by Dean Koontz
Louie Silverman was in uniform, driving a squad car, so he used the emergency beacons and siren to clear the surface streets ahead of them, staying off the freeways.
Sitting in the shotgun seat beside Louie, hands clasped between her thighs, shoulders hunched, shivering, Heather said, “Okay, it’s just us now, Toby can’t overhear, so tell me straight.”
“It’s bad. Left leg, lower right abdomen, upper right side of the chest. The perp was armed with a Micro Uzi, nine-millimeter ammunition, so they weren’t light rounds. Jack was unconscious when we hit the scene, paramedics couldn’t bring him around.”
“And Luther’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
“Luther always seemed…”
“Like a rock.”
“Yeah. Always going to be there. Like a mountain.”
They rode in silence for a block.
Then she asked, “How many others?”
“Three. One of the station owners, mechanic, pump jockey. But because of Jack, the other owner, Mrs. Arkadian, she’s alive.”
They were still a mile or so from the hospital when a Pontiac ahead of them refused to pull over to let the black-and-white pass. It had oversize tires, a jacked-up front end, and air scoops front and back. Louie waited for a break in oncoming traffic, then crossed the solid yellow line to get around the car. Passing the Pontiac, Heather saw four angry-looking young men in it, hair slicked back and tied behind, affecting a modern version of the gangster look, faces hard with hostility and defiance.
“Jack’s going to make it, Heather.”
The wet black streets glimmered with serpentine patterns of frost-cold light, reflections of the headlights of oncoming traffic.
“He’s tough,” Louie said.
“We all are,” she said.
Jack was still in surgery at Westside General Hospital when Heather arrived at a quarter past ten. The woman at the information desk supplied the surgeon’s name—Dr. Emil Procnow—and suggested waiting in the visitors’ lounge outside the intensive care unit rather than in the main lobby.
Theories of the psychological effects of color were at work in the lounge. The walls were lemon yellow, and the padded vinyl seats and backrests of the gray tubular-steel chairs were bright orange—as if any intensity of worry, fear, or grief could be dramatically relieved by a sufficiently cheerful decor.
Heather wasn’t alone in that circus-hued room. Besides Louie, three cops were present—two in uniform, one in street clothes—all of whom she knew. They hugged her, said Jack was going to make it, offered to get her coffee, and in general tried to keep her spirits up. They were the first of a stream of friends and fellow officers from the Department who would participate in the vigil because Jack was well liked but also because, in an increasingly violent society where respect for the law wasn’t cool in some circles, cops found it more necessary than ever to take care of their own.
In spite of the well-meaning and welcome company, the wait was excruciating. Heather seemed no less alone than if she had been by herself.
Bathed in an abundance of harsh fluorescent light, the yellow walls and the shiny orange chairs seemed to grow brighter minute by minute. Rather than diluting her anxiety, the decor made her twitchy, and periodically she had to close her eyes.
By 11:15, she had been in the hospital for an hour, and Jack had been in surgery an hour and a half. Those in the support group—which now numbered six—were unanimous in their judgment that so much time under the knife was a good sign. If Jack had been mortally wounded, they said, he would have been in the operating room only a short while, and bad news would have come quickly.
Heather wasn’t so sure about that. She wouldn’t allow her hopes to rise because that would just leave her farther to fall if the news was bad after all.
Torrents of hard-driven rain clattered against the windows and streamed down the glass. Through the distorting lens of water, the city outside appeared to be utterly without straight lines and sharp edges, a surreal metropolis of molten forms.
Strangers arrived, some red-eyed from crying, all quietly tense, waiting for news about other patients, their friends and relatives. Some of them were damp from the storm, and they brought with them the odors of wet wool and cotton.
She paced. She looked out the window. She drank bitter coffee from a vending machine. She sat with a month-old copy of Newsweek, trying to read a story about the hottest new actress in Hollywood, but every time she reached the end of a paragraph, she couldn’t recall a word of it.
By 12:15, when Jack had been under the knife for two and a half hours, everyone in the support group continued to pretend no news was good news and that Jack’s prognosis improved with every minute the doctors spent on him. Some, including Louie, found it more difficult to meet Heather’s eyes, however, and they were speaking softly, as if in a funeral parlor instead of a hospital. The grayness of the storm outside had seeped into their faces and voices.
Staring at Newsweek without seeing it, she began to wonder what she’d do if Jack didn’t make it. Such thoughts seemed traitorous, and at first she suppressed them, as if the very act of imagining life without Jack would contribute to his death.
He couldn’t die. She needed him, and Toby needed him.
The thought of conveying the news of Jack’s death to Toby made her nauseous. A thin cold sweat broke out along the nape of her neck. She felt as if she might throw up, ridding herself of the bad coffee.
At last a man in surgical greens entered the lounge. “Mrs. McGarvey?”
As heads turned toward her, Heather put the magazine on the end table beside her chair and got to her feet.
“I’m Dr. Procnow,” he said as he approached her. The surgeon who had been working on Jack. He was in his forties, slender, with curly black hair and dark yet limpid eyes that were—or that she imagined were—compassionate and wise. “Your husband’s in the post-op recovery room. We’ll be moving him into ICU shortly.”
