Maguire edged closer, the beer bottle held at his side. “You should let this drop,” he said.
Shannon laughed. “You’re going to attack me now? Mike, not a smart move on your part.”
Maguire crept closer, his face cautious as he moved. Shannon let himself be walked back into the living room. There was more room to maneuver there. He braced himself. Maguire swung out with the beer bottle and Shannon stepped away from it and kicked Maguire on the back of his knee with a solid roundhouse. Maguire fell to the floor, his knee collapsing under him. With the kick Shannon felt something rip in his shoulder. He also felt a warm stickiness start to spread down his arm and knew something was very wrong with his surgically reconstructed shoulder.
Maguire tried to get to his feet, couldn’t. A siren could be heard off in the distance. Shannon knew it was heading their way-that Susan must’ve called the police. Maguire heard the siren also and knew where it was heading. He looked up at Shannon. “They were killing me,” he said, his voice coming out a mile a minute as he tried to beat the police sirens. “Every night it was like that DVD you’re playing now. I was working twelve plus hour days and then I couldn’t even sleep at night because of their bullshit. I’d try asking Carver to turn it down, and he’d just turn the music louder and make more noise down there. Sometimes it would go on all night. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Work’s killing me, my wife’s killing me by moping around like a zombie twenty-four hours a day, and they’re killing me by not letting me have a second’s peace. I couldn’t sell the place. I didn’t have the money to get out from under the mortgage. So what the fuck was I supposed to do? What the fuck would you’ve done?”
“Something other than beating them to death with a baseball bat. And even if you flipped out with them and couldn’t help yourself, you were rational when you decided to kill your wife.”
The sirens were loud now. Shannon heard car doors slamming, then a police radio going on and officers talking. Someone pounded on the front door. Maguire turned from the noise back to Shannon. “Come on,” he pleaded. “Give me this one break. We could make such a great fucking team!”
Shannon left Maguire to go answer the door.
Shannon was admitted to the hospital later that evening and the next morning underwent surgery to repair his reconstructed shoulder. The following Tuesday he took a codeine tablet and accompanied Susan to Les Hasherford’s funeral. There were more people there than Shannon would’ve expected. After a while he realized that most of the mourners were the parents and other relatives of the children Hasherford had helped save. He recognized the parents of the boy who’d been rescued recently in Colorado Springs. At the grave site when the minister gave Hasherford’s eulogy and talked about the gift he had and how he used it so unselfishly, Susan wept. Shannon put his left arm around her and held her tight to his side. He knew why that got to Susan as much as it did. She knew as he did that it was far more than being unselfish, that he had sacrificed himself to save that last child.
After the funeral, Susan took him back to the hospital and he stayed two weeks before his doctor released him. He didn’t put up any resistance during that time-one look from Susan told him he’d better not even think about it. Eli visited him a lot, so did Eddie to play chess. Daniels came by once.
Whatever distance he had briefly felt with Susan had vanished. As she drove him back from the hospital, she turned the wrong way on Pearl Street and headed towards the Boulder mall instead of their apartment.
Shannon raised an eyebrow at her. “And where are we going?”
She showed him a sly smile but didn’t answer until she pulled into the Boulderado Hotel parking lot. “Last time we were here you didn’t get a chance to enjoy it. Besides, we have some unfinished business.”
Susan had arranged for the same suite they had before. After they checked in and were alone, Susan opened her bag and took a couple of pom-poms from it. Shannon tried replicating Eli’s deadpan stare, knew he was failing miserably with it. “And where’d you get those?”
Susan couldn’t keep the smile from her face. “These were nothing. Wait ’til you see the cheerleader outfit!”
The next couple of days Shannon spent part of the time reading the Zane Grey collection, and the rest of it with Susan and her pom-poms.