She’s all alone in New York. Her own family doesn’t pay much attention to her. And she’s really good with the baby. Would it be so awful if she lived in the spare bedroom and helped take care of him?”
Michaels blinked. The idea was something of a shock. “Uh. Um.”
“Think about it.”
He nodded. “Okay. I will.”
14
Tyrone lay in a restless, Demerol-induced sleep. His breathing was mostly slow and heavy, but now and then he would moan softly and breathe faster, and try to turn on the bed. When he did that, Howard would reach out and put his hand on the boy’s head, speaking soft reassurances until his son calmed down.
Nadine had gone to the cafeteria to get some sandwiches and coffee. Howard expected her back in a few minutes. She was a wreck, had seldom left this room since they’d gotten here. He had tried to send her home to rest, but she wasn’t having any of that.
Leave her baby here, in a hospital, alone?
Well. He was fourteen, and hardly a baby, but she had spoken with such fierceness that he hadn’t brought it up again.
And he understood her feelings. Even though he was pretty much out of the woods, one or the other of them was going to be right here until they let Tyrone go home.
Tyrone’s left leg was supported in a sling. A titanium pin the size of a big nail had been driven through his leg just below the knee, skewering his shin bone. The pin was connected on both ends by a looped cord to a cable, which was in turn attached to a big sandbag, supported by a pulley on the steel frame over the bed. They needed to keep things a certain way until they could do the rest of the surgery with plates and screws, an open reduction, they called it, and even then, the boy was going to wear a fiberglass cast for a couple of months, from his hip to his ankle.
It hurt Howard to look at it. The doctor had assured him that there weren’t any nerves in the bone, and that the pain where the traction device pierced the skin was minimal. Where Tyrone hurt the most was where his muscles had been torn and bruised in his upper leg when the thigh — the femur — had snapped. This had happened when a half-ton pickup truck, driven by a forty-three-year-old construction worker, had crossed the center line and plowed head-on into the car in which Tyrone had been a passenger in the rear seat. His seat belt had held, but the car had compacted and accordioned enough so that the seat in front of him had been thrust back into his leg, breaking it just above the knee.
Tyrone’s friend, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessie Corvos, who had been riding in that front seat was in Intensive Care with massive internal injuries, and her prognosis was poor. The car’s driver, the girl’s older brother, Rafael, had three broken ribs, a punctured lung, shattered right arm, broken ankle, and had undergone surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, but was expected to recover.
The man who’d been driving the truck had a tiny cut on his forehead that had taken three stitches to close; otherwise, not a mark on him. The man had been playing pool and downing pitchers of beer with friends at a bar. He had been arrested for driving under the influence and released on bail. His blood alcohol level was 0.21 percent, nearly three times the legal limit when they’d tested it.
Howard had met Jessie and Rafael’s father, Raymond, in the ER. The older Corvos had been pale and shaking, probably in shock, but there had also been in him a tightly suppressed rage. Howard had caught only a glimpse of it. It was like seeing a nuclear fireball through a pinhole some distance away from the aperture: only a speck of intensely bright light was visible, but to move your eye closer would guarantee instant blindness. Raymond Corvos was an accountant, a slightly built, balding man, and mild-looking, save for that hint of white-hot anger.
If Jessie or Rafael Corvos died, then Howard would not want to be the driver who had killed them — he had the impression their father would come for the killer, and Howard would not wish to be standing in his way when he did.
As he watched his sleeping child, he could understand that. Vengeance belonged to the Lord, and Jesus had preached forgiveness for sins, no matter how heinous; but if Tyrone died as a result of some negligent idiot too plastered to be driving, he could easily see appointing himself judge, jury, and executioner, even at the risk of his own soul.
There were some things a man had to do, no matter what the cost.
Nadine came back into the room, carrying a plastic bag and a drink holder with four paper cups of coffee in it.
“He wake up?”
“No. He’s still out. Resting better, I think.”
She handed him a cup of coffee with a corrugated cardboard sleeve on it. He pulled the lid off and blew on the hot liquid.
“They had tuna on white, turkey on rye, and ham and cheese on whole wheat,” she said. “I got two of each. You want one?”
“Maybe later,” he said. “Coffee’s fine for now.
She nodded, took a cup of coffee for herself, and pulled her chair closer to his, next to the bed. She reached out with her free hand, and he took it in his.
He knew they would get used to this. You could get used to almost anything if you had the time. One of them would eventually go home, shower, get a nap, bring back clean clothes, while the other stayed. They’d swap off. But with any luck, they’d be going home soon. There were portable traction devices they could hook up to Tyrone’s leg, once the doctors were sure he’d be okay. The surgery that would come later was relatively safe. There were some rare, but potentially dangerous complications following this kind of accident they’d told the Howards about: fat emboli, blood clots that might break loose and get into the circulatory system to cause problems. After a few days, the risk of these would be minimal.
Tyrone was going to be okay. But — what if Howard had been off on assignment somewhere in some hellhole, doing Net Force’s business when this had happened? It was bad enough, but — what if it had been worse? If his son had been injured so badly that he didn’t make it? Died while his father was a thousand miles away, unable to get back in time?
When he thought about it reasonably, he knew this was an irrational argument. Tyrone could have died in the accident and Howard could have been a block away and it wouldn’t have made any difference. You couldn’t live your life looking over your child’s shoulder, worried every minute of every day about what might happen to him. The Almighty had His own plans. And if He wanted to call Tyrone — or Nadine — home? Well, that’s what would happen, and there was nothing Howard could do about it.
Man proposes, God disposes.
But in his heart of hearts, he felt that if he was
It was something he was going to have to think about some more.
Toni stuck her head into Alex’s office.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“The BCIII sting is about to go down.”
“Really? That was fast.”
She nodded. “Turned out the ‘Chinese hackers’ were in Richmond, they didn’t have far to travel. Jay’s run the feed from a case — and a sticky-cam into the conference room’s big monitor, if you want to watch.”
