do but wait.”
“Dr. Ryan, I’m—”
“My name’s Cathy, Pat. We’re friends, remember?” There was nothing like saving the life of a woman’s child to get on her permanent good side.
“Okay, Cathy. Yeah, I’m scared. It’s not—I mean, Andrea’s a cop, too, but—”
“But being good with a gun or just being tough doesn’t help much right now, does it?”
“Not worth a damn,” Inspector O’Day confirmed quietly. He was about as used to being frightened as he was of flying the Space Shuttle, but potential danger to his wife and/or kid—kids now, maybe—the kind of danger in which he was utterly helpless—well, that was one of the buttons a capricious Fate could push while she laughed.
“The odds are way in your favor,” Cathy told him.
“Yeah, Dr. North said so ... but ...”
“Yeah. And Andrea’s younger than I am.”
O’Day looked down at the floor, feeling like a total fucking wimp. More than once in his life, he’d faced down armed men—criminals with violent pasts—and intimidated them into surrender. Once in his life he’d had to use his Smith & Wesson 1076 automatic in anger, and both times he’d double-tapped the heads of the terrorists, sending them off to Allah—so they’d probably believed—to answer for the murder of the innocent woman. It hadn’t been easy, exactly, but neither had it been all that hard. The endless hours of practice had made it nearly as routine as the working of his service automatic. But this wasn’t danger to himself. He could deal with that. The worst danger, he was just learning, was to those you loved.
“Pat, it’s okay to be scared. John Wayne was just an actor, remember?”
But that was it. The code of manhood to which most Americans subscribed was that of the Duke, and that code did not allow fear. In truth it was about as realistic as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but foolish or not, there it was.
“I’m not used to it.”
Cathy Ryan understood. Most doctors did. When she’d been a straight ophthalmic surgeon, before specializing in lasers, she’d seen the patients and the patients’ families, the former in pain, but trying to be brave, the latter just scared. You tried to repair the problems of one and assuage the fears of the other. Neither task was easy. The one was just skill and professionalism; the other involved showing them that, although this was a horrid emergency which they’d never experienced before, for Cathy Ryan, M.D., FACS, it was just another day at the office. She was the Pro from Dover. She could handle it. SURGEON was blessed with the demeanor that inspired confidence in all she met.
But even that didn’t apply here. Though Madge North was a gifted physician, she was testing for a predetermined condition. Maybe someday it could be fixed—genetic therapy offered that hope, ten years or so down the line—but not today. Madge could merely determine what already was. Madge had great hands, and a good eye, but the rest of it was in God’s hands, and God had already decided one way or the other. It was just a matter of finding out what His decision had been.
“This is when a smoke comes in handy,” the inspector observed, with a grimacing smirk.
“You smoke?”
He shook his head. “Gave it up a long time ago.”
“You should tell Jack.”
The FBI agent looked up. “I didn’t know he smokes.”
“He bums them off his secretary every so often, the wimp,” Cathy told the FBI agent, with almost a laugh. “I’m not supposed to know.”
“That’s very tolerant for a doc.”
“His life’s hard enough, and it’s only a couple a day, and he doesn’t do it around the kids, or Andrea’d have to shoot me for ripping his face off.”
“You know,” O’Day said, looking down again and speaking from the cowboy boots he liked to wear under his blue FBI suit, “if it comes back that it’s a Down’s kid, what the hell do we do then?”
“That’s not an easy choice.”
“Hell, under the law I don’t get a choice. I don’t even have a say in it, do I?”
“No, you don’t.” Cathy didn’t venture that this was an inequity. The law was firm on the point. The woman—in this case, the wife—alone could choose to continue the pregnancy or terminate it. Cathy knew her husband’s views on abortion. Her own views were not quite identical, but she did regard that choice as distasteful. “Pat, why are you borrowing trouble?”
“It’s not under my control.”
Like most men, Cathy saw, Pat O’Day was a control freak. She could