Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [27]
Today Caputo was shirtless, covered in blood, sitting on the front step of his trailer home holding his left hand, his fist wrapped in a bloody white T-shirt. A table saw was still powered up and whirring in the yard. When the weather allowed, Caputo kept his power equipment on wooden blocks in the front yard, fending off the rain with tarps stamped UNIFIED FISHING TACKLE. If you’re missing a table saw, we know where it is.
“I think we were followed,” Ian Hjorth said, glancing out the driveway at the road.
“Karrie already tried that one.”
“No. I really think we were followed.” Nobody could play straight man better than Hjorth.
It was hard to hear anything between Caputo’s yelling at the dogs and their barking.
Max Caputo had sliced off the last three fingers on his left hand. By the time he’d gotten his dogs chained up and phoned us, he’d deposited a pretty fair blood trail.
When Karrie took his blood pressure, Caputo fainted. And then, as if the barking had all been a show for their master, the dogs grew silent.
Ian stanched the flow of blood while I retrieved the fingers from the table saw and dropped them into a plastic bag. After the medics arrived, we helped them get a line into Caputo and put him onto the stretcher.
We cleaned up the blood on the floor of the trailer, unplugged the table saw, turned off the radio and two TVs that were blaring inside the trailer, fed the dogs, and locked up.
Before we left, Ian said, “I wonder if I could get those fingers back. You know? If they’re not going to sew them back on?”
“What do you want with them?”
“Well, two of ’em I’d tie on a string and hang in the doorway of the garage for the cat to play with. The pinkie I want to put in Ben’s coffee.”
Karrie said, “Ugh! That’s sickening.”
I couldn’t help laughing, not at the joke, but at the demented Jack Nicholson look on Ian’s face.
The station was empty when we got back, no sign of Stan Beebe or his truck. Or of the mayor. I couldn’t believe it.
After we scrubbed down, I dialed Beebe’s house, but nobody answered. I told Ian where I was going and took a portable radio, intending to seek out Mayor Haston in the city offices next door to the fire station.
“What happened?” I asked Haston in his office. “Where’s Stan?”
“He wanted to leave.”
“And?”
Haston shrugged. “He wanted to leave.”
“You let him?”
“Yes.” Even at the best of times, Haston and I had never been friends. I hadn’t hung out with him when he was a volunteer, and after Chief Newcastle threw him out of the department, I didn’t miss him. His ex-wife and mine had been friendly, so we’d seen each other socially from time to time. In fact, we’d been studiously avoiding each other since our respective divorces. When he showed up to talk with me about Stan, it was the first time he’d been in the station since Newcastle died.
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“He didn’t say.”
“Did you even ask him?”
“No.”
“He just got up and walked out?”
“What did you want me to do? Wrestle him? I wasn’t going to wrestle him.”
“Did you even try to stop him? Shit, Steve. This is priceless. I just hope to God he’s okay.”
“Sure, he’s okay. He’s just a little down. I get down all the time.”
I went back to the station, pissed. I’d had some time to think about it and figured Stan Beebe’s theory was a good dose of paranoia induced by a vastly overactive imagination. I would never have said this aloud, because I liked Stan for both his good-humored nature and his eagerness to work hard, but he had never been the sharpest pencil in the box.
I was no genius myself, but at least I knew bunk when I heard it. It was bunk that there was a syndrome, and it was probably bunk that he was going to kill himself.
While I disbelieved his theory,