Three Shirt Deal

Chapter 34.

OVER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, I WAS REINTRODUCED TO MY LIFE one little piece at a time. Alexa was there, and sometimes Chooch and Delfina. A couple of times I woke up for a few seconds and saw the same old, white-haired, fatherly looking gentleman. What I'd thought was curiosity now looked more like disapproval. Somewhere around his second or third visit, I placed him. He was the retired head of the LAPD Internal Affairs Division who had twice tried to get me thrown off the job. I still couldn't remember his name. What the hell is that guy doing here? I wondered. Once or twice, when I was between heavy doses of medication, my mind would actually start working again and through a hazy landscape of missing facts, I would remember the same string of events: The BlackBerry. Switching it with a young, arrogant man inside a restaurant. The shanking in the prison cafeteria. A necklace of ugly mistakes. Sometimes during my lucid moments, Alexa would be there and translate my slurred questions, answering them for me. She told me Casa Dorinda was a private hospital up the coast in Santa Barbara. I was slowly coming out of the fog, feeling stupid and exposed, loaded up on painkillers and sedatives. As my memory of the last two weeks slowly returned, it brought with it deep self-anger. When I slept, my dreams were tortured accusations. Occasionally, Dr. Lusk was in the mix, Buddha-like and unemotional. "/ can't help you if you won't share your feelings." Then one night I woke up at midnight, coming out of the drug-induced confusion like a swimmer from a muddy lake. I suddenly felt a new sense of clarity and control. Chooch was sitting beside the bed. "Hi," I said, softly. He leaned over. "Don't talk, Dad." He held my hand tighter. "Dad," he whispered softly. "You and Mom are all I have. You've got to get through this. You've got to do it for me. Okay?" I loved him so much I suddenly had tears in my eyes. "Try," I said, forcing the word out. The next morning I was more or less back. Chooch and Delfina had returned to the hotel to get some sleep. People were tiptoeing in and out of my hospital room. I looked over and saw Alexa reading a brown file folder in the corner. When we spoke, we settled for small talk and some personal housekeeping. How I got here, how close a call it had been. Apparently, I had actually drowned in that mountain stream. I'd flatlined in the ambulance, been revived by the EMTs on the way to the Corcoran State Prison Hospital, which was the closest medical facility. Our police badges had made it possible for us to be taken there. But I'd had a mild heart attack and then a mini-stroke two hours later. When I asked about Secada, Alexa told me she was in critical care. Her prognosis was guarded. Something in the way she spoke these words told me that was all I was going to get. Whether she was protecting me or what was left of us, I couldn't tell. Over the next twenty-four hours I discovered the rest of it, picking up pieces, and fitting them carefully back into a broken mosaic of facts that, once formed, made a weird, unhappy picture. Alexa had cut through a mile of red tape to have Secada and me transferred here from the prison hospital at Corcoran. She knew that inmates at the prison changed the bedpans and hospital drips. As Secada had correctly surmised, if left there long enough, somebody would eventually hit the right number and we'd go End of Watch. "How did you find this place?" I asked her. "Captain Terra vicious," she said. The silver-haired, disdaining ex-head of Internal Affairs. His name was Victor Terravicious, and he'd been known far and wide inside the department as Vic Vicious, which tells you something about him right there. He ran I. A. back when Alexa was the star advocate in the division. Vic was her first department rabbi and I always thought he had the hots for her. The Terravicious family was one of those Southern Californian legends, like the Chandlers or the Hearsts. Vic's grandfather had been a successful gold prospector in the 1890s. The family mined its gold on Wall Street now. Victor had elected not to go into their huge investment banking firm, opting instead for police work. He finally pulled the pin in the late nineties due to a diseased kidney, and moved into an expensive senior citizen community in Santa Barbara. A quarter of a million got you a casita and full medical care for life. It turned out that was where I was. Casa Dorinda, or "The Casa" as everyone here seemed to prefer calling it, was forty Spanish-style casitas and a four-story medical center complete with ICU, operating theaters, and a physical therapy wing, all of it nestled in amongst twenty rolling acres of tennis and shuffleboard courts with a nine-hole pitch and putt golf course. Over the next two days, Alexa and I