‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’ It applies to little boys as well.”
“A prayer?”
“A plea.”
“You took off,” Jagger said.
“There’s a chapel on the third floor.” He pushed himself up. “I hear it calling to me now. Do you hear it?”
Jagger rose, shook his head.
Owen gripped his arm. “Of course. You do your work here. I’ll do mine there.”
Jagger watched him disappear down a hall, then he started pacing. He thought about calling someone, even got the mobile phone out of Beth’s bag. He stared at it, noticing for the first time in months the bars that indicated service. He opened the directory and found the number for Beth’s parents, a little picture of them smashing their faces together to fit in the frame, laughing about it. But why put them through the agony of uncertainty? There would be time to call when they knew more. He dropped it back into the purse.
He found himself in the bathroom, staring at his own bloodshot eyes in the mirror, and Tyler’s blood caked on his cheek. He splashed water over his face and scrubbed it off, a token to his belief, his having to believe, that Tyler would be fine. He watched the pink water swirling around the drain, going down, and regretted letting even that much of his son get away from him.
As he returned to the chairs, a surgeon pushed through the OR doors. Jagger tried to read his eyes, but didn’t get anything until the man pulled his mask down, showing a tight smile. Beth ran up and grabbed Jagger’s arm, afraid, Jagger thought, of collapsing regardless of the news. What the doctor said was a blur of contradictions: Tyler was in critical condition, but stable. They’d removed the bullet and repaired damage to his lung, several blood vessels, and muscles.
“He is not-what do you say? — away from the forest yet, but he is a very lucky little boy. The bullet missed his major arteries and his heart. Do you know what sort of gun was used?”
Jagger shook his head. “A pistol.”
“It is interesting,” the doctor said. “It appears to be a. 25 caliber and extremely low velocity, not what we normally see.”
Jagger understood: low-velocity bullets were special-order ammo, meant to be subsonic, so there would be no crack of a bullet breaking the speed of sound; combined with a small caliber, it was ideal for a sound-suppressed firearm-an assassin’s weapon. The woman’s gun hadn’t been equipped with a suppressor, but he suspected that an inspection of its muzzle would reveal threads to accommodate one.
“Bullets cause tissue damage in three ways,” the doctor was saying. Jagger almost interrupted, wanting only a bottom-line prognosis, but Beth nodded, her brows furrowed in concentration. Jagger appreciated her desire for knowledge, even when it was stomach-turning and hit close to home. The journalist in her. He pulled her closer as the doctor continued.
“Laceration and crushing from the bullet itself. Fragmentation, either from the bullet or from splintered bone. That’s like getting shot again. Then there are shock waves and cavitation, caused by the energy radiating out from the path of the projectile. This can be more devastating than the bullet, which is why firearm injuries tend to be worse than those produced by blades. Eighty percent of nerve damage results not from the bullet but from shock waves. They’ve been known to even fracture bones several centimeters from a passing bullet.”
Beth pulled in a breath and covered her mouth. The doctor patted the air reassuringly. He said, “That is not an issue with your son. In all cases, the greater the velocity of the bullet, the worse the damage. Because the child was shot with a small caliber at low velocity, he sustained minimal shock wave damage, no bone breakage, and the bullet did not fragment, as far as we can tell at this point. As I said, a very lucky boy.”
“Lucky?” Beth said. “He almost… almost died. He’s still in danger, isn’t he?”
“He is,” the doctor said, “but considering his size, if he’d been shot with an ordinary round, the type we usually see…” He shook his head. “We need to monitor him for any internal bleeding we may have missed, and of course infection. He lost a lot of blood and his body went into shock. He seems to be bouncing back, but we will know more in twelve or so hours.”
“Seems?” Jagger said. “He seems to be bouncing back?”
The doctor smiled. “The human body is a complex organism. It constantly surprises us, both for bad and for good. We’ll move him to a private room in the ICU. He will sleep for some time, but please, be there with him. I believe he will”-he searched for a word-“ feel your presence and will respond favorably.”
“You couldn’t drag me away,” Beth said. She hugged Jagger, pressing her face into his chest and digging her fingers into his back.
Her tears soaked through his shirt, and he wished they were anyplace but here, doing anything but this. He wanted it so badly, the weight of it weakened his knees and pulled at him as though gravity had suddenly doubled its power. He braced himself, fighting the urge to collapse. If he ever had to be strong, it was now.
[56]
Five and half hours after Jagger and Owen had carried Tyler into the ER, the boy was lying in a hospital bed, canted to one side by foam wedges to keep pressure off his back. Jagger eyed the machines arrayed around his son. They beeped and hissed and occasionally squiggled out a few inches of paper, a permanent record of his vital signs at that particular moment. One IV dripped antibiotics into a tube that snaked to a needle in his arm. Another of saline kept him hydrated. A vinyl bag hanging on the bed by Jagger’s knee caught urine from Tyler’s bladder, and somehow to Jagger that captured the enormity of what had been done: his son couldn’t even pee.
He held Tyler’s hand and tried to see past the oxygen mask to his face. Pale, except for his eyelids, which were the color of storm clouds. He could tell they had cleaned him up, but had either been sloppy about it or too careful: the rim of his ear was caked with maroon blood.
Beth sat in a chair on the opposite side of the bed, stretching to hold Tyler’s other hand. Her head was bowed in prayer, but as he watched she raised it and frowned at him. “God didn’t do this,” she said.
He closed his eyes and bit his tongue. She didn’t want to hear his opinion on that.
“Jagger?”
He hated the pain in her eyes, the redness that he couldn’t imagine ever going away.
She said, “Let this draw you closer, not push you away.”
He wanted to yell at her to shut up about that, to open her eyes to the way God really was, merciless and spiteful. Instead, he ran his hand over his face and pushed his fingers through his hair. “I need some air,” he said, turning toward the door. “And coffee. You want some coffee?”
She shook her head, and he stepped into the corridor. It was bright with fluorescents, reflecting off floors so polished they could have been liquid. Still, the place appeared as vacant as an office building on Sunday morning. To his right, at the far end of the corridor, a nurse crossed from her station and disappeared into a room. He turned the other direction and started walking. A wall of glass at the end, overlooking rectangles of undeveloped parcels and the low, white buildings of Sharm el-Sheikh to Naama Bay and the Red Sea. He spotted a door with a plaque showing a stick figure on stairs, pushed through, and descended.
At the first landing, he stopped. His lungs were keeping time with his racing heart, pumping air like a bellows in the hands of a spastic kid. Dizziness made his vision swim. He staggered and grabbed the railing, then stumbled into a corner and leaned his forehead against a pipe running from floor to ceiling. It was cold, and that’s all he thought about: the pipe and the way it cooled his skin… not about Tyler or the woman who shot him or God or anything but the pipe and its temperature.
Tyler.
The woman.
God.
Jagger groaned, and it turned into a scream. RoboHand gripped the pipe, and he leaned back. His real hand was squeezed into a tight fist, hurting from being that way for a while. He threw it into the wall, making an indent. He punched again and again until he broke through, and continued striking the edges, widening the hole, leaving bloody streaks and spots around it.
