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This question could be answered simply and definitively. No phantom-pain issues, no I-think-maybe-I-feel-something responses. It could be answered right now. Yes or no. He didn't need MRI scans or a dynamic resistance gauge or whatever contraption the doctors had in their little black bags. Right now he could simply send tiny impulses shooting to the muscle along the highway of neurons and then see what happened.
Would the messengers arrive and make the finger curl--which would be the equivalent of a world-record long jump? Or would they crash to a stop on a dead strand of nerve?
Rhyme believed he was a brave man, both physically and morally. In the days before the accident, there was nothing he wouldn't do for the job. Protecting a crime scene once, he and another officer had held off a crazed mob of forty people trying to loot the store where a shooting had taken place, when the cops could easily have dodged to safety. Another time, he'd run a scene fifty feet from a barricaded perp taking potshots at him, in order to find evidence that might lead them to the location of a kidnapped girl. Then there was the time he'd put his entire career on the line by arresting a senior police officer who was contaminating a scene simply to grandstand for the press.
But now his courage failed him.
His eyes boring into the right hand, staring.
Yes, no . . .
If he tried to move his finger and wasn't able to, if he couldn't even claim one of Dr. Sherman's small victories in this exhausting battle he'd been fighting, he believed that it would be the end for him.
The dark thoughts would return, like a tide rolling higher and higher on the shore, and finally he'd call up a doctor once more--oh, but not Sherman. A very different doctor. The man from the Lethe Society, a euthanasia group. A few years ago when he'd tried to end his life he hadn't been as independent as he was now. There'd been fewer computers, no voice-activated ECU systems and phones. Ironically, now that his lifestyle was better, he was also more self-sufficient at killing himself. The doctor could help him rig some contraption to the ECU, and leave pills or a weapon nearby.
Of course, he had people in his life now, not like a few years ago. His suicide would be devastating to Sachs, yes, but death had always been an aspect of their love. With cop blood in her veins, she was often first through the door in a suspect takedown, even though she didn't need to be. She'd been decorated for her courage in firefights, and she drove like hot lightning--some would even say she herself had a suicidal streak within her.
In Rhyme's case, when they'd met--on a hard, hard case, a crucible of violence and death some years ago--he'd been very close to killing himself. Sachs understood this about him.
Thom too accepted it. (Rhyme had told the aide at the first interview, "I might not be around too much longer. Be sure to cash your paycheck as soon as you get it.")
Still, he hated the thought of what his death would do to them, and the other people he knew. Not to mention the fact that crimes would go unsolved, victims would die, if he wasn't on earth to practice the craft that was the essential part of his soul.
This was why he'd been putting off the test. If he'd had no improvement it could be enough to push him over the edge.
Yes . . .
The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is.
. . . or no?
When this card appears in your reading you must listen to your inner self.
And it was at this moment that Lincoln Rhyme made his decision: He would give up. He'd stop the exercises, would stop considering the spinal cord operation.
After all, if you don't have hope, then hope can't be destroyed. He'd made a good life for himself. His existence wasn't perfect but it was tolerable. Lincoln Rhyme would accept his course, and he'd be content to be what Charles Singleton had rejected: a partial man, a three-fifths man.
Content, more or less.
Using his left ring finger, Rhyme turned his wheelchair around and drove back toward the bedroom just in time to meet Thom at the doorway.
"You ready for bed?" the aide asked.
"As a matter of fact," Rhyme said cheerfully, "I am."
III
GALLOWS HEIGHTS
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10
Chapter Twenty
At 8 A.M. Thompson Boyd retrieved his car from the alley garage near the bungalow in Astoria where he'd parked it yesterday after escaping from the Elizabeth Street safe house. He pulled the blue Buick into congested traffic, headed for the Queensborough Bridge and, once in Manhattan, made his way Uptown.
Recalling the address from the message on the voice mail, he drove into western Harlem and parked two blocks away from the Settles' town house. He was armed with his .22 North American Arms pistol and his club and carting the shopping bag, which contained no decorating books today; inside was the device he'd made last night and he treated it very gingerly as he moved slowly down the sidewalk. He looked up and down the street casually several times, seeing people presumably headed for work, an equal mix of blacks and whites, many in business suits, on their way to work, and students heading to Columbia--bikes, backpacks, beards . . . . But he saw nothing threatening.
Thompson Boyd paused by the curb and studied the building the girl lived in.
