Split Second

CHAPTER 44

Baltimore General Hospital

Wednesday night

Savich stood over his sleeping wife. He hated her pallor, hated that her eyelids looked bruised. He knew intellectually she was going to be all right; the doctors had assured him of that at least three times. But that assurance didn’t seem to matter to that place deep inside him that knew he would curl up and die if something happened to her. A nurse appeared at his elbow, lightly touched his arm. “You look worse than she does, Agent Savich. I swear to you, your wife will be fine. Her throat is going to feel a bit bludgeoned, but that won’t last long, maybe a day or two.”

He nodded. What had she seen on his face? Fear? All right, Sherlock would be fine, no reason for her not to be. The nurse wouldn’t lie, would she? They’d pumped her stomach, and her blood pressure was back to normal. They said the drugs were short-acting, and their effects were wearing off.

They’d soon know for sure if Kirsten had used the same drugs on Sherlock as she had on her other victims. The symptoms were right. He wondered if Kirsten had given Sherlock an extra-large dose.

Ruth walked into the room, handed Savich a cup of hot tea, a cup of coffee in her other hand. Good old hospital cafeteria Lipton, he thought, savoring the hot, bitter taste. He saluted her with his cup. They both looked down at Sherlock, her glorious hair, clips removed, now a wild nimbus around her pale face. He pulled the sheet over the green hospital gown to Sherlock’s shoulders, smoothed it out. “She’ll be okay,” he said, more to himself than to Ruth. Then he said it again. “She’ll be okay, Ruth.”

Ruth touched her fingers to his forearm. “Yes, she will, Dillon. The nurse told me to repeat that to you myself until you believe it. Sherlock’s a trouper, she’s got a gold-plated engine of a heart. She’ll be okay, so stop worrying.” But Ruth knew he couldn’t help but worry; she was worried herself, impossible not to be, as she looked down at her. Sherlock was always so full of energy; she radiated a kind of life force you could practically reach out and touch. But lying here now, she looked almost insubstantial, like a pale copy of herself.

Ruth said, “I nabbed a nurse as she came out of the OR. She said Comafield’s intestines are a mess but that his surgeon is the best they’ve got, and that was all she could tell me. She looked worried, Dillon.”

“He’ll make it,” Coop said from the doorway. “People like him always make it.” He walked to the bed and stared down at Sherlock for a moment, touched her hand, then nodded at both Ruth and Savich and walked back to the surgical waiting room. He looked for Lucy, but she wasn’t in the waiting room; she’d moved away to sit off by herself halfway down the hall where there was another small grouping of chairs. Her head was down. It looked to him like she was staring at her sneakers.

He went down on his knees in front of her, took her hands in his. Her skin felt clammy. “Hey, Lucy, what’s going on?”

Her head jerked up, but she wasn’t there, she looked as though she were a million miles away, and where she was, he thought, was a mad and lonely place—and where was this place? He couldn’t stand to see that look, couldn’t stand that she was so far apart from everyone. From him. He’d known her for only six and a half months, not long at all in the scheme of things, but he realized at that moment he didn’t want her to hide herself from him. He realized in that moment that she was perhaps the one human being with whom he wanted to share his life. He rocked back on his heels. How had this happened? It didn’t matter; it had happened, and he accepted it, relished it. He waited, said nothing.

He was right about the place Lucy was. Nothing around her could take her mind away from the ring for very long. But she hadn’t even thought of the ring during the shoot-out at the Texas Range Bar & Grill, only afterward. Would she have used it to stop Comafield and Kirsten? Was it her duty as an FBI agent to do whatever she could to stop people from getting hurt, getting shot?

What is past is done; it can’t be changed. That was so much a part of her experience, it rarely even needed to be said. How did a person make peace with the power to change the past, even only a few seconds of it?

Should she try to become some kind of hero, undoing every tragedy and accident she came across, giving back a suddenly orphaned child his parents again? If so, how should she live? Out patrolling all the time so she’d have a better chance of using the eight seconds to make things right? Or would she come to use the ring on a whim, playing with people like marionettes to get her way, or simply for sport, for the fun of it?

Wasn’t life about accepting what came down the pike, both the joys and the sorrows, being responsible for what we did ourselves, facing it, making the best of it?

