Cavanaugh Judgment (18 page)

“Yeah, but I don’t know how long he’d been like this,” Blake repeated, worried.

“It wasn’t all night,” she assured him. “When I was getting my things together to go downstairs, I heard your father moving around in the next bedroom. That had to be some time between one and two.”

Blake glanced at his watch as he continued working over his father. “It’s six now. What if he’s been like this for the past five hours?” he asked. “What if he—”

Greer laid a gentling hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she advised sympathetically. Looking at the man on the floor, she thought she saw a slight movement. Greer rallied around it. Slight was better than nothing.

“Look,” she pointed out excitedly. “Your father’s trying to open his eyes. His eyelashes just fluttered, I’m sure of it!”

Sitting back on his heels, Blake sighed with relief. He’d thought he’d only imagined it. Wishful thinking. But if Greer saw it, too, they couldn’t both be hallucinating.

“Thank God,” Blake ground out.

There was no masking his pleasure that his father appeared to be coming around and that, with a little bit of luck, was going to be okay. For one awful second, when he’d walked into the room after not receiving any answer to his knock, he’d thought the older man was dead.

The first thing that occurred to him was that Munro had somehow found out his address.

What if the drug dealer had somehow gained access into the house and had killed his father first? He would have never forgiven himself.

But to his relief, a quick check around his father’s body showed no blood. There’d been no attack. Immediately something else suggested itself to him. And if that was true, it wasn’t exactly a cause for celebration, either. The words
heart attack
loomed over him with twelve-feet high letters.

Blake knew that his grandfather—his father’s father—had died of a heart attack at a relatively young age. Gunny had bragged the other day about already outliving his father. Under normal circumstances, he gave no credence to superstitions, but he didn’t believe in thumbing his nose at fate, either.

In the background, the sound of an approaching siren began to register, growing stronger by the second. They’d be here soon, he thought.

“Dad?” Blake cried. He leaned over his father’s body, his lips close to the man’s ear. “Dad, can you hear me?”

Lips that felt as dry as dust came together in an attempt to form words. When he finally managed, they came out in a whisper.

On her knees on the other side of Blake’s father, Greer leaned in to hear what he was trying to tell them. His voice was too low.

“Could you repeat that, Gunny?” Greer asked, her voice deliberately loud.

“Not…deaf…” Gunny told her, his breath just barely sustaining him. He was obviously referring to the fact that his son was fairly shouting when he addressed him.

Shaking his head, Blake blew out a breath. “He’s still an ornery old man,” he observed. “That’s a good sign.”

“A very good sign,” she agreed, patting his shoulder firmly. Getting up, she moved toward the doorway. “I’ll go downstairs and let the paramedics in,” she told Blake just before she left.

Blake wasn’t sure if he said that was a good idea or if he’d only thought it without actually telling her that. His attention was completely focused on his father’s ashen face. And on keeping him alive. “You hang in there, old man. Help’s on its way.”

“Don’t…need…help…just…need…to…rest,” Gunny gasped out the words as if each was being wrenched out of him with rusty pliers.

“If you don’t want to be resting permanently, old man, you’ll accept help,” Blake all but ordered him tersely. “I’m not ready to lose you yet, understand?”

“Why? You…got…a…cute…replacement…waiting…in…the…wings,” his father said, laboring over each word.

Oh, no, he wasn’t about to admit to anything right now. And definitely not to his father. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad.”

He would have smirked if he could have. But he was almost too weak to even draw a single breath. Still, this might be the last conversation he was going to have with his son.

“Saw…her…coming…out…of…your…room…this…morning.” Alexander began coughing. “You
really
don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad. You’re hallucinating,” Blake told him. Now wasn’t the time to get into this. Once his father was better—and once he knew if what was between the long-legged detective and him had a future,
then
there was time enough to talk about things. Right now, the only thing that mattered was that his father recovered. “Save your breath for something important—like breathing,” he ordered.

