It was night again, so she assumed she must have slept from around 8:00 a.m. for the next twelve hours. Sometimes she thought that with the induced forty-two-day coma and all the other drugged sleep after that, she would never have to sleep again. Staying awake would be the only way to get back all the time she had lost.
Diane looked at herself. There were bruises, but nothing to indicate she had sustained any serious new injuries—no tubes, no wires except for blood pressure and pulse. She felt her body and found no casts, seriously painful spots, stitches, or bandages. She knew from practice where the nurse’s call button would be, so she felt for it and pressed.
In a moment, a nurse arrived in the doorway. She was about forty and looked like an athlete, probably a runner. “Hello, hon. Is everything all right?”
“I don’t know,” Diane said. “What hospital is this?”
“Valley Presbyterian.”
“Do you know who I am?”
The nurse stepped closer. “I hope you do.” Diane could see she was joking, but she waited. “You’re Diane Hines. You were transferred from Cedars early this morning.”
She lifted Diane’s left arm to point to the plastic bracelet. “Are you having trouble remembering things?”
“No,” Diane said.
“I guess you’re checking up on us. We hardly ever mix up names and give anybody the wrong operation—just when things get slow and we need a laugh. Are you feeling all right? Any dizziness, vertigo, or nausea?”
“No,” said Diane. “I was in an explosion and got blown around, but I seem to be getting used to that.”
“Yeah, I saw that in your paperwork. Let me bring you some water.” She glided out of the room on silent rubber shoes.
A moment later she was back with a plastic pitcher of water and a paper cup. She swung the side tray beside Diane’s bed and showed her a smaller paper cup with a pill in it. “Your chart says you can have a sedative if you want it.”
“Can I hold on to it for later if I need it?”
“Sorry, we’re not allowed to do that. Just press your call button and I’ll bring it whenever you want.”
“I won’t. Have I had any visitors?”
“There was a man from the police department who called about the visiting rules around an hour ago. Let me see if I can remember his name.”
“Was it Captain Stahl?”
“That’s the one.”
“What are the rules?”
“If you want to see somebody, visiting hours are twenty-four hours a day. If you don’t, then there are no visitors allowed. You’re under observation, and they’ll keep up your physical therapy, but you’ll probably be out of here tomorrow or the next day.”
“What time is it? After the first explosion they took my watch and phone.”
“It’s almost ten. If you want a phone, there’s one right over here.”
“Thanks.”
“Press the call button if you need me.” The nurse left and closed the door.
Diane remembered being afraid to call Dick from a hospital room, but that seemed like a minor issue now. She dialed Dick’s cell phone number. It was interesting to her that she had remembered those eleven digits so easily. Her hands seemed to do the remembering, even though in the first blowup she had lost the names of close friends, childhood pets, and probably her memory of several college courses her parents had scrimped to pay for.
She was aware that the ringing noise she heard was not the actual sound of his phone ringing, just a ring-like signal to reassure the caller that the system was trying to complete a connection. The ringing stopped. “The party you are calling is unavailable at this time,” said another female voice. The voice was better than Diane’s, a little lower and softer, a mature but sensual voice. It made her jealous for a second; even though it was a recording triggered by a computer with a database of sentences, the words were somebody’s voice. “If you would like to leave a message, wait for the tone.”
“Hello, Captain,” she said. “This is Sergeant Hines. I’ve been moved to Valley Presbyterian hospital. My number here is,” and she read the number off the phone’s sticker and then hung up. She set the phone on the swivel table beside the bed where she could reach for it without spilling her water pitcher.
The door opened and Dick Stahl came in. He was looking at his phone. “Hey, Diane. Did you just call me?”
“About a second ago,” she said.
He stepped up to her bedside, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek—an easy, friendly peck. “What did you want?”
“That, for starters.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Since I woke up I’ve been kind of lonely.” She looked at him. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Likewise. They tell me you didn’t get hurt much worse by the bomb this time. How did you accomplish that?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet,” she said. “I had just left my room and given a big push to the wheels of my chair toward the waiting room, when I felt that hard puff of air hit the back of my head, back, and shoulders. And the noise came, and it was insane, and I was moving fast, and then I was down and things were flying along the hall past me. All this was in the first half second, you know?”
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t see anything we can use, did you?”
“I don’t think so. I never saw the device or any kind of trigger. The area behind the nurses’ station appeared to me to be the most likely location.”
“Did you see who brought the cake and drinks?”
“No,” she said.
“Just for the record, you didn’t have anything to do with arranging that get-together at Cedars, did you?”
“Me?” she said. “No. I thought it must be you. When the nurse told me about it I was a little annoyed. The last thing I would ever have wanted was to have the whole squad come at once. But now I think it must have been the bomber.”
He frowned. “That’s what it looks like.”
She said, “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you, but I had this really disturbing visit from Captain Almanzo yesterday.”
“He told me,” said Stahl.
“Well, it seemed important to tell you about it before anything else happened, and then, when I kept getting calls from the police department, I thought it must be on the same subject—maybe even calling me in to talk about it. I ducked the calls. I told the nurses to make an excuse for me. But it must have been Andy.”
He gently rubbed her arm. “We’ll deal with this if it gets to be a problem. Until then, forget it. They know you survived, so there’s no reason for them to investigate your private life.”
He pulled the lone visitor’s chair beside her bed and they sat together and talked for two hours. Stahl got quieter and quieter until Hines realized he’d dozed off. She said, “Hey, Dick?”
He blinked his eyes. “Hmm?”
“You’re exhausted. Have you even slept since the explosion?”
“I got a couple of hours this morning.”
“Go home and get some sleep. You don’t know what you’ll have to face tomorrow. Please.”
He stood and stretched, then leaned over and gave her a soft, gentle kiss. “See you tomorrow.” He walked out the door and closed it.
When she was alone again she kept thinking about him. The day after the fourteen men were killed and he showed up to take over, she thought he was probably a good, simple guy. By then she had spent a year being trained on military bases and more years working in police stations, and had met a lot of men like him. They seemed to find their way to those places in abnormally large numbers. They were mentally resilient and brave and physical, and not very hard to understand. But later that first day, while she was working with him on the car bomb in the gas station, she started to realize he was more complicated than they had been.