Evening Street (7 page)

Hinkle listened to her with no expression on his face. When he finally did speak, he did so quietly, all the fight gone out of him. “Well, now I got something to say to you, too, Angie. You're a know-it-all bitch with a mean streak, and I pity the people who get nursed by you. I've done a lot of wrong things in my life—God knows I've done some terrible things, too, including what's happened here tonight—but on my worst day, I still ain't as bad as you. Not in my heart.”

With that, he handed the shotgun to Bell. She was startled, but she took it quickly.

“It's up to you now,” he said to her. “Can I go touch my boy?”

The moment Hinkle relinquished the shotgun, Lily yanked the cell from her pocket. She punched in 911 and had a brief, hectic conversation with the dispatcher: “This is Evening Street clinic—I've got a gunshot victim—no, not an infant, an adult male, substantial blood loss, critical—and a hostage situation has just been resolved.”

Once Lily finished her call, Hinkle went on speaking to Bell: “Your friend down there says I can't touch my boy. Not even now, when I'm unarmed.” He tilted his head and looked searchingly at her. “It's the only time I'll have with him. We know that. Only time I'll touch him in this life. But it's your decision.”

The sounds of a medley of sirens—still distant, but growing closer—were audible. Angie Clark mumbled, “Thank the Lord, we'll soon be rid of this bastard,” and sank back into a heap, hands clapped to her bloody cheek. She gave Hinkle a grimly triumphant stare. “You're gonna pay for this, buddy-boy. Just you wait. They'll be locking you up for a good long time. And if that man over there dies, wellsir, they'll throw away the key.”

The shotgun was slimy in Bell's hands, from all the sweating that Hinkle had done. She held it as tightly as she could and addressed Lily. “Need help getting Del ready to go?”

“No,” Lily said. “Paramedics will be here any minute. It's under control.”

Bell nodded. She looked at Jess Hinkle. His hands hung down at his sides. He had turned away from all of them and was gazing at the basinet where his son lay in a nest of lines and wires and electrodes. But Hinkle didn't move. He was waiting for permission. It might not come, but he'd wait anyway.

“Lily?” Bell said. She knew Lily would understand what she was asking, without her having to spell it out.

The sirens were louder now. It sounded as if the vehicles had turned into Evening Street and were racing from the corner to the clinic. Any second now, Bell surmised, the big doors would heave open and Sheriff Pam Harrison and her deputies would come hurtling in, followed by the paramedics.

“Lily?” Bell repeated. She had control of the weapon, and she knew that Hinkle was no longer a threat. But she wouldn't give the okay unless Lily agreed. Bell had been wrong once before about Hinkle, and had missed the signals that he was a dangerous man, and she was afraid she might be wrong again. She trusted Lily's instincts. More, at this moment, than she trusted her own.

All at once, the building itself seemed to shift slightly on its foundation, owing to the massive vibration of heavy footsteps in the lobby, footsteps now approaching the door of the room in which they stood.

“Oh, hell,” Lily said wearily. “Let him say good-bye.”

Hinkle leaned over the basinet. Bell was right behind him, shotgun at the ready. She was taking no chances.

He had only seconds. There was no time for him to pick up the child before the door pounded open and the shouts and confusion would commence, before he was handcuffed and hauled away, forever exiled from the only thing in the world he truly cared about. Yet even if the authorities hadn't been on the doorstep, Hinkle still wouldn't have picked up his son, Bell surmised. He was afraid of hurting him. He was too intimidated by the great phalanx of medical equipment surrounding the infant, all the intricate machinery that had been marshaled to save these smallest and frailest of lives, lives permanently compromised by other people's bad decisions.

Hinkle smiled. With great gentleness, he sent a scarred, gnarled finger toward his son's tiny white fist. As Bell watched, Abraham stirred and yawned, and then he seemed to sense the presence of something there beside him. His eyes stayed closed, but he moved his fist, so that it brushed against his father's finger.

