Hardbingers

26

"Mister Westphalen?"

Jack heard the voice but didn't react. He'd heard at least a hundred names in the past few hours, none of them his. He'd seated himself at the rear of the waiting room and dropped into a barely functioning state just this side of suspended animation.

"Mister Westphalen?"

Then he realized the voice was calling for him. He shot out of his chair, looking around.

"That's me!"

He saw a middle-aged woman standing at the front of the waiting area. She held a clipboard and wore an expectant look. He'd watched the shifts change and she was the new head honcho.

His heart pounded in his throat as he bulled through the waiting area, bumping people left and right, barely aware of an occasional "Hey!" and "Watch it!" His mind was consumed with thoughts of Gia and Vicky, knowing he couldn't expect good news, but praying he wouldn't hear the worst.

Finally he reached her.

"What is it? Something wrong?"

Her face gave nothing away. Most likely she didn't know a thing.

"Doctor Stokely would like to speak to you."

Jack looked over her shoulder. "Who's he?"

"'tS/ie. She's one of our trauma specialists—the attending on your wife and daughter. She's waiting for you in one of the treatment rooms. I'll show you where."

Jack followed her to a small cubicle, windowed on three sides. The curtains were open. Through the glass he saw a dark-skinned woman in green, sweat-stained scrubs. She looked about Jack's age—mid thirties—but the extra twenty or thirty pounds she carried might have taken off a few years. She wore no makeup and kept her kinky black hair short and natural.

She stepped forward and extended her hand as he entered. She introduced herself as Dr. Malinda Stokely.

"Call me Jack," he said as they shook. She had a good grip. "How are they?"

"Let's sit down over here."

Sit? He didn't like the sound of that. The last thing he wanted to do was sit. He'd been sitting for hours. But he didn't argue with her. He took the chair she offered. She sat opposite him.

"Just tell me: Are they alive?"

She said, "Yes—"

Jack slumped in a warm wave of relief.

"—but they're in very serious condition."

He straightened in his seat. Aw, no.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know how much you know—"

"I know they were hit by a car, but beyond that…"

He couldn't say more. He had a pretty good idea who'd been driving. A score to settle there. A monumental score that dwarfed all scores before it. But it could wait. Had to wait. Nothing more important now than getting Gia and Vicky through this.

"They both suffered trauma to the abdominal viscera, the chest, and the head. We've stabilized them but…"

His tongue felt like sand. "But what?"

"The head trauma was severe, especially in your wife. We had to evacuate a subdural hematoma."

Maybe on a good day the words would have made sense, but today, now, they might as well have been Swahili.

"Come again?"

"A pocket of blood inside the skull—between the skull and the brain. It was putting pressure on her brain so we drained it."

"How—?" Jack waved off her explanation. "Never mind." Some things were better left unsaid.

"Your daughter had intracranial bleeding that stopped on its own."

"I guess that's good news."

"Well…" She looked him square in the eyes. "They're both comatose."

After a slap of shock and a quailing of his heart, he recovered. Okay. Comatose. He could deal with that. His father had been in a coma down in Florida and he'd come out of it fine. He was up and walking less than a week after his hit and run—

Hit and run… was there a pattern here? A connection?

No. Couldn't be. He'd found out who'd run his father down and they were very literally sleeping with the fishes.

"What're their Glasgow scores?"

She blinked. "You know about the Glasgow scale?"

The Florida experience had taught him that there were different levels of coma.

"A little." He steeled himself for the answer. His father had started out a seven, which his neurologist had considered pretty bad. "Scores?"

"Both eight—the same eight: E-two-V-two-M-four."

Well, better than Dad had been.

"What's the E-two stuff?"

"It explains the score. In their cases their eyes open in response to pain—that's a two; any sounds they make are incomprehensible—that's another two; they withdraw from pain—that's a four. And I guess you know that any score of eight or below means severe brain injury."

"What are their chances?"

"It's too soon to say."

He shot out of the seat and circled it. Couldn't sit still.

"I've got to see them, doc. I need to see them."

She nodded as she rose. "Of course. But only for a minute or two."

Feeling as if he were walking underwater he followed her to the elevator. He was pretty sure she was talking to him as the car rose but he couldn't make out the words. Trying to deal with the realization that the two most precious people in his world were comatose crowded out everything else.

The elevator stopped at some floor or another and again he fell in behind Dr. Stokely, following her down a hallway to a pair of double doors. He felt her hand grip his upper arm and stop him just outside.

"I need to warn you that what you're about to see will come as a shock, so be prepared."

"How do you prepare for something like this?"

"Just remember that you're here to look and no more. Whatever you do, don't interfere."

"Why would I interfere?"

"We've had people scream and throw themselves onto the bed. You don't look like the kind to do that, but I just want you forewarned that the first look can be very upsetting."

"You're telling me it gets better with time?"

He couldn't imagine that.

"Let's just say it gets more tolerable."

She elbowed a large button on the wall and the doors swung open. Dr. Stokely started ahead but Jack held back. He saw beds, he saw curtains, he saw tubes and bags, he heard the whoosh of respirators and the beep of heart monitors. The combination paralyzed him. His legs wanted to turn and run, but he forced them forward.

He created a sort of tunnel vision by focusing on the spot between Dr. Stokely's shoulder blades as he followed her. She led him to the feet of two beds and stopped.

