Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.
She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.
Dropping her cane – it would only slow her down – Mrs Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.
She knelt beside Mr Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs Gibson didn’t see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr Peterson to gasp in air.
He did not.
During the first phase of her working life, Mrs Gibson had been a teller at Flint City First National. When she retired from that position at the mandatory age of sixty-two, she had taken the classes necessary to become a qualified Home Helper, a job she had done to supplement her retirement checks until the age of seventy-four. One of those classes had necessarily dealt with resuscitation. She now knelt beside Mr Peterson’s considerable bulk, tilted his head up, pinched his nostrils shut, yanked his mouth open, and pressed her lips to his.
She was on her tenth breath, and feeling decidedly woozy, when Mr Jagger from across the street joined her and tapped her on one bony shoulder. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Not if I can help it,’ said Mrs Gibson. She clutched the pocket of her housecoat and felt the rectangle of her cell phone. She took it out and tossed it blindly behind her. ‘Call 911. And if I pass out, you’ll have to take over.’
But she didn’t pass out. On her fifteenth breath – and just as she really was about to – Fred Peterson took a big, slobbery breath on his own. Then another. Mrs Gibson waited for his eyes to open, and when they did not, she rolled up one lid. Beneath was nothing but the sclera, not white but red with burst blood vessels.
Fred Peterson took a third breath, then stopped again. Mrs Gibson began the best chest compressions she could manage, not sure they would help but feeling they could not hurt. She was aware that the pain in her back and down her leg had lessened. Was it possible that sciatica could be shocked out of one’s body? Of course not. The idea was ridiculous. It was adrenalin, and once the supply was exhausted, she would feel worse than ever.
A siren floated over the early morning darkness, approaching.
Mrs Gibson returned to forcing her breath down Fred Peterson’s throat (her most intimate contact with a man since her husband had died in 2004), stopping each time she felt on the verge of toppling into a gray faint. Mr Jagger did not offer to take over, and she didn’t ask him to. Until the ambulance came, this was between her and Peterson.
Sometimes when she stopped, Mr Peterson would take one of those great slobbering breaths. Sometimes he would not. She was barely cognizant of the pulsing red ambulance lights when they began to zap the two adjacent yards, strobing across the jagged stub of branch on the hackberry tree where Mr Peterson had tried to hang himself. One of the EMTs eased her to her feet, and she was able to stand on them almost without pain. It was amazing. No matter how temporary the miracle was, she’d accept it with thanks.
‘We’ll take over now, missus,’ the EMT said. ‘You did a hell of a job.’
‘You surely did,’ Mr Jagger said. ‘You saved him, June! You saved that poor bugger’s life!’
Wiping warm spittle from her chin – a mixture of hers and Peterson’s – Mrs Gibson said, ‘Maybe so. And maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t.’
7
At eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Ralph was cutting the grass in his backyard. With a day devoid of tasks stretching ahead of him, mowing was all he could think of to do with his time … although not with his mind, which ran on its own endless gerbil wheel: the mutilated body of Frank Peterson, the witnesses, the taped footage, the DNA, the crowd at the courthouse. Mostly that. It was the girl’s dangling bra strap he kept fixing on for some reason – a bright yellow ribbon that jiggled up and down as she sat on her boyfriend’s shoulders and pumped her fists.
He barely heard the xylophone rattle of his cell phone. He turned off the mower and took the call, standing there with his sneakers and bare ankles dusted with grass. ‘Anderson.’
‘Troy Ramage here, boss.’
One of the two officers who had actually arrested Terry. That seemed a long time ago. In another life, as they said.
‘What’s up, Troy?’
‘I’m at the hospital with Betsy Riggins.’
Ralph smiled, an expression so lately unused that it felt foreign on his face. ‘She’s having the baby.’
‘No, not yet. The chief asked her to come down because you’re on leave and Jack Hoskins is still fishing on Lake Ocoma. Sent me along to keep her company.’
‘What’s the deal?’
‘EMTs brought in Fred Peterson a few hours ago. He tried to hang himself in his backyard, but the branch he tied his rope to broke. The lady next door, a Mrs Gibson, gave him mouth-to-mouth and pulled him through. She came in to see how he was doing, and the chief wants a statement from her, which I guess is protocol, but this seems like a done deal to me. God knows the poor guy had plenty of reasons to pull the pin.’
‘What’s his condition?’
‘The docs say he’s got minimal brain function. Chances of him ever coming back are like one in a hundred. Betsy said you’d want to know.’
For a moment Ralph thought the bowl of cereal he’d eaten for breakfast was going to come back up, and he right-faced away from his Lawnboy to keep from spewing all over it.
‘Boss? You there?’
Ralph swallowed back a sour mash of milk and Rice Chex. ‘I’m here. Where’s Betsy now?’
‘In Peterson’s room with the Gibson woman. Detective Riggins sent me to call because ICU’s a no-cell zone. The docs offered them a room where they could talk, but Gibson said she wanted to answer Detective Riggins’s questions with Peterson. Almost like she thinks he could hear her. Nice old lady, but her back’s killing her, you can see it by the way she walks. So why’s she even here? This ain’t The Good Doctor, and there ain’t gonna be any miracle recovery.’
Ralph could guess the reason. This Mrs Gibson would have exchanged recipes with Arlene Peterson, and watched Ollie and Frankie grow up. Maybe Fred Peterson had shoveled out her driveway after one of Flint City’s infrequent snowstorms. She was there out of sorrow and respect, perhaps even out of guilt that she hadn’t just let Peterson go instead of condemning him to an indefinite stay in a hospital room where machines would do his breathing for him.
The full horror of the last eight days broke over Ralph in a wave. The killer hadn’t been contented with taking just the boy; he’d taken the whole Peterson family. A clean sweep, as they said.
Not ‘the killer,’ no need to be so anonymous. Terry. The killer was Terry. There’s no one else on the radar.
‘Thought you’d want to know,’ Ramage repeated. ‘And hey, look on the bright side. Maybe Betsy’ll go into labor while she’s here. Save her husband from making a special trip.’
‘Tell her to go home,’ Ralph said.
‘Roger that. And … Ralph? Sorry about the way things went down at the courthouse. It was a shit-show.’