Jack was alive.
“Is he going to be all right?”
“He’s got a good chance,” Procnow said.
The support group reacted with enthusiasm, but Heather was more cautious, not quick to embrace optimism. Nevertheless, relief made her legs weak. She thought she might crumple to the floor.
As if reading her mind, Procnow guided her to a chair. He pulled another chair up at a right angle to hers and sat facing her.
“Two of the wounds were especially serious,” he said. “One in the leg and one in the abdomen, lower right side. He lost a lot of blood and was in deep shock by the time paramedics got to him.”
“But he’ll be all right?” she asked again, sensing that Procnow had news he was reluctant to deliver.
“Like I said, he’s got a good chance. I really mean that. But he’s not out of the woods yet.”
Emil Procnow’s deep concern was visible in his kind face and eyes, and Heather couldn’t tolerate being the object of such profound sympathy because it meant that surviving surgery might have been the least of the challenges facing Jack. She lowered her eyes, unable to meet the surgeon’s gaze.
“I had to remove his right kidney,” Procnow said, “but otherwise there was remarkably little internal damage. Some minor blood-vessel problems, a nicked colon. But we’ve cleaned that up, done repairs, put in temporary abdominal drains, and we’ll keep him on antibiotics to prevent infection. No trouble there.”
“A person can live…can live on one kidney, right?”
“Yes, certainly. He won’t notice any difference in his quality of life from that.”
What will make a difference in the quality of his life, what other wound, what damage? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t have the courage.
The surgeon had long, supple fingers. His hands looked lean but strong, like those of a concert pianist. She told herself that Jack could have received neither better care nor more tender mercy than those skilled hands had provided.
“Two things concern us now,” Procnow cont
inued. “Severe shock combined with a heavy loss of blood can sometimes have…cerebral consequences.”
Oh, God, please. Not this.
He said, “It depends on how long there was a decrease in the supply of blood to the brain and how severe the decrease was, how deoxygenated the tissues became.”
She closed her eyes.
“His EEG looks good, and if I were to base a prognosis on that, I’d say there’s been no brain damage. We have every reason to be optimistic. But we won’t know until he regains consciousness.”
“When?”
“No way of telling. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Maybe never.
She opened her eyes, fighting back tears but not with complete success. She took her purse off the end table and opened it.
As she blew her nose and blotted her eyes, the surgeon said, “There’s one more thing. When you visit him in the ICU, you’ll see he’s been immobilized with a restraining jacket and bed straps.”
At last Heather met his eyes again.
He said, “A bullet or fragment struck the spinal cord. There’s bruising of the spine, but we don’t see a fracture.”
“Bruising. Is that serious?”
“It depends on whether any nerve structures were crushed.”
“Paralysis?”
“Until he’s conscious and we can run some simple tests, we can’t know. If there is paralysis, we’ll take another look for a fracture. The important thing is, the cord hasn’t been severed, nothing as bad as that. If there’s paralysis and we find a fracture, we’ll get him into a body cast, apply traction to the legs to get the pressure off the sacrum. We can treat a fracture. It isn’t catastrophic. There’s an excellent chance we can get him on his feet again.”
“But no guarantees,” she said softly.
He hesitated. Then he said, “There never are.”
CHAPTER SIX
The cubicle, one of eight, had large windows that looked into the staff area of the ICU. The drapes had been pulled aside so the nurses could keep a direct watch on the patient even from their station in the center of the wheel-shaped chamber. Jack was attached to a cardiac monitor that transmitted continuous data to a terminal at the central desk, an intravenous drip that provided him with glucose and antibiotics, and a bifurcated oxygen tube that clipped gently to the septum between his nostrils.
Heather was prepared to be shocked by Jack’s condition—but he looked even worse than she expected. He was unconscious, so his face was slack, of course, but the lack of animation was not the only reason for his frightening appearance. His skin was bone-white, with dark-blue circles around his sunken eyes. His lips were so gray that she thought of ashes, and a Biblical quote passed through her mind with unsettling resonance, as if it had actually been spoken aloud—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He seemed ten or fifteen pounds lighter than when he had left home that morning, as if his struggle for survival had taken place over a week, not just a few hours.
A lump in her throat made it difficult for her to swallow as she stood at the side of the bed, and she was unable to speak. Though he was unconscious, she didn’t want to talk to him until she was sure she could control her speech. She’d read somewhere that even patients in comas might be able to hear people around them; on some deep level, they might understand what was said and benefit from encouragement. She didn’t want Jack to hear a tremor of fear or doubt in her voice—or anything else that might upset him or exacerbate what fear and depression already gripped him.
The cubicle was unnervingly quiet. The heart-monitor sound had been turned off, leaving only a visual display. The oxygen-rich air escaping through the nasal inserts hissed so faintly she could hear it only when she leaned close to him, and the sound of his shallow breathing was as soft as that of a sleeping child. Rain drummed on the world outside, ticked and tapped against the single window, but that quickly became a gray noise, just another form of silence.
