heard her zip up her jacket with one long forceful yank.
“Now me and Charlie, we got an understanding,” she continued.
“Are you saying you and Charlie Cardinal are more than just friends?”
“Yeah, well him and me, we have a thing, see,” she replied, turning quickly in my direction and then back to the front of the truck. “I guess ya could say we connect. I’m good for him. He and that bitch of a wife don’t get along. In fact, he’s gonna leave her.”
She turned her gaze back to me. “Nov, Meg, I’m telling ya this on the q.t. . . . I don’t want ya blabbing this around, eh?”
“I won’t say a word. But you surprise me. I thought you kept pretty much to yourself.”
“Yeah, that’s what I want people to think. Keeps them from sticking their nose in where it don’t belong. Ya know once the word gets out, it’ll be game over. Me and Charlie have been real secret like. We have a secret place we go to, eh?” She glanced at me. “Anyways, by the time they find out, we’ll be long gone.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked, even more surprised by this additional news.
“Yeah . . . sometime . . . Soon as Charlie gets his affairs in order. Then we’re outta here. Now don’t ya be telling nobody.”
“But I thought you loved your job at the store?”
“Yeah . . . I do. But I gotta get out of this hole. I ain’t never seen nothin’. Charlie’s gonna change all that. Him and me, we’re gonna see the world.” Her voice shook with defiance.
“I suppose if you’ve never lived anywhere else, this place can get to you. Where do you plan to go?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere with lots of lights and glitter. Toronto, New York, maybe even Paris, you know the big city in France, where all them painters hang out. I saw some of them pictures in a book once. They were real pretty, that’s for sure.”
“Sounds exciting, but won’t this require a bit of money? Why not settle for Toronto? It’s cheaper and would have just as much action as the other two cities.”
“Like I said. Me and Charlie got plans. And maybe, just maybe these plans include getting a few bucks. And then maybe they don’t.”
I didn’t bother to ask where the money was coming from. I knew it was courtesy of CanacGold. And judging by Charlie’s fancy new Yukon, they were paying him a bundle. No wonder Charlie didn’t care about preserving the island. He wasn’t going to be around when the mine finally got going.
Out of the darkness, a pinprick of light suddenly loomed into view. Worried it might be a reflection from the eyes of an animal, I slowed the truck down. As I got closer, the white dot was joined by a red one, and rather than remaining stationary the way a deer would when startled by oncoming headlights, the lights wove from side to side across the road.
“Jeez, not another damn drunk,” Hélène muttered, voicing my own thoughts.
I slowed my truck to a crawl and wondered how I was going to get around the car without getting hit. I blasted the driver with my horn, hoping to convince him to remain on one side while I attempted to pass on the other. No such luck. The car suddenly swerved across my path. I jammed my foot on the brakes. My truck slid over the loose gravel and came to a stop, inches from the car’s bumper.
However, the car, one I recognized with unease, continued its slow aimless course, like a wind-up toy winding down. It bumped along the shallow ditch, lurched over a boulder protruding from the side of the road, narrowly missed a tree before wobbling back across the road. Finally, it came to rest against a hydro pole. For one long second everything froze, and then the horn began emitting one loud continuous blast.
With anger overriding all caution, I jumped out of my truck, yelling, “Hey! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” A dark shape slumped over the steering wheel. In the glare of headlights, I saw Tommy.
THIRTY-SIX
Like father, like son, I thought as I shook him. “Hey, Tommy! Wake up! This is no place to sleep it off!”
Slowly, his body slipped from the steering wheel and slid through the open car door towards the ground. I grabbed for his arm, his shirt, anything to break his fall, but, too heavy, he collapsed in a heap on the road. The horn stopped. Tommy didn’t move. It was quiet, almost too quiet.
I slapped his face. No response. Worried this was more than a drunken coma, I checked his pulse and thankfully felt life. I reached around his chest and tried to prop him against the car. I almost had him upright when I felt something sticky and wet. Startled, I loosened my grip and saw a dark stain spreading across his tattered flannel shirt. Covering the back of the driver’s seat was a similar stain, glistening red in the light.
“Hélène! Come here! Quick! I need your help!” I called out, expecting her to be right behind me. But the answering silence told me she’d vanished as suddenly as she’d appeared this night. No doubt she was tired of dealing with drunks.
Not knowing what else to do, I frantically tried Tommy’s pulse again. He was still alive. Then his eyelids fluttered. With a painful groan, he opened his eyes. Unfocussed blue looked out at me. Across his forehead stretched a dark angry welt.
“Tommy? You have to try and help me get you into my truck.”
But his only reply was a faint twitching of his lips. He tried to raise his trembling hand to his face, but it fell back with a thud to his side. I attempted once more to raise his body into an upright position, so I could half-carry, half-walk him to my truck. Impossible. He weighed a ton.
I ran back to my truck and drove it closer. Straining to keep his upper body off the ground, I slowly dragged him towards the passenger side. His boots left two shallow creases in the dirt. Between them dribbled a line of blood.
Finally, I manoeuvered him into the front seat through a combination of pushing and pulling with some feeble assistance on his part. I covered him with the dirty blanket used to protect the seat from muddy paws.
“Tommy? I’m going to take you into the hospital in Somerset. Can you hang in?”
The blue eyes opened. “Yes . . . I’ll . . . try . . .” And closed again.
I drove as fast as I dared while trying to minimize the jolts in the road. I had no idea what the injury was or what had caused it. I only knew he was still losing blood, a significant amount judging by the growing patch on the blanket.
Except for his ragged breathing, he was quiet the entire trip. He cried out only once, when the truck was jolted by an unseen bump in the road. Normally a thirty minute trip to Somerset, this time it took me just under twenty minutes to reach the emergency entrance of the town’s hospital.
While the hospital staff was transferring him to the stretcher, he opened his eyes and looked directly into mine. “Found the money,” he whispered and closed them again.
Before I had a chance to ask “What money?”, he was whisked beyond a set of doors that proclaimed “No admittance”.
I phoned Eric, who promised to come immediately. Then I got myself a strong cup of coffee and sat down
