The Bad Sister. Kevin O'Brien
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let me say this,” Gil went on. “Frank—at the agency, you know my friend Frank—he wrenched his back. So he went to Kaiser and they had him see this physical therapist there. The woman spent forty-five minutes showing him some stretching exercises. Then she printed up some exercise instructions for him and sent him on his way. They charged Frank three hundred and ninety bucks. I’ll bet that’s a hell of a lot more than you get per hour at the veterans hospital. According to Frank, this girl was like—phoning it in. She didn’t exactly break into a sweat.”
Nate squirmed in the passenger seat. “I’m sure Kaiser gets most of that three hundred and ninety bucks,” he said. “And maybe the therapist seemed apathetic because she doesn’t like her job. I happen to love where I work. I love the guys. I like helping these veterans put themselves back together again.”
Nate hoped Rene would keep her mouth shut. Earlier this week, he’d complained to her that one of his new patients had spit on him. In truth, the job wasn’t always the lovefest he made it out to be. Occasionally he got patients who were genuine jerks. That was true in any job. But most of the guys who came to him were still traumatized and in pain. And his job was to inflict even more pain on them and teach them to tolerate it. Whether it was on an exercise mat, on a pair of parallel bars, or in the shallow end of a pool, he had to push these broken men to their limit. Many of them were amputees. Nate had to help them adjust to using prosthetics, and he might as well have been torturing them. But by the time they’d completed their therapy, most of his patients were grateful. Nate became like a war buddy with some of these guys. He’d wiped away their tears, lifted and carried them, and cheered them on. Once they were whole or pretty much independent, Nate always got a lump in his throat saying goodbye to them. They made him feel essential and seemed to look up to him. It was a feeling he never got from his older brother.
“All I’m saying is that you work like a dog, and they pay you shit,” Gil said. He checked the rearview mirror again. “It took seven years to earn your degree, and for what, Nate? How much do you rake in a year? Fifty? Fifty-five grand?”
Nate turned toward his window. “Around there,” he mumbled.
He was pretty sure his brother didn’t make much more as a private detective.
Nate used to look up to Gil, who had been kind of wild when they were growing up. He attracted people with his charm, his good looks, and his athletic prowess. He was a tough act to follow. Much of Nate’s identity was wrapped up in being Gil Bergquist’s kid brother—and that had made him proud until late high school. Then he’d started to resent it.
Time had shifted things around a bit. Nate was in great physical shape from working out with his patients every day. He was tall, with blue eyes, wavy black hair, and a goatee. As for Gil, though still handsome, he’d gotten paunchy. He’d had two failed marriages and rarely saw his only child, a nine-year-old daughter who lived with the first ex-wife in Ashland. His private investigation business was unsteady. He was probably in debt up to his elbows and certainly couldn’t afford the Audi. If someone was actually following them on the highway, it was probably a repo man.
Gil was always pushing the envelope, living beyond his means.
Two nights ago, when he’d called Nate about this trip, Gil had mentioned that he was about to “score a shitload of money.”
“And how exactly is that going to happen, Sherlock?” Nate had asked.
“I’m not at liberty to say, but it involves some information I’ve dug up for a client—valuable information, it turns out.”
“This doesn’t sound very aboveboard,” Nate had said warily. “In fact, it sounds way under the board. What’s going on?”
“The less you know about it, the better. But if everything goes according to plan, I’ll be sitting pretty next week.”
“Jesus, Gil, I can’t believe this. What are you doing, pulling a bank heist or something?”
“That’s it, I’m Thomas Crown.” He’d chuckled. “Relax. It’s nothing that serious. Forget I even said anything.”
To Nate, it sounded like extortion—what with that talk about the valuable information Gil had dug up for a client. Gil had gotten into trouble before with other shady get-rich schemes. He’d been lucky not to have his detective’s license revoked or been arrested or worse.
And yet, here was Gil, Mr. Shady Deal, doling out career advice to him.
“If I were you, I’d tell the VA hospital to take this job and shove it,” Gil said as he took a curve in the highway. “Then I’d find some cushy work at one of these health care providers. Or you could start your own business—like I did, work out of your house for a while, no overhead. Anything but that miserable hospital job . . .”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Nate replied.
He didn’t say anything else to his brother. He turned and asked Cheryl about her job behind the Enterprise Rent-A-Car counter at PDX. That kept her talking for the next thirty minutes. They turned off the highway onto a rural road, and then to a gravel trail that snaked through the woods.
Nate listened to the pebbles ricocheting against the underside of the car. He noticed the turnoff to their closest neighbor’s cabin, which meant they had a half mile to go. It was getting dark, but Nate still spotted certain landmarks along the way—including an old metal Smokey Bear sign he’d nailed to a tree twenty years ago, and Gil’s initials carved in another tree closer to the cabin. Then there was their mother’s birdhouse on a pole that never stood straight: the Leaning Tower of Pisa Birdhouse, the family used to call it. The birdhouse was pretty dilapidated now.
The vacation home—a three-bedroom log cabin with big windows and a porch in front—looked slightly neglected as well—at least, from the outside.
Parking by the porch, Gil popped the trunk. They unloaded their overnight bags, some groceries they’d bought for the weekend, and a cooler full of perishables. While the women turned on the lights and opened some windows to air out the place, Nate went to the side of the cabin and got the water pump going. He noticed Gil at the end of the driveway, glancing up the gravel trail.
Nate caught up with his brother as he started back toward the cabin. “What’s going on?” Nate asked. “Are you expecting someone?”
Gil squinted at him. “What do you mean?”
“On the way here, the way you drove and the way you kept checking the rearview mirror, I thought someone might be following us or something.”
Gil chuckled and shook his head. “We’re fine. God, what an imagination. Y’know, you always used to get spooked out whenever we stayed here for the weekend with Mom and Pop. Nothing ever changes . . .”
Once they stepped back inside the house, Gil switched on the porch light.
Nate wondered why he’d turned on the outside light if they weren’t expecting anyone.
* * *
The plumbing in the cabin was ancient, but reliable. Nate could hear the pipes moaning. Gil was upstairs in the shower. Rene and Cheryl were in the kitchen, knocking off a bottle of red wine. The cabin had sufficiently aired out and was now getting chilly. Nate made the rounds from room to room, closing the windows again.
He noticed that Gil had turned on all the outside lights—including the ones in back and two floodlights that were fixed on trees by the driveway. So everything was illuminated around the cabin. Beyond that, it was just a wall of trees—and darkness. The moon wasn’t out tonight.
From his parents’ CD collection, Nate had James Taylor’s Greatest Hits playing on the old boom box in the living room. “Fire and Rain” was just the tune for his nostalgic mood.
His brother used the family cabin a lot more than he did. Nate hadn’t been here since they’d lost their dad.
Their mom had been the first to go—three years back. She’d died from pancreatic