by Scott Blade
And how could he forget his sheriff mother coming home to see the town’s only fire truck parked in front of their house. At the age of ten, Widow had burned a hole in their roof and his mother had beat his butt. He never started a fire again, not unintentionally, anyway.
Widow lay back in a bed. He knew that.
His vision was fuzzy and bright and filled with blurry images of white light. Tears watered his eyes like he was opening them for the first time and the exposure of light was too much for them to handle. He closed them again. The light was too bright.
He listened instead to the birds. He listened carefully, with a long examination of his surroundings by taking in the sounds and determining where the hell he was.
His first thought was he was outside, but why would he be in a bed?
There were the birds chirping. The bright light was like sunlight, but he felt cold. No sunlight on his face or his skin. He started to move his hands, starting with his fingers. He moved his right hand, index finger first and then middle and ring and pinkie. He made a fist. It felt good. Then he tried his left hand. He started with his index finger, then the middle, then the ring, and then the pinkie. Everything moved. Everything was right. Then he tried to make a fist.
Suddenly, a burning pain shot through his palm and his wrist. He jerked his right hand over to grab the left. Instinct. But the right hand stopped three inches from the horizontal position. He heard a clanging sound, metal on metal. He pulled at his right hand again and got the same results. He heard the same clanging sound.
He opened his eyes, looked down. Everything was still blurry, but he didn’t need to see clearly to know that sound. It was handcuffs. Widow was handcuffed to the rail of a bed.
He looked around the room, tried to make out the blurry objects. He let his ears help him. He listened for the birds chirping, craned his head in that direction. It was up, about twelve feet above him. He could make out a green blur with a brick texture.
Must be a wall, he thought.
He looked up toward the chirping birds. The sound changed to two people talking. He realized it wasn’t birds, not real ones. He was staring at a television, hung up high in the corner of a room with green walls. He looked around the room. He could make out blurry pieces of equipment. Some were lit up. Some were beeping and purring, quietly.
He was in a hospital room and a hospital bed.
He squinted and strained his eyes. His eyelids blinked, heavily and violently, trying to clear the tears from his eyes, trying to focus his vision.
Another burning spasm of pain shot through his arm. He craned his head up and down, looked over his chest at his left arm. It wasn’t handcuffed to the bed like his right arm, but there was something else. Something heavy was on it.
He felt weak. He must’ve been drugged.
He dug deep and used his left shoulder to pull his arm up higher. The feelings in his arm and fingertips were there, but the arm felt numb in a strange way, like he had just woken up from sleeping on it.
Widow managed to heave it up and hold it above his chest for five seconds, long enough to see what was so heavy about it. Then he saw it.
From two inches below his elbow, stretching for six inches to his wrist, stopping where his palm started, was a brand-new, white cast.
The pain returned and shot again through his wrist, down into his forearm and up his bicep. And he had to let the arm drop. It fell and landed on a small pillow that someone had stuffed underneath it.
One or more of the bones in his left forearm was broken.
CHAPTER 4
WIDOW’S VISION RETURNED as the first person he had seen all night finally walked into the room to check on him. It was a nurse.
She was a young black woman. Maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She saw Widow’s eyes open and she walked over to him.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fuzzy. My arm hurts.”
She said nothing to that. She just stood near him, out of reach, and looked him up and down.
“The doctor will be in shortly,” she said and she turned, said nothing else. She vanished back through the doorway.
NEARLY AN HOUR PASSED before a doctor came into his room. And she didn’t come in alone. The doctor was escorted by a man in uniform. It wasn’t hospital security. Widow’s vision was still not one hundred percent, but he knew that much. Hospital security guards don’t walk the way this guy walked. They don’t carry themselves the way this guy carried himself. They don’t stand at attention the way this guy stood at attention. He could’ve been a cop. Widow guessed. Maybe.
The doctor came in close to Widow, stood on the handcuffed side of the bed. She held a metal hospital clipboard with a metal cover to prevent damage to the paper. It was stuffed under her left arm. She stopped and stayed where she was. Then she took out the clipboard and opened it, looked over the first sheet, and flipped it to the second one.
She also held a thick manila envelope on the back of it. It was sealed. Markings on the front. Widow couldn’t make anything out.
She smelled like maple syrup, which led Widow to believe it must’ve been some time in the morning; either that or she’d just eaten her breakfast and was on the graveyard shift. He had been there before. Breakfast, the most important meal of the day, did not have to be eaten in the morning. Technically, there were two types of mornings: the actual time of day, and whenever you woke up.
Maybe she worked the graveyard shift. Maybe it was one o’clock the morning.
The doctor got in close enough for Widow to see more details. She had brown, curly hair, the kind that women everywhere would pay to get. Widow didn’t think she paid for it because it was pulled haphazardly back in a ponytail, away from her shoulders. That kind of hair cost a lot of money to get for women with straight hair. He didn’t see someone spending three hundred bucks for curly hair, just to yank it back like that.
