“What is it, Barb?”
“He only pushed me after I ran into the street! He pushed me out of the way! I think he might have saved my life, and I’m glad.” She’s crying hard now, but Hodges doesn’t believe for a minute it’s because of her broken leg. “I don’t want to die, after all. I don’t know what was wrong with me!”
“We really have to get her in an exam room, Chief,” the paramedic says. “She needs an X-ray.”
“Don’t let them do anything to that boy!” Barbara calls as the ambo guys roll her through the double doors. “He’s tall! He’s got green eyes and a goatee! He goes to Todhunter—”
She’s gone, the doors clapping back and forth behind her.
Hodges walks outside, where he can use his cell phone without being scolded, and calls Tanya back. “I don’t know where you are, but slow down and don’t run any red lights getting here. They just took her in, and she’s wide awake. She has a broken leg.”
“That’s all? Thank God! What about internal injuries?”
“That’s for the doctors to say, but she was pretty lively. I think maybe the truck just grazed her.”
“I need to call Jerome. I’m sure I scared the hell out of him. And Jim needs to know.”
“Call them when you get here. For now, get off your phone.”
“You can call them, Bill.”
“No, Tanya, I can’t. I have to call someone else.”
He stands there, breathing out plumes of white vapor, the tips of his ears going numb. He doesn’t want the someone else to be Pete, because Pete is a tad pissed at him right now, and that goes double for Izzy Jaynes. He thinks about his other choices, but there’s only one: Cassandra Sheen. He partnered up with her several times when Pete was on vacation, and on one occasion when Pete took six weeks of unexplained personal time. That was shortly after Pete’s divorce, and Hodges surmised he was in a spin-dry center, but never asked and Pete never volunteered the information.
He doesn’t have Cassie’s cell number, so he calls Detective Division and asks to be connected, hoping she’s not in the field. He’s in luck. After less than ten seconds of McGruff the Crime Dog, she’s in his ear.
“Is this Cassie Sheen, the Botox Queen?”
“Billy Hodges, you old whore! I thought you were dead!”
Soon enough, Cassie, he thinks.
“I’d love to bullshit with you, hon, but I need a favor. They haven’t closed the Strike Avenue station yet, have they?”
“Nope. It’s on the docket for next year, though. Which makes perfect sense. Crime in Lowtown? What crime, right?”
“Yeah, safest part of the city. They may have a kid in for booking, and if my information is right, he deserves a medal instead.”
“Got a name?”
“No, but I know what he looks like. Tall, green eyes, goatee.” He replays what Barbara said and adds, “He could be wearing a Todhunter High jacket. The arresting officers probably have him for pushing a girl in front of a truck. He actually pushed her out of the way, so she only got clipped instead of mashed.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“Yeah.” This isn’t quite the truth, but he believes Barbara. “Find out his name and ask the cops to hold him, okay? I want to talk to him.”
“I think I can do that.”
“Thanks, Cassie. I owe you one.”
He ends the call and looks at his watch. If he means to talk to the Todhunter kid and still keep his appointment with Norma, time is too tight to be messing around with the city bus service.
One thing Barbara said keeps replaying in his mind: I don’t want to die, after all. I don’t know what was wrong with me!
He calls Holly.
15
She’s standing outside the 7-Eleven near the office, holding a pack of Winstons in one hand and plucking at the cellophane with the other. She hasn’t had a cigarette in almost five months, a new record, and she doesn’t want to start again now, but what she saw on Bill’s computer has torn a hole in the middle of a life she has spent the last five years mending. Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.
Just as she begins to pull the strip on the cellophane, her phone rings. She drops the Winstons into her purse and fishes it out. It’s him.