She wanted to hold his hand more than she’d ever wanted anything. But his hands were hidden in the long sleeves of the restraining jacket. The IV line, which was probably inserted in a vein on the back of his hand, disappeared under the cuff.
Hesitantly she touched his cheek. He looked cold but felt feverish.
Eventually she said, “I’m here, babe.”
He gave no sign he had heard her. His eyes didn’t move under their lids. His gray lips remained slightly parted.
“Dr. Procnow says everything’s looking good,” she told him. “You’re going to come out of this just fine. Together we can handle this, no sweat. Hell, two years ago, when my folks came to stay with us for a week? Now, that was a disaster and an ordeal, my mother whining nonstop for seven days, my dad drunk and moody. This is just a bee sting by comparison, don’t you think?”
No response.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’ll stay here. I’m not going anywhere. You and me, okay?”
On the screen of the cardiac monitor, a moving line of bright green light displayed the jagged and critical patterns of atrial and ventricular activity, which proceeded without a single disruptive blip, weak but steady. If Jack had heard what she’d said, his heart did not respond to her words.
A straight-backed chair stood in one corner. She moved it next to the bed. She watched him through the gaps in the railing.
Visitors in the ICU were limited to ten minutes every two hours, so as not to exhaust patients and interfere with the nurses.
However, the head nurse of the unit, Maria Alicante, was the daughter of a policeman. She gave Heather a dispensation from the rules. “You stay with him as long as you want,” Maria said. “Thank God, nothing like this ever happened to my dad. We always expected it would, but it never did. Of course, he retired a few years ago, just as everything started getting even crazier out there.”
Every hour or so, Heather left the ICU to spend a few minutes with the members of the support group in the lounge. The faces kept changing, but there were never fewer than three, as many as six or seven, male and female officers in uniform, plainclothes detectives.
Other cops’ wives stopped by too. Each of them hugged her. At one moment or another, each of them was on the verge of tears. They were sincerely sympathetic, shared the anguish. But Heather knew that every last one of them was glad it had been Jack and not her husband who’d taken the call at Arkadian’s service station.
Heather didn’t blame them for that. She’d have sold her soul to have Jack change places with any of their husbands—and would have visited them in an equally sincere spirit of sorrow and sympathy.
The Department was a closely knit community, especially in this age of social dissolution, but every community was formed of smaller units, of families with shared experiences, mutual needs, similar values and hopes. Regardless of how tightly woven the fabric of the community, each family first protected and cherished its own. Without the intense and all-excluding love of wife for husband, husband for wife, parents for children, and children for parents, there would be no compassion for people in the larger community beyond the home.
In the ICU cubicle with Jack, she relived their life together in memory, from their first date, to the night Toby had been born, to breakfast this morning. More than twelve years. But it seemed so short a span. Sometimes she put her head against the bed railing and spoke to him, recalling a special moment, reminding him of how much laughter they had shared, how much joy.
Shortly before five o’clock, she was jolted from her memories by the sudden awareness that something had changed.
Alarmed, she got up and leaned over the bed to see if Jack was still breathing. Then she realized he must be all right, because the cardiac monitor showed no change in the rhythms of his heart.
What had changed was the sound of the rain. It was gone. The storm had ended.
She stared at the opaque window. The city beyond, which she couldn’t see, would be glimmering in the aftermath of the day-long downpour. She had always been enchanted by Los Ange
les after a rain—sparkling drops of water dripping off the points of palm fronds as if the trees were exuding jewels, streets washed clean, the air so clear that the distant mountains reappeared from out of the usual haze of smog, everything fresh.
If the window had been clear and the city had been there for her to see, she wondered if it would seem enchanting this time. She didn’t think so. This city would never gleam for her again, even if rain scrubbed it for forty days and forty nights.
In that moment she knew their future—Jack’s, Toby’s, and her own—lay in some far place. This wasn’t home any more. When Jack recovered, they would sell the house and go…somewhere, anywhere, to new lives, a fresh start. There was a sadness in that decision, but it gave her hope as well.
When she turned away from the window, she discovered that Jack’s eyes were open and that he was watching her.
Her heart stuttered.
She remembered Procnow’s bleak words. Massive blood loss. Deep shock. Cerebral consequence. Brain damage.
She was afraid to speak for fear his response would be slurred, tortured, and meaningless.
He licked his gray, chapped lips.
His breathing was wheezy.
Leaning against the side of the bed, bending over him, summoning all her courage, she said, “Honey?”
Confusion and fear played across his face as he turned his head slightly left, then slightly right, surveying the room.
“Jack? Are you with me, baby?”
He focused on the cardiac monitor, seemed transfixed by the moving green line, which was spiking higher and far more often than at any time since Heather had first entered the cubicle.
Her own heart was pounding so hard that it shook her. His failure to respond was terrifying.
“Jack, are you okay, can you hear me?”
Slowly he turned his head to face her again. He licked his lips, grimaced. His voice was weak, whispery. “Sorry about this.”