I felt myself rising from my chair and walking toward the bed, and her eyes followed me. I couldn’t breathe, and my vision was clouding with the pent emotion of what seemed like a lifetime. I had never seen eyes as beautiful as the ones I was looking into now.
I reached out and took her hand with my battered, finger-guarded paw. “How long have you known?”
He smiled and shook his head at my ignorance. “Just now.”
I was standing there looking at him when I thought I felt a mild pressure in my hand that a man without hope would have perceived as a reflex action. I turned and looked at Cady, and her eyes stayed steady with mine. I gently squeezed her hand in return and, once again, ever so gently, she squeezed back. I kneeled down by the bed, the tears stinging. “I see you. I see you, and I felt that just now…” I stayed with those eyes, staying with them just as sure as I held onto her hand. “Don’t you go away. Don’t you ever go away again.”
She didn’t nod or even move, but I knew she could hear me and understand. I squeezed her hand again, but she didn’t squeeze back this time, and that was okay. She was probably tired, and we had a long way to go.
It was Dr. Rissman’s day off. Another surgeon from the floor below said that it was a cognitive effect that denoted a reactive concept but not necessarily one of perceptivity. He started to give me the reactivity/perceptivity routine, but I refused delivery and told him “The Greatest Legal Mind of Our Time” was on its way back, so get ready.
The narrow rays of hope I’d been nurturing cracked across the ICU like the sound of Henry’s hands, and I sat at the side of Cady’s bed for the next hour and forty-three minutes until her eyes closed again.
They wanted to run more tests, and I was the thing that was holding them up. I didn’t want to let go and wanted to be there when her eyes opened again, but one of Henry’s thunderclap hands rested on my shoulder, and I felt the tug of home from two mountain ranges away.
I brushed the sleeve of my shirt across my face, smearing the residue of sentiment and careful to avoid the parts that were freshly stitched. I laughed.
“What is it?”
I tried stretching my shoulders without pulling at my beat-up, Raggedy Andy head. “I was just thinking that if my face was the first thing I saw when I came to, I might go back to sleep myself.”
I looked to see if she would respond when he dragged my hand away, but she didn’t. Like Sleeping Beauty, she was enchanted again, and all I could do was wait.
It was a beautiful day, and the warmth of the sun felt good on my back. Henry had picked the Vietnamese stir-fry place near the university for an early lunch, and the food was actually pretty good. The guy had almost dropped his spatula when the Indian ordered in Vietnamese. Since it was a Saturday and the students were otherwise engaged, we occupied one of the picnic tables; my two regular pigeons hopped over and stood beside my boots. I motioned with my plastic spork. “Mutt, Jeff, meet Henry Standing Bear.”
Henry nodded at the two freeloaders. “Ha-ho, Mutt and Jeff.” Mutt cocked his head at the baritone Cheyenne, but Jeff kept his beady eyes on my fried rice.
I looked toward the facade of Franklin Field and thought about what had happened today. I thought about the chain of violence and death that had been at least momentarily reversed. I thought about acts of kindness and acts of risk that were due a reward.
Henry ate his shrimp with rice and looked at me but didn’t say anything. He took a sip of his green tea and studied me with the steady, dark eyes. “What do you think they will find at the medicine man statue?”
I took a deep breath, and it seemed like my ribs didn’t hurt as badly. “Now that I’ve had time to think about it, nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I think William White Eyes was going to be there.” I put my paper plate on the ground so that Mutt and Jeff could get a shot at some rice. “He’s not going to show for Philadelphia’s finest, but he will for us.”
He sat the cup down. “This is not over then, is it?”
“He saved Cady.” He didn’t reply. “You and I both know that if she hadn’t gotten medical attention as quickly as she did, she’d be dead.” It felt good having some idea of what I was going to do. “He exposed himself, not once, but a bunch of times to make sure that we were okay.” I used the finger guard to scratch at the stitches at my jaw. “That’s just not something I can walk away from.”
“Toy Diaz?”
“Has to be. The way I see it, Devon Conliffe tried to put pressure on Cady about the laundering scheme, but when she didn’t bite, he was going to turn state’s evidence on Osgood. Either Osgood or Diaz got antsy and decided to have Shankar DuVall toss Devon off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, but then Billy Carlisle became a loose cannon, and everybody decided they couldn’t trust anybody.”
“You do not think that Shankar DuVall was there at the Academy to kill you?”
“No. It might have been what Diaz told Osgood, or what Osgood planned with him, but I think Diaz had decided that Assistant DA Vince ‘Oz’ Osgood was not the type to go down with the ship. Besides, DuVall told me himself that he hadn’t planned to kill me.” I sipped my iced tea. “Now, the only one left with any of the answers is Billy Carlisle, aka William White Eyes.”
“So you think it is our responsibility to keep him alive?”
“It’s mine.”
“Then it is ours.”
Our attention was drawn to a sassy brunette who was attempting to walk an oversized dog into the lobby of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Henry stuck both fingers in his mouth and whistled with a piercing note that rattled the surrounding windowpanes.
Vic stopped arguing with the security guard, flipped him off, and crossed 34th without looking. Mutt and Jeff scattered in the presence of Dog as Vic sat next to me and took my iced tea. She sat very close. “So, you got any other great ideas?”
“Nothing?”
She held a few ice cubes in her mouth. “Nothing.”
“Where are the cops?”
“There was a possible Toy sighting up in Germantown, where a competitor in the highly volatile commerce of grass-root pharmaceutical distribution came down with a critical case of NFP.” We continued to look at her. “No fucking pulse.”
“Did this competitor fall off a bridge?”
“No bridges big enough in Germantown.” She shook her head and continued crunching the ice between her teeth. “Somebody ran over him with a car. Twice.”
Henry and I looked at each other, and then I looked back at Vic. “I want to go up to the Medicine Man and have a look for myself, or have William White Eyes have a look at us.” I remembered Lena’s invitation as I looked at her. “Your mother and father invited us over for dinner.”
Vic choked, picked up the cup again, and began eating more ice. “Yeah, tell ’em I’ll pencil ’em in.”
Henry watched her for a few moments. “They say chewing ice is a sign of sexual frustration.”
Vic slipped her hand on my knee under the table, and I almost jumped off the bench. She continued chewing. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Four hooves down means that the individual died in battle.”
I looked at the four bronze horse hooves planted firmly in the granite base. “I thought died in battle was one hoof lifted.”
Vic held Dog and input her two cents. “What are two hooves lifted?”
I glanced down at the description in the book. “You mean rearing?”
“Yeah.”
I looked around. “Fell off his horse during battle?”
The sloping lawn of this part of Fairmount Park was at odds with the sordid squalor across Ridge Avenue. The row houses on the block were falling apart from the neglect, and the only retail establishment was an after-hours club in what looked to have been a restaurant.
I turned back to the statue and read from the book. “‘Cyrus E. Dallin, 1861-1944.’ He was from Utah.” The Bear moved a little closer to the statue but seemed distracted and looked at an area to the southwest. “‘Famed Native American scholar Francis LaFlesche described the nudity of the holy man typifying the utter helplessness of man in comparison to the strength of the Great Spirit, whose power is symbolized by the horns upon the head of the priest.’”