The Pain Scale (37 page)

After Johnny and Bruce—who are always in heavy rotation because I have so much of their music in my collection—the shuffle surprised me with Tom Waits’s “House Where Nobody Lives.” I hit the
R
EPEAT
button and let it play four or five times. It was the perfect song for wallowing.

I waited for the meds to kick in and the progression of the pain to slow and hopefully even back up a bit. It didn’t.

A few minutes after one, I took another pill and forced myself to sit down at the dining room table and watch a video of Bailey and Jacob. That didn’t work, either.

I thought about calling Jen, but on the off chance that she’d managed to find any rest at the hospital, I didn’t want to disturb her. She’d said she’d let me know if there was any news, and I had no doubt that she would.

After I moved on from Tom, Arcade Fire tried to cheer me up with “Antichrist Television Blues.” That didn’t work, either.

I turned the iPod off and picked up the banjo. Five minutes of random finger picking did nothing.

The pain was still as strong as it had been all night. The third Vicodin hadn’t dulled it, but it had left me feeling off center and mildly nauseous.

It seemed that I stood in the kitchen for a very long time looking at the Grey Goose on the counter, but, in reality, I doubt that I took more than a minute to reach for the bottle.

My cell phone seemed much louder than usual when it woke me. The morning sun was bright through the living-room window, and I was slumped uncomfortably over the arm of the sofa.

It was Jen’s ringtone.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

I waited for her.

“They say he’s not getting any worse.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Not as good as him waking up.”

“That’s true. Did you sleep at all?”

“A little. They let me crash on a cot in one of their break rooms. You in the squad?”

“Not yet. Still at home.”

“Were you sleeping?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit. Sorry I woke you up. I just figured...” Her voice trailed off.

She didn’t need to finish. It was 7:40. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept so late. Then I wondered if I should think of the unconsciousness I’d just experienced as sleep. It didn’t seem like a good precedent to set.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m on the way in right now. Once I have updates on everything, I’ll head over there. Want me to bring you a change of clothes?”

“If you wouldn’t mind staying for a little while, maybe I’ll take a break.”

“Sure thing.”

“Good news,” Ben said.

“Tell me.” I’d stopped to check in with him on the way up to the squad. I flipped open the top of the pink box and offered him a donut.

He looked inside. “Four vanilla crullers?”

“Yeah.”

“Why no chocolate?”

“There’s a chocolate bar and two cake.”

“But no chocolate crullers?”

“No. Sorry. Have a vanilla.”

His face screwed up into what looked like a very uncomfortable expression. “I’ll just have a glazed. Wouldn’t want to short anybody.”

“Please.” I raised the box toward him. He took one.

“That’s good,” he said.

“So what’s the news?”

“The video recordings.”

“Go on.”

“It doesn’t look like Detective Glenn was worried about anybody finding the equipment.”

“Then why the whole closed-circuit thing?”

“He
was
worried about somebody picking up the signal. Hacking in. Getting a free show.”

“Okay.” He could see I wasn’t following.

“What that means is I didn’t have to figure out his security. I was able to bypass it and just remove the hard drives and access them with our equipment here.”

“That’s great. What did you find?”

“Nothing yet. He had six cameras and enough space for four or five days’ worth of recording. Going to have to scan it all manually.”

“How long?”

“A few hours, I’ll have everything that matters ready for you to look at.”

Jen checked in with the doctor one more time before she agreed to let me take over her watch.

“He said Patrick’s doing a bit better. The pressure in his head is going down. That’s a good sign.” She didn’t sound convinced, though. “I’m just going to get cleaned up and change; then I’ll be back, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe just lie down for a few minutes, too.”

“Maybe.”

When she hugged me, I pulled her head into my shoulder and let her rest it there for a long time.

After she left, I checked in with the nurse on duty and told her I was there for Patrick. She told me the doctor would be checking on him before too long and they’d let me know if there were any changes in his condition.

