Black Swan Rising

by Lisa Brackmann

  Casey started clicking through. Winced and swallowed hard. “You did,” she said.

  Zoomed-in close-ups of Matt Cason, his face covered in blood, hand clutching the jacket collar of a man on the ground. If that was Lucas, you couldn’t tell from the photos. The kid was right, the man’s face was a mass of swelling and blood that no longer looked like flesh on bone, just raw, misshapen meat.

  “Have you posted these yet?” Rose asked.

  He shook his head. “No WiFi.”

  “We can take care of that. Just let us show them first. On-camera interview, photo credit, and we can pay you a licensing fee for their use—it won’t be a lot, but you’ll still own them. Deal?”

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning. “Yeah, I really want to be a photographer, or maybe a reporter, you know?”

  “These are pretty brutal,” Casey said quietly, while Diego showed Gio Stewart his News 9 camera setup.

  “They can do a black bar on Douchebag’s face if they don’t want to show the whole thing. That’s up to Chris. The shots of Cason … ” Now it was Rose’s turn to smile. “These are fucking killer.”

  Casey had reached the last image on the camera. This one was of a young blond woman crouched by a man’s body, pressing a wad of fabric against his blood-soaked thigh. Her white shirt was smeared with blood, and it had popped open so you could see the top of her bra.

  She was looking up, her eyes huge, staring directly into the camera’s lens.

  News 9 San Diego @News9SanDiego

  Unidentified bystander aids seriously wounded victim at #CasonShooting—News 9 EXCLUSIVE kasd.us.Wgu9X

  Jack @JackAMole

  Nice tits LOL #CasonShooting #AJLA

  19

  She called Matt’s phone. He didn’t pick up.

  “Ping me when you get to the hospital, I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Jane had said. “I’ll probably beat you there by ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Did they have any information for you?” Tegan asked.

  “No. Just that … someone was shooting people at the park. And Matt’s at the hospital.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Tegan steered her Beemer onto the 5 South. “Well … just so you know … we can’t be sure it’s true, but I did see a tweet right before we left that said your husband took down the shooter himself.”

  “A tweet?”

  “I know, it’s not a lot,” Tegan said.

  The traffic was light. But even on ordinary days, Lindsey always felt stressed when she came around that huge cement curve and merged onto the 8 East from the 5. Mission Valley was so poorly designed. They’d built it in a flood plain, around a river that disappeared during drought so they could pretend it wasn’t there, sacrificed the best farmland in the county for car lots and hotels and shopping malls and, more recently, condos. She hated how inefficient and ugly it was, how wasteful.

  Funny, Lindsey thought. These were thoughts she had every time she drove this interchange, like wheels falling into a well-worn groove. And for just a moment, the familiar litany was actually a comfort.

  Tegan cut over into the third lane, squeezing the car into a faster-moving box on the freeway. “I’m hoping and praying for the best for you,” she said.

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  Tweets, she thought. I’ll look for tweets. Lindsey unlocked her phone. Should she check Campaigner first? Well, Sarah was at the park, she seemed to be on top of these things.

  God, you’re a bitch, Lindsey told herself. Sarah could be dead for all she knew. People were dead, Jane had told her that.

  She opened up Campaigner. She’d had the thing on mute since she’d left the park. Red Alerts: news on the shootings posted by Jane and Angus. Nothing about Matt’s condition, or anyone else’s. Jane had tagged Matt, Sarah, and Ben: Please check in!

  Tegan shook her head. “We’re living in crazy times. There are people who do things and you just can’t understand why. I don’t know whether it’s craziness or evil. A lot of times I think it’s both.”

  There were multiple tweets about the shootings tagged with Matt’s handle. Two stood out.

  News 9 San Diego @News9SanDiego

  Witness: @RepMattCason took down

  Clairemont shooter EXCLUSIVE more to come #CasonShooting

  SD Baseball Mom @SDBaseballMom

  Cant believe what I just saw guy shooting at

  @RepMattCason and Cason beat the shit out of him Im shaking

  Lindsey stared at the screen. A picture formed in her head. She knew if she closed her eyes, she could play the whole scene.

