Karl Weisenbeck, Leo's doctor, was standing next to him with a dollar in his hand.
"Hi, Doc. Yeah. Vermont Bureau of Investigation."
Weisenbeck nodded a couple of times, as if trying to remember the name of a song. "Sounds important."
Joe laughed as he watched the cup filling, successfully so far. "Not if you're in law enforcement. Most cops assume we exist only to steal all the credit and headlines they have coming, not to mention the grant money."
"Do you?"
Joe retrieved his cup and stood back to give Weisenbeck a shot at his own luck. The condition of the floor at the foot of the machine suggested he had a fifty-fifty chance. He enjoyed the man's directness-had from the day they first met.
"Try not to. How's Leo doing? I mean really?"
Now it was Weisenbeck's turn to look up inquiringly. "You think I've been bullshitting you?"
"Not one bit. That's why I'm asking."
The doctor returned to monitoring his progress, even delicately placing his fingers around the cup so he'd be in position to tear it away at the right moment. A veteran.
They both waited until that time when, indeed, he had to extract prematurely and allow the spigot to piddle a little extra coffee into the miniature catch basin, from where it dribbled onto the floor. Weisenbeck shook his head with disgust and began walking with Joe down the hallway toward the ICU.
"He's no worse, which, given what he's facing, is saying a lot. From what we can tell, he's suffered no additional setbacks, which means that time is now playing to our advantage."
"Because of the bone knitting?"
"Right. Once the flail chest is behind him and he can breathe entirely on his own, my suspicion is that we'll see improvement."
"But you did say, 'From what we can tell.'"
Weisenbeck stopped walking to look at Joe straight-on. "Mr. Gunther, as I told your mother earlier, there's a lot we don't know. Sometimes, it can be like driving in winter with the windows fogged up. You trust to instinct, luck, your knowledge of the road, all your other senses, and anything else you can find. In the end, you can usually figure out why you failed-ice on the pavement, a deer jumping out in front of you, a mechanical failure. But only rarely can you do the same with success. Things often work out simply because it wasn't your time for them not to."
Oddly, Joe thought, he found those words comforting despite their absence of medical vocabulary or cant, perhaps because they so eloquently applied to life in general.
Weisenbeck's pager went off. He glanced at it briefly and began making apologies before Joe cut him off with "Believe me, Doc, I know what it's like. Thanks for your time," and headed down the hallway on his own as the doctor disappeared into a nearby stairwell.
In the ICU waiting room, as if in counterpoint to the conversation he'd just left, he walked in on Gail Zigman and his mother, sitting side by side near the window overlooking the euphemistically called "floor," their heads together in a deep discussion.
They both looked up as he entered, Gail rising.
"Hey, guys," he said, smiling. "Plotting an overthrow?"
Gail gave him a brief hug as he drew near to kiss his mother, who admitted, "Good Lord, no. We were comparing recipes."
"God, don't tell him," Gail protested. "He always hated my cooking."
"I did not," he exclaimed. "I just could never tell what it was." He glanced at his mom. "Tofu-no-fish? Instead of old-fashioned tuna? I mean, give me a break."
"That's an extreme example," Gail said.
"Tofu instead of tuna?" their elderly spectator spoke up, her interest sharpened. "That sounds wonderful. You spread it on bread?"
Joe left them to exchange details and approached the window, where he watched nurses and technicians in gowns and masks working their way among their swathed, recumbent, immobile charges. It was both futuristic fantasy and lunatic ant farm, where those bedded in the white pods were tended and catered to for reasons far outreaching their apparent usefulness.
Of course, one of those pods had a very clear use to him personally, and he found himself staring at Leo's supine shape with the intensity of an aspiring mentalist, wishing he could transfer some of his own life force across the sterile space between them.
"What're you thinking?" Gail's voice said quietly from beside him.
He turned to look at her, surprised by her presence. A glance over his shoulder revealed his mother's absence from the room, as well as how deeply in thought he must have fallen.
"Bathroom trip," Gail explained.
He returned to his viewing and answered her question. "I was trying to figure out how to revive him using ESP, or maybe a ray gun."
"It's weird seeing him like that," she said. "A guy so famous for his energy. You learn anything new? I heard you talking with Weisenbeck outside."
"No," he answered simply. He considered sharing some of the thoughts he'd entertained as a result, but held back, realizing that he didn't have that kind of bond with her anymore-a continuing revelation, which jarred him still, and which, he knew, was inhibiting his taking any great steps forward with Lyn. He and Gail were friends now-old and deeply intertangled friends, to be sure. But they weren't what they'd once been, and he now found a governor restricting the things that he'd never held from her in the past.
As if to cover his own embarrassment, he added, "It boiled down to no news being good news."
"No news is becoming agony, if you ask me," she said softly. She then checked her watch and added, "I better get going."
They both turned as the door opened and his mother rolled in. Gail crossed to her and made her farewell, giving Joe another brief hug, and was gone before they knew it.
And before she noticed that she'd left her cell phone behind.
Joe grabbed it and jogged for the elevator banks, finding nobody there. He mimicked Weisenbeck earlier and headed for the stairs, taking two steps at a time and hoping the elevator had lots of stops.
When he reached the lobby, he saw her in the distance, swinging through the bank of doors to the driveway outside. He broke into a jog that wouldn't also alarm the small army of people milling around him, and reached the doors in under a minute.
From there, he saw her approached by the well-dressed driver of a fancy waiting car, its exhaust plume thick in the cold air, and greeted with a hug and an intimate, almost lingering kiss.
He stopped dead in his tracks, assessing what to do.
In his training as a cop, public and personal safety were the priorities, followed by tactical considerations-level of threat, availability and nature of countermeasures, and on down the line.
Here there was none of that. The adrenaline rush was similar, but the situation was absurdly benign. He stood rooted where he stood, people jostling him to use the doors before him, and tried to unscramble his synapses.
Fortunately, or perhaps not, Gail ended his dilemma by glancing over her shoulder as she broke away from the embrace and began circling the front of the car.
She, too, froze in place, transparently nonplussed.
Lamely he held up the cell phone he still clutched in his hand, and pushed the door open before him, hoping his expression was within a mile of normal.
The car's owner, one foot already inside his vehicle, was arrested by Gail's abrupt immobility and glanced in Joe's direction, giving the latter more purpose.
This was perfectly reasonable, Joe was thinking as he approached-reasonable and logical. Wasn't he seeing someone else? Hadn't he and Gail both moved on?
He smiled as he reached them. "Can't live long without this, I bet," he told her, sticking out his right hand to the man and adding, "Hi. Joe Gunther. Glad to meet you."
Gail had, by now, returned to that side of the car, a black BMW, her face red and pinched as if from a steady blast of cold air. "This is Francis Martin, Joe. He works with Martin, Clarkson, Bryan."