“Mr. Hudson?”
Calder hadn’t realized that he’d fallen asleep, so waking came as a mild surprise. He hadn’t intended to sleep. Must be the medications, he thought.
Or maybe his brain had simply done him a favor by shutting down so he wouldn’t have to dwell on the mass shooting, which somehow, by a trick of fate, he had survived when others hadn’t.
He didn’t want to contemplate the miracle of why he had beaten the odds. That question was too intricate and complicated for him to deal with right now. If ever.
“Mr. Hudson?”
Unable to put it off any longer, he blinked open his eyes.
The man gazing down at him said, “I’m Dr. Montgomery, chief of the trauma unit here. I treated you in the ER, but I doubt you remember that. Later, I oversaw the surgery on your arm, although others on the team did most of the work. How are you doing?”
The scrubs he was wearing were fresh, so he hadn’t come directly from an operating room, but he appeared to have spent long, hard hours in one. He looked very tired. His thinning hair had threads of gray in it, and Calder took comfort in learning that the doctor who’d been in charge of his care wasn’t a newbie.
“Dumb question, huh?” Montgomery smiled wryly. “Under the circumstances, how are you doing?”
Calder cleared his throat. “What about my arm?”
“The bullet entered here.” He indicated a point an inch or so above the crook of Calder’s elbow. “It dinged your humerus and exited out the back just beneath your shoulder. It missed the joint, for which you can be grateful.
“All the bone splinters were tweezed out. A vascular surgeon repaired one major blood vessel and restored the blood supply to your lower arm and hand. As gunshot wounds go, you got off lucky. What worried us most was your head injury.”
“Head injury?”
“Apparently your head struck the ground. Hard. When they brought you in, you were responsive but remained unconscious. We did a brain scan to look for bleeds, a fracture, or a depression. Didn’t find any. You have a bad concussion, and there is some brain swelling, but it’s not severe. We can control it with meds and supplemental oxygen.” He indicated the cannula.
“I have a bitch of a headache.”
The doctor nodded. “That’s to be expected. It will dissipate. The neurologist assigned to you will come in later and test your cognition, but you don’t appear to be confused. Speech isn’t slurred. Is your vision blurry?”
“Not since I first woke up. Takes me a few seconds to focus, though.”
“That’s normal, too.” The surgeon lifted Calder’s left hand off the bed. “Can you wiggle your fingers? Like you were playing a piano.”
Calder did so against the doctor’s hand and had a sudden recollection of impatiently tapping his fingers against his outer thigh as he waited his turn to go through the turnstile that had admitted him into the fair.
If he hadn’t been delayed, would he have missed the shooting? If he’d been delayed even a moment longer, would he have been killed? What vagaries of fortune had caused him to be struck by a bullet? What had prevented that bullet from going into his heart instead of his upper arm?
Dr. Montgomery seemed pleased by his ability to move his fingers as instructed and returned his hand to the bed. “Neither I nor the neurosurgeon detected any nerve damage, but alert us to any numbness or tingling anywhere along your arm.
“As insurance, we’ll do another brain scan tomorrow. We’ll monitor you closely for the next few days and keep you on IV antibiotics to avoid infection, then send you home to take it easy and let your arm heal. In a few weeks, if there are no complications, the orthopedist will prescribe several weeks of PT to rebuild muscle strength and flexibility. You’re thirty-seven?”
“Thirty-eight next month.”
“Well, you’ve got general good health on your side. Your vitals are good. Blood work was perfect. You’ll have scars where the bullet entered and exited, but the important thing is that you’ll heal. In a few months your arm should be as good as new.”
“I’m relieved to hear that. Thanks.”
The doctor paused, then said, “A psychologist will be in to talk to you about the experience.”
“No need for that.”
“It’s hospital protocol for patients who’ve survived a traumatic event.”
“Well, it’s not my protocol. I don’t want to talk about the experience. I just want to forget it.”
The doctor looked him in the eye long enough for it to become uncomfortable, then quietly said, “In a day or so, the swelling in your brain will subside. But what it recorded today will be there every day for the rest of your life. You acted with courage during the crisis, Mr. Hudson. Don’t turn cowardly now. Talk to the psychologist.”
Calder lost all sense of time. Staff cycled in and out of his room like circus clowns in a mini car. His temperature was taken. His blood was drawn. Once an hour, he was forced to sit up and huff into a spirometer.
After he puked up the first soft drink, he was offered something to alleviate the nausea. When a nurse arrived with a suppository, he told her to forget it. He’d rather vomit up his toenails.
A nurse who appeared to be about twelve years old came in to check his catheter and measure the amount of urine in the attached bag. It was mortifying.
In between the incessant interruptions, he tried to sleep; he longed for a return to unconsciousness, but his injured arm had begun to throb like an independent life form with a heartbeat of its own. His headache was compounded by all the activity going on around him.
He was told that his girlfriend had been refused admittance because he hadn’t yet been interviewed by the police. He felt sorry for the person who’d had to turn Shauna away. She would have gone into orbit. Shauna Calloway of the award-winning channel seven news team wasn’t accustomed to being told no.
But he was secretly relieved she’d been denied access. Beyond the humiliation of her seeing him in such a pathetic state, she would be sorrowful, grateful, sympathetic, and solicitous. She had a flair for drama. He didn’t have the fortitude to cope with that spillover of emotionality right now.
She would also be curious. She would probe him for information, pester him to give her details, and ask in-depth questions that he wasn’t prepared to answer.
Which was why when two strangers entered his room and identified themselves as detectives for the county sheriff’s office CID, dread settled over him like a blanket of chain mail.
Chapter 3
The masculine half of the pair appeared to be in his fifties. He was of average height, average weight, average everything except for the traits one would attribute to a detective.
Although his expression tended toward dour, there was no edginess or toughness to him, nothing hard-boiled. He could have been the man who prepared Calder’s tax returns. His last name was Perkins. Calder didn’t catch his first.
By contrast, there was nothing average about his female partner. She had oversize hair, oversize teeth, and oversize breasts that strained the buttons on the light blue shirt she wore beneath her navy blazer. Her name was Olivia Compton. She wasn’t as old as Perkins, but her demeanor was more assertive. Despite the maternal bosom, her aspect was all business.