And in the days and weeks to come, they would all hear Harding lie convincingly over the phone or to dark-suited visitors with flat, sociopathic faces, that the room had erupted into deadly flame before anybody could access the computers.Joey went on record—many times—as saying his father was a decompensating toxic narcissist and a paranoid sociopath who reallywouldset a deadly destructive firebomb rather than let anybody else have access to his shit.
And everybody else said that if Joey hadn’t been in the basement, looking over the scene where his partner had been tortured, he could have warned the rest of the unit, but he was understandably upset.
But that was in the weeks to come.
Once the house was clear, burning to the ground with the fire services addressing the ashes with all the special flame retardant they had to counter the thermite, Harding and Tal peeled away in the rented SUVs.Both vehicles were now missing grills and damaged beyond repair because they’d both rammed the gates to get into the compound, but neither of them appeared to give a ripe shit.
Gideon had been taken to surgery the minute he’d cleared triage, and as Harman told Harding, sounding breathless and worried, Gideon was in for the fight of his life.
The next six hours were interminable.Joey remembered very little—lots of staring numbly into space, wondering why he was still breathing.
Random snippets of moments from the last two years kept coming back to him.
The occasional shoulder bump from one of his colleagues, making sure he was still breathing.
Somebody—Gail?—helped him out of his tac gear and gathered his weapons to lock away somewhere, probably a local police vehicle, since they were all off duty and not allowed to carry anymore.
A shift to a small prep room, and the sting of antiseptic as Blodgett—probably in an attempt to still his own shaking nerves—tended to the bleeding scrapes on his shoulders, biceps, and knuckles.
They all left him his knives, in their special sheath sewn into the back of his work slacks.
Somebody washed his face and even ran a brush through his hair to remove the gravel.He had no idea who.
When the doctor came out, like they did in the movies, and said the patient had been moved to recovery, and only family was allowed in, Harding stood up and said Gideon’s parents were on their way from Philadelphia, but his domestic partner was there and needed to see him.
The doctor didn’t even blink when Talia shoved Joey forward.
Joey allowed himself to be led to a recovery room in the ICU, and he almost crumpled at the doorway.Gideon lay there, head and face wrapped in bandages, a tube in his nose to give him oxygen, one arm heavily bandaged and immobilized.
“Oh God,” he whispered.
Talia was right at his shoulder.“It looks bad,” she said, “but he’s still breathing on his own.No intubation.No breathing tube.They reinflated his lungs, cleaned out the pneumothorax, and sedated him—alot—to give the swelling in his brain a chance to go down.His skull was fractured, but that meant they didn’t have to drill a hole in it, so that’s not always a bad thing.”
“None of what you’re saying sounds not bad,” Joey said numbly.
“How’s this,” Tal murmured, guiding him to a chair and putting Gideon’s uninjured hand in his.“He’s alive.And I’m pretty sure he hung on just so he could protect you.If he knows you’re here, he’s not gonna leave.How’s that?”
“Okay,” Joey mumbled, laying his head on the bed next to Gideon.Squeezing that callused, ink-stained, battered hand.“That’ll keep me from going apeshit for now.”
“Good,” she whispered.“Good.”
HE WASin the induced coma for a week.
Gideon’s parents arrived the next day, and Harding made Joey leave so they could have some time with their son and to get Joey to a hotel to shower and eat.
He wasn’t sure where the clothes were coming from—later he found out that Garcia had gone into Boston and bought him everything from jeans to briefs to micro-Ts to pajamas.
He brought pajamas to the hospital so he could sleep in a cot next to Gideon’s bed.
He managed to remember words the next time he met Gideon’s father.His first thought was that Gideon looked just like him.His second was that the man seemedreallyhappy to meet him.
His third was that Gideon’s stepmom kept trying to feed him, and Joey ended up letting her because Gideon seemed to think she walked on water and Joey couldn’t hurt her feelings.
But all of that passed in a haze.
Most of what he remembered was setting his phone out on one of Gideon’s Spotify lists and playing it for hours at a time.
Gerald and Trish seemed to be okay with this.
