“I don’t think so. I’m kinda... liquored up.”
“All right.” Virgil gave Cain a thumb. “Out in my truck.”
He pointed a finger at Birkmann. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Birkmann said, “He was going to kill me.”
“I was only going to slap him a little until he confessed,” Cain said.
Birkmann: “See? I just wanted to sing.”
“All right.” Virgil turned to the bartender. “You got this?”
“Yeah, the cops are on the way. But it’s over if you get Corbel out of here.” He nodded at Burke. “And this asshole.” To Birkmann he said, “You owe us for a microphone.”
Birkmann said, “Okay, if it’s broken.”
Burke said, “I need a drink.”
—
Virgil left Burke standing in the parking lot, loaded Cain in the passenger seat of the 4Runner. On the way to the clinic, Cain said, “My arm hurts like hell. I never broke one before.”
Virgil said, “Shut up.”
“What, you’re pissed at me, too?”
“You’re an asshole, Corbel. You deserve a broken arm. You’re lucky he didn’t bury that microphone in your fuckin’ skull.”
“Yeah, he was crazy mad.”
“Wouldn’t you be if some drunk started pushing you around in a bar and told everybody that you’d murdered Gina Hemming?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have busted his arm.”
—
Virgil had calmed down by the time they got to the clinic, but as they walked to the door he told Cain, “You’re an alcoholic, Corbel. You’re a binge drinker, which is the worst kind, because you don’t believe that you’re an alcoholic. You’ll eventually kill somebody, either in a fight or driving drunk. Then you’ll dry out, because they don’t serve drinks in prison. You want to visit Stillwater for a few years, keep on drinking.”
“You really turned into a Debbie Downer,” Cain said. He laughed. “That goddamn Birkmann. He broke my arm. I gotta give it to him, I didn’t see that coming. Not at all. Didn’t think Bug Boy had it in him.”
TWENTY-SEVENVirgil waited until Cain’s arm was x-rayed and the duty doctor confirmed that it was broken. “Simple fracture, not terrible. We’ll put a cast on it. Probably be on for three or four months, depending on how fast you heal.”
Cain, who was rapidly sobering up, said, “I got to quit this shit.”
The doc agreed and asked, “Aren’t you the guy who got beat up by Ryan Harney’s wife?”
“Yeah, I guess. Been a bad week,” Cain said.
The doc said that because Cain had been drinking, and because he was going to need some painkillers, he wanted to keep him overnight until the alcohol had worn off. “I’m going to supervise the analgesics myself. I don’t want you overdosing and dying, which would get me sued.”
“That’s nice, worried about getting sued while I’m dying,” Cain said.
The doc said, “People die all the time. I can live with that. It’s the lawsuits that are a pain in the ass.”
A nurse came in and said to the doctor, “We got more business coming in. Some out-of-town woman got in a fight up at Tony’s Chicago Style. She’s burned. Some other woman got a broken arm.”
Virgil had an instant bad feeling. “What out-of-town woman?” he asked.
