“We know that,” he said. “This isn’t about being here waiting for something bad to happen. We’re here for Daddy. When he gets better, we want him to know we were here for him.”
Isabella smiled. “I can understand that. I just didn’t want you to worry needlessly.”
“I’m not.” He was worried but not over anything the hospital could help with. Shel was more concerned about what the Army was going to do to his daddy once Victor Gant’s charges got out into the open.
“They said he Heimliched a boy before he had his heart attack.” Isabella held her chart on one cocked hip. “From what I was told, he probably saved that boy’s life.”
Shel nodded. He’d read the police officer’s reports too.
“He had a busy day,” Shel said, thinking his daddy had also killed three men who were going to take his life and escaped to the border.
“He’ll have others.”
Shel nodded again, but he wondered where his daddy was going to spend those days.
“Were you guys in a car wreck?”
Shel gave her blank look.
Isabella touched her face with the end of her ink pen, causing Shel to realize she was referring to the bruises on his face. His daddy had them too.
“I know your father didn’t get the bruises on his face from the cardiac event,” the nurse said.
“No. It was a separate thing. We were working on the farm. Stacking hay. Things… things didn’t go as well as they could have.” Shel felt bad about the near lie, but he didn’t want to have to explain the fight. Dr. Abelard knew, and Will had had to vouch for Shel to be allowed to remain in the room.
“I see.” Isabella looked into his eyes, and he couldn’t tell if she believed him or not.
Shel crossed his arms and looked back at his daddy.
“He’ll probably sleep for a while longer, but if he doesn’t or he seems like he’s having problems, buzz the desk.”
“I will.”
“If you need anything, just let me know.”
Shel stood again out of respect as the woman left the room, and she smiled at him over her shoulder. Then he resumed his vigil.
For a moment, he let his vision linger on the silent television set in the corner. CNN showed the top news stories. He’d muted the audio.
When he gazed back at his daddy’s still form almost lost in the huge hospital bed, he saw that Tyrel McHenry’s eyes were open and staring straight at him.
50
›› Intensive Care Unit
›› Las Palmas Medical Center
›› El Paso, Texas
›› 0704 Hours (Central Time Zone)
For a moment, staring into his daddy’s partially opened eyes above the oxygen mask he wore, Shel didn’t know what to say.
Tyrel didn’t look happy to see him there. Then again, remembering how the bruises and scabs on his daddy’s face had gotten there, Shel figured his daddy had every right not to be feeling kindly toward him.
“Where am I?” his daddy croaked.
“El Paso,” Shel said. “Las Palmas.”
Tyrel frowned at that. “Why am I in the hospital?”
“You had a heart attack, Daddy.” Shel’s voice nearly broke when he said that.
“Don’t remember no heart attack. Seems like that’s something a person oughta remember. As long as he woke back up.” Tyrel looked at the machines. “Well… am I gonna live?”
Shel wasn’t really surprised by the matter-of-fact tone in his daddy’s voice, but it still sounded strange at that moment and in that place.
“Yes, sir.”
“That might not be the best thing.”
“It ain’t like you to give up.”
“Didn’t say I was giving up, now did I?” Tyrel’s voice was sharp and cold. “Just said it mighta been better, is all. Or do you want to try to tell me that me and you in this place right now is what you wanted?”
His daddy’s anger turned Shel more angry himself, and that squeezed some of the sympathy out of him. Tyrel didn’t look at him, and Shel was grateful for that. He didn’t know what would show on his face.
“Reckon not,” Shel said.
“How’d you find me?” Tyrel asked.
“The police found you. They tried to book you under the identification you were carrying, but they couldn’t.”
“They could tell that identification was fake?” Tyrel grinned wryly. “I paid good money for that. I probably wouldn’t have made it through the border checkpoint either.”
“Running was stupid.”
“You calling me stupid, Shelton?”
Even though his daddy was lying in the hospital bed, a chill of deathly fear raced through Shel. Even when they’d fought in the barn, he’d never said anything disrespectful.
“No, sir.”
“You’d best not be.”
Gathering some of his defiance back, Shel asked, “What would you call it?”
Tyrel shook his head slowly. The mask bobbed across his face. “All I had left. Wasn’t anything else I coulda done at that point. Running was it.”
“Didn’t help anything.”
“Everything that coulda been helped was forty years ago.”
Shel drew in a quiet breath and folded his arms.
“How’s that boy?” his daddy asked.
Puzzled, Shel looked at his daddy.
“The boy that was choking,” Tyrel said irritably.
Shel couldn’t believe his daddy. The man was lying in bed after a heart attack, had killed three men in his escape, and was possibly facing a military execution, and yet he wanted to know about a boy he’d probably never see again in his life.
“He’s good, Daddy,” Shel said. “Him and his mama were there when the ambulance got there and took you away. The police interviewed them because you’d been seen talking to them before you went down.”
“At least there’s that. Boy that young, he ought to do him some more living.”
Impatience stung Shel. “What did you think you were doing by leaving?”
“For a smart man who’s been in the Marines and taken some of them college classes they offer, you sure act like thinking’s a new thing for you.”
Heat flamed Shel’s face.
“I figured leavin’ would be self-explanatory.”
“You were going to leave? Without telling me or Don good-bye?”
“I’ve told Don good-bye lots of times,” Tyrel said. “Me and you, we said good-bye in the barn the other night.”
That hurt Shel a lot more than he expected it to.
The sound of the hospital equipment filled the room for a moment. Outside, Shel heard the low buzz of conversations.
“Did you kill Dennis Hinton?” Shel asked.
Tyrel turned toward Shel and gazed straight into his eyes. For a moment Shel hoped that his daddy would say no and that everything had been some incredible mistake.
Then, as calmly as if he were ordering breakfast, Tyrel said, “Yes, sir. I reckon I did.”
›› Atwater Apartment Building
›› Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
›› 0819 Hours
Maggie Foley stood outside Apartment 616 and rang the doorbell.
Beside her, Remy said, “I didn’t hear anything.”
Maggie hadn’t either. She rapped her knuckles against the door and waited. Despite the nap she’d caught on the airplane during the jump from Fort Davis to Philadelphia, she felt bone-tired. The last two days had been incredibly hectic.
Rather than break in on Richard McGovern before eight o’clock in the morning, they’d killed an hour at a diner down the street. At present, they still didn’t have the leverage they needed to put pressure on McGovern. All he was guilty of lately was having once been a friend of Victor Gant.
There were two peepholes in the door. One was at normal eye level, but the second one halved the distance to the floor.
“Try knocking louder,” Remy suggested. He wore street clothes with a jacket to cover the pistol on his hip.
“I don’t want to knock much louder,” Maggie said. “People in the other apartments could still be trying to sleep.”
Growing up in her father’s house, she’d never had to live on top of other people the way the residents in the apartment building had. She couldn’t imagine what that was like. Down the hall, she heard the sounds of a television and a baby crying. The odor of frying eggs and coffee filled the hallway.