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  She chucked him on the shoulder. “I’ll do my damnedest. See you later.” She brushed past him with a determined click of her heels.

  Chapter 11

  Carter entered the hospital room hesitantly. She looked up from a handful of tissues as he did. Emotion blotched her face. It did not detract from what he was beginning to think of as the endearing quality of her face. He wanted to smooth her hair back and kiss her brow. He couldn’t think of a way to do it without feeling awkward, so he just stood there.

  “Came to say good-bye.” He added, “How did you like Joyce?”

  “Now I know what they mean when they call someone a breath of fresh air.”

  “More like a hurricane warning, but I’d trust her with anything.”

  She pointed at the chair. “You can sit?”

  “For a minute.” A mid-morning snack had been brought in while he was gone. Four cartons of juice remained among empty muffin wrappers.

  She picked out a carton of apple juice and passed it to him, saying, “I can’t possibly drink all this.” The IV had been removed from her arm.

  “I think they want you to hydrate.”

  She sipped woefully at her pineapple juice. “One major fruit group at a time.”

  He laughed in spite of himself. That seemed to please her. She said, “Apology accepted. And thank you. You’re the only thing that seems real in this whole nightmare.”

  Carter decided against interrupting, and settled into what he could do best, which was to listen.

  The young woman looked across the room, at a smog- and dirt-obscured window. “He didn’t like me having my hair cut, so he decided to do the job himself. With a knife.” She winced with the memory, as he watched her talk. “So I left. He followed me all the way from the land of rain, manic-depressives, and wife-beaters to the city of smog, quakes, gangs, and serial killers. And last night, he came after me again.”

  Carter felt himself smile wryly, pierced by both disappointment and relief that she had not been a target for Mr. Blue. “Like you said, it was some night.”

  “My head feels like they all happened at once.” She moved her jaw again tentatively. “So you know what no one else knows or believes. Or even asked,” she added bitterly.

  “Sounds like you have a beef against L.A.’s finest.”

  “They think my father did this to me and I—I retaliated.” Her voice broke. She did not continue.

  “They’re not looking for your estranged husband?”

  She jerked her head in a negative.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “They say there’s no proof of a third party.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “And you’re afraid your spouse will come back.”

  She hesitated long enough that he intuited that she was not afraid of many things, that this was one of them, but there was something else she wasn’t telling him. Then she said, “Wouldn’t you be? How many stories like that do you read in the paper or see on TV?”

  “Enough. It’s not a welcome privilege.” His gaze wandered across the room, over her chart hanging from the foot of the bed. He ought to go, but he did not want to. He saw the notation penciled in the corner of her paperwork about her father’s condition and location. “A talk with Joyce ought to clear up our boys in blue. Or when they depo your father.”

  “He can’t be interviewed, or so they told me.” She slumped back on her pillows. The eyes closed in weariness or defeat.

  “Let me help.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to have to read another statistic. If I can keep him from coming after you, if I can make the police believe in your husband, if I can keep you from stepping into the line of fire, so much the better.”

  “All I want to do is see my dad. Can you do that?”

  “I can try.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First, we need transportation.” He stepped out of the room and went to the floor’s nursing station. The women were brisk and busy. He took a wheelchair from under their watch and brought it back to the room. No one said a word to him.

  She was shrugging into another gown, wearing it like a robe. The soft, worn pale-blue-flowered pattern did nothing to enhance her looks. He caught a glimpse of one bare hip before she was able to pull the gowns about her and settle on the edge of the bed, waiting. That brief look of young and supple flesh was marred by a slashing bruise across its contour. Carter had been weighing tragedies in his mind, but the sight of the wound made him realize what the living suffered. She’d lost a husband, a marriage, and might yet lose her father—and the police thought there were no victims here.

  Carter pushed the wheelchair forward. “Watch your step.”

  She swayed a little as she essayed the journey from bedside to the chair, just three halting steps, but he could see from the lack of color in her face the effort it cost her.

  “All right?”

  She settled in the seat and caught her breath. “Yes.” She looked up. Her gaze searched his face, and seemed suddenly reassured. Her mouth twisted. “I keep wanting to get the number of the truck that hit me.”

  He laughed without thinking, but that pleased her, and a little pink came back into her cheeks. “That’s truer than you know,” she added. “Jack drives trucks.”

  He bent down to put the footrests into place. “It takes all kinds,” he commented.

  She looked at him reflectively. “Must be awful,” she said, “to live with someone and have absolutely no idea what’s going on inside his head.”

  “In most cases that’s probably a blessing.” He was glad she couldn’t read his mind, with the image of her bare flesh still fresh. He pivoted the chair around. “You up to the elevator? ICU’s a couple of floors up.”

  She nodded, winced, and said, “Yes.”

