Lucas told the deputies that he had to take Letty to the hospital, right now, and he pried Letty loose from the murder scene and half dragged her across the parking lot to where she’d parked the SUV. The only thing Letty said on the way out of the parking lot was “Take it slow.”
Her nose was bleeding again and she tipped her head and pushed Kleenex into her nostril.
“What was I thinking about?” Lucas asked, pounding the steering wheel as they headed out the highway toward town. “What the fuck was I thinking about?”
He had his flashers on, but the highway was crowded with people heading into the Juggalo Gathering, or leaving it, and he never got any speed.
“You should have been at the goddamn hospital a half hour ago,” he groaned. “What the fuck was I thinking about . . . ?”
“Had to find Skye.”
“Somebody else could have found her,” Lucas said. He turned sideways: “Tell me the truth. How bad?”
“It hurts, but he never hit me or kicked me square, except that first punch, and that didn’t knock me out or anything, I kept moving—”
“Get the fuck out of the way, you asshole,” Lucas shouted at a slow-moving car ahead of them. “Get the fuck out of the way.” He crowded the car until it pulled off onto the shoulder, then accelerated away until he caught the next slow-moving vehicle.
“He could have killed you if that fat guy hadn’t helped you,” Lucas said. “Letty: you’re not a cop. Maybe you will be, but you’re not now. What you did . . .”
He trailed off, and she said, “Stupid.”
Lucas banged the steering wheel with the heels of his hands: “Motherfuckers. Get out of the fuckin’ way.”
• • •
AS THEY GOT CLOSE to Hayward, Letty said, “You’re mad now.”
“Yes,” Lucas said.
“I don’t want to . . . sound like a jerk, but I don’t think the sheriff’s deputies up here will find Pilate. They don’t do that kind of thing. They don’t track people. They’ve got their county and that’s it.”
Lucas nodded. She was right.
“So you’re gonna have to do it.”
He didn’t have an answer to that.
They crossed Highway 63 and pulled into the hospital emergency room, and Lucas led her in. A nurse went to wake up the night doc and a couple minutes later he came in and took Letty away, while Lucas went to fill out some paperwork.
The doc was back in five minutes and said, “We’re going to do some X-rays. She got hit hard, by that eye, I want to make sure nothing’s broken, and I want to take a look at her ribs. I think she’s probably got a cracked rib or two, we need to make sure there’s nothing sticking into a lung.”
“What are the chances of that?”
The doc shook his head: “Small. The X-ray’s more of a precaution, than anything. We’ll know right away if there’s a problem.”
• • •
HALF AN HOUR LATER, Letty was back. The doc was with her, and said, “She’s got two cracked ribs, but they’re not displaced at all. Judging from the placement of the bruise where she was kicked, I don’t think there’ll be any complications: it was well away from the kidneys or liver. We already talked about it, she knows what to do, and what to look out for. And there’s not much to do, except try not to sneeze or cough or laugh too hard.”
“What about her face? Her nose?” Lucas asked.
“Nothing broken, but she’s got a small natural bone spur inside the nasal vault.” The doc tapped the bony top of his own nose to show Lucas what he was talking about. “When she got hit, the spur apparently cut through a part of her nose lining, and that’s where the blood is coming from. It didn’t look like it was going to stop, so I put a little dab of chemical cautery up there, to seal it up. It won’t bleed anymore, but it’s going to hurt when the anesthetic wears off. I got her some pills for pain, more for the nose, than the ribs.”
“How long to heal up?” Lucas asked.
“Maybe three days for the nose to stop hurting. The ribs are going to hurt for a while. She’s got a big bruise on her rib cage, and that’ll add some pain in addition to the ribs, and she’ll have a heck of a shiner. She’s gonna be creaky in the morning. Nothing dangerous—but it’s gonna hurt.” He looked at Letty and said, “Remember what I told you about, mmm, the side effects.”
“What side effects?” Lucas asked.
“Side effects of the drugs,” the doc said.
Out in the truck, Lucas asked, “What side effects? The doc was tap-dancing back there.”
“He was afraid he’d embarrass me,” Letty said. “If I use the pain pills, I might not be able to poop. He said I should get something called a stool softener.”
“Does that embarrass you?”
“No.”
“Good. If you get to be a cop, and things get rough—they stick tubes into all kinds of places that could be embarrassing, if you’re the embarrassing type. I’ve had a few of them,” Lucas said. And, “I’m gonna call your mom.”
“She’s gonna scream,” Letty said.
“Yeah, well—it’s her turn.”
• • •
LUCAS CALLED WEATHER, then gave his phone to Letty, who talked to her mother for another five minutes, telling her the whole story, downplaying her injuries. A cop car with flashing red lights whipped past them as they drove back toward the Juggalo campground.
When Letty was finished talking, Lucas took the phone back and said, “She’s hurt more than she told you. She’s not feeling too bad right now, but she will in the morning. She’s not going to be driving anywhere. We’re gonna need somebody to come up here and get the truck, or the Porsche.”
Weather said that Letty should stay at the cabin until the next afternoon, then she’d be up with either Lucas’s old friend Sloan, or with Del’s wife, to get the extra car.
A minute after he rang off, Lucas took a call from Stern.
“Clark Chapman called, he said you’ve got a body,” Stern said. Chapman was the county sheriff.
“Yeah. Skye. Pilate apparently killed her by kicking her to death. My daughter might actually have witnessed the murder. She didn’t know it at the time, only found out later.”
“Jesus. Is Letty okay?”
“More or less. Got beat up,” Lucas said. He described the scene, and how Letty was assaulted by Pilate.
“Oh, boy. Okay, we’re blocking off all the major roads around there, making people go through the checkpoints. I understand we’re looking for a guy dressed as a priest.”
“Might not be, anymore,” Lucas said. “After they killed Skye, they left in a hurry. They’re running.”
“I’m rolling the crime scene crew,” Stern said. “But, uh, what are you doing up there?”
“Letty came up after Skye and I got worried,” Lucas said. “I’m sort of up here as her dad. I’m gonna stand back now and let the deputies do it.”
“Don’t stand too far back,” Stern said. “They might need a little advice. Weren’t you technically a deputy sheriff up there once? Seems like I remember something like that.”
“Yeah, but that was years ago, a different county, and it was pretty technical. Didn’t get paid, or anything.”
“Okay. But hang around for a while. I’m still in Madison. Talk them through it, until I can get up there.”
Lucas said he would.
• • •
THEY CAME UP to the Gathering site, and Lucas asked Letty, “How bad do you hurt right now?”
“Not terrible.”
“I need to pull in here for a minute. Kick the seat back and sit here. Don’t get out.”
“’Kay.”
Lucas parked and said, again, “Do not get out.”
• • •
THE DEPUTIES HAD taped off the area of the murder and Pilate’s encampment, and were waiting for the crime scene crew.
Lucas had one of the plainclothes deputies interrupt the rap concert. The deputy went onstage and told the crowd that a Juggalo woman had been murdered by some outsiders from California and that if anyone had taken any photos that showed a circle of cars parked over there—he pointed—“we would be desperately anxious to see them.”