He squinted his eyes, still couldn’t see, but that didn’t stop him from trying to read her name badge, which was clipped to the bottom lapel of a white doctor’s coat. She wasn’t wearing scrubs underneath, but regular brown khakis and a black top.
Widow noticed a wedding ring, gold, worn. She had been in a long marriage.
He squinted again, still couldn’t make out her name, or the hospital that he was in.
She spoke with a hoarse voice, like she had just overcome being sick herself.
“Mr. Widow?” she said, looking at him from over the clipboard.
Widow stayed quiet. He felt a draft wash over him. The air conditioner had kicked on and was blowing down from a vent at the top corner of the room, near the TV.
“Mr. Widow? Do you know where you are?”
“Aren’t you supposed to ask if I know my name first?”
She was quiet a beat and then she asked, “Do you know your name?”
“Jack Widow.”
“And what about where you are?”
“I’m in a hospital.”
“Do you know what city?”
Widow stayed quiet.
“Do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you know why you’re in here?”
Widow thought for a long moment. Mostly, he was waiting for his eyes to adjust. He stared at the doctor, who shifted from one foot to the other, patiently. Then he tried focusing on the cop behind her, then the TV, which was now playing a show about renovating houses. He realized that he could see the people on the screen, the house torn up in the background.
He looked back at the doctor. She was slowly coming into focus.
She was younger than he thought. Maybe his age.
“My name is Jack Widow. I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. I’m thirty-six years old. Birthday is November 9. I was in the NCIS and the Navy for sixteen years.”
Till my mom was shot by some asshole back home, Widow thought.
“I returned home one day. My mom died. I took care of what I needed to take ca
re of.”
“And?”
“And I never went back to the Navy.”
“You went AWOL?”
“If I went AWOL, I’d be in prison. I wasn’t military anymore. Technically, I was a civilian.”
“Thought you said you were in the Navy?”
“I can’t tell you any more than that. Classified.”
Widow had been part of an undercover unit with the NCIS while he was in the Navy, which meant that he was ostensibly an officer in the Navy SEALS, but actually a civilian because NCIS is a civilian investigation force.
“I’m not here to ask you about that anyway. I just need to know if you remember how you got here.”
Widow closed his eyes, imagined the scenery he’d spent thirty-five-plus hours watching. He pictured seeing the Empire Builder for the first time. He imagined the two GE Genesis P42 locomotives, half a dozen sleeper cars, a single baggage car, and several passenger cars. He remembered how awesome the machinery was. There was something seductive about it. Then he remembered the moment he was dropped off at the station. He remembered kissing DeGorne goodbye and good luck.
“Train wreck.”
“What do you remember about the wreck?”
“All of it.”
“All of it?”
“I guess the parts I was conscious for. I remember sitting in the lounge car. I remember flashes of light out the window. I remember loud sounds like metal and screeching. I remember it felt like an eternity. I remember seeing people tumbling around through the air. I figure the train must’ve derailed and flipped.”
“That’s right. The train derailed and your car separated from the car in front of it. And it tumbled through the warehouse district.”
“What about the attendant?”
“Attendant?”
“The Sightseer Lounge car? She was blonde, young. She hit her head pretty bad. That was the last thing I remember.”
“I’m not sure about her. Not exactly. But there were some causalities.”
“How many?”
“Ten. So far.”
“What the hell happened?”
“There was a car parked on the train tracks. The engineer didn’t see it in time.”
“Car?”
“It was a suicide by train.”
“The police are sure?”
She said, “Yes. That’s what they said in a statement.”
Widow looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then back at her. He said, “Last I remember we were in Minnesota. This must be Milwaukee?”
“Minneapolis.”
“I know. Was joking.”
“We’re in St. Marks Memorial Hospital. My name is Karen Green. I’m your doctor.”
“Doc, why am I handcuffed to the bed?”
“I can’t speak to that. I’m here to talk about your condition.”
Condition? Widow thought.
“You mean my arm?”
Green paused a beat and fumbled with the clipboard. She glanced at it quickly and back at Widow.
“Your left arm was broken at the ulna bone. It’s in the forearm,” she said and showed him on her own forearm.
“I know where it is.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It does when I move it.”
“I’d recommend minimal activity until the cast comes off.”
“When’s that supposed to be?”
“Well, normally I’d say four to six weeks. But in your case, it could be more like ten.”
“Ten?”
“Yeah,” she said and closed the clipboard and set it down on the blanket over Widow’s shins. She took out the manila folder, undid the metal clasps holding it shut and walked over to a wall-mounted X-ray board. She clicked on a switch and the board hummed to life. A backlight lit up the board’s white surface.
She pulled out an X-ray and stuck it up on the board.
“Can you see that, Mr. Widow?”
Widow craned his head and stared in her direction.
