Marfa Shadows by John DeMers

Author:John DeMers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781933979816
Publisher: Bright Sky Press

17

JUD AND I TOOK OUR SEPARATE trucks to the Medical Center after I called 911. I also phoned Diane Cordova, asking her to meet us there. You never know when you might need your lawyer at the bedside of a man who’s buying your restaurant if you die in the next 12 hours.

It was pretty much against the laws of nature (not to mention of Texas) for Diane to beat us to the hospital coming from her house north of Fort Davis. But she was there at the entrance to the emergency room when Jud and I drove up. I asked her how the hell that was possible.

“I see,” she said with a weary grin, “you don’t remember that whole thing about the broom?”

I loved our repartee, and there was so much more where that came from—going on two decades of it, in fact. It was what we had now in lieu of wild sex. But haunted by my friend lying close to death and by the man in dark clothing who’d put him there, I didn’t have the heart for any of it.

A Presidio County sheriff’s deputy was waiting in the, well, waiting room. He rose from his orange plastic chair, one of many planted along the row of windows, and planted himself between us and the front desk.

“Do you folks have business here?” asked the deputy, who, like his compadre killed in this very hospital when they kidnapped Meridyth, seemed hopelessly young and bright, in appearance if not always intellect. At least, to the best of my knowledge, I’d never slept with his older sister.

Deputy Horace Jenkins was determined to stand in our way.

We were, of course, a chef, a lawyer and more or less an Indian chief. That might have made a great proposal for Gilligan’s Island: The Next Generation, but it conferred upon us no legal right to see anyone or do anything. Diane stepped forward, giving the deputy her patented I’m-tough-and-you’d-love-it-with-me smile.

“I demand to see my client, Gilberto Cruz.”

Good start, I thought.

Even better, it worked.

We saw Gilberto, as demanded. He was lying on a hospital bed on wheels, in a makeshift room created by four drawn curtains. Doctors and nurses came and went, checking his vital signs and writing numbers and descriptions on several charts. Wrapped around his throat was a thick blanket of gauze, which they changed whenever it went from white to red.

Gilberto wasn’t able to talk.

“I tried to tell you that,” Jenkins said. “They got him on some real powerful meds.”

“What do we know about what happened?” This was Diane, and I figured she was a better asker than I’d be.

“Only what he told me when I first got here.”

“You talked with him?” This was me, getting excited about hearing something beyond Manuelita’s non-narrative.

“Yes, sir. I did. For just a couple minutes.” Jenkins pulled a small notebook from the breast pocket beneath his badge and began flipping through. “So... Cruz says he was leaving the restaurant from the kitchen by way of the dining room about 11:10, 11:20 latest.

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