  As he wheeled her down the corridor to the elevator bank, he added, “I got your name from your charts. McKenzie Smith. Do they call you McKenzie? Or is that a hyphenated?”

  “Hyphenated?”

  “Two last names.”

  “Oh. No, it’s McKenzie.”

  “Family name?”

  “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” She made a gusty sound. “I used to have to fight about it when I was a kid. But I got proud of it. At least it kept people from calling me Smitty.

  Didn’t want to change it, not even when Jack and I ... when we got married. What about you?”

  “Wyndall’s a southern name.” He drawled it slightly so she could get the effect. “Most people call me Windy.”

  “But you prefer Carter.”

  “Yeah, I do. I’ve always liked the sound of it.”

  The elevator door opened. There was another wheelchair in residence, the woman flushed with life, her stomach fairly palpitating with the kicking child inside her, her hair already sweat-streaked back from her face, and there was no doubt where she, the admittance nurse handling the wheelchair, or the nervous man pacing behind them were going. The pacing husband was counting, the woman’s mouth pursed as she “Hee, hee, hoo’d” in time. They fairly charged out of the elevator on the next floor. McKenzie waited until the doors were closed, then said softly, “That was cute.”

  “Cute? I thought the guy was going to have a coronary. I think giving birth must be easier on the woman.”

  She tilted her head back to eye him. “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Be nice or I won’t tell you what floor ICU is on.”

  “You don’t have to,” and she pointed at the board. “It’s marked.”

  He could tell that the bantering had relaxed her a bit, reading her with an ease that came from years of reading interviewees. He wiggled the chair a little, saying, “Don’t upset the driver.”

  She laughed. It pleased him immensely to hear her, though the laugh was raspy and dry. What would she be like to listen to a month from now, when she’d healed and life looked immensely better?

  He was relieved when the doors opened again, checking his
train of thought.

  He said, as he began to push her out, “Don’t let it scare you.”

  She put a hand on the wheelchair arm, gripping it with a hand that was bruised with treadmarks, puffy and discolored, and held on tight until the misshapened knuckles paled.

  No inattentive nurses here. A finely-featured East Indian woman looked up, saying, “May I help you?”

  “Walton Smith.” Her voice was scarcely higher than a whisper. “He came in last night.”

  “Ah.” She turned aside to look at something on her desk, then looked up, with eyes that were, startlingly, green-hazel, with coffee flecks deep in them. “No visitors yet, but you can stand outside the room and watch for a moment. He’s in critical, but stable, condition. Cubicle C.”

  His passenger almost stood up out of the chair. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she relaxed again. He took his hand away to push her to the viewing window, then, casually, dropped it back in place again, lightly, comfortingly. From the stillness of her body, he had no idea at all what she must have been thinking as she looked upon the sheet-shrouded form of her father.

  McKenzie looked through the window, and could hardly see her father for the reflection of herself in the glass, and for the bank of equipment that surrounded him, less sophisticated than she imagined, almost menacing. She rubbed her eyes, trying to keep her vision sharp, failing slightly. He could have been dead, for she could see no rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, but she could see the blips and lines across the monitor registering his life force. She had no idea if there were really protective custody, or if they had just slipped through somehow, but she was fiercely grateful for this moment.

  For once not the main obstacle in her life, he’d tried to stand between her and disaster. Don’t touch my little girl! He hadn’t done well, but he’d tried. And she’d failed as well, for if she could have dealt with Jack, her father wouldn’t be lying there half-dead.

  She brought a hand up to her mouth, felt her lip swollen and split, and trembling. She would not try. Not now, not yet. Stable condition. Critical but stable. What did that mean, exactly? Poised on the brink, but not likely to fall one way or the other, not wobbling, just ... balanced? She found herself holding her breath, in case she might be the factor which toppled him over that brink.

  She had a weird sense of déjà vu, a memory of her younger self lying quietly on a hospital gurney, head throbbing, to wake and see her father standing and watching her, tears in his eyes. She’d been hit by a pitched ball. She’d seen double for three days, McKenzie suddenly remembered. Her father had been terrified she’d never play ball again. She’d used his wooden bat until she made the high school team, and graduated to aluminum.

  There had been good times. McKenzie gripped the windowsill. There had.

  She’d forgotten all about Carter until he asked softly, “Are you all right?”

  It was then she realized he had in his hand on her shoulder, a softly bracing touch. When had he put it there, and why didn’t it hurt? When every square inch of her felt as though it had been pounded on, why didn’t it hurt where he touched her?

  McKenzie swallowed. “I’m okay,” she answered. “It’s just—”

  “Difficult. I know.”

  He must know better than she did. McKenzie stirred. He lifted his hand away. A nurse passed behind them, on softly creaking shoes, offering, “We’ll know more tomorrow.”

