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Valid PI license. Native American gentleman. Fade into the background.
It had been a setup from the start. But for what?
There were too many FBI agents, I knew that much.
I took the elevator up to the ICU swimming in anger.
But when I stepped out, I saw Sharon. The expression on her face turned me to ice. I started to speak, but no words came out.
“Where have you been?” she said.
“Looking for your husband. What’s going on? How is Lindsey?”
She simply hugged me and I felt my body go numb. I felt her warm breath on my ear as she whispered, “David, I am so sorry.”
Lindsey was dead.
The obscene ease with which the thought came surprised me, as if I had earlier decided to take the stairway in the office tower as high as it would go, break open the locked door, walk across the roof, and step into the air. Lindsey and I had been twinned for so many years, the only surprise was that I hadn’t felt something, an extrasensory squeeze of the heart, something, as I was prattling on with the red-haired detective downstairs.
I didn’t hug Sharon back. My body was slack. Widower, my God. Yes, I would find the strawberry blond assassin and kill her. For that matter, I would find and kill Mike Peralta, too, for thoughtlessly precipitating this catastrophe like the diplomats and generals and plumed emperors had done with the Great War a century before.
Sharon led me into a consultation room where an older woman in blue scrubs was waiting. She had a face that was both kind and had seen it all. Her identification tag read “RN.” I heard the door close.
Then I was sitting there with no memory of my body having moved from the elevator to this chair.
The woman said, “Your wife has a serious fever.”
I let out a heavy breath of relief. Lindsey was alive. How bad could a fever be?
I said, “I want to see her.”
“Talk to me for a minute, Mister Mapstone.”
I regained my fear and stammered, “She’s felt cold to me.”
“I know,” the nurse said. “That’s normal because of the shock and the blood loss.”
When she paused, I forced myself to take out a notebook and a pen. I wrote what she had told me, my shaky hand leaving the first few sentences looking as if they had been written in some strange, ancient alphabet.
“In general, fever is not altogether a bad thing,” she said.
“Is Lindsey okay?” What a foolish, immature question. I asked it anyway.
“No.”
“Sorry,” I said. “So, ‘not altogether a bad thing’…”
“Right. So far as fighting infection goes, it’s better for the body to run a little hot because the ‘bugs’ can’t survive above a certain internal temperature. So maintaining ninety-nine to a hundred-and-one degrees Fahrenheit is considered not out of the question.”
Her voice was calm and businesslike and I was screaming inside with impatience. If it wasn’t out of the question, what was the problem? But there was a problem, of course.
“She had a dirty wound,” the nurse said. “For the past hour, her temperature has been one-hundred-four. That’s dangerously high for an adult.”
I made my hand write. My letters became more intelligible.
“We’re using antibiotics and taking other steps to knock it down.”
I stopped writing and rested my hands on the table. “What if you can’t?”
