Virgin River by Robyn Carr Page A

cotton and approached the young man warily. He lifted his eyes to her face and grinned at her with a mouth full of dirty teeth, some of which appeared to be rotting. In his eyes she saw that his pupils were very small—he was full of amphetamine, higher than a kite. He kept grinning at her and she tried not to make eye contact with him. She cleaned some of the cuts on his face and finally said, “Wipe that look off your face or I’ll let Doc do this.” It made him giggle stupidly.
    “I’m going to need something for the pain,” he said.
    “You already had something for the pain,” she told him. And he giggled again. But in his eyes there was menace and she decided not to make any more eye contact.
    Doc made a sudden movement that slammed Calvin’s arm onto the table, hard, gripped by Doc’s arthritic hand. “You never do that, you hear me?” Doc said in a voice more threatening than Mel had heard before, then slowly released Calvin’s forearm while boring through him with angry eyes. Then Doc immediatelyturned his attention back to Maxine. “I’m going to have to put this bone right, Maxine. Then I’ll cast it for you.”
    Mel had no idea what had just happened. “You don’t want an X-ray?” she heard herself ask Doc. And her answer was a glare from the doctor who’d asked her to try not to talk. She went back to the man’s face.
    There was a cut over his eye that she could repair with tape, no stitches required. Standing above him as she was, she noticed a huge purple bump through the thinning hair on the top of his head. Maxine must have hit him over the head with something, right before he broke her arm. She glanced at his shoulders and arms through the thin fabric of his shirt and saw that he had some heft to him—he was probably strong. Strong enough at least break a bone.
    The bucket of water arrived—the bucket rusty and dirty—and momentarily she heard Maxine give out a yelp of pain as Doc used sudden and powerful force to put her ulna back into place.
    Old Doc Mullins worked silently, wrapping an Ace bandage around her arm, then dipping casting material into the bucket, soaking it, and applying it to the broken arm. Finished with her assignment, Mel moved away from Calvin and watched Doc. He was strong and fast for his age, skilled for a man with hands twisted by arthritis, but then this had been his life’s work. Casting done, he pulled a sling out of his bag.
    Job done, he snapped off his gloves, threw them in his bag, closed it, picked it up and, looking down, went back to the truck. Again, Mel followed.
    When they were out of the compound she said, “All right—what’s going on there?”
    “What do you think’s going on?” he asked. “It isn’t complicated.”
    “Looks pretty awful to me,” she said.
    “It is awful. But not complicated. Just a few dirt-poor alcoholics. Homeless, living in the woods. Clifford wandered away from his family to live out here years ago and over time a few others joined his camp. Then Calvin Thompson and Maxine showed up not so long ago, and added weed to the agenda—they’re growing in that semitrailer. Biggest mystery to me is how they got it back in here. You can bet Calvin couldn’t get that done. I figure Calvin’s connected to someone, told ’em he could sit back here and watch over a grow. Calvin’s a caretaker. That’s what the generator is about—grow lights. They irrigate out of the river. Calvin’s jitters don’t come from pot—pot would level him out and slow him down. He’s gotta be on something like meth. Maybe he skims a little marijuana, cheats the boss, and trades it for something else. Thing is, I don’t think Clifford and those old men have anything to do with the pot. They never had a grow out there before that I know of. But I could be wrong.”
    “Amazing,” she said.
    “There are lots of little marijuana camps hidden back in these woods—some of ’em pretty good size—but you can’t grow it outside in winter