  McKenzie found herself nodding. Carter backed her away, driving her back toward the elevators. She became aware that there were tubed and wired occupants lying quietly in most of the other cubicles. The nurse was busy readying the “F” cubicle. She had the doors thrown open, banks of monitors being hooked up, when the double elevator doors opened.

  A cart came out, two nurses, a man and woman, in attendance. There was no doubt about a police escort here. Two men, faces drawn, one black, one Asian, brought up the rear. McKenzie found herself drawing back in the chair lest they see her.

  Carter stopped to move the wheelchair to the corridor’s side. She stared in fascination as this new group passed, caught in a drama of their own, unaware of McKenzie and Carter, the elderly black man on the bed with a gray pallor under his dark skin, his eyes shut, his face in many folds, his grizzled hair matted by the tubing and elastic of the oxygen mask.

  “That’s Ibie,” Carter murmured. “Councilman Ibrahim Walker.” He did not push her forward until the cubicle doors had swallowed up the emergency team, and they had begun transferring the man to the bed, wiring and cabling him into the new equipment. “Looks like he’s been here overnight and nobody informed us.”

  “How do you know?”

  Carter was watching the scene avidly. “I know,” he said absently. “It’s my job.”

  Walker lifted an arm wearily and tried to assist in the maneuvers. She watched as they tucked him in and smoothed the cool white sheets around his rich, coffee-colored torso. He mumbled, nearly incoherent, his voice slurred and masked by oxygen feeders. “Animal. Alien. What was that?”

  The fear in his voice ran a shiver down McKenzie’s spine. The whites of his eyes showed.

  The nurse closest to him shushed him gently and put his arm in place.

  “McKenzie,” Carter said shortly. “I need to take you back, and then find out what’s happened.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to.” He was looking around, attention riveted on Cubicle F as banks of machines came on-line. “McKenzie, I’m a reporter.”

  Her throat tightened. No wonder he’d been interested in her. A paycheck for her grief. Her knuckles went white as she dropped her hands down to the wheels of the chair. She spun them, wrenching the chair from his grip.

  “McKenzie—”

  “I can take care of myself!”

  He stood, feet spread, hands out, torn. But he kept looking away from her, back to the action.

  His kindness, even bringing Joyce, had been a sham. She kicked a foot to the floor, pushing the chair away.

  “No. I got you this far. It’s just that—”

  “It’s your job,” she finished for him. “Let me know how it all comes out. Film at eleven, right?”

  “No—the evening edition.”

  She could hear in his voice the pride that there was a difference, to him. Not to her. “I thought you were a counselor. You talked about the heart donor—I thought you cared. I never thought you were here because it was your job. ” She leaned forward painfully to propel herself toward the bank of elevators. Without a word she rolled through the first door that opened.

  “McKenzie!”

  The door shut in his face.

  She caught her thumb under the rim as she tried to settle the vehicle. It grabbed skin. She snatched her hand away and sat, sucking the injury, verging on tears again. The elevator sank all the way to the basement before she realized she hadn’t punched in her floor number. She looked out on colored lines directing her to the morgue and to the surgery theaters. Dumbly, she pounded her hand on the panel to get out of there. Her head began to throb again as the lift dropped, then began to climb.

  She studied the floor, praying no one would walk in and see her alone. Toward the corner, a brilliant bubble of red glistened wetly. It caught her attention. She stared, transfixed. Blood. She swung about, but this crimson, shivering drop did not follow, did not drown her. Real, then. Vital and, in this day and age, dangerous. Whose? What patient?

  The doors slid open on the fifth floor. McKenzie rolled herself out with an effort. No one stood at the nurses’ station. There was some luck in that. She didn’t feel like facing questions about where she had been, and why. She felt empty, drained. Her rib cage ached as she bent slightly to roll the wheelchair down the corridor. She had only been gone, what, fifteen minutes, but her legs felt like lead. At the corner of the nurses’ station, she got out of the chair. Mac tottered, then determinedly caught herself on the edge of the counter.

  Behind her, the elevators opened and closed. She pivoted,
but saw no one who could have come out. For a moment, she thought Carter might have followed her. Hope and disgust that he might have warred inside her.

  Mac pushed away from the counter. One step at a time, she delicately trod the distance to her room. Behind her, from the far side of the nurses’ station, on the other side of the U that comprised the floor, she could hear the laundry cart, and women chatting casually. No one would even know she’d been gone.

  She leaned her weight wearily on the hospital door, swinging it open.

  Streaks of crimson pierced her vision. She blinked, not understanding. Was it real, or imagined? It was as if she stood on a threshold; one step one way or the other could prove disastrous. She put out her hand. She touched the wetness. The curtains that separated the beds had been drawn. In her half of the room, something awful had struck. She stumbled forward.