should try to help.

“Come on, Mom,” the nurse was saying, “you need to keep moving. Let’s get your boy back here and start fixing him up.” But

the young mother had frozen just inside the door, as if this were suddenly more than she could handle.

“He got burned,” she said.

The nurse looked over at Kinnick warily, then cocked her head slightly to look more closely at his bruised face. “Looks like

you took quite a shot. Zygomatic arch?”

“So they tell me,” Kinnick said.

She nodded to a window. “Head over to intake with your ID.”

“Oh, no,” Kinnick started to say, “I’m not here for—”

But the nurse had turned back to the young mother. “Come on, Mom. We can do this. I’m with you. Your boy’s gonna be okay,

but we gotta get him inside.”

She guided the young woman and her writhing son deeper into the hospital.

Kinnick walked past the intake window, and farther into the waiting room, but didn’t see any sign of Chuck or Lucy. Or the police, for that matter—

“Rhys?” She came in behind him, through the open double doors, a Styrofoam cup in her hand. Lucy wore jeans and a sweatshirt,

her hair pulled back in a distracted ponytail, strands coming out on all sides. She looked like maybe she’d been crying.

“Oh, no, he isn’t—”

“No, he’s fine,” she said, and strode over. “Sounds like he got lucky. The bullet didn’t fracture his hip, and it didn’t hit

any arteries or anything. Just sort of settled in. The surgeon is on her way down now to debride the wound and remove the

bullet.”

“Oh. That’s good, I guess.”

“Where have you been? I thought you’d be here hours ago.”

“I didn’t want to bring the kids, so I took them to a friend’s house.”

Niceties over, Lucy smacked him in the chest with her open hand. “What the fuck were you thinking, Kinnick!”

“I didn’t— I wasn’t— What?” Kinnick had been so worried about the police, or that small-town sheriff, or the Army of the Lord,

that it hadn’t occurred to him that the real threat to his safety might be Lucy. “I was just going along with Chuck.”

She hit him in the chest again. “You don’t go along with Chuck fucking Littlefield! Not when he goes manic like that! What

did I tell you? Where’s your common sense?”

“You’re the one who set me up with him!”

Another shot to his chest. “Yeah, because I assumed you’d know better than to go half-cocked into some militia compound with

him!”

Kinnick looked around, worried that people would think this angry woman was the cause of his black eye.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Today?” Kinnick asked. “Or, like... lifetime?”

She smacked him again. “It took me six months to break up with Chuck! And now, because of you—and me—he almost gets killed. The guy has no one to take care of him, Rhys! His ex hates him. His kids won’t talk to him. Who do you think is going to have to take care of Chuck now?”

Of course, he hadn’t thought of that. “Lucy, I didn’t—”

“I honestly don’t know how you do it. One day back in my life and it’s a steaming bucket of rotten fucking fish heads.”

“I am so sorry. I really didn’t—” He held up Chuck’s phone and key fob. “I just came here to give back his truck and his phone. He’s

got a lot of messages.” In fact, the thing had been buzzing nearly nonstop for the last hour.

She sighed. “Come on. I’ll take you back to see him.”

Kinnick followed her through the misery of the waiting room, past an aide taking a blood sample from a quietly weeping old

man. The aide paused from his work to buzz them back into the treatment area, where another set of doors opened.

“Also, this sheriff’s deputy from Idaho was here earlier,” Lucy said. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Did you give him my number?”

“Funny. You’re fucking hilarious, Kinnick. No, I told him I’d pass his number on to you.”

“Well, I’m not sticking around. And I’m not calling that sheriff.”

“Right. Good move. You’ll make a good fugitive.”

“I’ve got to find Bethany first, and once I bring her back, we’ll get this all straightened out with her kids.”

Lucy looked back over her shoulder. “You know where she is?”

“I think so,” Kinnick said. “She told Leah where she was going.”

“She did?”

He thought about telling Lucy what Leah had begrudgingly told him, but he didn’t want to put Lucy in the position of having

to withhold anything from law enforcement. “Yes,” Kinnick said simply.

Lucy paused outside Chuck’s treatment room. She put a hand on the curtain and turned back to Kinnick. “He’s pretty jacked up on pain meds right now.”

From the other side of the curtain: “Gilligan? Is that you? Where’d you go?”

She pulled the curtain, and there was Chuck, in a hospital bed, cabled to a heart monitor, electrodes all over his bare chest,

a blood pressure cup on his arm, IV drip above him, catheter bag below him. He looked so small in that bed, hooked to all

that equipment.

“Hey! There he is!” Chuck said. “My new partner. Hey, we pulled it off, didn’t we?” He held up a fist for Kinnick to bump.

“How are you feeling, Chuck?”

“Me? Shoooot.” His fist fell to his side. “I’m fine. All things, you know, considered.” His eyes were glossy with pain meds.