Adrienne fought her way back to her senses, knowing that something terrible was happening and that she had to stop it. She dragged herself slowly to her feet and staggered as the room tilted, the wave of dizziness nearly forcing her back down. She shook it off and tried to get to the door.
It was happening only a few feet away and Frank knew he had no chance. He felt indescribably weak, weightless, and he wasn’t even sure if his body would obey him but there was nothing else to do. He saw blurred and indistinct movement in the upper corner of his vision, heard Adrienne’s scream, and saw Wellner’s head jerk up toward Adrienne at the top of the staircase.
Frank was slipping in his own blood as he launched himself at Wellner, so he was slow, too slow, and he saw Wellner reacting, the long-barreled Springfield swinging back down toward him. He got just inside the muzzle’s arc and plunged into Wellner’s midsection. There was little momentum behind it and Wellner staggered but didn’t go down. Frank’s fingers scrabbled in Wellner’s pocket, closing on the handle of his revolver and dragging it free. Wellner brought the butt of the Springfield down hard, grazing Frank’s forehead, and Frank let himself fall away from him, struggling with the weight of the big handgun as he tried to raise the muzzle. He saw the rifle butt poised high above him and pulled the trigger just as it started down.
Adrienne saw the big man’s head explode, pelting her with chunks of bone and flesh, blood spraying toward her. She rocked backward and fell, fighting to get upright again, get to Emily.
She made it to the bottom of the stairs and gasped. It was carnage in a very small space. There were splashes of blood and brain matter everywhere, on all of them, and she couldn’t tell where any of it belonged. She made herself move, but there was so much blood on the floor that she slipped and fell again, practically skidding to a stop at her daughter’s side, her hands frantically trying to find where she’d been hurt. Emily moaned quietly and her eyes slowly came open. Adrienne almost fainted with relief. She tried to say something to her but she couldn’t form any words and then Emily reached up and pulled her down and held her as tightly as she had when she was a little girl. They stayed that way for a long time and finally Adrienne came to herself and looked around the room. She saw Frank lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving.
29
Frank had no idea where he was. Faces looked down at him, said things he couldn’t hear, then went away or were replaced by utter blackness.
The next time a face hovered above him he tried to make some kind of connection with it, ask who it was, where he was, but the effort exhausted him and he watched as the face just slowly dissolved to black.
The next time he lasted longer, but there wasn’t anybody there. The door opened suddenly and a nurse came in. He tried to say something to her but she made soothing noises he couldn’t understand and bustled around his bedside, then left again. He was in and out like that for what could have been minutes or hours or days.
Finally he came awake and stayed awake. Everything hurt, but he took that as a good sign. The next time one of the nurses was in the room he was able to form a sentence that actually sounded coherent, even to him.
“The girl,” he asked, fearing the answer, “is she all right?”
“She’s fine, “the woman replied, “her mother took her home a days ago.”
“What about Billy? “
“Who?”
“Billy Dancer. The big guy.”
The woman pursed her lips, not sure how much to tell him.
“He’s still here.”
It seemed like weeks—Dancer was released first, although not much earlier than Frank—before Frank got out of the hospital. In that time, one of the nurses told him, Dancer hadn’t received any visitors at all.
Not that Frank had been snowed under either. He endured an awkward visit from Ed Cunningham, during which he pretended to drift off to sleep. Brent was there a couple of times, and a few other members of the force made perfunctory visits that usually didn’t last very long.
The visit he wanted was the one he didn’t get.
For someone with a medical degree Jeff Wagner could look remarkably out of place in a hospital.
“How ya doin’, Frank?” he asked, folding his gaunt, angular frame into a straight backed chair beside Frank’s bed.
“I’ll be glad to get back to work,” Frank allowed. A shadow flickered across Wagner’s face and he busied himself pulling that anachronism of a silver flask out of his pocket and pouring a couple of fingers’ worth into two Styrofoam cups. He shoved one across the narrow bedside table to where Frank could reach it. Frank just stared at him. Wagner shifted uncomfortably in his seat and finally glared back.
“What?”
“Spit it out.”
Wagner sighed.
“Brent or Cunningham been in to see you the last few days?”
“Nope. Not lately, not as far as I know,” the first week Frank had been there he’d been so heavily sedated a marching band could have come through and he wouldn’t have known it. He vaguely remembered Cunningham’s awkward visit and a couple of visits from Brent and the others, but the last few days no one had been in unless it had been while he was sleeping.
“Bastards,” Wagner observed, taking a drink from the cup, then cradling it in both hands and looking Frank in the eyes, “They’re pulling the pin on you, Frank.”
Frank just stared at him, unbelieving. Wagner fidgeted in his chair.
“It’s the thing with the girl,” he said, “conduct unbecoming, all that shit,” Frank started to say something, but Wagner held up a hand, “they’re not calling it that, though. Unless they have to. Officially they’re going to put you on full disability and hope the rest of it just goes away.”
There wasn’t much to say after that, and when Frank got out a few days later he ended up taking a cab back to his house. No one had taken the time to pick him up or meet him, and he hadn’t expected it anyway.
He’d wanted to call Adrienne several times, the last few days he was in the hospital, but decided it would be...pathetic. Now that he was home he had to fight the urge all over again.
The knock on the door came two days later and when he opened it she was standing there. He started to smile, swing the door open, but her expression was closed, set.
“I should have come to see you,” she told him.
“Come in,” he said, taking a step to the side so she could walk past him. She stayed where she was.
“I don’t like running away from things and I don’t like pretending,” she told him. It sounded rehearsed, “and I hate what happened...with you and Emily.”
She shifted her weight, looked for a moment like she might come in after all. Frank kept himself to one side of the doorway, the door wide on the other, giving her the opening in case she decided to take it. She stayed where she was.
“I don’t like to leave loose ends, either,” her eyes never left his, “You saved her life and—probably mine, too—but I can’t forgive you for what happened,” Frank started to say something, but the unrelenting look on her face stopped him, “no matter how it happened.”
Maybe Emily had told her what she’d done after all.
“Just stay away from us, Frank.”
She turned away and left. Frank watched her walk away, then carefully and very softly closed the door.
About the Author
Doug Sutherland is a producer, actor and director with many years of experience in the film industry. DANCER’S RAIN is his first novel.
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