computer monitor. I sat down on the edge of the tub, head in hands.
I heard him walking quickly down the hall. His gait sounded odd to me, as if he was favoring his right leg. I forgot about that when I heard him take hold of the doorknob and try to turn it.
“Don’t you dare try to come into this room!” I shouted.
“Come out of there now!”
I took hold of a towel, stuffed it in my mouth, and screamed into it.
“Are you screaming into a towel?”
It almost struck me as funny. Almost.
“Open this door,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Don’t ask me if I’m all right, you insincere bastard,” I said. “You don’t really give a shit. I’m tired of taking crap from you. I’m tired of everything!”
I heard him walk off, then walk back. He was definitely limping.
Suddenly there was a loud bang, and the middle panel of the three-panel bathroom door splintered into pieces as Frank’s long-handled flashlight came crashing through it. Outside, all three dogs were barking.
Ben’s hand reached through the hole in the door and unlocked the doorknob.
I stared up at him in amazement as he opened the shattered door.
“Why in God’s name did you do that?” I asked.
“I wanted to apologize.”
It hit me first. I started laughing. He started laughing. I nearly lost my perch on the tub.
The doorbell rang. I went to answer it, wiping tears from my face. It was one of the patrolmen.
“Mrs. Harriman?” he asked, looking past my shoulder, then back at me. “We heard a loud noise — and the dogs. Are you all right?”
“Oh yes,” I said, straining to keep my composure.
The officer looked at me warily.
“I made the sound,” Ben said sheepishly. “I broke a door.”
“I locked myself in the bathroom and couldn’t get out,” I said quickly. “Dr. Sheridan kindly rescued me.”
“Oh,” the officer said, and after a fleeting look back at Ben, left us.
We had cleaned up the wood splinters and tacked some brown parcel paper over the opening in the bathroom door when I saw him wincing and rubbing his thigh.
“Ben, rest for a while.”
I half expected an argument, but he moved off to the couch. By the time I walked into the living room, all the color had drained from his face.
“I think I overdid it yesterday,” he said. “Lately, I’ve noticed that’s the only time the phantom pain really bothers me.”
“You tried to keep up with Bingle’s SAR group?” I asked.
He nodded. “I would have been fine, I think, but just when I got home they called to tell me about the skull, so I went into the lab, too. I stayed on my feet too long.”
“So why are you keeping your rig on? Take it off.”
“Some protection I’ll be to you then.”
“You’re right — besides, it’s better entertainment to watch you writhe in agony.”
He smiled a little. “More entries for your Horrible Ben Diary.”
“That bathroom door would probably still be in one piece if you had just admitted that pain was making you crabby. Give me your car keys and I’ll get your chair out of the trunk.”
“Do you still have that extra set of crutches here?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll just use those,” he said, reaching down to push the release button on his prosthesis.
There were two basic sections to Ben’s rig: the socket, worn over the end of his leg, and the Flex-Foot itself. A liner between his skin and the socket held the socket on by suction. A long metal pin extended from the bottom of the socket and fit into a clutch lock, which in turn was attached to his Flex-Foot. By pressing the button on the lock, he removed everything except the socket and liner. The socket and liner couldn’t be pulled off, they had to be slowly rolled off. While he went to work on those, I got the crutches.
After bringing him an ice pack, I let the dogs in and fed them.
Frank came home, looking as if he was highly amused over something and greeted me by telling me that it was all over the department that his wife had alarmed the surveillance unit by getting stuck in the bathroom. Ben looked so mortified that I decided to hold off telling Frank the whole story until we were alone.
We invited Jack and Ben to have dinner with us. Afterward, we let Ben have the couch again, and he tried the