Hinkle looked up at Bell. His eyes were bright and wet, and luminous with love. “That's my kid,” he said.

And then the door crashed open.

*   *   *

“I don't get it,” said Bret White, one of the paramedics. “What'd he want here tonight? What'd he hope to gain? Revenge against that meddling nurse—okay. But he coulda just jumped her on her way out to her car tonight, after her shift. And it's not like he was gonna kidnap the baby—he knows how sick the kid is. So what was the plan?”

The others were gone. Bell had stayed behind with White to help him finish the incident report. Delbert Ryerson had been transported to the hospital, with Lily at his side, filling in the paramedics on what she'd done. Angie Clark rode to the same place in a squad car, insisting that she, too, deserved an ambulance. Deputy Jake Oakes had arrested Hinkle and taken him to the Raythune County Jail, where he'd wait for his arraignment.

Three nurses, sent by the hospital to take charge of the clinic and the infants in the wake of the crisis, moved around White and Bell, and around the basinets, in studious, efficient figure-eights. Most of the babies had—mercifully—barely noticed the drama, except to cry and fuss from time to time at the excessive noise.

“I don't know,” Bell said.

White, a good-looking, middle-aged man with a blond crew cut and a broad face, gave her an I-know-better grin. “Bet you've got a theory, though.” He and Bell often worked together at the same crime scenes. He'd heard her philosophize many times about good and evil, in light of the terrible things they saw.

“A theory.”

“Yep.” He clicked his pen shut and slid it into the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. “Hinkle didn't just get up this morning and decide to go terrorize a clinic with a bunch of seriously ill newborns. So why'd he do it? Where's the upside?”

“There's not always a reason for everything. Sometimes there's just an emotion. A ragged one. One you don't know what to do with—and so you lash out. You end up doing something monumentally stupid. Something like this. And like Jess said, maybe someday, Abraham will hear about how his father came here tonight to defend him—and he'll know how much he was loved. Jess loved him enough to give up his freedom for him. His future. I'm not saying I condone what Jess did—but part of me can understand it.”

White thought about it. “Yeah, okay.” He pushed the clipboard up under his arm. “Looks like ole Del might pull through. That nurse—he owes her his life.” He looked around the clinic. “Life and death. This is a kind of crossroads, I guess. Same as any hospital. People are born. Some of them live and some of them die. Here, a lot of them don't make it. But we keep on trying, don't we? We just keep on trying to make it right.”

“We do.”

They were interrupted by the stark umbrage of a baby's cry. A nurse leaned over the basinet. She lifted out the child, cooing softly while she swayed back and forth in a comforting rhythm.

“Is that Hinkle's kid?” White said.

Bell took a look. “No. That's a little girl. Name's Sunny.”

“Sunny.” White waited for her to explain the name, a name that seemed incongruous in a place dominated by tragic fates and constant pain. “Sunny,” he repeated.

When Bell didn't offer a backstory—she was too tired—White said, “So how
is
Hinkle's kid?”

“Stable. He has a hard road ahead, though. He'll be getting methadone for a while. And the way I understand it, they have to administer a ton of other drugs, too, just to stop the seizures. Those take a toll. Chances are, he'll have severe developmental delays. He's got some pretty big mountains to climb.” She surprised herself with what she said next. She wasn't sure why she said it, or where it came from. “But he's fighter, that one.”

“How do you know?”

“He's still here, isn't he?”

*   *   *

Jess Hinkle never saw his son again. He died in prison four months after the night he stormed the clinic. He'd gotten caught up in a nasty feud with another inmate, and the bad feelings finally erupted in a fight in a shower stall. Hinkle held his own, even after the other man produced a razor blade he'd hidden in a bar of soap, and the fight ended in a draw. A guard had separated the two men and was leading Hinkle away when his opponent rushed back toward him and gave Hinkle a last hard push, just to make his point. Hinkle lost his balance on the slippery tiles and fell, hitting his head on the floor. He died in seconds of a subdural hematoma.

