Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [25]
“Jesus, Stan. I’m not going to let you drive.”
“Okay. I’ll kill myself here.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself, Stan.”
He looked directly at me for the first time in a couple of minutes, held my gaze, and said, “Don’t try to stop me. You stop me, you’ll be doing the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“Stan, I’m not going to stand by and—”
Never one to miss out on a melodramatic moment, Mayor Steve Haston suddenly appeared in the doorway behind Stan Beebe, wildly gesticulating and silently mouthing some kind of urgent message to me. I had to assume his daughter, Karrie, had called him and told him about Stan.
I excused myself and left Stan pouring salty tears into his coffee. At the other end of the corridor, Steve Haston whispered, “I hear he’s talking about killing himself.”
“That’s what he says. He was depressed a couple of years ago, too. Newcastle sent him to a doctor and they put him on something. Prozac, I think it was. He needs a doctor. When the medics get back we’ll have them take him.”
“Has he got a gun?”
“Not that I know of.”
“We’ve got to do something.”
“That’s what I just said.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“How about . . . we have the medics take him to the ER?”
“You think that’ll work?”
Just then the bell hit. It was a medic call, which meant we would take the aid car and engine, and the medics, who were out of quarters, would respond from their current location, probably somewhere between Overlake Hospital and North Bend. It would be a good little while before they showed up.
“Listen, Steve. We’ve got a call. We need somebody to stay with him.”
“Me?”
“I don’t see anyone else in the station.”
“I’ve got an appointment in fifteen minutes.”
“Steve. A man is talking about committing suicide here. A friend of ours. I don’t want to come back and find him hanging in the hose tower.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. I guess I can stick around until somebody shows up.”
“Until the medics show up. Or we come back. Don’t be turning him over to the mailman, and don’t leave him alone.”
“Of course not,” Haston said, heading for the beanery with an air of confusion about him.
The dispatcher sent us to Edgewick Road. Ian Hjorth drove the aid car; I drove the engine.
As we headed south through town and toward the freeway, Karrie said, “You think he’s going to be all right?”
“I think so. He was pretty depressed a few years ago. He snapped out of that one.”
“There’s a lot to be depressed about. The chief. Joel. Yesterday was terrible.”
“I know.”
A few moments later Karrie looked into the mirror on her side and said, “I think she’s following us again.”
“Who?”
“That woman from yesterday.”
Now even the probies were mocking me.
13. STICKING A PINKIE IN BEN’S COFFEE
On our way to the alarm, I tried to convince myself Stan Beebe was off base about whatever it was he thought we were all coming down with. He was a nice guy, but we all knew he was not exactly a brain surgeon. He’d gotten the facts wrong. Had to have.
I tried to distract myself by focusing on North Bend as we raced through town. It was a funny little place. The dinky downtown district had at one time been bisected by the major east–west route that traversed the Cascade Mountain Range, which separated the dry half of the state from the wet half, where we lived. These days Interstate 90 skirted the town by a good quarter mile. The old highway was now the main drag in town, the speed limit twenty-five MPH.
When Lorie and I first moved here as newlyweds, the occasional stray dog could be observed sleeping undisturbed in the middle of any of the side streets. Most locals didn’t even bother to honk their horns—knew the dogs and the owners, just pulled around or waited for the pooch to wake up and move. The town was small enough then (under twenty-five hundred people) that we all felt like neighbors. Then came the outlet mall and fast-food chains next to the freeway and later the upscale housing developments.
These days people drove faster, meaner, gunned their engines at stoplights, rode your