help. Medics. Okay? Everyone okay?”
More stunned silence.
The girl held up her arms. He looked down at her, the familiar pick-me-up gesture twingeing his heart in a place he’d thought had long ago gone brittle and blown away. One of her pigtails had pulled loose, freeing a cloud of hair. The blood on her earlobe had hardened, a black crust. Both cheeks glimmered with tears, but her face remained blank with shock. He crouched and lifted her, grunting against the pain, trying to use his legs instead of his arms. Her wrist brushed the letter opener, sending through him a wave of nausea so intense that he thought he might vomit. But he kept on toward the door, blood warming the back of his shirt.
The security guard had landed faceup, his head corkscrewed unnaturally, white eyes aimed over at them. Stepping into the waiting elevator, Nate turned so the girl was pointed away from the death sprawl. She took his cue, bending her head into the hollow of his neck, the scent of no-tears shampoo bringing him back to Cielle at that age in the bathtub:
The elevator hummed its descent. His skin tingled-the afterglow of that invincibility he’d felt staring down the hail of bullets. How long had it been since he’d felt like that? He’d cheated something in that room, sucked a last taste of marrow from the bone.
The elevator slowed, the girl’s weight pulling at the crook of his arm. Her face was hot against the side of his neck, and he realized he’d been talking to her, whispering a quiet mantra: “-everything’s gonna be all right everything’s gonna-”
The doors peeled back, exposing the empty lobby. His footsteps grew heavier as he neared the tinted glass of the front wall. Beyond, cop cars, SWAT vans, ambulances, and fire engines crammed the street. Barricades and gun barrels alternated, a pattern of impenetrability. Sniper scopes winked from awnings and balconies.
The girl made a fearful noise and buried herself deeper in his neck. Firming his grip around her with one hand and raising his other painfully overhead, he shoved through the revolving door, staggering out to a reception of countless muzzles and the bright light of day.
Chapter 4
When Nate entered the emergency room, flanked by cops like an escaped convict, the TV in the lobby was already rolling footage from outside the First Union Bank of Southern California. Despite the bandages, blood trickled down his arm, drying across the backs of his fingers like an ill-advised fashion statement. The letter opener, removed from his trapezius and encased in an evidence bag, was handed off to a venerable triage nurse, who looked from it to Nate with an impressive lack of curiosity. She led him through a miasma of familiar hospital smells to Radiology, then deposited him in a room the size of a walk-in closet.
The doctor came in, scanning Nate’s chart as Nate crinkled on the paper sheet of the exam table. “So you got stabbed with a letter opener.”
“It sounds so unimpressive when you say it
She hoisted her lovely eyebrows.
“Sorry,” Nate said. “I just joke so people don’t notice my low self-esteem.”
“It’s not working.”
“It’s a long-term plan.” He exhaled shakily. The adrenaline had washed out of him, leaving him unsteady and vaguely drunk. Beneath the dull throb of a headache, a jumble of images reigned-a burst of red mist from a hooded head, patches of black mesh in place of eyes, the blood-sodden blouse of the bank teller whose hand he had clasped as she’d died. He was rattled, all right, but given what he’d just been through, he was surprised he didn’t feel worse.
A page fluttered up. The doctor’s pen tapped the chart. “Your liver enzymes are elevated. Taking any meds?”
“Riluzole.”
She looked at him fully for the first time, her gaze sharpening behind John Lennon glasses. “So that’s…?”
The familiar image flickered through his mind-Lou Gehrig, the luckiest man on the face of the earth, against the packed grandstands of Yankee Stadium, his head bowed, cap clutched in both hands to rest against his thighs. “Yes,” Nate said.
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
“And so you’re … acquainted with your prognosis.”
His prognosis. Yeah. He was acquainted. He knew he would soon have trouble gripping, say, a pen. Then one day he wouldn’t be able to pick it up at all. He knew that his tongue would start to feel thick. Some slurring on and off, at first merely troubling, and then he wouldn’t be able to communicate. Or swallow. He knew that he would in due course require a feeding tube. That his tear ducts would start to go, that he’d need eyedrops and eventually someone else to apply them. He knew that he would feel some general fatigue, at first inconvenient, then debilitating. That he wouldn’t be able to get a full breath. At some point he’d need a CPAP mask at night. And then he’d go on a ventilator. He knew that the cause of the disease was unknown but that there was a significantly increased risk among veterans. There were no answers, and certainly no good ones.
“I am.”
“Where are you in the course of illness?” the doctor asked.
“I was told I could expect six months to a year of good health.”
“When?”
“About nine months ago.” He couldn’t help a dry smile-it so resembled a punch line.
“Any symptoms?”
“A little weakness in my hand. It goes in and out. The symptoms are intermittent. Until they’re not.”
She touched his forearm gently, a technique he employed now and again in his own job. “There are some experimental treatments.”
“Don’t.”
“Okay.” She moistened her lips. “I won’t say anything comforting.”
“Much appreciated.”
She slotted the chart into an acrylic wall rack above a torn-loose
“Yeah.”
“Then just antibiotics and Vicodin, you’ll be back to form in a week”-she caught herself. “On this front, I mean.” Chagrin colored her face, and she busied herself opening a suture packet. “Should we stitch you up now?”
Nate smiled wanly. “We could just let me bleed out on the table, save us all the aggravation.”
“L.A.,” she said, threading the needle. “Everybody’s a comedian.”
He sat quietly, enduring the pinpricks of the local anesthetic, then the tug of his numb skin.
“Everyone’s talking about you,” she said. “The bank. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“The army.”
“You don’t seem the soldier type to me.”
“I’m not. Just signed up for ROTC to pay for college. It was 1994. I was never gonna get called up to active duty.”
She made a faint noise of amusement. A metallic snip as she cut the last stitch. “How’d that work out for you?”
“Not so hot,” he said.
