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“He just opened his eyes.” Hammond sighed with disgust. “I’ll give you one minute to get in and get out.”
One minute was all we’d need, enough time to wring two words from that bastard — his first name and his last. I pushed open the door marked RECOVERY and approached Hawk’s bed. It was a shocking sight.
Hawk’s body was lashed down in four-point restraints so that he couldn’t flail and undo the work his surgeons had just done. Even his head was restrained. IV bags dripped fluids into his body, a chest tube drained ooze out of his lungs, a catheter carried waste into a canister under the bed, and he was breathing oxygen through a cannula clipped to his nose.
Hawk looked bad, but he was alive.
Now I had to get him to talk.
I touched his hand and said, “Hi there. My name is Lindsay.”
Hawk’s eyes flickered open.
“Where . . . am I?” he asked me.
I told him that he’d been shot, that he was in a hospital, and that he was doing fine.
“Why can’t . . . I move?”
I told him about the restraints and why he was tied down, and I asked for his help. “I need to call your family, but I don’t know your name.”
Hawk scanned my face, then dropped his gaze to the badge on my lapel, the bulge of my gun under my jacket. He murmured something I had to strain to hear.
“My work here is finished,” Hawk said.
“No,” I shouted, gripping the kid’s hand with both of mine. “You are not going to die. You’ve got a great doctor. We all want to help you, but I have to know your name. Please, Hawk, tell me your name.”
Hawk pursed his lips, starting to form a word — and then, as though an electric current had taken over his body, his back bowed and he went rigid against his restraints. Simultaneously, the rapid, high-pitched beeping of an alarm filled the room. I wanted to scream.
I held on to Hawk’s hand as his eyes rolled back and a noise came from his throat like soda water pouring into a glass. The monitor tracking his vital signs showed Hawk’s heart rate spike to 170, drop to 60, and rocket again even as his blood pressure dropped through the floor.
“What’s happening?” Conklin asked me.
“He’s crashing,” Hammond shouted, stiff-arming the door. The rapid beeping turned into one long squeal as the green lines on the monitor went flat.
Hammond yelled, “Where’s the goddamned cart!”
As the medics rolled it in, Conklin and I were pushed away from the bed. A nurse closed the curtain, blocking our view. I heard the frenzy of doctors working to shock Hawk’s heart back into rhythm.
“Come on, come on,” I heard Dr. Hammond say. Then, “Crap. Time of death, 6:34 a.m.”
“Damn it,” I said to Conklin. “Damn it to hell.”
Chapter 105
AT 7:45 THAT MORNING, I took off my jacket, hung it over the back of my chair, opened my coffee container, and sat down at my desk across from Conklin.
“He died on purpose, that monster,” I said to my partner.
“He’s dead, but this is not a dead end,” Conklin muttered.
“Is that a promise?”
“Yeah. Boy Scout’s honor.”
I opened my desk drawer, took out two cello-wrapped pastries, not more than a week old. I lobbed one to Rich, who caught it on the fly.
“Oooh. I love a woman who bakes.”
