Free Rocket Science by Jay Lake Page B

old knife. It scared the heck out of me, even now, that Dad had kept some German’s heart blood in the tool shed for all these years. He always said it reminded him what he was supposed to do.
    “Good thing he’s a quiet drunk now,” laughed Truefield. I wanted to pop him one, but held my ground.
    Sheriff Hauptmann looked calmly at Truefield until the Deputy blushed. “Deputy Truefield, why don’t you get started taking Mr. Dunham to Wichita? It’s a long drive. Stay at the hospital with him until they can tell you something useful, then call it in to me.”
    “I’ll get my hat,” said Truefield, stepping toward the coat tree by the front door. “Can someone please help me bring Mr. Dunham out to the car?” He was a lot more polite with Sheriff Hauptmann around than he had been before.
    “I’ll help,” volunteered Ollie.
    “Get some blankets from Mrs. Milliken,” Doc Milliken said. “Can’t have him getting chills in his shape.”
    The two policemen clattered and huffed around the house, finding blankets at the direction of Doc’s wife, then fetched Dad from the examining room. I watched from my chair as they carried him out. He didn’t look peaceful now, just pale and ill. Old, he was, that funhouse mirror of who I would be. It made me want to gather him in my arms and weep as if he had been my son instead of I his.
    A moment later, I was left alone in the room with Sheriff Hauptmann and Doc Milliken.
    The Sheriff and the Doc looked one another in the eye for a long moment. Something that I couldn’t follow passed between them, words unspoken lingering in the air just out of my earshot. Hauptmann cleared his throat.
    “Vernon,” he began. “We don’t know each other, but the Doctor here speaks highly of you.”
    “Yes sir,” I said noncommittally. I was worried about Dad, sick of Floyd’s airplane, and now Hauptmann’s tone made me feel like I was about to be pitched at like a farmwife facing off with a brush salesman.
    “I understand that you and your father don’t get along, and I believe I understand why.”
    Now Mom’s ghost was in the room, hanging over me as if she were waiting for Dad. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak right at that moment.
    The Sheriff kept talking, his eyes narrowing as the lightly-built dining room chair rocked on its back legs under his weight. “Doc Milliken says there’s no way you felt strongly enough to attack him, let alone try to kill him. The medical evidence points pretty clearly away from you.” He glanced at my legs.
    “Yes sir.” I wondered where he was heading — it was time for him to give me the proposition, whatever it was going to be.
    Sheriff Hauptmann cleared his throat again. I suddenly realized that unlike Deputy Truefield, he didn’t even carry a gun. Confidence? Power? “Now, this doesn’t release you as a suspect, you realize, but unofficially I’m confident that you didn’t have anything directly to do with the assault on your father.”
    I thought about that. “What do you mean, directly ?” I asked.
    The Sheriff leaned his chair perilously far forward. “You have a government clearance from your work at the Boeing plant over in Wichita, is that correct?”
    We weren’t supposed to talk about that stuff outside the plant, but the war was over, and the Sheriff seemed to have something important on his mind. He wanted to say something that hung on this point. I decided for Dad’s sake to go along with him. “Yes sir, I do have a clearance.”
    “Then I am going to tell you something I wouldn’t normally reveal to an outsider. But in return for my confidence, I need your full cooperation.”
    I thought about Floyd Bellamy, and the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth. I was already deeper than I had ever wanted to go into a bad situation, but there seemed to be nothing for it. Dad was on his way to the hospital in Wichita, somehow because of Floyd’s secret. His beating was connected with the papers, with the airplane. I