Dead Silver

34

I drifted in and out of sleep after that, occasionally aware of the monitors I was attached to and hospital personnel stopping in to check on me. The wound was a dull throb in my side; it didn't feel much different from broken ribs, although that was probably thanks to painkillers. I got a look at the front of it when a nurse changed the dressing-a ragged little hole where the bullet had entered, surrounded by a blackish purple bruise. The exit wound was worse, but I couldn't see that. Still, it wasn't too serious, she informed me; assuming I was able to get up and take care of myself, I might go home as early as tomorrow.

I drifted in and out of lucidity, too; it came in brief spells before the haze would creep back and put me under again. I recalled getting shot with detached vividness, as if I was watching a movie. I even did some thinking about the events leading up to it, and about where this was headed. And a part of my mind that acted on its own tried to make sense of it all, although I couldn't keep track of that very well.

Long ago, I'd started believing that everybody had a sort of cosmic bank balance where commodities like luck were stored up, and I had no doubt that I'd just made a heavy withdrawal from mine. Paulson's aim had been almost as bad as my own, and he'd used a.40-caliber pistol, popular with cops, which fired a fast powerful round. He'd clipped the lower right side of my chest, splintering ribs both on entry and exit. But the jacketed bullet had passed under my lung, barely grazing it, and had punched straight through instead of blowing out a big chunk like a.357 or my own.45 would have, or glancing off bone and turning inward as lighter ammunition sometimes did.

Then there was the real luck. A killer who'd gone free for twelve years-who had certainly committed rape in the interim, and maybe worse-was finally on his way to prison for good. Like a hidden viper, he'd been the more dangerous because nobody had known about him. That threat was ended, and so was Renee's personal nightmare.

As for me, I was going to have some time on my hands, and I wouldn't be able to fill it with the usual upkeep around my place. It would be a couple of weeks before I could take on physical work, and then only light tasks. I'd have other things to keep me busy, like dealing with the police about the assault and filling in the rest of the Paulson story.

But I was still going to be up against something I dreaded-a deep-seated reason why my life had ended up the way it had. I'd never been able to explain or quantify this, which was part of the problem. It was an inner absence, which brought a feeling along the lines of waiting endlessly at a bus stop, in a strange and bleak industrial city, on a cold night; a flaw in your being that darkened everything you saw, saddened everything you felt, slowly crushed the life out of an inmost part of you. It wasn't depression, it was the root of depression. For years, the single thing that I had crave. most was oblivion, the complete annihilation of consciousness. But I believed that was something you had to earn, and I didn't know how to-only that I hadn't.

I'd tried to resolve the issue in various ways and failed. With that frustration piled on top of the rest, I'd ended up running. That was a major reason for the job I'd settled into; it allowed me to keep moving hard through the days and wear myself out. Then when I got home at night, fatigue and, too often, alcohol reduced my worries to nothing weightier than getting my boots off and filling my belly. There was nothing commendable about that, but it worked.

Renee's fear of being an emotional cripple wasn't a one-way street. Even if she did offer her light to me, I wasn't sure I could ever be fair to her, either.