won't have any problems. You were entirely justified.
'I didn't have a warrant.'
'He had no right to be there, either. I talked to the owner of the building. It'll be all right, Kate. Don't worry about it, just get better. Do you want me to call Lee?'
'No!'
Hawkin stood beside her bed and looked down at her for a long time, but in the end he did not comment, merely nodded and said good-bye. Kate was tired, but her throbbing skull kept sleep at bay for a long time - the throbbing, but also the tangled memories of Dio's sweaty face, the gun kicking in her hand, and the strangled cough of the man when her bullet hit him.
One of the things Kate hated most about being in the hospital was that people were forever coming in on her while she was asleep. Not so much the hospital personnel - she was resigned to them; after all, they were body technicians, and having them wandering around the room while she was out like a light was much the same as having a doctor doing a yearly exam, prodding and looking into areas of her body that even Lee hadn't seen much of.
It was the others who were given free rein to come in and stare at her who drove her mad. Over the next few days, especially when she was moved from the I.C.U., there was a constant stream: The man from Internal Affairs, the police psychologist, the social workers and investigators and everyone connected with the squat and its boys and the criminality of its leader - all had come in at one time or another, and most of them had caught her sleeping.
And now, yet again, five days into her stay, she was struggling up into alertness, knowing someone was standing beside her bed. Two someones, she saw, Al and a boy who was either extremely short or else sitting down, a boy with a Mayan face and long hair as black as Jules's, a boy who looked embarrassed and shy and determined.
'Kate, this is Dio,' Al said.
She tried to lift herself upright, then remembered the switch and raised the head of the bed. The boy was sitting, in a wheelchair, though by the looks of him it was more due to hospital policy than need.
'Well, you're certainly looking better than when I last saw you,' Kate told him, and put out her hand. He shook it with the awkwardness of someone who is more familiar with the theory of a handshake than with its practice. That seemed true of dealing with the adult world in general, as well; when he had his hand back, he didn't seem to know what to do with it, and his gaze flitted about the room, landing only briefly on Kate's face and veering away from the thick bandages around her head.
'I, um, I wanted to say thank you,' he said. 'They're discharging me, and I wanted to see you before I left. To say thanks.'
'You're welcome,' she replied, swallowing a smile. 'I'm just glad I found you. You should thank Jules, and Grace Kokumah.'
'Um, I - I did. I also wanted to thank you for getting the library book back to Jules.'
'Library book?' She looked to Al for explanation, but he only shook his head in incomprehension.
'Yeah, the one I had in the tent. I was really worried about it,' he said in a rush. 'It's been bugging me ever since I left, 'cause I know how careful Jules is with books, especially library books, and I knew the tent would leak as soon as it rained.'
'I see. Why didn't you give it back to her before you left?' And, she thought, why didn't you take your bits of jewelry with you?
He looked down intently at his fingers, which were plucking at a worn spot on the arm of the wheelchair. Al moved casually away to examine a wilting flower arrangement.
'I was gonna go back. I only came up here for the day, you know? There was this other kid in the park - he wanted to come up and he had a ride, so I came with him. Then we met Weldon, and it got late, so we stayed with him, and then, well, we just got busy, you know?' He looked up, and read the expression on her face as disapproval. 'He always had things for us to do. And I was afraid that if I went back down, I might have problems getting up again, like if the cops - the police'd found my stuff and thought I stole it, so I just kept putting it off. But I felt really bad about that library book.'
The smile tugged itself out of the corners of Kate's mouth. 'You're something else, you know that, Dio?'
His head came up, looking for ridicule but looking relieved, and when he realized she meant it as a compliment, his brown skin blushed copper.
'You just stayed on in the squat because it was better than living out in the open, with winter coming on?'
'Yeah. It was an okay place. It was dry, and we had lots of blankets, and some of the other kids were cool. Weldon was a little weird sometimes, but he was good at getting food and stuff, and he knew some great stories. He used to tell us things at night. Called it 'sitting around the campfire.' ' A crooked smile softened the boy's face for a minute, and then it was gone.
'How was he weird, Dio?' she asked, and when he didn't answer, she said, 'I think I deserve to know. He nearly killed me, for Christ sake.'
'That was Gene that hit you.'
'I mean with the gun. Or didn't you know that Weldon tried to shoot me?'
'I heard, yeah.' He shifted uncomfortably. 'I don't know. Weldon was kind of paranoid. He used to tell us how he'd protect us against people - cops and CPS and people who'd want to break us up. He used to call us his family. He even tried to get us to call him Dad, but only a couple of the littler kids ever did.' He sounded regretful, as if he had failed a friend.
'Why didn't you let Jules know you were okay? She was terribly worried.'
'I know. I did write. Twice.'
'What happened?'
'I gave them to Weldon to mail,' he said flatly.
'And he never did.'
Dio shrugged.
'What are you going to do now?' she asked.
'I'm gonna live with a family for a while. The Steiners.'
'I know them. They're good people.'
'I guess.'
'Well, good luck to you, Dio. Stay in touch, and look, if things get rough, give me a call, okay? I might be able to help.'
His eyes went to her wrapped head, and he winced, but his parting handshake was more assured than the first one had been.
Al took the chair's handles and began to push it toward the doorway, but Kate had remembered something else. 'Dio - who was the woman in the picture? The snapshot I found in your tent?'
Al turned the chair around, but the boy's face was closed up and he said nothing.
'Anyway, did Jules give it back to you?' After a moment, he ducked his head. 'Yeah.'
'That's good. Well, take care, man. See you later, Al.'
Their voices faded down the noisy hallway, and Kate lay back to await the next interruption.
She was in the hospital for a week, refused release because of occasional spikes in her temperature and a cycle of blinding headaches that entertained a series of doctors and worried the nurses. Finally, however, her fevers left, and with the possibility of an infection inside her brain out of the way, she was discharged. Even then she had to lie to the head nurse, saying that there would be someone to care for her at home, but eventually, her shaven scalp cold around the smaller bandage, she eased herself from wheelchair to Hawkin's car, and he drove her home.
She let him take the bag of accumulated possessions into the house - things he or Rosa Hidalgo or Rosalyn Hall had fetched for her - and walked cautiously through to the living room sofa. Hawkin brought her the alpaca throw blanket, turned up the heat, made her a cup of hot milk, and carried her bag upstairs. He came back with her gun in its holster.
'Where do you want this?' he asked.