skated cautiously across the thin ice of our faltering marriage. Even though I had done nothing with Secada that I wouldn't have been willing for her to observe, the potential had been there. The desire. I knew that in this, I had failed us. To her credit, I could see she accepted her share of responsibility. Alexa knew her lack of physical interest in me had strained our bond. There was plenty of fault on both sides. So we sat across from each other in this sterile environment, choosing our words with extreme care. Alexa had also arranged to have Tru Hickman moved to a more secure wing of the Corcoran prison hospital, which was a bit like saying a chicken had been moved to the secure wing of the coyote compound. But she hadn't given up on trying to get Tru transferred to USC County and several times when I woke up, she was on her cell phone trying to get the CDC to approve the move. She didn't seem to be having much luck. There are some unwritten rules in police work. One of them is you always go to your wounded partner. When I learned that Secada was breathing on a ventilator only a few yards down the hall I knew that I had to see her. I owed Scout the visit no matter the stress it might put on my relationship with my wife. "I need to see Secada," I told Alexa one morning after a particularly long and weighty silence. "I want to go now." "Okay," she said abruptly, and without comment walked out of the hospital room to arrange it. Secada's parents were expected shortly. It had taken time to reach them because they'd gone to Midland, Texas, to visit relatives. Alexa told me all this as she helped me into a wheelchair. Then she watched from the door of my room as a nurse pushed me down the hall. I was told I could not enter the critical care ward, but was parked where I could look through the glass into Secada's room. Scout's once beautiful body was now pillaged by drains and tubes. Her eyes were open and she looked across the room through the observation window at me. I saw bravery and resolve. She smiled and waved one hand feebly. We looked at each other through that glass until the nurse said I had to return to my room. Later that afternoon, while Chooch, Alexa, and Delfina waited outside, I endured a scrupulous physical exam by one of the Casa's chief physicians whose nametag identified him as Thomas Briggs, M. D. After it was completed, Chooch and Alexa hovered at my bedside as the doctor gave me the results of the exam. "You're a lucky man," he started out by saying. "The gunshot wounds didn't hit anything vital, so barring infection, those will heal up nicely. You were underwater for quite a while. Your brain was deprived of oxygen. The mild heart attack and mini-stroke came as a delayed result of that." "When can I get out of here?" I asked. "When there is heart muscle damage during a coronary attack, a specific protein is released into the blood," Briggs continued. "If we see that protein, we know a serious event has occurred, one that will require extensive rehabilitation. If we don't see it, and in your case, we didn't, then a full and quick recovery is usually expected." I liked the sound of that. "From the neurological tests I've done, we can tell the feeling is already coming back to your left side. If that tingling keeps up it means the nerves are reviving. You should be ready to leave here in a week. I'm going to have our physical therapist get started with you immediately." After the doctor left, Alexa, Chooch, and Delfina pushed my wheelchair outside and parked me on the patio. Several other infirm, elderly people were parked out here as well. Most of them had paper-thin, blue-white skin and wispy tufts of spun silver hair. We all sat blinking and squinting like zombies caught in sunlight. "This is too much for me," Chooch finally blurted. "First Mom, now you." He stood between us. "Why do you two have to be cops? Can't you do something less scary?" "It's what we do, honey," Alexa said simply. "It's too dangerous," Chooch persisted. "So is football," Delfina said, her voice gentle but firm. "Everyone has to do what's right for them, querido." Chooch didn't react, but Alexa and I both nodded. Later, we had dinner in my room. McDonald's catered the event. When visiting hours ended at ten, Chooch and Delfina said goodbye before driving back to USC. He had football, Del had summer school. "You sure you're okay, Dad? I won't go if you need me." He held my hand. "Yeff," I told him. "Yeff? What kind of answer is yeff?" He was grinning. "Yes," I said carefully, and smiled for him. After they left, Alexa and I again sat in silence. The silence was becoming painful. It was more painful than the gunshot wounds, more annoying than my tingling left side. "Do you love her?" she finally asked, interrupting this thought. "Huh?" "When you were unconscious you kept saying Secada's name."