“If she hadn’t gotten thrown, she would have been burned alive,” he says. Then he adds: “And I should have mentioned it before, but her lung got concussed pretty good in the blast, too.”
I say, “Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus must’ve been riding shotgun with her,” Jake says, and then tells us he’ll see us when we get there, there’s no need for me to drive like Helene would, she’s still in surgery.
“Wait,” I say.
“What?”
“Is she gonna make it?”
“Doc said first she had to make it through surgery,” Jake says. “And then through the night.”
He pauses once more.
“Tucker?” he says. “From now on, you ride with me.”
When we get to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Dr. Bauer tells Taylor and me that he plans to keep Helene unconscious for at least the next twenty-four hours, and probably longer than that, because of the intense pain she’ll be feeling when she’s awake, no matter how much pain medication he has in her.
In the short run, he plans to keep her on a ventilator.
Dr. Bauer then informs us that he managed to surgically repair the major tears in her abdomen and has inserted a chest tube between her ribs as a way of re-expanding her lung.
We’re all looking at Helene through the window of the ICU’sprivate room that Governor David Henry had arranged for her before checking into the Wake Forest Inn for a couple of hours’ rest.
This time, Helene is the one attached to the tubes and monitors. She’s the one with her head so bandaged that we can barely see her eyes. She’s the one trying to win the fight that Burt Webb had lost here.
Dr. Bauer says, “This is the kind of car bombing you read about from those wars in the Middle East. Not in western Carolina.”
“Not until now, anyway,” I say.
“This is really the work of the Southern Mafia?” Dr. Bauer asks.
“All the live long day,” Jake Courville says.
Dr. Bauer then walks us down past the nurses’ station, telling us there’s nothing we can do for Helene tonight, but if there’s any change, he’ll call us immediately.
“You mean if she takes a turn for the worse,” Taylor says.
“She’s already done that, Mrs. Webb,” Dr. Bauer says. “Overnight we need her to turn back.”
He gets into the elevator, the doors close, and then it’s just Taylor and Jake and me.
“Ready to hit it?” Jake asks.
“I know I am,” Tay says. “I’ve had enough of hospitals to last me a lifetime.” She shrugs. “At least mine.”
She and I are in the parking lot and back in the pickup when I hear a rap on my window and see Jake standing there, motioning for me to roll it down.
“Eli just called,” he says. “He thinks we found where the Crockett assholes are holed up.”
Then he puts his head back and loudly sniffs the air and looks more dangerous than ever.
“Turns out their old man was right,” he says. “There is blood in the air.”
ONE HUNDRED SIX
IT IS A half-hour trek through the woods, after Jake has parked the van at the bottom of one of the smaller mountains in the Appalachian chain.