Like facing what had happened tonight?

She thought again of her grandfather, what her grandfather had written about her grandmother’s unhealthy obsession with the ring. Lucy couldn’t remember a single time she’d been with her grandmother and wondered if something was wrong with her. Had her father seen the obsession in his mother? Had he understood it? He’d known about the ring, but had he known what it did? She didn’t think so, but it didn’t matter now; they were all dead, there would be no answers for her.

Twenty-two years her father had protected his mother, and he’d protected her, too.

Twenty-two years he’d known his father’s body was buried in the attic, waiting for the day it no longer mattered.

The strange thing was, it still mattered. She thought it might matter forever. And she wondered again, had the stress of all of that killed him too young?

Her grandfather had believed her father wouldn’t have wanted her to have the ring. But her father hadn’t known the ring could have saved Claudine.

Coop snapped his fingers in her face. “Lucy? Are you with me?”

She looked blank, then quickly focused. “I was thinking about all the chaos—the local cops crowding around us to see for themselves what a mess the feds had made. Everybody knew she was long gone before they cordoned the area.”

That isn’t what you were thinking at all. She’d lied to him, nice and clean, but he decided not to call her on it. He grinned at her. “Yeah, we sure got to enjoy a lot of their jokes. The worst one I heard was from that young rookie—he looked about eighteen?” Coop mimicked him: “‘But I thought you guys were the best in the whole world!’”

Lucy said, “Yeah, well, we’re supposed to be. Serves us right, I guess.”

She hoped she’d never see anything like tonight’s fiasco again. The ring. They’d been so lucky no one was killed. The two civilians Comafield had shot had suffered only minor wounds, thank God.

She said, “This was a learning lesson, and my father always told me learning lessons had to be painful to be worth anything. I’m afraid the price of this one is going to be too high.

“Where does Kirsten go from here, Coop? On a rampage? You know she’s unstable, and now she’s got to be enraged—at us, and at Sherlock in particular. Don’t forget Savich gut-shot her boyfriend. What is she going to do now?”

Coop laid his hand on her shoulder. He could feel the bones. She’d lost more weight. Well, her father had died, and she’d remembered her own father and grandmother dumping her grandfather into a trunk. And now there was the blasted ring.

The bloody ring—he shook his head. He wanted to ask her, but more, he wanted to press her face against his shoulder and comfort her, maybe tell her a joke, but he didn’t do either of these things.

He sighed, stepped back. “You’re probably right. Look, we’ll figure it out and we’ll catch Kirsten Bolger.” He paused a moment. She looked exhausted, from the inside out. It was worth a shot, and so he said, “Lucy, you were sitting here alone, your head down. What were you thinking about? Not about tonight, so please don’t lie to me again. Were you thinking about that ring?”

She looked at him, saw the worry in his eyes. He was a good man, she knew that now, and he was a good agent, she thought; he could probably pry sardines out of the can without opening it. He saw to the heart of things, but even that didn’t matter. She wasn’t about to tell him anything about the ring; it wouldn’t be fair to involve him, surely not yet, if ever. She touched her fingers to her shirt, felt the ring lying against her throat, warm and pulsing.

Lucy drew in a slow breath as she looked up at him. He looked tired, all the mad adrenaline drained out of him now, and he looked afraid. For her? She had to touch him. She laid her hand over his. “Don’t be worried for me, Coop. All the excitement’s over, and all of us survived tonight. We were lucky.”

Coop took her hand between his. “Lucy, I want you to know, whatever you’re going through, whatever is eating at you, I don’t want you to think you’re alone. Listen, I’d really like to be there for you. Actually—I want to be with you.” There, he’d said it, for the first time in his life, he’d said those words to a woman, to Special Agent Lucy Carlyle. Who knew?

She looked at him for a long moment and seemed to consider what he’d said. She pulled her hand away, giving a slight shake of her head as she rose. He watched her fill a paper cup with water from a water cooler and raise it in a toast. He watched her give him a bright smile. “Hey, here’s to Mr. Spicer and his handy bat. Who knows, without the bat, maybe we wouldn’t have Comafield. Excuse me, I’ve got to hit the bathroom.” And she was gone in under two seconds.

He stared after her.