Evidence of Mercy

  Jake shrugged. “Well, a few people. There’s the first officer I fly with sometimes. We had a few drinks the night before while he was laid over. And there was the woman I met in a club that night . . . and some of her friends. . . .”

  “Can you name them?”

  He moaned. “The pilot is Frank Adkins. But as for the others, I can’t even remember the name of the woman I was with. I’m not very good with names. Besides, why would someone who’d just met me want me dead?”

  “You tell us,” Tony said.

  Jake was getting tired of this. “Nobody wants me dead, okay? It was her plane.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re thinking, too,” Tony said. “But we just thought we’d try. If you think of anybody, maybe you could give us a call.”

  “Sure,” Jake said, watching him set his card down on the bedside table. “If I come up with any valets I didn’t tip enough or any gas-station attendants I might have offended, I’ll let you guys know.”

  “And we might call you, if we think of any questions you might be able to answer.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jake assured them. “Look, you find that guy, okay? You find whoever it is and tell him what he did to me. He may not have wanted me dead, but you can sure bet that I’d love to see him dead. And if I ever get the chance—”

  “We have to find him first,” Tony said.

  The door opened, and Abby stuck her head in. “Jake, Lynda was trying to call your room, darlin’, but the phone wasn’t working.”

  Jake glanced at it sitting cracked and lopsided on his table. “What did she want?”

  Abby came in further. “Are you gentlemen from the police department?”

  “Yes,” Larry said.

  “Well, she said to tell you that as soon as you left, one of the guys she put on her list visited her. Gordon somebody. He just left.”

  Tony and Larry looked at each other. “We’d better go,” Tony said.

  “Yeah.” Larry patted Jake’s arm and mumbled, “Take care.”

  Abby followed them out, and Jake watched the door close behind them then let out a labored breath. He wondered if the cops’ questions had frightened Lynda. She was probably scared to death, and he couldn’t really say he blamed her. He wondered if the guy who’d done this to them would really have the guts to show up here.

  She’d given them a list, they’d said. Her paranoia about people she’d insulted, offended, or defeated almost amused him, but it really wasn’t funny. She was struggling to think of people who had reason to be irritated with her since she couldn’t think of anyone who hated her outright.

  On the other hand, there were plenty of people who hated him. Women whose hearts he’d broken, men whose women he’d stolen, people he’d walked on, stepped on, kicked in the teeth—

  Even his own mother.

  He shoved the thought out of his mind.

  Frustrated, he tried to sit up and move his legs, as if he could jump off the bed and run as fast as he could from his own thoughts, but they wouldn’t budge. Finally, he gave up in a sweat and collapsed back into the pillows.

  Why hadn’t he just died?

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe if he just kept his eyes open for an opportunity, he would find a way to do just that.

  If there was a hell for people like him, it couldn’t be any worse than this.

  Lynda saw the vacuous look in Jake’s eye when she came to his room hours later. It was a haunting look, a look that spoke of defeat and self-loathing, that said he would throw the towel in if only he had a towel and knew where to throw it.

  He seemed unwilling to look her in the eye now. She wondered if he were beating himself up for holding her and crying against her yesterday. He was probably surprised she had let him, after the way he had treated her. He had just finished throwing things at her, for pete’s sake, as if doing her further harm could somehow relieve him of his own injuries.

  But Jake Stevens didn’t seem like the type to let anyone see him so unveiled, so vulnerable. And she could tell he didn’t like it.

  “Did you talk to Larry and Tony?” she asked.

  “The cops? Yeah, I talked to them. Did they catch up with the guy who visited you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I never heard.”

  “They seem to know what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll find whoever did this. I just wish I could get out and look for him myself. You don’t know how many times I’ve dreamed of getting my hands around his throat and showing him just what he did to me.”

  The words startled her, but then she realized that she had had the same fantasy. “I just want to know why he did it. What if we had died?”

  She saw the raw pain growing more pronounced on his face. Covering his bandage with his wrist, he lay quietly for a moment. “Funny,” he said finally. “I’ve been more concerned with the consequences of living.”

  He was back, she thought, that man who had been broken, vulnerable, and honest yesterday. Taking a chance, she reached down and touched his hand and moved it away from his face to make him look at her. “What do you mean?”

  When he looked up, she knew the barrier was gone. This was Jake, the man so full of pain that he couldn’t contain his grief or his rage, the man she liked more than the one he often pretended to be. “I mean if I’m paralyzed, I’ll lose my pilot’s license. Even in the best-case scenario—if my legs do start working again—I’ve still lost an eye. Which means I’m out of a job. There’s disability, of course, or I could take a desk job. But TSA has a policy against keeping pilots who are damaged goods. And did I mention the fact that my face has a gash the size of the San Andreas Fault? The Elephant Man didn’t have anything on me.”

  When she couldn’t find the words to take his pain away, she squeezed his hand. And he squeezed back. It was something, she thought.

  Trying to lighten the mood, she said, “No, but what’s really wrong?”

  He shot her a look that said she was crazy, but when he saw the grin in her eyes, he began to laugh softly. “Maybe I just need a hobby,” he said facetiously.

