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“I wanted somebody, to hold my hand. Penny Detweiler was my patient. I failed her.”
He looked at her a moment.
“Somebody? Anybody? Or me?”
“I knew you would be there,” Amy said.
Peter held his arms open. She took several hesitant steps toward him, and ultimately wound up with her face on his chest.
“Amy, you did everything that could be done for that girl,” Peter said, putting his hand on the back of her head, gently caressing it. “Some people are beyond help. Or don’t want it.”
“Oh, God, Peter! I feel so lousy about it!”
He felt her back stiffen under his hand, and then tremble with repressed sobs.
“Tell you what I’m going to do, Doc,” he said gently. “On one condition, I will accept your kind invitation to breakfast.”
She pushed away from him and looked up at his face.
“I made no such invitation.”
“That I cook breakfast. The culinary arts not being among your many other accomplishments.”
“You think that would help?”
“I don’t think it would hurt.”
“I don’t even know if there’s anything in the fridge.”
“So I’ll open a can of spaghetti.”
Amy tried to smile, failed, and put her head against his chest. She felt his arms tighten around her.
“Would you rather tear off my clothes here, or should we wait until we get into the bedroom?”
It was half past seven when the ringing of his door buzzer woke Matt Payne.He fumbled on his bedside table for his wristwatch, saw the time, muttered a sacrilege, and got out of bed.
The buzzer went off again, for about five seconds.
“I’m coming, for Christ’s sake,” Matt said, although there was no possibility at all that anyone could hear him.
There was ten seconds of silence as he looked around for his discarded underpants—it being his custom to sleep in his birthday suit—and then another five seconds of buzzer.
He was halfway through the kitchen when the buzzer sounded again.
He found the button that activated the door’s solenoid, pushed it, and then continued through the kitchen and the living room to the head of the stairs. When he looked down, the bulk of Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., attired in a nicely cut dark-blue suit, nearly filled the narrow stairway.
“Tiny, what the hell do you want?” Matt asked, far less than graciously.
“What I want to do is be home in my bed,” Tiny Lewis replied. “W
hat I have been told to do is not let you out of my sight.”
“By who?”
“Wohl,” Tiny said as he reached the head of the stairs. “God, are you always that hard to wake up? I’ve been sitting on that damned buzzer for ten minutes. I was about to take the door.”
“I didn’t get to bed until three,” Matt said.
