Chapter 49
I SAT UP all night on a couch outside the surgical facility. Mo-bot joined me around one, Sci an hour later.
Del Rio had gone under the knife at eleven p.m., two hours before I got to the hospital after a short visit to Sanders’s Beverly Hills offices, where a simple e-mail message from a blind source declared, “The children will be released tomorrow. Time to be determined. We contact. Justice has been served. They are innocents.”
As hour upon hour ticked by on the clock with no word from the doctors trying to treat Del Rio’s burns and back, I felt unable to think or talk about the Harlows, or No Prisoners, or Tommy, or Carmine Noccia, for that matter. For the first time in a long time, probably since my mother’s death, I prayed, confessing my belief that I had caused Bud Rankin’s death as surely as No Prisoners had. I was also the reason my best friend was five hours into surgery, and now six. I begged God for mercy, for Rankin’s soul, for Del Rio’s spine.
I didn’t know whom to contact about Rankin. The man had no family and was a real loner. I vowed, however, to honor his passing in some way.
Overriding those thoughts was the fact that I’d always considered Del Rio virtually indestructible—a force fused to me in battle, a fellow marine, a blood brother who would never desert me, a man whom I would never desert. As dawn broke over Los Angeles, the idea of that man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life nearly broke my heart.
I sipped a coffee Sci had gotten me and gazed up, numb, at the television blaring coverage of the bombing and the deaths on the Huntington Beach Pier. The media had much of the story now and was blaring every aspect except, it seemed, Private’s involvement. The mayor was even shown admitting that the explosion had taken place during a phony drop of—
“Jack?” Justine said, shaking me from the screen.
Cruz was there too, but I could only look at her. She looked exhausted. Her right forearm was wrapped in bandages. Her lower face was slightly swollen. And yet she was beautiful as always. But I could see that something had been taken from her in Mexico, or cracked in her in Mexico, and that only served to bewilder me more.
A tiny woman in surgical scrubs exited the operating room. She introduced herself as Dr. Phyllis Oates, chief neurosurgeon at the medical center.
“Who is Mr. Del Rio’s next of kin?” she asked.
I swallowed hard, instantly feared the worst, and said, “I’m closest.”
For a moment, Dr. Oates just looked at me, and I felt like I was being pushed over a cliff. Then the surgeon managed a tired smile and put her hand on my arm. “I wanted you to know what a lucky, lucky man Mr. Del Rio is. By all rights, he should have been paralyzed from the waist down, but the lineman’s belt and the wet suit held the broken vertebrae in place, prevented them from severing his spinal cord. There’s considerable swelling, and it might take several months, but I believe he’ll walk again. And run.”
I looked at Justine, and Sci, and Mo-Bot and Cruz, and we all began to cry and hug. I don’t remember being happier or more grateful in my entire life.