Small Vices

Chapter 35

It was a late Friday afternoon with a light snow falling steadily. Susan had two more patients to see and I was passing the time until she saw them by running along the Charles River. I ran east along the Cambridge side, past the boat house, and up onto the Weeks Footbridge that crossed the river and linked the rest of Harvard with the Business School. The streetlights on both sides of the river were blurry in the snow, and pedestrians coming toward me looked slightly out of focus. It was barely freezing, just cold enough for snow. The river wasn’t frozen yet and the black water moved opaquely, patched with light and shadow, curtained by the snowfall, toward the harbor five miles east. The footbridge has a barrel arch to it, and as I reached the peak of it I saw a tall man in a gray overcoat coming toward me through the snow from the Boston side. The brim of his gray soft hat was pulled down to shield his face from the snow. He had a gun.

The first bullet hit me just as I dodged to my left. It got me in the right shoulder, and the gun I’d almost gotten out of my jacket pocket plopped softly into the cushioning snow. The sound of the shot was gentle in the falling snow. The second bullet got me lower and turned me sideways against the chest-high railing of the bridge. I had no feeling in my right arm. The Gray Man was maybe twenty feet away, standing square, holding the handgun in both hands, perfectly still, his outline muted in the snowfall. Nothing moving except for the slight recoil of the long-barreled hand gun. I felt the thump of his third shot in my back, near my spine, as I grabbed at the railing with what strength there was left in me. My left leg felt numb. I heaved myself mostly with my left arm and the push of my right leg up over the bridge railing and fell twenty feet into the not quite frozen water. The impact was stunning. The shock of the cold was slowed by my running clothes, but only for a moment. The cold water began to bite through the clothes almost at once. I went down under the black surface, carried by the momentum of my drop. The cold water seemed to give me a little lift at the same time it almost paralyzed me. I held my breath and let the current move me away from the bridge, treading water with one leg and one arm. I got my head above the surface, feeling already the cold and the numbness of cold and shock and, probably, blood loss. I was in the dark. I wouldn’t last long in the river, but I had no chance on the bridge. I looked back and saw the blurred form of the Gray Man standing at the rail, motionless, looking into the darkness. He didn’t shoot. He couldn’t see me in the snow-curtained shadows. Then I couldn’t see him. My vision shrank and all there was was my nearly senseless body in the icy water and the smell of the river at my face. I paddled feebly toward the left bank with my good arm and got hold of a pole. It was a pole in the center of the earth and I clung to it trying not to spin off into space, and the pole shrank rapidly and the world spun faster and faster, and then the pole got too small to hang onto and the centrifugal pull spun me out, and I sailed, fast at first and then slower, into black space where I drifted without weight or direction forever, until I bumped against something and, still spinning, wriggled onto it in the deadly cold, and disappeared into the blackened vortex of infinity.

Infinity turned out to be busy. It revolved more slowly than the world had when I’d spun off its top-most pole. There was a lot of random noise, a lot of sudden and unexplained light coming and going. There was movement, jostling, wailing, and blaring, and long stretches of dark silence. There was an occasional blurred human sound, and the smell of chemicals, and the feel of my breath, and some pain, and the thud of my pulse that sometimes enveloped all the other sounds. The slow revolutions got slower. The thunder of my pulse quieted. My throat was sore. The light was too bright. It was hot. I shifted in the bed. There was a tube in my throat. There was an IV in the back of my right hand. There was a woman in a white uniform looking down at me. I wasn’t dead.

“Welcome back,” the nurse said.

She was a black woman. Her voice had a Caribbean lilt to it.

I smiled pleasantly and said, “Glad to be here.”

She smiled back at me.

“You’re not coherent yet,” she said. “It’ll take a little while.”

It took a couple of hours. During which time a resident appeared and took the feeding tube out of my throat, and the nurse cranked my bed up enough that I could see Hawk sitting in a chair across the room reading a book by Tony Brown.

“Where’s Susan?” I said.

“Vinnie’s with her,” Hawk said.

“I want to see her.”

“She’ll be here,” Hawk said.

“Where is here?” I said.

“Massachusetts General Hospital.”

“How long?”

“’Bout three weeks,” Hawk said.

“Three weeks?”

“You been out three weeks, you been here two weeks, four days. Couple of coeds trying to cross-country ski found you on the bank of the river, ’bout opposite the foot of De Wolfe Street. They put their jackets over you and one of them stayed with you while the other one run over to Dunster House and called the Harvard cops. They got you up to Mt. Auburn. Soon as Mt. Auburn got you stabilized, Quirk had you brought over here. Officially you here as James B. Hickock.”

“James Butler Hickock?”

“Un huh. Quirk’s idea.”

There was too much information coming at me too fast. I closed my eyes for a moment. Infinity revolved a little and I opened them. It was dark. Susan was sitting beside the bed. I put my left arm out to her and she bent over without a word and kissed me and I held her against me as hard as I was able, which wasn’t very. I smelled her perfume, and the scent of soap and shampoo, and the scent of her. I felt shaky inside, but the air going into my lungs seemed fresh and plentiful, and after a while I felt the shakiness quiet. We stayed that way a long time with her face against mine, my arm weakly around her. I could feel her breath on my face. Then she sat slowly up, carefully taking my arm and putting it back down on the top of the sheet and kept her hand on top of it.