  That was quick thinking.

  I don’t know if he would have made it here if you hadn’t done that.

  He’s still very sick.

  It’s too soon to predict an outcome.

  Sarah found herself in the main lobby of the hospital. She wasn’t sure what she was doing there. She’d ridden in the front seat of the ambulance that took Ben. She didn’t have any other way to leave the scene—Ben had driven both her and Matt from headquarters.

  For some reason, when she closed her eyes she could still see the dashboard of the ambulance. A low-end radio and a glove compartment, with GPS mounted on the dash.

  What should she do now?

  The hospital lobby was soothing and spacious, done in earth tones with mood lighting. A grand piano stood in an alcove. No one was playing it.

  She sat down on a padded bench by the piano and got out her phone.

  She’d texted her parents first thing, in the ambulance on the way here: There’s been a shooting in the park but don’t worry I’m fine. They’d called back immediately, but she didn’t answer. Instead she texted back, I’m not hurt, I’m fine, but I can’t talk now. Will call as soon as I can.

  I should call them, she thought, but she didn’t want to. She could already hear their voices, the concern, their rising panic. She couldn’t take that right now. Just thinking about it made her feel like she was sinking back into who she had been before.

  Mommy, Daddy, please come take care of me.

  Something bad happened.

  It wasn’t my fault.

  Tell me everything will be okay.

  She couldn’t go back to being that person. She’d worked too hard to get away from her.

  Instead, she opened Campaigner. She’d heard alerts go off but they’d been background noise.

  From Jane: @MattC @SarahP @BenK Please check in!

  I’m at the hospital, she wrote. I’m not hurt. Ben is in ICU. Someone needs to call his parents. Matt is here too. He has some injuries but he—

  She didn’t know how to put it. “Nearly killed the person who was shooting at us so I think he’s okay”?

  She’d seen the paramedics trying to slide a tube down the man’s throat, searching for an airway in a mass of mangled flesh and blood, broken teeth and bone.

  She felt a rush of anger, the first thing she’d really felt since she’d gotten in the ambulance.

  Serves him right, she thought. She hoped he died.

  Matt has some injuries but they didn’t seem serious, she typed and hit Send.

  He texted her as she got out of Tegan’s car. I’m okay. Just banged up a little. XOXO Matt.

  Lindsey found Jane in the ER waiting room. “Come around from the frontage road,” she’d said, “you’ll miss the press that way.”

  It wasn’t hard spotting Jane. The ER lobby was small, more of a waiting room, the vinyl chairs in facing lines against opposite walls, the lights a harsh fluorescent. Jane sat near the reception desk, texting on her phone, thumbs skittering on the virtual keyboard. She stood up when she saw Lindsey. “Don’t worry,” she said first. Then, “Let’s go outside.”

  They walked a few yards away from the ER, over to a large planter with a palm tree and a couple birds-of-paradise, where the reporte
rs camped out by the main entrance couldn’t spot them. Behind the planter, cars drove by on a frontage road, the blur of freeway traffic beyond it. She caught a whiff of moldy cigarette butts, though she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to smoke here.

  “Matt’s down in Imaging,” Jane said. “He’s conscious and he’s ambulatory, and that’s all they’d tell me. But I think it’s good news.”

  Lindsey could feel some of the muscles in her neck and back start to relax. Relief was blood, she thought, flowing where it was supposed to.

  She nodded. “He texted me and said the same thing.”

  “Thank god.” Jane let out a deep breath.

  “Did you … did you get my Campaigner alert?”

  She’d forwarded the tweets from News 9 and SDBaseballMom to the core staff, hating herself as she’d pushed Send. Because how could she be thinking about this now? What was wrong with her?