  “Sure,” she teased. “You should take up woodworking or something.”

  “I’m actually thinking about taking up jogging. I hear there’s a great running track on the roof of this building. And if running doesn’t boost your spirits, you can always jump.”

  Her grin faded. “That’s not funny.”

  His smile died as well. “No, it isn’t. Don’t mind me. I’m just fantasizing.”

  “You don’t need to fantasize about suicide, Jake. That’s not the answer.”

  She saw the mist welling in his eye as he looked away. “Then what is? The doctors told me I’ll never take a step again. So tell me what good physical therapy will do me.”

  “None,” she admitted, “if you go into it determined to fail. Besides, I know they’ve told you that there’s a chance you could walk again. I’ve asked them myself.”

  “All right,” Jake conceded. “A slim chance. A next-to-nothing chance. And judging by the way my legs are lying here like limbs on a corpse, I’d say the chances are even slimmer than that.”

  “And what odds would they have given either of us for surviving that crash? Probably none, Jake. And they sure wouldn’t have bet on my being able to go home tomorrow, less than a week after the crash.”

  “They’re letting you out?” he asked, his gears suddenly shifted.

  She wondered at his choice of words. Did he consider this a prison? “Yes. Only because I have someone at home who can help me out.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “A client of mine who needed a place to stay. But my point is that—”

  “Well, if that’s the criteria, I guess I’ll grow old here.”

  She forgot what she was saying, and for a moment, just looked at him. “You’re going to be all right, Jake. And if you need anything—I could go by your hotel room and bring you all your things. Or go to the store for you. I could sneak you in a hambu
rger. . . .”

  Jake looked up at the ceiling, his face expressionless. “Get off it, Lynda. You’re gonna leave here without looking back, just like I’d do.”

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m going to visit you every day.”

  He moved his angry eyes back to her. “Why?”

  “Because, I . . . I want to.”

  He let go of her hand. “I don’t need your pity,” he said as his lips began to tremble. “And I don’t need your visits. We hardly even know each other, and we sure don’t owe each other anything.”

  “Jake, there’s no way I’m going to forget that you’re lying in here. And pity is the last thing I feel for you. I’m not the one moaning about how you’ll never walk again and how you need to get to the roof so you can jump off.”

  “What if I don’t want you to come?”

  “Tough,” she said. “I’m coming, anyway.”

  For a moment, he seemed at a loss for a reply. Finally, he muttered, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Good.”

  There was a thick silence between them as they stared at each other, and finally his eyes softened infinitesimally. He reached for her hand again and held it in front of his face, as if examining it. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to be at home?”

  Instantly her courage deflated, and she felt like a broken, injured, frightened woman again. “I hope so. Mike seems convinced that no one’s after me personally, that it was just some random act, that it could just as easily have been one of the other planes on the tarmac that night.”

  “And what do you think?”

  She sighed. “I think I’ll go along with his theory. I have to go on with my life, after all. And if there is someone after me, maybe having the police snoop around will deter him.”

  “Pretty optimistic, considering what you’ve been through.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” She looked down at their hands, clasped on his chest and felt a surge of warmth that there was someone who cared. “I’ll be okay.” Taking a deep breath, she redirected her thoughts. “Anyway, back to my offer. Do you want me to do anything for you when I get out?”

  He considered that and realized there wasn’t anyone else he could ask. And there were loose ends of his life to be tied up. Loose ends that he’d tried to handle by phone until now. “Yeah,” he admitted finally. “There are a few things you could do once you get on the outside.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  * * *

  The light assaulted Jake with jackhammer force as Allie, his occupational therapist, threw open his drapes the next morning.

  “I like them closed,” he muttered.

  “Don’t be silly. You can’t lie here in the dark all day. You need sunlight to motivate you.”

  “Motivate me to do what? Roll over? I’ve gotten real good at that already.”

  “Nope,” she said. “You’re going to sit up today. We’re gonna get you in a wheelchair if it kills you.”

  “It might,” he said, getting angry. “We’ve only gotten to twenty degrees without me passing out or puking all over the place, remember?”

  “Buzz is bringing a special wheelchair that reclines. We’ll move you up as slowly as we need to. And to help with the circulation, I brought you these TEDS.”

  She held up a pair of stockings, and Jake moaned. “Forget it. I’m not wearing those. There’s got to be a limit to the humiliation.”

  “Oh, yes, you are.” She uncovered his legs and began to work a stocking over one foot. “And then we’re going to wrap the legs tight with Ace bandages. It’ll help you fight the orthostasis, so we can get you sitting up.” As she spoke, she worked the tight stocking up his calf then propped his foot on her shoulder as she pulled it over his knee. “Tonight we’re gonna start you on sequential compression stockings to keep the blood from pooling in your legs while you’re asleep.”

  “If I could kick, I’d send you flying,” he gritted as she got the stocking up his thigh.

  “If you could kick, none of this would be necessary.”

