Page 24 of Shatter

She's sitting in a wooden chair beside the bed with a paperback open face down on her knee, and a lamp on the dresser behind her throws a soft yellow circle over her lap.

Blonde sort of grayish braid.

Navy uniform pants and a faded black tank top, a paramedic patch on the shoulder of the jacket slung over the chair back.

I know her.

The memory swims up slowly, like something rising from the bottom of a pool.

She knelt on the floor beside a couch.

She kept her hands in her lap.

"Vail." My voice cracks in the middle of it, and I swallow against a throat full of sand.

"Good memory." She smiles, and the corners of her eyes crinkle. "Most people don't remember anything from last night after what Gwen gave you."

She reaches for a plastic cup on the nightstand with a bendy straw in it and holds it out, not close, halfway between us.

She waits for me to reach.

I do.

My fingers are shaking so hard the ice rattles.

She wraps her hand around the bottom of the cup to steady it while I drink, touching nothing but the plastic.

The water is so cold it makes my molars ache.

Nothing has ever tasted better.

"You're at the Raiders of Valhalla MC clubhouse." She sets the cup back on the nightstand. "This is Hakon's room. You've got fourteen stitches in your left forearm, a cracked rib, a split lip, and a black eye you're going to hate in about two days when it goes green. Your hands are scraped up pretty good, too. We cleaned them out."

I look down at my hands.

Both palms are wrapped in white gauze, neat and tight, the tape crisscrossed over the backs.

Under the gauze on my left arm, a long line of stitches pulls every time I move my fingers.

I remember the knife.

I remember the cold before the heat.

Nausea should come next.

It doesn't.

My mouth goes dry instead, dry enough my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

Overhead, the fan keeps turning, slow and patient, and I stare at it until the blades stop blurring.

"He's gone, honey." Vail's voice is gentle. "The man who did this. He's not coming back."

I know.

I heard the shots.

Three of them, cracking off the front of the diner, and after them a wet whistling I didn't have a word for.