  They needed to know, she thought. It meant that Matt was probably okay. As for the rest of it …

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did. It’s … ” Jane rubbed her forehead, her eyes closed. “It’s more good news, really. I mean … not that any of this is good. But, under the circumstances … ” She suddenly reached out her arms and pulled Lindsey into a tight hug. Lindsey hugged her back, feeling Jane’s wiry, compact body against hers.

  They’d known each other for years, but they rarely hugged.

  “Did you get Sarah’s alert? About Ben?”

  “Yeah.”

  “One of the interns from the district office too. I don’t know how bad she’s hurt.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “I know. It’s … ” Jane let go of her and swiped her fingers over her eyes. “I called Angus and filled him in. He’s handling press and looping in Presley.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  You have to tell her, she thought. “Look … I think he needs to get on top of this News 9 story.”

  Jane frowned. “What’s to get on top of? If it’s true he took down the shooter, that’s nothing but good for us.”

  “It’s … it’s what images they might have. In case … well, the one woman, San Diego Baseball Mom, she said he beat the shit out of the guy. That can look … ”

  A fist smashing into a face. Blood gushing. An eye, puffing up, swelling purple.

  “It just might look ugly.”

  Jane nodded, her eyebrows drawing slightly together. “Okay. I’m guessing they’ve already called us, so we should be able to work it. The bottom line is, Matt’s a hero. He took down a killer. No matter how many casualties there were today, it could have been a lot worse if he hadn’t stepped in.” She stopped, drew in a breath, let it out, and closed her eyes. “Jesus,” she muttered, sitting down on the rim of the cement planter, in a gap between the beaky orange flowers of two birds-of-paradise. “I’m sorry, this is just … ”

  “It’s okay,” Lindsey said. “We need to be thinking this way.”

  Jane looked up. “Why?”

  “Because Matt … ” Her throat closed. “He has a temper. He’s done some things.”

  For a moment, Jane just sat there, her mouth slightly open, as if she was waiting for the right words to emerge from a place she didn’t know. “I know Matt gets mad. I’ve seen that,” she finally said. “Are you … are you talking about something else?”

  Lindsey sat down next to her. “It wasn’t me.” Which was mostly true. “And it was years ago.”

  “Okay.” Jane stared straight ahead. “Nobody’s going to blame Matt for taking down a killer,” she said, seeming to test out the words. “Nobody. He’s a hero.” Now she turned to Lindsey. “Look at me, okay?”

  Lindsey did. Jane’s eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy. She could still do that particular trick of hers, though, the one where she would stare at you like she could read your mind, and she’d know if you were lying or telling the truth.

  “What happened in the past, it’s not relevant to what happened today. I want you to tell me about it, but whatever comes up, whatever they say, Matt is a hero who took down a killer and saved people’s lives. That is how we respond to the media. Unless you really have a reason to disagree.”

  “No. I don’t.” She stood up, legs and back aching. I’m still wearing my running clothes, she thought. She was starting to itch beneath the sweaty band of her sports bra. “We better go inside.”

  A sudden trumpet fanfare: the Campaigner alert. Lindsey and Jane both reached for their phones.

  From Angus: News 9 posted photos from the park. You’d better take a look.

  “Are you okay?”

  Sarah opened her eyes. She was so tired. She thought if she just closed her eyes for a few minutes, she’d have the energy to figure out what to do. Take a Lyft home, probably.

  “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  It was an older woman, maybe a volunteer, a frizzy gray-haired lady with glasses around her neck and a pear-shaped body.

  “No,” Sarah said.

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you. It’s just your blouse … ”

  “My blouse?” She looked down at her white shirt, noticing the bloodstains for the first time. “Oh,” she said. “It’s not mine. I mean, the blood.”

  Jane found her a few minutes later.

  “Sarah. Thank god.” Jane sat down next to her and put her hands on her shoulders and gave them a gentle squeeze.

  Sarah started to cry.