The next minute, two paramedics came hurrying in. One of them was bringing a gurney. They collapsed it so that it was beside his father.

Rising, Blake moved out of their way, but not so far that he couldn’t observe every move that the paramedics made.

“He’s going to be all right,” Greer told him, her voice confident and firm. For just a second, she rested her hand on his shoulder in mute reassurance.

Blake placed his own hand over hers, as if that could somehow transfuse some of her faith into him. As an unmanageable fear gripped his stomach, Blake only wished he could believe her. But he had always been, first and foremost, a realist and realists knew that everything could change in less than a heartbeat. It had already happened to him once.

Was it happening again?

Chapter 14

“S
ee, I told you he’d be all right,” Greer couldn’t resist reminding Blake cheerfully.

It was a little more than twelve hours later and they were finally driving home again. Twelve hours earlier, Blake had ridden in the ambulance with his father and she had followed directly behind them in her car. Thinking ahead, she wanted to ensure that they would have a way home once things settled down.

Once she got a prognosis from the E.R. doctor, Greer contacted the precinct, placing calls to her captain, the chief and Jeff to bring them up to speed on this latest development and to assure all of them that, aside from being worried, the judge was just fine.

Once the danger had passed, they had left his father, alert and complaining, in the coronary care unit on the first floor of Aurora Memorial, the same hospital whose fundraiser they had just attended the night before.

It was a small world, Greer remembered thinking when she’d arrived there and parked her vehicle in the E.R. lot. The world got even smaller when one of the cardiologists who had been at that function and had engaged them in conversation during the evening turned out to be the doctor who was on call this morning. The physician wound up treating Blake’s father.

Blake was not impressed with her prediction coming true. Mainly because it hadn’t actually
been
a prediction. “You only said that because that’s what people say to make other people feel better in dire times.”

“No,” she contradicted, easing down on the brake as she approached a red light, “I said that because I really felt your father was going to be all right. Gunny’s strong as an ox and, for the most part, he eats rather healthy.”

“For the past three weeks,” he agreed, then told her, “That’s all on you. Until you started cooking, takeout was all either one of us had had for the past couple of years. In my father’s case, probably a lot longer.”

She’d thought the takeout thing was just a temporary aberration. To think of two grown, capable men having nothing else but whatever food they could have brought to their door was mind-boggling. “Seriously?”

Blake laughed shortly. “Seriously. You’ve made changes in his life. In our lives,” he amended, then abruptly stopped. Maybe he’d said too much. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to make these kinds of admissions yet.

“Nice to know,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. Foot on the accelerator again, she switched lanes to move faster than the beige Cadillac in front of them. “Your father should be fine and back on his feet in a couple of days.”

That was the projection the doctor had made, as well, but Blake wasn’t buying into it wholeheartedly. “If that’s the case, why wouldn’t they let me take my father home again? Why are they keeping him in CCU?”

She knew the answer to that. “They’re just following standard procedure. Everyone experiencing ‘an episode,’” she told him, referring to the heart attack his father’d had in the neutral terms that doctors used, “is kept in CCU for twenty-four hours because the doctors want to observe the patient, make sure nothing else is going on that could prove fatal.”

It sounded to him as if Greer knew what she was talking about. “I take it you’ve been through this before?”

She nodded grimly. “One of the detectives in the squad, a guy by the name of Ray Walker.” She always felt a story sounded more real and personal if the people in it had names. “The man should have retired long ago except that he had nothing to retire to except four walls and silence. So he managed to convince the chief to let him stay a little while longer. Well, one day he tried to chase down a perp over half his age and had one of those ‘episodes.’ Luckily, the ambulance attendants rushed him to this hospital.”

She’d gotten him curious. “This Detective Walker, he still working at the precinct?”

Greer shook her head. “With such a recent history of heart trouble, the brass
made
him retire. They didn’t want to hear any excuses.”

