Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(51)
He called Del, who said, “I’m at Regions, I can’t talk to a doc, they’re all working on her. Anyway, she’s alive. The EMTs who brought her in said she was still unconscious when they got here. I found a friend of my wife’s, got her to snoop around.” Del’s wife, a nurse at Regions, wasn’t on duty when Weather was brought in. “Weather was bleeding from some head cuts, but they don’t think she’s got a fractured skull, which is good. But she does have a collapsed lung and a broken arm. They’re gonna run her through an MRI when they think they’ve stabilized her enough. They haven’t had to give her blood yet, which is also good I guess . . . That’s what I’ve got so far.”
“I’m on my way to the airport,” Lucas said. “What do we have on the other driver?”
“Don’t know anything yet about the driver. I’m calling my friends in St. Paul; I know they’ve got every patrol cop in the city searching the neighborhoods for him. They told me that the guy ran the stop sign on Randolph and T-boned her in that convertible of hers. That’s all I know so far, but I’m doing my best to stay on top of things. When you get on your plane, call me and tell me when you’ll get in—I’ll meet you at Humphrey.”
* * *
—
LETTY CALLED BACK as Lucas’s cab was approaching Dulles. “I’m on a red-eye out of SFO at ten, going through Denver. It’s the only flight I could get. I’ll rent a car when I get to Minneapolis. See you early in the morning. How’s Mom?”
Lucas told her what Del had given him, and then they were at the airport. She said, “Dad, take care.”
* * *
—
THE SMALL BUSINESS JET had two pilots, no cabin attendant. The pilot said, “We’re told your wife was in an accident; sorry to hear it. We’ll get you there in a hurry.”
Lucas nodded, strapped in, and they were gone.
Lucas had seen movies in which people made phone calls from flying jets, but he wasn’t able to get through on his cell. Two hours after they left Dulles, the jet put down at the Humphrey terminal at Minneapolis–St. Paul International, and Del was waiting.
“How much do you know?” Del asked, after Lucas had stumbled down the steps to the tarmac.
“Only what you told me—I couldn’t get through on my phone when we were in the air.”
“She’s alive. She sort of recovered consciousness . . .”
“What the hell does that mean?” Lucas demanded. “Sorta?”
“She’s got some short circuiting. The docs say that’s not unusual with concussions. She’s got a broken arm. Her lung collapsed when something . . . I dunno what, maybe a rib . . . punctured it, but the lung’s been re-inflated. She has more cracked ribs, she’s got major bruising, and she’s probably got a soft injury in her neck tissue, although all her arms and legs and fingers and toes are moving. She’s gonna make it, but she’s gonna hurt for a few weeks. Or months.”
Lucas felt the boulder lift from his shoulders. “I gotta call Letty,” he said. “She should be in Denver by now.”
“I gotta tell you about the driver.”
“They got him?”
“Sorta.”
“Del, goddamnit.”
“He’s dead. He’d just gotten out of Lino Lakes on a fifth DWI. The last one, he managed to cross the centerline and hurt a couple of people,” Del said. “He did a year in the treatment facility. I guess he wasn’t completely treated because he’s only been out for a month.”
Lucas had nothing to say to that, except, “Wouldn’t you fuckin’ know it.”
* * *
—
THE TWO OF THEM walked into Regions at two o’clock in the morning. Weather was in the intensive care unit, where guests were discouraged, but given Lucas’s history and the fact that Weather was a doc, they’d pulled two chairs behind the ICU curtains around her bed.
When Lucas stepped behind the curtain, he wanted to stop and cry. Weather’s eyes were open, but her face was horribly bruised, purple over the entire left side. Her neck was encased in a brace, her left arm in a fiber cast. Two bags of solution were hanging from a drip stand, with tubes snaking down to her arm; another emerged from beneath the bed covering, emptying urine into a bag hanging on the side of the bed.
Lucas had been in an ICU himself as a patient on a couple of occasions and had learned to hate the odor, which he could have identified anytime, anywhere: a mixture of the coppery smell of blood, raw meat, urine, several kinds of disinfectant, and what he thought might be iodine, a stink he remembered from his rough-and-tumble childhood.
He sat, leaned toward Weather, took her free hand, and muttered, “I’m here.” He got no acknowledging squeeze, but her eyes moved toward him, and she said, through sandpapery lips, “Was I in an accident?”
A nurse behind Lucas whispered, “She keeps asking that.”
Lucas said to Weather, “Yes, but you’ll be fine. The docs say you’re doing great.”
Weather closed her eyes and seemed to drift away. Lucas sat holding her hand, and, a few minutes later, her eyes opened again, turned fractionally, and she again asked, “Was I in an accident?”