“Is that so?” I say calmly.
I look down at him, seeing the side of his jaw already beginning to swell, and want to hit him again.
I want to hit him and keep hitting him maybe until he’s the one on his way to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
“You can believe whatever you want to,” he says, “but I’m not fool enough to shoot a cop.”
“Low bar,” I say, and press down harder with my knee, putting as much of my weight on him as I possibly can.
“Can’t… breathe,” he says.
“Must be an awful feeling.”
But now I shift just slightly enough to take some of the weight off him.
“You better hope Burt Webb lives.”
“So that punch just now, that was for him?” Roof asks, his voice sounding so weak and raspy it’s like my knee is really pressing down on his throat.
“For my father,” I say.
SEVENTY-ONE
BURT WEBB HAS made it through surgery, and through the night. But barely.
I’d followed most of what his surgeon explained this morning to Taylor and me. The first bullet had deflected off his sternum and pierced a lung lobe, but somehow missed all of his major blood vessels, by the grace of God. The bullet, which the surgeon had removed from the chest cavity, had miraculously missed damaging his heart, in the end only partially collapsing his right lung.
The bullet to the side of his head, as close as it had come to the brain, had passed through him.
By late morning, Burt has already been moved into a private room, just down the hall from the ICU. The governor is the one who made that happen after Helene Mayes had called him. She’s gone back to Cross Rivers by now.
I had sat with Taylor through the night in the visiting lounge near intensive care. An hour ago, they had allowed us into his room. I could tell it was sooner than any of the doctors and nurses on Burt’s floor would have preferred, but I assumed the permission might have been some sort of executive order from the governor, too.
There is an IV in Burt’s arm and a heart monitor next to his bed. All of it, the tubes and monitor and even the antiseptic smell of the room and the nurse checking in every few minutes, has taken me right back to Chapel Hill after my accident.
Like it’s me in that bed.
But now it’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had. He’s the one fighting for his life.
Even not being much of one for prayer, I’ve spent a lot of the night praying that he wins this particular fight the way my friend Gideon Garland had not, after he never even made it as far as a room like this.
None of this do I mention to Taylor.
“I’m not going to cry,” Taylor says suddenly. “I don’t even want him tohearme crying.”
I’m not surprised by that in the slightest. Somehow, even now, there is this calm about her as she keeps her eyes and her intense focus on her husband, as if willing him to open his eyes.
“I nearly lost you, Silas, but I didn’t,” she says. “And I’m not going to lose him.”
“You’re not going to,” I say.
She turns to face me briefly, before she turns back to Burt. A bandage covers his face from the side of his left eye to his ear.
“When you walked away before, the doctor told me the loss of blood injured his brain as much as the second bullet did,” she says. “Almost like he took two shots to the head instead of just the one. But you heard what he said about the coma they induced to help him rest.” She swallows hard. “Rest and start healing up.”
I’d asked Dr. Bauer, that was his name, how long the coma might last.
“A few more hours,” he’d said. “A few days.” He shrugged. “Maybe longer. At this point, that’s about as definitive as I can be.”