  He lay on his back, miserable, as she fought the other stocking up then began wrapping both legs so tightly that he imagined his face turning red. He was almost glad he couldn’t feel them.

  “I have this theory about Mary Poppins,” he told her through his teeth.

  “Mary Poppins?”

  “Yeah. You remind me of her. I hated her even when I was a kid. I’ve always thought she was a child abuser, leading those kids into all sorts of danger, introducing them to bums and no-accounts, playing with their heads. She was probably an occupational therapist before she was a nanny.”

  Allie looked undaunted. “Well, I did finish Torture 101 at the top of my class.”

  She finished wrapping just as Buzz came in followed by two orderlies, pushing a black monstrosity on two wheels.

  “Hey, Jake,” he said, just as cheerfully as Allie. “You ready to go for a ride?”

  “You people are crazy. If I don’t pass out in the first ten seconds—”

  “When you start feeling faint, we’ll lay you back for a few minutes,” Buzz said. “This chair reclines to whatever angle we need. It’ll be slow going, but we’ve got to get you sitting up before we can get on with serious therapy.”

  There was nothing he could do to stop them, so Jake braced himself as they surrounded his bed.

  “All right now, on the count of three,” Buzz said. “We’re going to lift you carefully into the chair, lying flat. Our goal is just to get into it for a few minutes. Are you ready?”

  Jake couldn’t answer, but it was just as well. At the count of three, they lifted him into the chair.

  Allie was all business now as she adjusted the recline of the chair and moved his foot rests to elevate his feet then carefully positioned them. Then she gave Buzz the signal to begin raising him up. “Easy, easy . . . How do you feel, Jake?”

  He couldn’t find words to describe the agony of dizziness and nausea. Sweat dripping from his chin, he muttered, “Sick.”

  “He’s pale. Let him down,” she said, and they lowered him flat again.

  “Imagine how bad it’ll be when it’s moving,” he whispered.

  “You’ll get over it, Jake. Come on now. Let’s try it again.”

  He groaned as they pulled him back up. “Talk about motivation,” he said, breathing hard. “I’m starting to feel some. I’m wanting real bad to move these feet so I can ram them through your teeth.”

  Buzz suppressed his grin. “Well, we all have to have goals. But if it’s any consolation, I’ve been there. I was in a bad car wreck when I was nineteen, and I had injuries real similar to yours.” He held out his hands, as if he might burst into a shave-and-a-haircut routine. “And look at me now.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not nineteen, and they told me I may never walk again.”

  “They told me that, too, man. But with hard work, I overcame it. That’s why I went into physical therapy. I’m gonna do everything I can for you, too. Trust me. You do what we say, try really hard, and I promise you, if we don’t have you walking within a few months, you’ll at least be able to function within your disability.”

  Jake looked down at the wheelchair beneath him and realized for the first time that he truly was disabled now. He was one of those people he got impatient with in stores because they took up too much room in the aisles and slowed him down. He was one of those people who had to be boarded first on airplanes and needed special attention getting off. He was one of those people he had always looked at with an air of superiority, an air that said, “Sorry you’re disabled, pal, but you’re in my way.”

  Disabled. The word hung in his heart like a fish hook, and that familiar, fighting anger spread through him like an infectious disease.

  “After we get you up higher,” Allie said gently, “I can take you for a ride. You’re probably ready to get out of this room on something besides a gurney, aren’t you?”

  He had seen a Stephen King movie once where a deran
ged nurse had wheeled her victim into walls, down stairs, and dumped him out into a heap on the floor when she was finished with him.

  “No thanks,” he muttered.

  As if in punishment, they began raising him up again until his stomach churned.

  By the time they had worked him up to forty-five degrees, Jake was exhausted.

  “I—I think we damaged something,” he grunted after they moved him back to his bed. “My head feels like it’s about to burst.”

  “That’s normal, Jake. At least now you know that you don’t have to lie on your back all the time. You can sit up, and you can get out of bed. We may get you all the way up tomorrow. And before you know it, we can change you to a lighter-weight chair, and you can get in and out of it by yourself. After that, we may be able to send you home.”

  Home, Jake thought with a sinking heart. Where was that? He’d sold his condo in Houston, and everything he owned was here, except his car, which he couldn’t drive. He didn’t have a job, a place to live, or any friends to speak of.

  And he might as well not have any family.

  As Allie and Buzz left, he dropped his head back on the pillows. Home, he thought. What had once been such a given, such an expected element in his life was now something he didn’t have. He was not only disabled, but he was also homeless. He didn’t even want to think of all the biases he’d once had against homeless people.

  He had no idea where home would be when he was released from here. At least he wouldn’t be released for months and months. But that thought, his greatest comfort, was also his greatest fear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  You didn’t have to come get me,” Lynda told Paige the next morning when she met her in the lobby. “I could have had Sally bring me home.”

  “Well, that would be silly,” Paige said. “Sally has plenty of work to do, and I’m just sitting there in your house.”

  Lynda looked down at the child sitting on the lobby floor, playing with a puzzle. She looked so safe today, so secure. “Paige,” Lynda said with a heavy sigh, “we need to talk.”