Inherit the Bones

Chapter Thirty-three

I met Chief Chavez in the hospital waiting room. He came straight from his daughter’s soccer tournament, and under the fluorescent lights, he was pale, his legs surprisingly skinny in black and white gym shorts. Dark stains under his armpits made half-moons on his gray T-shirt, and when he removed his Nike visor, patches of hair stood up in a half-dozen cowlicks.

Chavez said, “His parents are on their way in. The dad was in Cheyenne, his mom in Denver. I got hold of the older sister, too, she’s swinging down to the Springs to pick up the younger one.”

“Where is he?”

Chavez leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. “He’s in surgery. Gemma, it’s not good. He lost a lot of blood, and…”

He sagged down to rest on his heels, and put his head in his hands.

“And what?”

Chavez shook his head and bit his lip. “They might not be able to save his leg. If he makes it through surgery, they’ll likely amputate as soon as he’s stable.”

Fuck.

“I can’t believe no one saw anything. For Chrissakes, Lou Moriarty and three other cops were less than a hundred yards away,” I said. “We got to get on this, Chief. Witnesses, tire treads, there’s a security camera at the 7-11 on the corner of Blair and Third-maybe it caught a car on the way up the road?”

Chavez nodded slowly. “I called in a favor, Avondale’s sending a team over to the site. They’ll work the case, Gemma. We should be here, for Sam, in case…”

In case.

In case he lived.

In case he died.

I slid down the wall and sat next to Chavez as he told me the story. The guys had driven up to Wally’s Pond, a quiet fishing hole twenty minutes outside of town stocked to the reeds with trout. There were two trucks; the beds were loaded with coolers of sandwiches and beer and bait. Sam followed them on his road bike and then took it past the fishing hole, up the road for another few miles. His plan was to ride down and join them, getting in both a workout and some relaxation on the river.

It was a good day for fishing.

A couple of hours later, seven trout were resting on ice chips, gutted and filleted, their innards thrown to the birds, birds that had waited and watched as the fishermen tied their flies and threw their casts.

And somewhere, somebody else had waited and watched.

When they were finished fishing, the guys loaded up their gear and headed back into town, Sam coasting behind the second truck. At some point, the driver noticed Sam was no longer in his rearview mirror. He turned around and backtracked and came upon a red Ferrari pulled over on the side of the road, the driver frantically yelling into his cell phone.

It was a hit-and-run.

The impact knocked Sam off the road and down the ravine. One of the officers scrambled down and got a tourniquet on Sam’s bleeding leg. That action probably saved his life. His bike was in pieces. Sam was unconscious and broken and scratched all to hell.

Ferrari Man wasn’t much help; he’d noticed a white sedan with muddy plates, possibly a passenger in the backseat. Possibly it was just shadows. He thought it might be a Honda or a Toyota.

It didn’t make sense, any of it. Sam was a twenty-two-year-old kid with a few weeks on the job and a girl with turquoise eyes waiting for him. He was supposed to be a cop, a good cop, not a desk jockey with one working leg and a psychological scar a mile wide.

Maybe he would turn out okay, we told ourselves, Chavez and Moriarty and I and a half-dozen other cops. We sat in the sad, cold hospital waiting room. We waited for Sam’s family to arrive; we waited for an update from the surgeon; we waited to see if one of our own would pull through.