“How much do you know?” Del asked, after Lucas had stumbled down the steps to the tarmac.
“Only what you told me—I couldn’t get through on my phone when we were in the air.”
“She’s alive. She sort of recovered consciousness...”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lucas demanded. “Sorta?”
“She’s got some short circuiting. The docs say that’s not unusual with concussions. She’s got a broken arm. Her lung collapsed when something... I dunno what, maybe a rib... punctured it, but the lung’s been re-inflated. She has more cracked ribs, she’s got major bruising, and she’s probably got a soft injury in her neck tissue, although all her arms and legs and fingers and toes are moving. She’s gonna make it, but she’s gonna hurt for a few weeks. Or months.”
Lucas felt the boulder lift from his shoulders. “I gotta call Letty,” he said. “She should be in Denver by now.”
“I gotta tell you about the driver.”
“They got him?”
“Sorta.”
“Del, goddamnit.”
“He’s dead. He’d just gotten out of Lino Lakes on a fifth DWI. The last one, he managed to cross the centerline and hurt a couple of people,” Del said. “He did a year in the treatment facility. I guess he wasn’t completely treated because he’s only been out for a month.”
Lucas had nothing to say to that, except, “Wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it.”
—
THE TWO OF THEMwalked into Regions at two o’clock in the morning. Weather was in the intensive care unit, where guests were discouraged, but given Lucas’s history and the fact that Weather was a doc, they’d pulled two chairs behind the ICU curtains around her bed.
When Lucas stepped behind the curtain, he wanted to stop and cry. Weather’s eyes were open, but her face was horribly bruised, purple over the entire left side. Her neck was encased in a brace, her left arm in a fiber cast. Two bags of solution were hanging from a drip stand, with tubes snaking down to her arm; another emerged from beneath the bed covering, emptying urine into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.
Lucas had been in an ICU himself as a patient on a couple of occasions and had learned to hate the odor, which he could have identified anytime, anywhere: a mixture of the coppery smell of blood, raw meat, urine, several kinds of disinfectant, and what he thought might be iodine, a stink he remembered from his rough-and-tumble childhood.
He sat, leaned toward Weather, took her free hand, and muttered, “I’m here.” He got no acknowledging squeeze, but her eyesmoved toward him, and she said, through sandpapery lips, “Was I in an accident?”
A nurse behind Lucas whispered, “She keeps asking that.”
Lucas said to Weather, “Yes, but you’ll be fine. The docs say you’re doing great.”
Weather closed her eyes and seemed to drift away. Lucas sat holding her hand, and, a few minutes later, her eyes opened again, turned fractionally, and she again asked, “Was I in an accident?”
She asked three more times, and after the third Lucas tucked her hand under the covers and stepped outside the curtain and said to a passing nurse, “I need to talk to her doc.”
“He’s here, I’ll get him.”
Del had been waiting in the lobby, and he walked up and asked Lucas, “What’s happening?”
“Gonna talk to the doc.”
The doc showed up two minutes later, carrying an iPad. He was a tall man, thin, in a white physician’s jacket, gray slacks, and steel-rimmed glasses perched on a beaked nose. “Mr. Davenport?” he asked, and, looking at Del, said, “Mr. Capslock, nice to see you again.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. Most likely,” the doc said, turning back to Lucas. “We’ve got all the obvious stuff handled, the open question at this point is the neck injury, which we can’t fully assess until we can talk to her. The head injury appears to be a moderate-to-serious concussion.”
“She keeps asking if she’s been in an accident.”
“That happens. There’s no reason to believe it will continue, it should clear up. She may have some residual amnesia, and thatmight go away or may never go away. Typically, she could lose the few minutes before the collision or part of the day, or she might lose some of it and get it back later. Or she might not lose anything at all.”
“Bottom line?”