I grinned at her and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

She patted my hand quietly.

“How am I?” I said.

“You are going to live,” Susan said.

“I don’t seem to have much feeling in my left leg or my right arm.”

“Doctor said to expect that,” Susan said.

“For how long?”

“I don’t think he knows,” Susan said.

I nodded, which made me feel a little funny, and I closed my eyes again for a moment. When I opened them the sun was too bright against the far wall. Susan was gone and so was Hawk. Martin Quirk was sitting where Hawk sat, and a man in a white coat was standing staring down at me over half glasses. He was a lean guy, with graying hair and a thin, sharp face. The face was tanned. There was a stethoscope hanging out of his pocket. Under the white coat he wore a white shirt with wide blue vertical stripes, and a blue tie with small white polka dots. He had a wedding ring on his left hand. His hands were tanned. His nails were square and neat as if they’d been manicured.

“My name is Phil Marinaro,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Like I got shot and fell in the river,” I said.

“Makes sense,” he said. “You feel like talking?”

“I feel more like listening,” I said.

“Okay,” Marinaro said. “If the man who shot you had used bigger bullets, you’d be dead.”

“Twenty-two longs,” Quirk said. “Same as Miller.”

“And you were lucky. The cold water probably slowed down the bleeding a little, and some of the internal swelling. The kids who found you probably saved you from dying of exposure. They covered you with their ski parkas, and one of them, in fact, pressed herself against you until the ambulance came.”

“Who can blame her,” I said.

“By the time the EMTs got there, you didn’t have a pulse,” Marinaro said. “They got you started on the way to the hospital. With all of that, the small caliber gun, the cold water, the resourceful Harvard kids, the professional EMTs, with all of that, if you weren’t as big and strong as you are, you’d be dead.”

“Right now I feel about as strong as a chicken,” I said.

“Right now you are about as strong as a chicken,” Marinaro said. “You are going to need a lot of rehab. Can you move your right arm?”

I couldn’t.

“Left leg?”

No.

“How technical do you want this,” Marinaro said.

“Eventually I want it all,” I said. “But right now all I want is a prognosis.”

“I don’t really know,” Marinaro said. “I’m a good surgeon. The repair job is first-rate. But you were damned near shot to pieces and almost drowned. A bullet fractionally missed your spine. I can make some informed guesses, which is mostly what prognosis is anyway. I think if you are willing to work hard enough you can come back from this. I don’t know how far. It is probably a matter of how hard you work.”

“I can work pretty hard,” I said.

“That’s what they tell me. Once you’re able to get up, we’ll start you on some simple exercises with a trainer. It will be a long, slow process.”

“How soon,” I said.

“Don’t know. We’ll watch you. We’ll get you started as early as possible.”

“Not a big rush,” I said.

“No, you’re pretty battered, and the amount of anesthesia you’ve had is debilitating. Captain, do you wish to say anything?”

“Yeah,” Quirk said.

He stood and stepped to my bedside and looked down at me.

“You know who shot you?”

“Gray Man,” I said.

“We figured. Hawk brought me up to date on that.”

“I saw him,” I said.

“Dr. Marinaro knows who you are and why you’re here. Everybody else thinks your name is Hickock and you are the victim of a jealous husband. We’ve told the papers that your lifeless body was recovered from the Charles River. Both papers ran an obit on you. You’ll probably enjoy them.”

“Call in some favors, did we?”

“Several,” Quirk said.

“Aren’t you a little out of line?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“When you assigned Belson and Farrell to Susan, I said you weren’t really in a position to do that, and Hawk said that was true, but you didn’t give a shit.”

Quirk shrugged.

“Why you think it took me so long to make captain?” he said.

“I always wondered.”

Quirk grinned.

“Besides, from Hawk that’s a compliment.”

“True.”

“We’ll keep somebody with you while you’re here,” Quirk said. “Hawk will be around a lot, and Vinnie Morris, and some of our people. I’m transferring Belson and Farrell to this detail.”

“The cops and the robbers,” I said.

“Changes places and handy dandy,” Quirk said.

“Well,” I said. “You literate son of a bitch.”

“I heard you say it once. I got no idea what it means.”

“As long as the Gray Man thinks I’m dead, and he has no reason not to, Susan’s safe. This is a guy doesn’t waste time killing people for nothing.”

“That’s what Hawk and I thought, but we also figured he might watch her for a while just to be sure. So when you woke up, we had the Cambridge cops pick her up and take her in as if for questioning. Then we smuggled her over here.”

“And no one followed her?” I said.

“Hawk brought her,” Quirk said.

“I withdraw the question,” I said.

I might have said something else, but I’m not sure, and then I was back in dreamland listening to the music of the spheres.