Devoted(74)

“Shoot him dead, just like that? Department rules—”

“Your life is more important than your career, Deputy. Shoot him dead, and I’ll do my best to ensure you aren’t disciplined too severely.”

Fenton thought about that. “I wish Sheriff Sheldrake was still sheriff.”

“Stay awake, stay sharp.”

“The head nurse, she brings me coffee.”

“You have to leave your post to use the bathroom.”

“I’m quick about it,” Fenton assured him. “Not that I don’t take time to wash my hands. I wash them, all right.”



“When you go to the bathroom, don’t first look through the view window in the door here. He might figure it’s a check before you step away.”

“You’re spooking me a little, Doc.”

Carson said, “Good.”





80



No. His name is Kipp.

Those words brought to full life in Megan something that she hadn’t realized was dormant: an exhilarating sense of possibilities that perhaps had shut down with the death of Jason. The precious sound of her child’s voice—sweet, mellifluous—awakened in her a hope that she’d put to bed in a deep chamber of her mind, with no expectation of returning to it. Eleven years of waiting, eleven long years of coming to accept that the waiting would be for nothing—and now those five simple words.

Beside her, at the foot of the bed, Ben Hawkins said, “What’s wrong? You’re shaking.” And then he remembered what she’d told him as they worked together in the foyer. “He’s never spoken.”

Her heart knocked no less forcefully now than when Lee Shacket crouched beside the bed, thumb and forefinger positioned to blind Woody, but this time it was the ardent pulse not of fear and anger, but of gladness and astonishment. And more than astonishment: Awe gripped her, a sense of the miraculous and transcendent, so that suddenly she was as mute as Woody had been before.



She found herself moving around to the side of the bed until she was standing over the boy, his back to her. She dared to put a hand on his shoulder, as tentatively as if her touch might turn him to dust.

Neither Woody nor Kipp moved, still engaged in whatever strange communion had conveyed to the boy the retriever’s name and had freed his tongue to share that knowledge with Megan and Ben.

The boy, the dog, the bed, the room blurred and melted warmly down her face. Even when she wished that Jason had been there to hear his son’s voice for the first time, the fabric of the moment included not one thread of sadness.

Over the years, when she had wondered what Woody’s voice might sound like if ever he spoke, she’d sometimes thought his enunciation might be unfortunate, distorted. He had spent his life listening to the speech of others, but he’d had no practice at it—as far as she knew. However, though these five words of his shook her and moved her more than she could ever explain, far out of proportion to the information they conveyed, he sounded as natural as any child his age.

She recalled the moment, earlier in the night, when Woody had been murmuring in his sleep and, turning away from his bed, she had thought she heard him say Dorothy, though they knew no one by that name. She had assumed that she’d misheard. Now she suspected that in fact he’d spoken the name. With her hand on his shoulder, eager to hear him speak again, she said, “Honey, who is Dorothy?”

The dog’s tail thumped three times against the mattress, and from Woody issued words that were musical to his mother. “Dorothy was his human mom. She raised him from a puppy. She died yesterday of cancer, and Kipp loved her more than anything, anything, the way I love you more than anything. Don’t ever die, don’t ever, it’s too terrible for those you leave behind.”



All her life, Megan had been strong. Fate could throw no punch that would knock her down and keep her down. Life was a racing river of many currents, yet all the undertows and raging rapids were not merely survivable but were also experiences that made her still stronger. She should not have been surprised, therefore, when it wasn’t a mortal threat that unraveled her heart, but instead Woody’s declaration of love, against which she had no—nor wanted any—defense, after waiting to hear those words for eleven years. Her legs abruptly grew so weak that she couldn’t stand, and the trickle of tears became a quiet flood. She sat on the edge of the bed and told him she loved him, too, loved him desperately, and although Woody said nothing more just yet, Kipp slapped his glorious plume of a tail three times against the mattress.





81



Kipp and Woody were eye to eye but also mind to mind, as they could be only on the Wire.

Their connection was private. They sent, and they received, but only between each other.



Kipp offered the boy the world as he experienced it.

Here I have been, this I have seen, these people I have met, this I conclude from all of that.

He revealed what he treasured, what he feared, all he knew.

The boy knew much the same, though less of many things, but also otherwise, and he, too, shared.

Kipp knew—and Woody Bookman knew but now came to understand in mind and heart and soul—that simplicity in human affairs was the way of truth, and complexity the way of deceit.

That envy and coveting were poisons from which arose the lust for power and all evil.