He knew of former judges, devoid of any hobbies to hold their interest, who just seemed to fade away once they retired. Their lives seemingly without purpose, they died less than a year after they left the bench. In one case, it was more like two months.

“How did this detective handle his retirement?”

Greer smiled then. “Not too badly—I gave him one of Hussy’s puppies so that he’d have something warm and loving licking his face each morning when he woke up.” She’d visited Walker just before landing this assignment. Master and dog were doing just fine. Nothing could have pleased her more. “Seems to have worked out well for everyone.”

Nodding, Blake put his own spin on the story. “So you moonlight as a terminal do-gooder?”

She’d never cared for the term “do-gooder” but she wasn’t averse to the actual act. “Hey, life’s hard enough as it is. No reason we can’t make it a little more bearable for the people we interact with if we can.”

Margaret would have liked this woman, he couldn’t help thinking. They would have probably become good friends. The thought made him relax a little and allow his guard to slip again.

He thought of the past few weeks and said, “Well, you certainly made it more bearable for my father.” And then, because that wasn’t all, he lowered his voice and added, “And for me.”

There it went again, she suddenly realized. Her pulse was accelerating just because the man had lowered his voice. Hearing it had made her imagination take off and she found herself thinking about last night. About every glorious second of lovemaking that had taken place between them.

She couldn’t keep doing this to herself, Greer thought fiercely. She
knew
this wasn’t the kind of thing that had a prayer of lasting. It was too overwhelming, too hot. And things that were too hot never remained that way. They cooled, returning to normal.

This was all happening because she and Blake were in an artificial setting which amounted to a highly volatile life-and-death situation. Once the threat, the urgency, was gone and life leveled off, so would his reaction to her. The level of passion and excitement that had exploded between them wasn’t the kind of thing that had a long shelf life. It was evaluated in terms of days, not months or years. She
knew
that.

So why did she find herself praying that this could be the one exception?

For now, she had to stop torturing herself and put it out of her mind. She might be an optimist, but she’d stopped believing in Santa Claus a long time ago and believing that this relationship had a shot at outliving the dramatic set of circumstances they found themselves came under that heading.

They were here, at his development, and she wasn’t a hundred percent sure how they’d gotten here. She needed to keep tighter control over her thoughts.

As they drove onto Kincannon’s street, she saw that there were parked cars all up and down both sides of the block, spilling out onto the next one. She heard the music and the noise of loud voices trying to talk over one another coming from the house next door to Blake’s.

This can’t be good.

Greer slowed her own vehicle down as she passed by the squad car where the two patrolmen charged with the task of watching the judge’s house were parked.

“What’s going on?” Blake asked them before Greer had a chance to.

“Someone in the house next to yours is having a birthday party, Your Honor,” the officer behind the steering wheel told him. “There was a delivery truck here earlier. Never saw so many balloons in my life.”

“The cake was huge, too,” the second policeman put in with enthusiasm. “Made you hungry just looking at it.”

The first man gave him an annoyed look for interrupting. “Everything makes you hungry.” He turned back to face Blake. “People started arriving about the same time. Want one of us to talk to them about keeping the noise level down?” It was obvious that he was dying to do just that.

Greer glanced toward Blake, leaving the matter up to him. He shook his head.

“It’s not so bad. Maybe they’ll wear themselves out and wind down.” Blake glanced at the clock in the dashboard. “Besides, it’s only eight o’clock.” Although disturbing the peace wasn’t attached to any particular time, most people didn’t register complaints about noise levels until after eleven. He saw no reason to do any differently.

The first patrolman looked slightly embarrassed. “When it’s dark like this, I keep thinking it’s later. How’s your father, sir?”

“Doctor said he’s going to be just fine. Thanks for asking,” Blake replied.

Both officers smiled at the news. “Glad to hear that, sir,” the more heavyset one said.

He wanted to get inside, to unwind and relax. With Greer. Blake nodded at the two patrolmen. “Well, good night, Officers.”