The Night Bird

47

The first bullet struck Lucy in the muscles of her right shoulder. Her hand froze; the knife slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. A second officer fired in the same instant. His bullet hit Lucy in the side, under her rib cage, penetrating kidney and bowel and exiting out her back and slamming into the wall.

The third officer fired and missed her head by less than an inch, but the damage was done.

She was on her knees when Frost reached her. Her eyes blinked in confusion. He eased her onto her back, and he took off his jacket and propped it under her head. He found the wound in her side and kept pressure on it to stanch the bleeding.

Lucy stared at him. “Frost?”

“I’m right here, Lucy.”

“Did you get me off the bridge?”

“Yeah,” he told her, giving her a smile he didn’t feel. “Yeah, you’re safe now. Nothing to worry about. No bridges.”

“I can’t move,” she murmured. “It happens like that sometimes. The fear overwhelms me, and I get paralyzed. Don’t worry, though, it always goes away. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine,” Frost said.

She closed her eyes. Time passed slowly as he waited for the paramedics, and all he could do was stare at her face and watch her steady breathing. Warm blood pushed between his fingers. He didn’t know how many minutes had gone by when he felt a hand graze his shoulder. It was Frankie.

“Let me take over, Frost,” she told him. “I’m a doctor, remember?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I want to help.”

He let her trade places with him. He got up from the floor, but he didn’t go far. He stood with his arms folded tightly across his chest. The pain at the base of his neck had become needles pressing everywhere into his skull. As he waited, Jess came up next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. They stood silently for a few seconds.

“You know I didn’t have a choice,” she said.

Frost didn’t answer. She was right, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not yet. He didn’t blame her. If anything, he blamed himself. History was full of bad moments that should have gone differently.

“None of this is your fault, either,” Jess told him.

He still said nothing. He didn’t want her to think he was being deliberately cold, but he had nothing to give. Jess got the message, and she left him alone. He watched Frankie, who looked up from Lucy and gave him a reassuring smile. It was a smile without the distance he usually felt from her.

“She’ll make it,” Frankie told him. “These wounds aren’t fatal.”

Not the bullet wounds, Frost thought. He didn’t know about the wounds inside. It was cruel enough to torture a person’s body, but it was even worse to torture someone’s mind. There was no surgery for that. No gauze pads to press against the blood, no stitches. He began to understand the temptation of manipulating someone’s memory to make the past go away. He wondered if, given the choice, Lucy would want to forget everything. Erase the last week of her life that began on the bridge with Brynn. Forget the Night Bird.

Forget Frost, too.

Then he stared at the stark white walls and thought, This is what a blank slate looks like. This is the emptiness that’s left when your memory is gone. It didn’t seem any better than the alternative.

Finally, finally, he heard sirens drawing closer.

The police officer who drove Frankie home loved to chat. She wasn’t in a mood to talk, but that didn’t bother him.

His name was Harmon Krug. He was one of the largest human beings that Frankie had ever met, with a chest so deep that he had trouble turning the steering wheel. He was bald, with no neck and hands that resembled baseball gloves. He slouched in his seat to avoid grazing the roof of the car with his head.

“So you’re a shrink, huh?” Harmon asked, in a voice that had its own amplifier. “Messing around in people’s heads, that’s gotta be weird. Most of the people I meet, I don’t think you’d want to take a good look under the hood, know what I mean?”

Frankie didn’t answer. She closed her eyes and leaned against the cold window of the squad car, but Harmon didn’t take the hint.

“I guess everybody’s a freak about something. Hell, it’s San Fran. People say we got more than our fair share of the weirds, right? I’ve got a brother who lives in North Dakota. Him and his family come out here, and they watch the pride parade, and they can’t believe it. Of course, then he calls on Christmas, and he tells me they’re eating lutefisk. You ever had lutefisk? Soak fish in lye until it’s some kind of jelly? No, thanks, that’s weirder than anything you’ll find in the Castro District.”

Frankie couldn’t help but laugh. It felt good to let go of some of the stress of the past week.

“I suppose you deal with phobias and stuff,” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“Spiders, snakes, germs, all those?”

“All those,” she said.

“Sidewalk cracks,” Harmon said. “Are there really people who can’t walk on sidewalk cracks? What’s that about?”

Frankie sighed. “Phobias aren’t rational, Harmon.”

“Yeah, but sidewalk cracks?”

“Usually, it’s a question of association,” she explained. “Maybe you’re a child who used to hide in your closet when your father came home drunk and violent. Later on in life, you find yourself experiencing intense claustrophobia. You can’t be in a room where the door is closed. To your brain, those places take you right back to that closet when you were a kid.”

Harmon pursed his big lips. “Huh.”

Outside the squad car, they passed Union Square. She could see her office building and the dark windows on the top floor where she had her practice. A parade of patient faces passed through her mind. Not just the recent stories — Monica, Brynn, Christie, Lucy — but many of the people who had been in pain, with fears taking over their lives and making it almost impossible for them to function. She told herself that she’d helped them. She wanted to believe that, but she wasn’t sure anymore.

“Almost home,” Harmon said. “You’re going to get wet.”

The rain kept on, sheeting across the windshield of the squad car. Rivers ran through the street gutters.

“That’s okay.”

“Hell, we need the rain, right? All these years of drought, and we’re finally getting some payback. My brother talks about the snow they get in Williston. Two, three feet at a time. No, thanks. His kids love it, though. My brother sends me pics of them out in the yard building snowmen and snow forts.”

Frankie smiled at the thought of kids playing in the snow. And then, strangely, her heart raced. A heaviness weighed on her chest, and she found it difficult to breathe. It was as if she were buried in cold, white snow.

Harmon stopped at her condo on O’Farrell. A torrent separated her from the doorway of the building, but she didn’t care. She needed to get inside.

“This the place?” he asked.

“This is it. Thank you for the ride, Harmon.”

Frankie climbed out into the deserted street. It was very late. The police officer waited while she swiped her key card to enter the building, and then the squad car peeled away. Her heels tapped on the tile floor of the foyer, but she could hardly put one foot in front of the other. She realized how bone tired she was, but this was more than exhaustion. Her heartbeat drummed in her ears, louder and louder. Dizziness rolled over her like a wave, and she put one hand on the building wall to steady herself.

The elevator arrived, and she crossed paths with a stranger. He gave her a charming smile, which looked like the smile of a man who’d gotten lucky tonight. He was still dressed for work, with his suit coat slung over his shoulder and his crisp white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Frankie got in the elevator. As the doors closed, she watched the man in the white shirt head for the street.

All she could see was his white, white shirt.

All she could feel was the heaviness of snow.

The elevator climbed.

As it reached the top floor, she watched the doors open, and then she watched them close. She rode the elevator all the way back down to the lobby, and still she couldn’t move. The doors started to close again, but she blocked them with her hand, and she got out. She stood, alone, dripping, on the stone floor. She was utterly unsure what to do.

She had the same uneasy sensation that had drifted like a fog around her brain for days. Something’s wrong.

But now she knew what it was.