The waiter asked in broken English if they wanted beer. They declined and sat quietly, flushed with the sting of mustard and the heat of the open grill.
Tim replayed his last conversation with Dray on the phone: The captain needs someone to pick up a few overtime parole hours… I'll take 'em if it'll be a late one for you.
It will, he'd replied, sealing her fate.
"If I hadn't slowed them down," Tim said quietly, not lifting his eyes from his plate, "Dray wouldn't have pulled them over. They would've been fifteen minutes farther up the road. Den would've had his helmet on."
"It's not your fault."
"I didn't say it was. I'm saying chance is fucked."
Bear's eyebrow rose at the anger in Tim's voice.
"It would be great if I felt guilty. But I don't. I'm pissed off at her. Everyone keeps telling me I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing. You don't take down five outlaw bikers on a deserted road without backup." His voice was wobbling, and Bear looked on, horrified and starting to mist up himself. "She fucked up."
"Maybe she thought-"
"There's no 'maybe,' Bear. You know it, and I know it. She should've gotten her ass back to the squad car. It was just Dray being stubborn. What'd she say? 'I'm not going without taking you in'? What kind of cowboy bullshit is that?" He took a moment to be unabashedly furious with Dray, a solo, pregnant deputy failing to retreat from a lethal biker gang. He swore quietly, used the napkin to dry his face.
"Okay," Bear conceded. "It looks like an error in judgment. A bad one. Maybe she was more emotional. She is pregnant."
You gonna cuff him upside the head, or should I?
Tim felt a faint grin tense his lips, catching him off guard.
Bear furrowed his forehead. "What?"
"Being pregnant wouldn't have affected her judgment. You know Dray."
"Which means she had a reason." Bear met Tim's eyes evenly. "Something we're missing."
"You're right," Tim finally said.
Bear rose and threw down a few bills. They exited through the split fabric of the sign amid a chorus of Japanese farewells. Tim found the CD in the glove box, twirled it between his thumbs. The shooting of his wife preserved on 700 megabytes.
Bear looked from the CD to Tim's thoughtful face. "You thinking of calling him?"
"Yep." Tim pulled out his phone, dialed a mobile number.
The familiar voice answered. Tim explained his predicament.
"Sure, I'll look at the footage, but that's it. I don't go operational. I know how things got last time you took something personal-people getting their heads blown apart and shit. So remember: I don't fight. I don't shoot."
"It's not like that," Tim said. "I'm doing this on Service time."
"So why are you calling me?"
"Because you're the best."
No argument there. A pause. "Meet you in two hours."
"Where?"
But Pete Krindon had already hung up.
Chapter 19
Mac sat nervously in a vinyl-upholstered chair by the door, his tousled hair and two-day stubble roughing out his appealing features. He stood at Tim and Bear's approach, hefting his gear-heavy belt and throwing a sigh that smelled of Clorets. As Dray's partner he was sometimes territorial; that he nursed a long-standing and hopeless crush on her didn't help ease tensions between him and Tim. Tim took a moment to smooth down his annoyance at the sight of this man sitting sentry outside his wife's room.
"Any change?" Tim asked.
Mac shook his head. "Nurse is with her now. But they're only letting in family."
Tim pushed on the doorknob. When Mac went to follow, Bear laid a thick hand on his shoulder.
"Can't I come in with you, Rack?"
"I'd rather be alone with her."
"Look, can I just-?"
"Not right now."
Sleeplessness and grief had left Mac looking loose and a touch unpredictable. He appeared to be working up a retort, but Tim slid past him into the room.
A nurse leaned over Dray, her arms moving industriously. Thumb on one lid, then the other, click-click of a pen flashlight. Over her shoulder: "Hello, Mr. Rackley."
Tim sank into the bedside chair. "Hi. Have we met?"
She turned, showing off her name tag, her jet-black hair twirled around a pen. "The night Andrea came in. We spoke a few times."
Beige liquid coursed up a clear plastic tube through Dray's nose and into her body. Her finger swelled into a pulse-oximeter. The cardiac monitor blipped deadeningly.
The nurse made a fist out of Dray's pliant hand and slid two fingers in. "Now, squeeze my fingers, Andrea. Go on and squeeze."
"She's Dray," Tim said, "unless you're mad at her."
The nurse smiled and tried again, using her nickname. She looked up and gave Tim a little head shake before jotting on a clipboard. When she finished, she used a moistened washcloth to wipe an iodine stain from Dray's forehead.
He worked up the courage to ask the question. "How's it look?"
"The doctor will be in to talk to you in a second."
Tim's vision went a little glassy. "I see." As the nurse walked past, he took her arm gently. "Thank you. For cleaning her face."
The doctor entered a moment later and greeted Tim warmly.
"No surgery," Tim said.
"That's the good news. The pellet is wedged against her rib cage at the back of the chest in the serratus anterior. It's not bothering anyone back there, so we're gonna leave it in her."
"What's the bad news?"
"The longer she stays unconscious…"
"Yeah?"
"The odds diminish."
"Of what?"
"Of her coming back. Or coming back easily. But it's not even been twenty-four hours. It's early yet."
"The baby?"
"By all indications the baby's healthy. Of course, this is a fragile situation. Do you know the sex?"
Tim shook his head.
"Do you want to?"
"No. We wanted to wait."
"Okay." The doctor paused at the door. "I'm sorry for what I said when you came in. When I talked about myself. I made some assumptions, and, frankly, my timing sucked. Husbands losing wives is a tough one for me. I'm sorry I didn't use better judgment."
"Believe me, I've used worse." Tim offered his hand, and the doctor took it. "I'm glad she's in your hands."
"I'll take care of her."
"Please."
The door clicked, leaving him with the headache beep of the monitor and the white noise of unseen moving parts. Dray's hair remained dark at the tips from dried sweat. Tim rested a hand on the mound of her stomach. His thoughts took him to the waiting crib in their nursery, and he remembered his first three weeks home with Ginny when C-section complications had left Dray hospital-bound. He tried to envision those three weeks of solo parenting stretched into eighteen years, and then he pictured not even having that option.
The thrill of their honeymoon, a four-day weekend in Yosemite he'd squeezed between deployments, had been heightened by his impending departure. The orange glow of moonlight filtered through tent nylon. Dray's form emerging from the flannel sheath of a sleeping bag. The muscles in her tapered back, arranged like river stones beneath her smooth skin. Her face smudged up against her shoulder so her cheek grew chins. A fall of lank hair split over her left eye. Tim tended hot-the exertion had overheated him-and he was sitting Indian style at her side, fingertip-tracing the dip between her shoulder blades.