The month before Hinkle's death, Angie Clark had been forced to undergo a formal disciplinary review by the ethics division of the Raythune County Medical Center. There were no witnesses to her conversation in the hospital with Tina—the one during which she'd advised the young woman to stop her drug use without medical supervision—and Angie claimed she had misspoken during the standoff with Hinkle when she admitted to giving that advice. She was under extreme stress at the time, she said. She was out of her head. She was a
nurse,
for heaven's sake. Why, she would never—
never
—put an infant at risk by telling the mother to quit drugs just before giving birth.

Tina herself disappeared after her release from the hospital. She was the only corroborating witness, and she was gone. Hence no action was taken against Angie. Still, Angie left the profession and moved away from Acker's Gap. The last Bell heard, she'd gotten a job somewhere in central Pennsylvania. The wound on her face was expected to heal well. It was unlikely to leave even the ghost of a scar.

Bell had promised Jess that Angie would pay for what she'd done to his son, for the extra pain she had caused him. It was a promise Bell couldn't keep, and it haunted her; the justice system, she knew, had no way to deal with certain kinds of crimes. Subtler ones. Crimes of the soul, she sometimes referred to them in her own mind. The justice system did fine with robbery and homicide and grand theft auto—but crimes of the soul were another matter entirely.

Bell still visited Evening Street as often as she could. Lily Cupp had asked for a duty change shortly after the night that none of them would ever forget; she was reassigned to the orthopedic ward at the main hospital. So Bell had made friends with the new head nurse: a beefy, ginger-haired man in his fifties named Steve Dilfer, who'd served as a navy corpsman in the Iraq War. Bell found something infinitely touching in the sight of a giant of a man in pale blue scrubs, sitting in a rocking chair while he sang to a newborn infant. The infant almost seemed to disappear in the crease between those muscular arms. Bell would sit down in the rocking chair next to Dilfer's, and one of the other nurses—Sue or Molly or Maribeth—would bring over a baby for her to hold, too, until it was time for the child to receive a more sophisticated form of treatment, something more substantial than a song and a warm lap.

Of Abraham, she knew only that he survived, and was placed in foster care in another county when he was ready to leave Evening Street. Bell learned that Hinkle's sister, a woman named Patty Moncrief, at one point had petitioned for custody, but irregularities were found in her application. She'd had her own problems with the law over the years, and lied about the particulars to the social workers, and was found out, and that was that.

Sunny pulled through, too. The Reverend Cholly had a friend in Blacksburg, Virginia, a single woman who had long dreamed of adopting a child, and he was able to arrange Sunny's placement with her. When he ran into Bell on the streets of Acker's Gap, he'd pull out his cell and show her the pictures of Sunny that the woman texted him each week, pictures that showed a laughing, smiling little girl—a girl who was much, much too small, and who had profound challenges ahead, but who still had a kind of sunrise in her eyes, a radiance that explained her name.

But Bell couldn't keep track of all the children. There were too many. In the years to come, she would find herself thinking about them and wondering how those early struggles affected them as they grew up. Little was known about the permanent impact on a child of a mother's addiction to prescription medication. Other kinds of drug addiction—crack, meth, heroin—had been around long enough for such studies to be valid, but pain pills were still too new, still such an unknown frontier, when it came to long-term medical research. And medical research, moreover, could tell you only so much; there were other variables at play. Softer things. There was the child's personality and temperament. There was nutrition. Education. Parental interest. The endlessly churning alchemy of circumstance and initiative, accident and will. All the elements that combine to make a destiny.

Bell knew only two things for sure about the children: She knew that through no fault of their own, they had been born with a shadow over their lives, and she knew that they had started out those lives in a place called Evening Street.

Read on for an excerpt from the next book featuring Bell Elkins