Knife River, page 16
The steel scaffolding and battens skidded sideways when the light rig hit the stage, propelled by the imbalanced weight and charged with deadly voltage by the slithering live cable. The film cameras were still rolling, stunned disbelief affording no time for their operators to react. The lenses captured the entire scene, caught the rogue section of tension grid as it spun sideways, mauling the two nylon-jacketed roadies underneath its bulk.
Somehow, it appeared that Ian Swann was still moving, unable to extricate himself, but reaching vainly for his younger brother, the boy’s expression frozen as his tendons seized and convulsed from the unrelenting stream of electrical current that was at that very moment burning him from the inside outward, disabling his internal organs one by one.
Ian Swann continued inching forward, clawing at the floorboards, dragging himself and the quarter ton of steel that held him captive for one final surge of effort that allowed his fingers to reach out and touch his little brother. Ian didn’t stand a chance when he finally made contact with Dowd, grasping his brother’s wrist and closing the circuit; and Ian’s body, too, began to convulse grotesquely from electrical shock.
EVERYTHING WENT black when someone backstage killed the power, and an odd and encompassing silence passed over the crowd. It lasted only for a moment before the stillness degenerated into pandemonium, the atmosphere roped with greasy smoke that bore the stomach-turning stench of incinerated flesh.
I sprinted through the blackness, elbowing my way through the crowd of horrified witnesses, fighting forward to the stage and to the ambulances whose flashing light bars flickered deathly shadows across panicked and bewildered faces. For a moment, I imagined I could hear incoming choppers and APCs, the sound of steel helmets and leather straps, the flash of incoming artillery rounds, the percussion of their impact carving a rutted path along a dark and crowded road.
I felt the rotor wash, and a dust cloud pushed down on me as I looked skyward and saw the camera helicopter making slow passes over the bedlam, strafing the turmoil in which I stood with a thin white spotlight fixed to its doorframe. The chopper’s noise and presence was escalating the hysteria into all-encompassing panic, and I waved the pilot away as I continued to fight my way forward to the dais.
I finally found Sam Griffin near the rear of the stage, where he and another stagehand had finally been able to kill the main breaker panel and were trying to isolate a circuit that wouldn’t place the paramedics in danger as they hunched over the supine bodies of Ian Swann, Dowd, and the two roadies stretched prone beside them on the boards. I could only make out passing images as the med techs passed their flashlight beams across the victims, assessing their vitals and status in triage.
“We gotta get some lights on that crowd,” I shouted to Sam through the continuous wail of the screaming spectators and the throbbing moan of the ambulance’s howler sirens. “They’re gonna trample one another.”
“We’re on it,” Sam said, and as he did so, the man who stood beside him threw open a subpanel breaker that controlled the fixtures at the tops of the sound towers, and bathed the frenzied throng in pale yellow illumination.
The light helped calm the chaos, and a number of Captain Rose’s state troopers began to herd the onlookers to the rear of the amphitheater where they could collect names and contact information for witness statements. I leaped onto the stage as a separate group of troopers conducted a cursory search of the stage apron and curtilage. All appearances suggested this disaster had been an accident, but there were protocols that had to be observed.
One small section at a time, the darkened venue began to rise out of the darkness, but the stage remained a black cavern, all power cut off. Two pairs of medical technicians examined the four victims, and from where I stood, I could see that Dowd’s clothing was still smoldering, the air putrid with the odor of singed hair and human flesh.
I squinted into the darkness of the stage set. When I had last spotted my daughter, she and her camera crew had been positioned in the wings adjacent to the monitor mixing board, and I half expected to find her pressed into a corner, curled into a ball and suffering hysterics. But when I finally found her, she was icily calm, her eyes reflecting myriad unspoken and unspeakable contemplations, a nylon jacket draped across her shoulders as she watched the attendants work on Ian Swann. I came up beside her and we stood together as we saw him lying helpless at center stage, pinned beneath five hundred pounds of steel girders and lighting, the skin of his forearms and wrists blackened, already dead or dying from severe electrical shock.
She turned and looked at me, her expression a mask about to shatter, and she reached out for my hand. Cricket had always been self-sufficient, strong and sensitive, a rare blend of a romantic and a realist, qualities I always associated with Cricket’s mother, but she wasn’t bulletproof, even though sometimes she believed herself to be. I wrapped her in my arms and felt her breathing on my chest, then I felt her lean her weight on me and finally allow herself to sob.
I STOOD beside Cricket as we watched the paramedics load Ian’s gurney into the back of the ambulance, an old Cadillac Meteor model that smelled of antiseptic and engine exhaust. The driver threw an arm out to bar Cricket from climbing in the back with Ian and reached in an attempt to shut the door.
“She’s going with you,” I said to the driver. “This woman is a friend of Mr. Swann’s.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
“Please don’t make me repeat myself,” I said and helped my daughter climb into the back of the vehicle.
