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CHAPTER 36
THE FACES WERE BLURRY, HALOED IN HAZE. I BLINKED and squinted. They remained hazy, but I recognized some familiar features. Jeff’s high, broad forehead. Art’s dwindling hairline and growing paunch. Jim O’Conner’s bantam-rooster stance and Waylon’s immense presence. Edelberto Garcia’s dark, quiet elegance.
“Are you the five people I meet in heaven?” The words came out in a dry croak, as if a raven had spoken them. Then I recognized a sixth person standing behind Art. “I guess not,” I rasped,
“since I see Grease there in the back.” The faces smiled fuzzily, and I heard a sound that reminded me of laughter.
Someone was missing-I closed my own eyes to think who it was, and when I managed to get them open again, everyone but Jeff was gone, and he was sleeping in a recliner beside the bed. Sleeping seemed like a good idea, so I closed my eyes again.
WHEN I AWOKE, daylight was streaming in through a set of miniblinds, and a nurse was jabbing rusty daggers into my hip, judging by the feel of things. “Ow!” I said. “If that’s not prohibited by the Geneva Convention, it ought to be.”
“You think it hurts now,” she said, “wait till the pain meds wear off.”
“This is the feel-good version?”
“’Fraid so. Hip replacement’s a bitch.”
“Somebody replaced my hip?”
“Seemed like the thing to do,” she said, “since somebody shot the old one to smithereens. You’re lucky they were able to save your leg.” She paused. “Actually, with that hole in your chest, you’re lucky they were able to save your life. A couple more minutes and you’d have bled out.” She lifted a clipboard from the foot of the bed and checked the chart. “You were five pints low when you got here,” she said.
“That’s pretty far down on the dipstick,” I said. “How’d I get here? And where is ‘here’ anyhow?”
She smiled. “UT Hospital, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “You could look out the window and see the Body Farm if you weren’t strapped to the bed.”
I glanced down. My arms were suspended by a complicated system of wires and pulleys, and instead of hands, I saw a pair of white paws floating several inches above the sheet. “What day is it? How long have I been here? What’s wrong with my hands?”
“Wednesday. You came in on LifeStar three days ago. You’ve got second-and third-degree burns on your hands and arms, but you’ll be fine. ‘The Forensic Phoenix,’ the News Sentinel’s calling you. Your lawyer friend just donated a million dollars to UT in your honor, and you not even dead. You’ve been quite the story.”
“You want to tell it?”
“You ready to hear it?”
“Depends,” I said. “Is it a happy ending or a sad ending?”
“For you, fairly happy, considering. But not for everybody. Hold on. I’m not the one should be telling you.”
She hung the clipboard back on the foot of the bed and whisked out the door. Jim O’Conner came in, looking like he hadn’t changed his uniform in a week.
“Morning, Doc,” he said. “Mighty good to see you. How you feeling?”
“Not bad, I guess, considering somebody chopped out my left hip and drilled a hole through my chest.”
“You should see the other guy,” he said.
The other guy. “Hamilton?” He nodded. “I think I did,” I said. “Or maybe I just dreamed I did. He was on fire, and he flew across the sky like a comet.” I laughed a little at the absurdity, and it hurt a lot, so I quit. “Some dream, huh?”
“Pretty close to right, actually. I got there just in time to see him catch fire.” O’Conner’s face was grim. “He went sailing over your head because I shot him. With a twelve-gauge. Pretty close range.” He looked away, then back at me. “He wouldn’t have survived those burns,” he said. “I didn’t really need to shoot him.”
“I think you did,” I said. “If you hadn’t, he might have fallen on Miranda and me. Hell, he might even have jumped on us, flames and all, to finish us off.”
He gave a slow nod, and something in his face eased. “You feel like telling me what happened before I got there?”
I told him the story as best I remembered it. I started with the moment in the bone lab when I matched the burned frontal sinus with Parnell’s X-ray-the moment I realized that Hamilton had murdered the homeless man to fake his own death while pretending to fake his own death with Billy Ray Ledbetter’s skeleton. I finished with the moment Hamilton was dousing us with gasoline, the moment I fished the matches from my pocket and struck them on the basement floor.
O’Conner shook his head. “Amazing,” he said. “A guy with kitchen matches outguns a guy with a.357.”
“I like to think of it as virtue triumphing over evil,” I said, and he smiled. “What brought you and your shotgun there in the nick of time?”
“Miranda,” he said. “She phoned from her car on the way there. Said something was happening up at the fire scene, she didn’t know what, but she was worried.”
Miranda. She hadn’t been in the room the first time I’d awakened, I realized, and her absence was ominous. I remembered how hard her head had struck the concrete and how faint her pulse had been, even before the world erupted in flame “Jim, tell me about Miranda,” I said. “I’m afraid to ask, but I need to know.”
“What do you need to know?”
The voice came from the doorway, and I thought my heart would burst at the sound of it. Miranda! Her head was clouded in bandages, but her eyes shone clear as the morning.
“Miranda,” I breathed. “Jesus, I thought you were dead. The way your head hit that slab…”
“I’m pretty hardheaded,” she said. “You know that.”
Jim O’Conner reached out, gave my knee a squeeze, and left the room.
I studied Miranda’s head, turbaned in gauze. She lifted a hand and touched the gauze gently, posing like a model in an old-fashioned hair-spray ad. “Like it?” I wiggled a thumb horizontally, halfway between thumbs-up and thumbs-down. “I have a brand-new cranial suture under here,” she said, “so they’ve duct-taped me back together for now. But once the bone knits and the hair grows, I’m good as new.”
“That’s pretty damn good,” I said. The white gauze glowed in the early light, and she could almost have passed for a medieval saint, the ones with the dinner plates painted behind their heads.
