“I… I heard those shots and I thought you were dead!”
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay. You didn’t have to worry about me. I’m inflatable. You punch me, I bounce right back up again.”
She drew back, studying him with her shiny pale green eyes. “Why does it sound like you have a clothespin on your nose?”
“It’s nothing. But tell me about you. How’s your wing?”
“Broken,” she replied, making a face. “They’re talking some fool stuff about airlifting me to the hospital.”
“Well, you’d better go, you big doofus.”
“Your big doofus wouldn’t leave until she found out how you were,” Yolie said, helping both of them back onto their feet.
“Well, how about now?” Mitch asked her. “Will you go now?”
“I guess,” she grumbled. “If you’ll come with me.”
“You mean like on a date?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” she pleaded, starting to sob all over again. It had to be the bullet wound. She was in shock or something.
“Girlfriend, I’m not making fun,” he promised, hugging her tightly, kissing her smooth cheek. “Honest, I’m not.”
Soave made his way over to them now, looking Mitch up and down with keen-eyed disapproval. The stumpy lieutenant resented Mitch as a presence in Des’s life. Regarded him as an unworthy interloper. Mitch had always detected a whiff of smoldering jealousy on him, too. “We heard a single shot, Berger,” he said to him rather stiffly. “You took him out?”
Mitch couldn’t bring himself to say the words yet. He could feel Des’s eyes on him, studying him anxiously.
“Talk to me, Berger,” Soave persisted. “What was it, kill or be killed?”
“Yes, it was, Lieutenant.”
“And…?”
“And I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to pay Jase back.”
Yolie held Des’s gun out to her. “Go ahead, girl. It hasn’t been fired.”
“What, he shot himself?” Des asked him, pocketing her SIG.
“He did. Then he shook my hand. And then he died.”
Soave took all of this in, tugging thoughtfully at his upper lip with a gloved thumb and forefinger. “Jeez, Berger, this is like a whole new world for you, hunh?”
“I sure hope not, Lieutenant. I was still trying to figure out the old one.”
He rode along with her in the chopper, which airlifted her directly to Middlesex Hospital up in Middletown, where they had a helipad and fully restored electrical power.
He was by her side when they took her into the emergency room. He was by her side when they wheeled her into surgery. It was only then that Mitch let them perform an X ray and cat scan on his own bean. He was okay-no skull fracture. A nurse tidied his scalp wound for him and dressed it rather elaborately. She also cleaned up his bloodied, swollen nose and gave him a couple of Advil for his headache.
He reached out to Bella on Des’s cell phone to let her know what had happened to her roommate. Bella was very upset by the news. For some strange reason, she was also really abrupt with him on the phone, Mitch felt.
Then he sat and waited. They wheeled her out of the operating room four hours later. He was with her when they moved her from the recovery room to a private room, an IV in her good arm, her broken, bandaged arm secured within an external titanium frame. He stayed with her all night, dozing in a chair next to her bed. She finally began stirring at about four in the morning. She came out of her drugged haze slowly, gazing around at her surroundings uncomprehendingly.
“Hey, tiger,” he exclaimed, grinning at her. “How are you feeling?”
“All depends…” she responded hoarsely, blinking at him. There was hallway light coming through the open door. “You… wearing a turban?”
“That’s how they dress head wounds. The nurse said I could take it off tomorrow.”
“What am I wearing?” she wondered, peering at her titanium frame in bewilderment.
“It’s the latest thing. All of the chic New York women swear by them.”
“Wha…?”
“You actually want a straight answer, don’t you? They can’t use a plaster cast in a case like yours, where you have deep flesh wounds. No way to tell if they’re healing right if your arm’s stuffed inside a cast. That’s what the nurse told me, anyway.”
“Incredibly glad…”
“Glad?” He frowned at her. “How come?”
“We’re not in that damned castle anymore.”
“I’m with you there, Master Sergeant.”
The attending physician was an alert young Asian woman. As the sky outside the hospital room window began to fade from black to the purple of pre-dawn, she told Des that the bullet from Jase Hearn’s. 38 had not only shattered a bone in her right forearm but had torn through the muscles, ligaments and nerves to her hand. The good news was that the orthopedic surgeon and neurosurgeon believed they had successfully put her back together again. Screws had been inserted in the bone, the damaged nerves repaired. She would have to stay in the hospital for a couple of days, hooked up to intravenous antibiotics and painkillers. Once she was sent home, her arm would have to be immobilized for at least ten weeks. Then there would be extensive rehab. But she should fully recover in time, the young doctor said confidently.
“Still can’t wiggle my fingers,” Des said, the worry showing in her eyes.
“You’ve sustained serious nerve trauma, Trooper. It takes time for the feeling to come back.” The doctor took a safety pin out of her pocket and opened it. “Tell me if you feel anything when I do this…”
“Nothing,” Des said glumly when she’d been poked in the pinky finger with the pin. “Still nothing,” she reported after the doctor tried her ring finger.
“How about this finger…?”
“A tingle, maybe.”
“And this one…?”
“Ow!”
“You’re doing fine,” she assured Des with a brilliant smile.
Relieved, Des immediately fell back to sleep.
Mitch took a cab home-his truck was still up at the castle. The roads from Middletown to Dorset were well plowed and sanded. The driver had heard on the radio that most of the electricity in the state had come back on in the night. A warm front was moving in. It was supposed to be a sunny, balmy forty-five degrees today.
And maybe the weatherman would even be right this time.
Peck’s Point had been plowed all the way out to the gate, Mitch was happy to see. He had his driver drop him there. Then he stepped his way carefully across the battered, snow-packed wooden causeway to his island home, feeling as if he’d been away for two months.
Big Sister had taken a definite pounding. A weeping cherry had come down on Bitsy Peck’s covered porch. The fine old oak tree out front of Dolly Peck’s had split right down the middle, landing this way and that in her driveway. The private dock where Evan Peck kept his J-24 tied up each summer had been smashed to pieces by the floating chunks of ice that the angry surf had brought crashing in. But no power lines were down and no houses had taken structural hits. It was all damage that could be dealt with in the weeks ahead, just as the causeway could be dealt with. Standard winter wear and tear when you lived out on an island in the Sound.
Although there was one very important lesson that Mitch had learned from this experience: The next time he saw a burnt orange sunrise in February he would not wonder if it was a good omen. Rather, he would bar the door and hide under the bed.
His carriage house had lost several of its roofing shingles to the wind, exposing the reddish, nearly new- looking cedar underneath. The little apple tree he’d planted in the fall had been uprooted. Otherwise, the place looked okay. And Mitch heard absolutely the most wonderful sound when he went in the door-the steady thrum of
