“This isn’t up for discussion.”
“The hospital gave me three packets of Tylenol, which they will surely charge to my insurance at fifteen dollars a pill, and sent me on my way. I do not need to be on medical leave.”
“I’m not suggesting you do,” Doyle countered. “But you got tased.Twice.Most people would opt for an afternoon nap.”
“I need to work,” Larkin said. “This is the first break in Marco’s case in twenty-three years. I can’t do it without you, but I also won’t let you do it alone.”
Doyle crossed his arms.
Larkin stared, unblinking.
And then Doyle sighed. “We’ll go out someday like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“A murder-suicide pact in Bolivia?” Larkin asked with a curious inflection.
Doyle laughed, and the remaining tension in his body seemed to finally relax.
“It’s a rather poor comparison for our partners-in-crime relationship,” Larkin continued, grabbing his suit coat and throwing it on. “First and foremost being that they were actual criminals and we’re lawmen.”
“Right.”
“And I’ve no intention of putting you out of your misery, should you suffer mortal wounds in a shootout.”
“Why am I the Sundance Kid?” Doyle asked.
“Because Harry Longabaugh was six feet tall and Robert LeRoy Parker was only five foot nine.”
“But Longabaugh was involved with Etta Place.”
“You’re the one who made the comparison. I’m doing my best with the available facts,” Larkin answered.
Doyle slid an arm over Larkin’s shoulders and said, pulling him into another hug, “It’s fine. I always thought they were a little gay for each other, anyway.”
It was 3:22p.m. when Larkin and Doyle reached a patient room on the fourth floor of New York-Presbyterian at Columbia University. A uniformed officer had been assigned to the door, but one look at Doyle and he was ushering the detectives inside. The room was one of those semiprivate layouts, but the second bed was unoccupied, so the curtain separator had been pushed against the far wall to allow afternoon sunlight to filter in. Aesthetically, it looked like any other hospital room: beige walls, beige tiles, drop ceiling, and two uncomfortable-looking chairs in a shit-brown vinyl, which Larkin felt was a misstep in the decorating of a locale known for its dealings with bodily fluids. The room was heavy with the smell of antiseptic, liquid soap sold in those industrial tubs, and lasagna—the last of which made sense when Larkin spotted a food tray on the overbed table, nothing left of the meal except an untouched Red Delicious apple.
Sitting up in the hospital bed and now wearing a shapeless gown was the same redheaded girl from Gary Reynold’s apartment. Her face had been scrubbed of makeup, and her hair looked clean too. She seemed younger than Larkin remembered of that split second before Reynold had tried to fry his brain. Young but hard—a child who’d already seen too much of the world and knew it only got worse from here. She was patently ignoring the counselor, an older woman who wore her hair in a poof of gray with a pantsuit to match, seated nearer the windows. The girl was staring at the overhead television playing an edited-for-daytime-TV version ofDon’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.
The girl shot the door a quick glance before she shoved the blankets back, jumped out of bed, and barreled into Doyle. She had her arms wrapped around his back and face pressed into Doyle’s chest as she asked, “What took so long?”
Doyle was smiling as he put a hand on the back of her head, stroking gently. In the second that hung between her question and his response, Doyle had transformed—transcended to a higher existence that Larkin refused to consider as an option in his own life because he wasn’t strong enough, brave enough, selfless enough. In that singular moment, Larkin saw in Doyle what he truly was and what had been taken away from him—he saw Doyle as a father.
“I had to check on my partner,” Doyle answered. He moved his hands to her shoulders, took a step back, and studied her face. “I told you I’d be back.”
Her complexion was tinged with pink, and her blue eyes were a little wet, but when she looked at Larkin, her voice was steady enough as she said, “You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“Did being tased hurt?”
Again, Larkin said, “Yes.”
Doyle inclined his chin. “Why don’t you get back in bed?”
She rolled her eyes like every teenager did, but obediently returned. “I wanted a blue Gatorade, but the nurse gave me cherry Pedialyte and it tastes like mouthwash.”
“Pedialyte is better for dehydration,” Doyle said as he motioned Larkin to take the spare seat. “Megan, this is Everett Larkin. Larkin, this is Megan Flouride.”
Larkin sat in the shit-brown chair opposite the counselor, who hadn’t said anything, was merely watching the interaction, noted Megan’s pink boots beside the bed and the scuffmarks that were actually words written in Sharpie—PUNK’S NOT DEAD—and replied, “Flouride is the stage name of Geoffrey Lyall, the bass player for the Dead Kennedys.”
