them.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There’s a huge difference! You look through those files again, and you’ll see it. Frankel and company only asked questions about where the Donovans might have run to. Nothing about whether they might have done it. No one ever noticed the sloppy work, because everyone thought they already knew the answer. Frankel was going to rest his whole case on the note and their escape.”
Paul let the words settle into his brain while she negotiated a treacherous series of turns through the center city. “And that other guy? Tony Bernard? He was just a bonus kill?”
“No. At least not at first. I think he was the original patsy. But when the Donovans survived, the bad guys had to regroup in a hurry. That meant killing Bernard.”
“And leaving a note.”
She nodded. “Yes. And leaving a note. Chances are, there was a whole other note already drafted, to frame Bernard. How big a deal could it be to rewrite it?”
“You’re crazy, Irene.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Travis was tired of the pain. He was tired of being checked and poked and peeked into. Most of all, he was tired of this tube they’d shoved down his throat to help him breathe. It helped some that it didn’t hiss anymore unless he told it to; unlike before, when it made him breathe.
The hissing snake. When he was first climbing out of the deep cave of his unconsciousness, in those horrible moments when the line between reality and fear was blurred, all he could think about was the snake in his mouth. He’d panicked, clawing at the tube with both hands to pull it free. They said he was strong, too. It took two doctors and a nurse to keep his arms pinned to the bed. The struggle didn’t last long, of course. Somebody injected something into his IV line, and right away, everything changed. He wasn’t afraid of the snake anymore. In fact, he wasn’t afraid of much of anything.
Gushing apologies, and assuring him over and over again that he’d done nothing wrong, the doctors and nurses went on to put fleece-and-leather handcuffs on his wrists-they called them restraints-and tied his arms to the metal bed rails. “We can’t afford to have you pulling that tube out,” one of them explained.
He understood, but he wished there was a way to make them trust him again. Better still, that there was a way for him to rub his nose. He’d have apologized by now, but he couldn’t make a sound. Apparently, this mile-long piece of plastic went right between his vocal cords and kept them from working. They told him not to worry, though. At the rate he was going, the tube would be out in a day or two. “Remarkable progress” is what they called it.
Of course, the mere fact that he couldn’t talk didn’t stop anyone from asking him questions. Tons of them. Can you feel this? Can you hear that? Can you squeeze my hands? On and on, with his only possible reply being a nod of his head. Happily enough, as far as he could tell, he’d given nothing but right answers.
He just wished that they’d get their act together. Every new face that came to see him asked the same questions as the face that preceded it. And the winner in the category of most frequently asked question by a doctor in ugly clothes was: Does it hurt when you breathe?
Thank God the answer to that was finally a no. If he never had to endure another night like last night, he’d die happy. Now, if they could just do something about the damned monitors. Between the hissing of the respirator and the incessant bleep-bleep of the EKG, he felt like he was going nuts. Those sounds made him think too much about things you were never supposed to be aware of-things that the body was just supposed to do. He kept waiting for that time when the noise didn’t happen. He knew from television that that would be the moment when he died.
Try to block it out.
He wanted his mom. He knew it was wimpy to think such a thing, but it was the truth. She loved him more than anything, and if she were here, he could relax a little more; let her do his worrying for him. If it weren’t for the cops, he knew she’d never have left his side. She’d have just sat there, holding his hand and talking nonstop about nothing.
He worried about her. He could still see that look on her face in the car, right before his vision had begun to sparkle. He didn’t like seeing his mom wrapped that tight. It brought back memories of the awful days when she was drinking, and he berated himself for being the cause of a potential relapse.
He missed his dad, too, but in a different way. Dad could take care of himself. But Mom needed him.
A lady named Jan-she called herself a physician’s assistant, whatever that was-told him his mom and dad were both okay but that they wouldn’t be able to come by to visit. He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but in his heart, he knew they’d come for him sooner or later. They’d have to. He’d seen the look in his dad’s eyes as he took him away from Mr. Menefee’s school. Sometimes his dad was too intense, but once he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him. Just ask the FBI. The thought made him smile.
Of all the doctors and nurses he’d met in the past few hours, Jan was far and away his favorite. Besides her quick smile and her perfect teeth, she always took the time to explain stuff to him. It was like she could read his mind, zooming right in on the questions he wanted most to ask but couldn’t. If he was alone and he had a question, all he had to do was turn his head to the right, and she’d catch his eye through the window separating his room from the nurses’ station. Seconds later she’d be right there by his side.
She was the one who told him about the heart monitor; how the shape of the little squiggles on the screen showed that his heart was working perfectly. “That’s your good-news monitor,” she said.
He’d seen those green tracings a million times on television and never even thought about them. Up close, though, it was cool. That those sticky white pads on his chest could record every contraction of his heart made him wonder at the science of it all. Maybe one day he’d become a doctor himself, he decided. Or maybe a physician’s assistant. From what he could tell, they had the best of all worlds: they got to do all the cool stuff without having to go to school forever.
“I want you to think of me as your mom away from home,” Jan told him. “If you need anything at all, just press the call button here on your controller.” She showed him a beige plastic box that was roughly the shape of a fat letter T. “I’m gonna loop it around your bed rail here so you can reach it easily. Just push the button at the bottom here.”
As she demonstrated, he thought he could hear a distant ding out in the nurses’ station. He tried it once, and it worked, but between the restraints and the IV crap dangling from his arm, it wasn’t easy.
As always, Jan interpreted his look correctly. “Maybe later this afternoon we’ll lose the restraints, okay? For right now, though, I think it’s the safest way to go.”
He nodded, but his face showed his disappointment.
She leaned in close and said in her most conspiratorial whisper, “Hospitals suck.”
That brought a smile, despite the intrusion of the tube. The buttons along the top of the controller were marked “Television,” and he tapped them with his finger.
Her expression darkened, and she broke eye contact. “Um, in your current condition, the doctor said you can’t have any television.”
Right away, he knew she was lying. Well, okay, fibbing. He liked her too much to think she’d lie.
“Tell you what, though,” she added quickly, clearly announcing the birth of a new idea. “I’m going off duty soon, but I’ll be back tonight at six. How about I bring in a VCR and a bunch of tapes so you don’t get too bored?”
He nodded again, but without much enthusiasm. Too late for that, he thought. It wasn’t possible for time to crawl by any more slowly. I just hope it’s not a lot of little-kid Disney stuff.
She patted his hand and left. That was an hour ago, probably, and nothing much had happened since.
The sound of sudden activity startled him. Normally a quiet, laid-back place, the nurses’ station exploded with activity. Through the window to his right, he saw everybody launching from their seats, tipping over chairs and coffee cups as they hurried off, out of his field of view. They looked scared, too, like maybe there was a fire or something. He tried to sit up to follow the action, but they were gone.
He lay back onto his sheets to begin the task of counting ceiling tiles when he saw a doctor peer in at him