“If she’s not family, sir—”
“The two of us are all the family he’s got at the moment,” I said. “Now, get going. That young man’s hanging by a thread.”
I watched the red lights of the ambulance fade away along the curved road through the forest, and I turned around just as the medics pulled white sheets over the faces of the two roadies and Ian’s brother, then slid them, one by one, into the maw of the remaining ambo.
“We’re not supposed to transport DBs,” the driver said as he pulled up the screen on the rear window.
“You say that like you’re doing me some kind of favor,” I said.
“No, sir, just saying—”
“Do yourself a favor and stop saying everything that pops into your head. This is your job, and everyone here expects you to do it with dignity. Are you hearing me?”
“Yes, sir. I hear you.”
“Take these three people to the morgue. Use your flashers if you want, but no siren. They’re not in a hurry to get where they’re going, and I’m sure they’d appreciate a little peace along the way. I’ll meet you there shortly.”
“Okay, Sheriff,” the driver said. “Roger that.”
“Much obliged,” I said.
I HAD told the sundowner with the tattoos that I would look for him if anything went sideways out here, and I meant it. And things had most assuredly done that.
I found the man standing alone in a dark corner of the backstage enclosure, hands thrust to the wrists inside his trouser pockets, rocking back and forth on the heels of his steel-toed work boots. His eyes were glazed, the skin of his face as pale as a fish belly, staring into a void in the trees where the last of the ambulances had disappeared around a corner, a sudden silence enveloping the woods behind it.
“What the hell happened here?” I asked him.
He turned his head slowly and stared at me as though searching his memory to recall how he knew me. I recognized shock when I saw it, so I waited for him to collect himself.
“I don’t know …” he said, as if speaking to himself. “It just came undone and fell.”
“Where were you?”
He shook his head, drew his lips into a seam, and breathed through his nose.
“Stage right,” he said. “In the wings near the rail. I was supposed to keep an eye on the crew while they brought out the instruments for the acoustic set …”
“So what the hell happened?” I repeated.
I watched him as he evaluated my question again, saw him begin to shiver.
“Those were my friends,” he whispered hoarsely, and he looked like he was about to pass out.
“Have you got a car?” I asked.
“No. I hitch if I have anywhere to go.”
“I’m headed to the hospital,” I said. “Care to ride along?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IT WAS A twenty-minute drive to the hospital from Half Mountain, deadly quiet as I drove, only the road hum and the intermittent tick of stray raindrops striking the windshield, each one provoking an involuntary flinch from my passenger.
We didn’t say a word to each other as we walked across the darkened parking lot into a rear entrance to the hospital. The door was down a short and narrow stairwell, unlocked and marked with a simple plastic sign that read coroner.
He followed me inside, into an empty corridor dimly lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Industrial-grade floor tiles ran the length and breadth in squares of chalky beige and a somber shade of mossy green that had no analogue in nature. The atmosphere inside the building reeked of disinfectant, cleaning solvent, and human waste, the air untouched and fetid in the stillness of the hall. I tried the door handle that led into the coroner’s workspace and found that it was locked, the lights behind the wire glass dimmed to near darkness.
“What’s with the colors in these places?” he asked me, the walls a similar unnatural hue as that on the floor tiles, casting both of us in a shade that looked like death. “Looks just like the VA clinic in Clarksburg.”
“As I recall, the public buildings in Korea used a shade of pink that might be even worse than this,” I said.
I left him to wait in the hallway outside the coroner’s office, pacing beside a stretch of molded plastic chairs that had been bolted to the floor.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“Where are you going?”
“My daughter’s in this building somewhere. She came here in the ambulance with Ian Swann. I want to find her, and I want to locate somebody who can tell us where to find your colleagues.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Where I was headed next did not include spectators.
“No,” I said. “Wait here. I won’t be long.”
He began to say something more and moved to follow me, but I halted him with my expression.
“Don’t move away from here,” I said. “Don’t poke around or look through any windows in this place. I’m doing you a favor telling you that. There’s nothing down here that you want or need to see, trust me. That is a stone fact.”
I RECOGNIZED the charge nurse, Cathie Fields, as I stepped off the elevator and onto the third-floor burn unit. I had seen enough of battle trauma to know that this would be the floor they’d bring Ian to.
“You were present at the event?” Nurse Fields said as I stepped up to match her rushed pace as she moved down the passageway.
“Yes, ma’am, I was.”
She paused when we reached the double doors that led into the ward and the operating rooms beyond.
“You can’t come any farther,” she said. “Not that you’d want to.”
“My daughter was in the ambulance that delivered Ian Swann.”
“Room three oh four,” she said. “I’ll come in and update you as soon as I can.”
Nurse Fields disappeared into the depths of the burn unit, and I navigated through the maze of intersecting corridors until I found room 304.