“I can,” he lied.
She took out a pencil and started to point at the X-ray.
“See, your ulna broke, clean, when you had sudden traumatic impact. Probably against the window in the train car because you had dozens of shards of broken glass lodged in your arm. We got them all out. Luckily, none of the gashes required stitches. Plenty more glass cut up your face as well. Again, lucky that it’s all superficial. No permanent scars.”
She paused a long beat. Widow was anxious for her to cut to the chase.
“The thing is that after we X-rayed your arm, we found that your arm has been broken before.”
“I know that.”
“Mr. Widow, it’s been broken in five places before. See right here?” She tapped the pencil tip to the screen and traced it along the bones.
“You’ve got rugged healing scars from each place.”
“I know. I was there. What’s your point?”
“While you were out, the orderlies had to remove your clothes. Put you in a gown.”
Widow looked down, realized that’s why he’d felt the draft earlier. He wasn’t in his clothes. He was in a green hospital gown. Then he saw the ID bracelet on his right arm, just above the handcuff.
She continued, “They saw your back.”
Widow was dumbfounded for only a brief moment. Then he remembered what was on his back.
“They saw the bullet wounds.”
Widow stayed quiet.
“You’ve got three wicked scars on your back. The only discernible thing is that someone shot you three times. So, we decided to do X-rays. Turns out there’s no signs of bullet fragments or even massive penetration from a bullet in your organs. Most of the damage back there was surface level, some major nerve damage, and it looks like four badly fractured ribs, all of which healed a long time ago.”
She stared at Widow like she was waiting for a response that would answer the bubbling questions she had in the back of her mind.
Widow stayed quiet.
“So, naturally we became concerned with who you are. We ordered more X-rays and found that you’ve had a lot of healed bone scars.”
“What about it?”
“Have you ever heard of Evel Knievel?”
“Of course.”
“It’s like him.”
“No way. Knievel was a crazy daredevil who had four hundred broken bones over a long career of doing stupid things.”
“Four hundred thirty-three broken bones.”
“I don’t have that many.”
“No. Maybe not. We don’t know because we stopped counting at two hundred fifty. And some of those we couldn’t rule out aren’t double infractions.”
“Infractions?”
“Some of your bone scars overlap.”
Widow nodded, said, “I was in the military. Been around. I told you that.”
“I wasn’t in the military, but I called around. First, to the Marine Corps here in the city. They transferred me around awhile, until I got patched over to McCoy, spoke to a surgeon there. He’s never encountered a soldier with half as many broken bones as you.”
McCoy, I thought. That’s in Wisconsin, not Minnesota. Then again, I really was fuzzy on details that normally I knew well.
“So?”
“So, I’m concerned. I looked on the internet and there are people who’ve had a lot of broken bones.”
“So?”
“The most I could find were with Knievel and several champion karate fighters.”
“Karate?”
“MMA or whatever.”
“And?”
“And you rank somewhere in the middle. My initial thoughts were that you were involved in dangerous criminal activity. The bullet scars. All the broken bones. So, I told the MPs over at McCoy.”
Widow said, “The guy standing behind you. He’s not police, is he?”
Green looked back over her shoulder at him and said, “No. Well, yes. He’s military police.”
“He from McCoy?”
Widow waited.
Green took down the X-rays of his broken arm. She tucked them neatly back into the manila folder like they were precious records that couldn’t be damaged under any circumstances. She took a breath and seemed to calm down a bit, like she had been on pins and needles before. Perhaps, she was a little afraid of who Widow was exactly.
She took out a new X-ray, out of the folder. She whipped it, gently, to straighten it out and then she slid it into the frame of the white X-ray box. She repeated the whole process with a second X-ray. This one was a profile shot of the same part of the body—Widow’s skull.
He stared at it. He stared at both of them. He realized that the good news was his vision was syncing up properly with what it should be doing. The bad news was that he was staring at two X-rays. One was his skull from the top. The second was his skull, showing the starboard point of view.
Widow’s vision was almost back to normal, which was to say it was still not perfect, but he could see details again. His far vision was worse. The X-ray box was within twelve feet of his bed, which was close enough to see discoloration on the starboard side of the skull, like the outer shell of his skull was hit so hard that it almost cracked.
Green pointed the pencil back at the X-ray. She pointed at exactly the spots he was staring at.
“Do you know the difference between a mild concussion and a severe one?”
“One is worse than the other?”
“Yes. Of course. But do you know what that means exactly?”
Widow shook his head, noticed that some of the bruises he had seen on the skull moved with his vision. Those weren’t bruises at all. They were vision spots. But the major bruising didn’t move.
Now, he was a little afraid. Brain injuries were no joking matter.
Green said, “Because there are only the two classifications of concussions; there is no classification for a moderate concussion. But it appears that’s what you have. Technically, you have a severe concussion. But I’ve seen much worse.”