The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and for the first time in weeks felt no pain.
For the woman, the day had been no better than it had been for her son, starting with an early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support payments. Translation: the bimbo he’d run off with wanted more money to spend on herself. Well, she’d disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she’d discovered that an associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the partnership slot that should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: Sit it out for another year, or start job hunting? But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn’t going to be made a partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.
Then, when she’d decided things couldn’t get any worse, the doctor called to recommend a good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she’d have him checked out by someone else. Except the HMO probably wouldn’t pay for it, and the trip to Maui at New Year’s had strained the budget as far as it would go.
Still, she’d figure out something.
Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.
It was the noise of the engine more than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told her something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.
She could see her son slumped inside his car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his back resting against the driver’s door. His head was lolling on his chest.
Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver’s door handle.
Locked!
She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son’s name.
Nothing!
Wait!
Had something moved inside the car?
She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.
His chest was moving! He was still breathing!
Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. “My son!” she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. “Oh, God, I need an ambulance!”
A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.
Her address!
Her mind was suddenly blank. “I can’t — oh, God! It’s—” Then it came back to her and she blurted out a number. “On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God, hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage and—”
“It’s all right, ma’am,” the calm voice broke in. “An aid car is already on its way.”
Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car open — she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench! Squeezing between the front of her son’s car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent prayer that her ex-husband hadn’t simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn’t — it was right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up, then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son’s car. The safety glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and the woman dropped the hammer to the floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across her son’s body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away, only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her son’s ankles and tried to pull him out of the car, but before she’d managed to haul him even halfway through the door, two white-clad medics were taking over, gently easing her aside, pulling the boy out of the car and clamping an oxygen mask over his face. As he stirred, her panic at last began to ease its grip.
“He’s coming around,” one of the medics assured her as they carried him out of the garage and put him on a stretcher. “Looks like he’s going to make it okay.”
Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its rear door.
“I want to come,” the woman begged. “For God’s sake! He’s my son!”
The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled inside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.
The ride seemed to take forever, and the woman watched helplessly as her son struggled against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son’s hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But just as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital’s emergency entrance, she felt his hand suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.
She heard one of the medics curse softly.
Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out of the ambulance slowly, as if she’d fallen into a trance.
The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take over for the medics.
She followed the stretcher into the hospital.
Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.
And in the end, she heard the same words she’d heard first from her son’s doctor, then from the ambulance crew: “I don’t understand — he should be doing fine!”
But her son — her sweet, handsome only son — wasn’t doing fine.
Her son was dead.
CHAPTER 1
NEW YORK CITY
“Whatcha tryin’ ta do, Sundquist? Kill ya’self?”
A harsh laugh followed the mocking words, ricocheting off the bare concrete walls of the high school gymnasium, echoing louder in Michael Sundquist’s ears as it resonated. What should he do? Abandon the bench presses he was doing and confront the jerk?
Not a good idea. The jerk, whose name was Slotzky — first name unknown, at least to Michael — was about a foot taller than he, and outweighed him by maybe fifty pounds, all of it solid muscle. Confronting Slotzky would be a good way to get his ass whipped, and getting his ass whipped was definitely not high on Michael Sundquist’s priority list this morning.
Finishing the bench presses, however, was very high on the list, as were doing fifty push-ups and fifty chin- ups, followed by as many laps around the track on the gym’s mezzanine as he could manage before the ten- minute bell sent him to the showers. If he ignored Slotzky, avoided a fight, and kept his mind firmly on his work, he could easily achieve his goal.
A varsity letter.
That was all he really wanted.
He would never be tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football. He suspected it was way too late for him to take up baseball. That left track. And the thing he’d always been best at was running. Even when his asthma had been so bad he could barely breathe, he’d still been able to beat the rest of the kids in his class in short sprints. In fact, it had been kind of a joke: don’t bother trying to beat Sundquist off the block, just keep trotting along behind him and sooner or later he’ll run down like a broken watch.
The joke had been all too true. Only a year ago he’d often found it impossible to run more than a quarter of a mile. Though he invariably led at the beginning of races, he never quite managed to win a fifty-yard dash, and in the hundred he always came in dead last.
