can possibly hope to maintain. “Do you like chocolate?”
Junior Weston nodded.
“I think there’s some double fudge chocolate ice cream in the fridge,” Ralph said, leading the child away by the hand. “Let’s go check. Does that teddy bear of yours have a name?”
I left the apartment knowing that Junior Weston was safe and sound and in truly capable hands.
CHAPTER 20
Police officers live with the possibility of death every singe shift of every single day. So do police officers’ wives. It goes with the territory.
Molly Lindstrom had been a police officer’s wife for more than eighteen years when I drove over to Ballard to get her and take her to Harborview Hospital. When she came to the door of their working-class-neighborhood home, she was wearing a long flannel nightie with a terry cloth robe thrown hastily over her shoulders. She turned on the porch light and peered out briefly before opening the door. A stricken look passed over her face as soon as she recognized me.
“It’s Allen, isn’t it!” she exclaimed. “Is he all right?”
“They’ve taken him to the hospital, Molly,” I said as gently as possible. “I’ve come to take you there.”
For a long time she stood staring at me uncomprehendingly, saying nothing. “Oh, well then,” she said finally. “Come in. Wait right here while I go get dressed.”
She hurried away, leaving me standing in the vestibule of their small two-story bungalow. The place showed the benefits of having a full-time Scandinavian housewife on the premises. For one thing, it was spotlessly clean, scrupulously so. The hardwood floor gleamed in the muted light of a small, cobweb-free, entryway chandelier. The gently enticing scent of a mouth-watering home-cooked meal lingered somewhere in the background.
Molly Lindstrom was a full-time housewife because that’s the path she and Big Al had chosen together long ago. Now, after years of scrimping to put their second son through college, Molly and Big Al were just beginning to indulge themselves a little. They had talked of shopping for a new couch and chair set for their living room, and Al had asked for my expert opinion on what Molly might think of a surprise Alaskan cruise on the occasion of their thirty-fifth anniversary late in the summer.
All that was in jeopardy now. Big Al, seriously wounded, lay on a hospital gurney when he should have been safe at home and in bed with his wife. He had been off duty, for God’s sake. I was the one who had called him up and put the bug in his ear about Junior Weston possibly being in danger. And I had been right, damnit, but I couldn’t help wishing our places had been reversed, that I had sent myself instead of my partner-my partner and my friend.
“I’m ready,” Molly announced, hurrying in from the bedroom, pulling on and buttoning a heavy hand-knit sweater. “Where is he?”
“Harborview,” I said.
We stepped out onto the porch, and I waited while she locked the dead bolt. “How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad, Molly. He was shot below his vest at very close range. They tell me there’s lots of internal damage.”
She took a deep breath and then straightened her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “I’m all right now. I promise I’m not going to cry. Let’s go.”
I helped her into the car, helped her fasten the unfamiliar seat belt, wondering why she thought I’d think less of her if she shed tears. I felt like crying myself.
“Do you think I should call the boys, Beau?” she asked as I settled into the driver’s seat beside her.
Plucking the cellular phone out of its holder, I handed it over. “Do it,” I said.
“But shouldn’t I wait until I have some idea of his condition before I call them?”
I knew Gary Lindstrom was working for a truck-leasing company down in California, and Greg, after several months of waiting, had lucked into a job with a prestigious downtown Seattle architectural firm. Of the two, Gary had by far the greater distance to travel.
“I’d call them both, but especially Gary. It’s spring break in several of the school districts right now. He might have trouble getting plane reservations.”
Molly stared blankly at the telephone receiver in her hand. “How do I work this thing?” she asked.
“Punch in the number, just like you would on your regular handset, then punch ”send.“”
She did. I could tell from the number of beeps that she was taking my advice and calling Gary in California. “It’s late,” she said. “He’ll be worried sick when he hears the phone.”
He ought to be, I felt like saying. This was exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that goes through people’s heads when a ringing telephone jangles them out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night.
“Hello, Gary. It’s your mom. Something’s happened…Yes, it’s Dad. He’s in the hospital. He’s been shot…No, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just on my way to the hospital right now…Harborview, that’s right. No, I don’t know any of that yet. I’ll call you again as soon as I find out. I’m with Detective Beaumont. Yes, he came to get me. Well, all right. Just a minute.”
She held the phone away from her ear and covered the mouthpiece. “Gary wants to know if you think he should come home.”
“On the first available plane,” I replied at once.
She looked at me for a long moment before taking her hand off the receiver. “He says for you to wait until you hear from me. There’s no sense wasting money on a plane ticket and rushing home if it isn’t really necessary. Flying is so expensive.”
I wanted to contradict her, but mothers have some inarguable prerogatives, especially ones in her precarious position. “If it’s really bad,” Molly Lindstrom was saying calmly to her son, “I’ll call you back and then you can get a reservation. I’ll talk to you again later.”
I already knew it was bad. Molly would have to learn that for herself in her own good time.
She disconnected and handed me back the phone. “What about Greg?” I asked. She tried a second number, the one in Seattle, but no one answered.
I hung up the phone for her, and we rode for a while in silence. Overcome by guilt, I could have handled her yelling at me a whole lot better than her enduring, stoic silence.
“I never should have called him,” I said at last. “I should have gone there myself and left Al out of it completely.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Someone tried to break into Reverend Walters’s house, tried to get in through a basement window. Al evidently caught him in the act and got shot in the process.”
“The guy was trying to get to Junior?”
“We believe so, yes.”
“Is Junior all right?”
“Yes. He’s fine.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. There was a pause and then she added, “Allen never would have forgiven himself if anything more had happened to that little boy. I’m surprised he let the guy get off a shot. I would have shot him myself if I’d had half a chance. Don’t blame yourself, Beau. Allen won’t, and I don’t either.”
We wheeled up to Harborview’s emergency entrance. I paused long enough to let Molly out of the car. “You go in,” I urged. “I’ll find a parking place and be right there.”
I found her a few minutes later upstairs in a surgical floor waiting room. By then Big Al had already been in surgery for almost an hour. We were told it could be as long as two more while they repaired the damage the bullet had done to his intestinal tract.
Molly took that piece of dire news with good grace. “At least he’s still alive,” she said.
Hospital waiting rooms are terrible places. They’re not places where you see the people in extremis. What you do see there is the collateral damage, the people whose lives have been thrown into upheaval and concision by whatever is happening to the person behind the closed door of the operating room, the person under the knife.
They say that with long-married couples, if one partner undergoes surgery, they both do. Molly Lindstrom was