Cricket was standing near the window of a dimly illuminated room divided by transparent partitions made of heavy plastic and crowded with sophisticated electronic equipment laden with cathode screens and catheters and cables. Despite the closeness in the room, she was still wearing the sweatshirt she’d been wearing for her work and the nylon jacket around her shoulders, gazing through the glass into the dimness of the night and the scattering of streetlights that traced the river’s course. She had tied her hair back in a knot behind her head, unaware the skin along her cheeks and neck had been left smudged and blackened in the chaos, or perhaps the outreached hands of Ian Swann.
She turned when she heard me enter the room, the angles of her face severe, fierce and ardent in a way I knew had stripped away the final vestiges I was likely to have ever recognized of my daughter’s youth. She came to me and held me, more out of habit than privation, and I could smell the smoke and ambulance odors in her hair.
“He’s in the OR,” she said. “Don’t know how long they’ll be.”
“Was Ian conscious?”
“I don’t think so. He moaned a little when they moved him, but that was all. I never even saw him open his eyes.”
She gently pulled away from me, her own expression washed in pain and confusion, and I could feel we both had the same foreboding as to how this was to end. I noticed a stain of blood on the sleeve of her jacket had already turned to rusty brown, and a small section of seared skin that had sloughed from Ian’s body and fixed itself onto it. I stepped up behind Cricket and slipped the jacket off her shoulders before she discovered that shocking artifact herself, folded it over the back of a chair.
Cricket was about to say something to me when a scuffle broke out in the hall outside, and I heard Mickey London verbally abusing a young nurse as she unsuccessfully attempted to bar him from Ian’s door.
“I was assured that this room would be assigned to Ian Swann exclusively,” London shouted. “I was told it was to be a private room.”
“I assure you, sir—” the young nurse began, but Swann’s manager was having none of it.
“If this is a private room, then what in the hell are they doing in here?” he interrupted.
“Keep your voice down, Mr. London,” I said. I nodded to the nurse, and I watched her as she backed out of the room into the corridor, her expression washed with gratitude.
“I want you out of here this minute,” London said, jabbing a stubby finger first at me and then at Cricket. “Both of you. You people and your Mayberry, aw-shucks bullshit. Get the hell out of this room, out of my sight. Get the bloody hell out of our lives.”
To her credit, my daughter did not respond or react in any way to the man’s histrionics, having either grown immune to them through recent association, or from simple disinterest. I searched London’s face for something I might use to decode this burst of hostility and found only the same predatory carnality I had always seen behind his eyes. I’ve known men like Mickey London on the field of battle and on the open range, their solipsism and narcissistic motivations practically lacertian in nature, possessed of a hardwired instinct for self-preservation that defied description in human terms and placed everyone around them in grave danger.
“You are lucky to be standing in a hospital, Mr. London,” I said to him. “Might come in handy for you, depending on what you do next.”
He cocked his head and tried to peel the skin off my face with his gray eyes.
“Apologize to my daughter, Mr. London,” I said, “and I will let you leave.”
Mickey London clicked his eyes from me to Cricket.
“This little twat—” London began, gesturing with his stubby finger in her direction again.
“If you say one more word,” I said, “I will cram that entire sentence back down your throat with my bootheel, together with pieces of your shattered teeth. Go ahead and do it; see if I am joking.”
London took a step backward, a sheen of perspiration forming on his upper lip. He smoothed his braided ponytail with one hand and showed me what was supposed to be a condescending smile.
“This is not finished,” London said to me.
“Oh, I’m fairly certain that it is. Good night, Mr. London. Someone will contact you when you have permission to return to this hospital. Until then, you may come no closer to this building than the entrance to the parking lot.”
I watched Mickey London stomp down the hallway to the elevator. When I looked back at Cricket, she had the suggestion of a smile touching her lips.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I only wish I had it on film.”
I lifted the nylon jacket off the chair where I had placed it and folded it carefully over my arm so she wouldn’t see the stains.
“They’re liable to take a while with Ian, sweetheart,” I said. “Want to come with me and get a cup of coffee from the refectory? Stretch your legs?”
“I think I’d rather stay right here,” she said. “Just in case.”
“I can bring something back for you.”
She declined with a tiny shake of her head, any trace of the former smile vanished. I turned to leave, and she touched me on the sleeve.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked. “Ian, I mean. He’s in bad shape, isn’t he?”
I didn’t like to lie to the people who placed their trust in me; never have.
“I’m afraid so, Cricket.”
I RODE the elevator to the subbasement and stepped out into the dimness, the beige and green floor tiles, and the sour stink of sorrow and mortality that hovered in the air. The man I’d left down here had finally stopped pacing and was seated in one of the uncomfortable molded plastic chairs anchored to the ugly floor outside the coroner’s office door.
“Anybody come by to see you yet?” I asked him.
He looked at me blankly, gestured a wordless no in my direction, and shrunk inside himself again. I couldn’t tell with certainty in the pale light, but it looked as though he had begun to shiver again, though it was far from cold inside these walls.