  “I know,” Jane said. “We’re going to get you out of here.” She pulled something out of a shopping bag—a large, long-sleeved T-shirt with San Diego CA written across it.

  “Put this on,” Jane said. “We can go out the back, we should miss the press that way.”

  “Why … ? Oh.” The blood on her shirt. She kept forgetting about it. “How did you know I needed it?” she thought to ask.

  Jane gave a quick, brief shake of her head. “We can worry about that later.”

  Did that mean there was something to worry about?

  “I’m fine,” Matt kept saying. “I’m fine.” He patted Lindsey’s back as she rested her head on his shoulder. His sweat had a sharp, sour edge to it.

  Finally, she let go of him.

  He didn’t look fine. He sat on the edge of the hospital bed, wearing a gown. His head was bandaged and his arm was in a sling, his wrist and hand splinted. It was his eyes, though, where you could really see it. It had been years since she’d seen his eyes look like that. Like he wasn’t seeing anything around him. Like he wasn’t really here at all.

  They’d put him in a private room in the hospital wing. A policeman stood by the door. “Just a precaution, ma’am. Nothing to worry about.”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, found a tiny box of rough tissues and blew her nose.

  She wanted to ask about what happened but wasn’t sure how. She could try to draw him out, but if she pushed too hard, she knew what the results would be.

  Just leave it alone, she thought. Wait until he’s ready to talk.

  Which might be never.

  “I saw some crazy stuff on Twitter,” she finally said.

  Matt laughed. One short, hard snort. “When you say crazy, what are we talking about here? The guy that came up to me in a park and started shooting?”

  You should have left it alone, she thought.

  “Matt … I’m sorry … You’ve been through something horrible, and I shouldn’t have said anything, I just … ”

  “Speaking of crazy … there was this head-case vet whose hand I was shaking when some asshole fucking shot him.” His good hand gripped the hard plastic side of the bed. Now he was present, all right. Lit up with building rage.

  “I’m not trying to start a fight. I want to help, just tell me how.”

  “Then there was a little boy, a kid who went to the park with his mom and dad to ride a
fucking pony and get his face painted. I saw him on the ground with blood pouring out of his head.”

  A knock at the door. A big man in scrubs entered without waiting for an answer. “Hello, I’m Doctor Parviz, I’m the hand specialist.”

  For a moment, Matt stared at him, his eyes big and bright, a flare of red on his cheeks. She watched him struggle for control, then smile.

  “Hi, Doctor. Thanks for seeing me. Yeah, feels like I did a number on it.”

  “You did.”

  Parviz grabbed a chair by the seat and pulled it over next to the bed. He carried a large iPad. “Here,” he said, unlocking it with his thumbprint and tilting it so Matt could see. Lindsey glimpsed an X-ray of a hand and wrist. “You have what is commonly referred to as boxer’s or brawler’s fractures of your fourth and fifth metacarpals. You see here, the jagged ends of the bones? With this degree of misalignment, we can try to reduce the fractures manually, but you may require surgery. You’ve also got a partial tear of the scapholunate ligament in your wrist. That should resolve with splinting and rest, but we will want to keep an eye on it.”

  “Okay,” Matt said, nodding. “Sounds good. What’s next?”

  “I want to do a quick consult with the attending physician and see if you need to be admitted. I don’t think so, but with the head injury—in case that is more serious than it is currently presenting—we’ll want to monitor you closely after the administration of any narcotics, which you will want when I try to reduce the fractures. In any case, as your physician probably explained to you already, you’ll need to be monitored at home.”

  “You get all that, Lindsey?” Matt asked, smiling. Their eyes met for just a moment and then it was as though his gaze glanced off hers, like he couldn’t stand to look at her.

  “I think so,” she said. “I’ll make sure to talk to the other doctor.”

  When Parviz left, he closed the door behind him. They were alone again, for however long that would last, before the next doctor or nurse or policeman came in.

  Or Jane. She should have let Jane have the conversation with him.

  You’re so stupid sometimes, she thought.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said.