"We put them in adjoining beds. Mother and daughter… it seemed right."

She stepped aside, giving Jack an unobstructed view.

His first reaction was a wild thought that it was all a horrible mistake, that these two… things in the beds couldn't be Gia and Vicky. They didn't look anything like either of them. The larger thing lay to the right. He didn't recognize the purple swollen face. It lay on its back with a clear green tube squirting oxygen into its nasal passages. A thick bandage encircled the head. Fluid from bags hanging on both sides ran through tubes into each arm. A blue fiberglass cast encased the left leg. A thicker tube snaked from under the sheet down to a large transparent bag quarter filled with reddish-yellow fluid.

No. This couldn't be Gia.

And to the left, the smaller thing looked like a mirror image of its larger counterpart, except that the cast was on its right arm instead of a leg, and bandages swathed the left side of the face. But no bandages on the head, leaving the hair exposed.

And Jack knew that hair.

The little thing was Vicky.

He heard someone moan and it took him a second to realize the sound had come from him.

He stepped closer and reached out a hand to touch her. Her left palm lay facing up. He placed his index finger across it, expecting it to close and grip him as it always did. How many streets had they crossed with Vicky's little hand gripping that finger? Too many to count.

But the skin of her palm felt unnaturally cool, and the fingers remained inert.

Without turning, he pointed to the bandages on the left side of her faee and moved his lips. The words came out sounding like a nail scraping on concrete.

"Why the bandage?"

"Abrasion from the street. She has a fracture of her left zygomatic arch—one of her cheekbones—but it's undisplaced so we're leaving it alone. The bandages are for facial abrasions from when she hit the pavement."

Jack's brain automatically tried to picture it but he shut it down. Instead he leaned over and spoke in her ear.

"Vicky? It's Jack. I'm here. You're gonna be all right. Jack promises."

Stupid thing to say. Irresponsible, even. But the words had come out on their own. Maybe because he'd come to see himself as her protector, and she probably felt the same. After he'd pulled her off that freighter a couple of years ago, she probably assumed nothing bad could happen to her as long as he was around.

But he hadn't been around this time.

He moved over to Gia. Facing her was even harder. Her swollen face was almost unrecognizable. He pointed to her bandaged head.

"The surgery?"

"Yes."

As he squeezed her cold hand he feared he might explode. He touched her purpled cheek, then leaned closer.

"Gia, this is Jack. I'm here and I'll be here as long and as often as they let me. I'm sorry. God, I'm so—"

His voice broke and so instead of trying to say more he kissed her hand. Then he turned to Dr. Stokely.

The doctor looked at him and backed away, her face a mask of fear.

"What?" she said, a tremor in her voice. "I'm not to blame."

"I didn't say—"

Then Jack knew what she was talking about. He closed his eyes and relaxed his facial muscles. He must have had that look. Gia had seen it once and called it "murder incarnate." But he had no grudge against the doc. Just the rest of the world.

Dr. Stokely said, "For a second there I thought you were going to… never mind."

"I'm pretty strung out right now, doc. But I need you to tell me flat-out true, no sugar coating: What are their chances?"

"I told you: too soon to say."

"I'm not asking for a percentage, just… good or not good?

"Not good."

Jack stared at her—for how long, he didn't know—until he could find his voice. Even then it took a massive force of will to push the next words past his frozen lips.

"You mean they might not make it?"

Her round face revealed no emotion, gave no hint of what she was thinking. He knew that look. He'd seen it on old cops and on the demimonde's bottom feeders. The look that comes from seeing too much human damage, the accidental and the intentional. So much damage that, in the interest of self-preservation, certain circuits shut down. Someone like Dr. Stokely couldn't allow herself to think about the private lives of the people she cared for, couldn't allow their hopes and dreams, the people they loved and the people who loved them to matter. If she did, she'd burn out like a meteor. She had to reduce them to problems to be solved. Which wasn't so hard since the vast majority of her patients were comatose; and the ones who weren't hadn't come to her willingly and wanted to escape as soon as possible.

Here was a woman who was used to giving bad news.

"I've learned not to make predictions, but it's a dire situation."

"Come on, doc. You've been around the block a few times—a lot of times. You must have an instinct for these things. What do your instincts say about their chances of coming back?"

She locked her gaze on him and said, "Fifty-fifty."

Fifty-fifty? That was no help. Even odds they'd live or die.

Or die…

Slowly, forcing his locked knees to turn him back toward the bed, he looked at the loves of his life and wanted to scream. But he couldn't give in to that. If he caused too much of a ruckus they might not allow him back.

What he really wanted to do—wished he could do—was rip out their tubes and grab their shoulders and shake them and shout that the game was over and they could stop fooling around now. They'd won, he gave in, they'd scared the hell out of him and ha-ha what a sick, sick joke, but now let's all stop fooling around and go out and laugh about it over a pizza.

Instead he stood there and felt his heart break. He'd always assumed it a figure of speech, a hoary cliche in hackneyed prose and Brill Building tunes, but here it was. Something in his chest turned to glass and shattered.

He bent and kissed Vicky's hand, then bent over Gia and kissed her swollen lips.

As he slowly straightened he noticed that the sheet over her abdomen was flatter than it should be.

He spun to face Dr. Stokely.

"The baby! What about—?"

She shook her head. "I'm sorry. She lost the baby."