I sat down in the waiting room and got out my Kindle. The only things I had on it that I hadn’t read were
The Passage
, a postapocalyptic vampire book, and
Room
, a novel narrated by a five-year-old who had never set foot outside the storage in which he and his kidnapped mother were held hostage. Both were on a bunch of the end-of-the-year best book lists. While I was trying to decide which one to start on, my memory got the best of me and I started thinking about Jen holding vigil here for Patrick. It had been almost fourteen months since she’d done the same for me.

Seeing her waiting had made me think of that experience, but I shoved it down in the back of my mind. I didn’t want to think about it. And I didn’t want to think about how hard it must have been for her. It was only just beginning to dawn on me that I’d been so caught up in my own pain and recovery that I hadn’t really given much thought to her. At least not about how she must have struggled. And I hadn’t given much consideration to her partnership with Patrick. I’d never thought of it as more than temporary, a transitory relationship that wouldn’t amount to anything of significance in the long run. But every month I was out on leave, every time the next surgery didn’t quite go as far as we’d hoped, every extension of my medical leave—four months to six, to nine, to thirteen—had been another step for them.

At what point, I wondered, did it start to feel like a long-term thing rather than a transitory, just-until-Danny-gets-back-on-his-feet deal?

Jen and I had four years together before I went out on leave. That was a long partnership. Sure, Marty and Dave had us beat by quite a stretch, but that was at least in part because the lieutenant was old-school and liked what he got from teams who really had the opportunity to get to know one another well and learn each other’s moves and manners. How much of that had Jen and Patrick been able to do?

Was I stepping in the middle of that? Did Jen resent it? Did Patrick? I had assumed that I’d walk right back into the job at exactly the place I’d been forced to leave it. Was I wrong to think I could do that? Was it even possible?

Before I knew it, I was simmering in a swill of guilt and jealousy.

Self indulgently, I tried to remember to blame my self-indulgence for Patrick being here.

When I finally turned on the Kindle, I went for
The Passage
because I like postapocalyptic stuff even more than I hate vampires.

Jen came back a few hours later, but the world still hadn’t ended. It was a long book.

“You can take off,” she said. She looked rested and as if she’d gotten a second wind and hoisted the weight she carried into a more manageable position.

“You talk to Marty and Dave?”

“Yeah.”

“Seem like they’re on top of things?”

She nodded.

“How about if I stay a while?”

The next morning, the doctor gave us an update. The pressure appeared to be back to normal levels and the swelling had gone down considerably. He was out of danger. “We’ll need to wait and see if there are any lingering effects.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well, traumatic brain injury can have a number of ramifications,” he said. “Memory loss, impaired function, primarily things like that. Because he was unconscious for more than six hours, the chances are greater that there will be some lasting consequences.”

“Lasting?” I said, aware that Jen didn’t want to ask the hard question. “You mean permanent?”

“It’s possible.”

“Thanks.”

He went back to doing whatever he’d been doing, and I wondered how many people he’d have to give bad news to today. I thought about how hard it is to tell a person that someone they love is dead. At least he gets to give people good news once in a while.

“What do you think?” I said. “Want to go back to the station with me, or stay here?”

“You think Ben’s got the video ready?”

“He said a couple of hours. It’s been more than three.”

“You mind going?”

“Not a bit.”

“Run it again, would you?” I said to Ben.

He did, and I watched a man in jeans, a dark jacket, and a ski mask with a dark object in his extended hands move quickly across the loft toward Patrick, who appeared to be completely absorbed in his work at one of his computers. It was a wide-angle shot that distorted the field of view, particularly around the edges. When the man was about fifteen feet away, Patrick either heard the intruder or was drawn to the motion, because he stood up, turned toward the intruder, and reached for his holstered pistol. The man stopped and fired the Taser in his hands. Patrick’s body tensed in the distinctive convulsion caused by electroshock weapons and then collapsed. His head recoiled and snapped backward as it impacted the edge of his desk. The intruder closed the distance between them, dragged Patrick out from behind his desk and tables, and bound and gagged him. When he finished with that, he went to work on the computers.