shot than he’d had before, more lines in his face. He’d always thought that stories of hair turning gray overnight was an old wives’ tale, but he was no longer sure of that.
* * *
—
THE LAST THING he remembered, before waking up in the hospital, wearing a respirator mask and with an arm full of intravenous needles, was the ambulance attendant shouting for the driver to go faster. He’d been taken to a Level 2 trauma center at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena and had spent eleven days there. Bob and Rae arrived a few minutes after he did. His adopted daughter, Letty, a student at Stanford University, had arrived at the hospital at noon, and Weather in the late afternoon.
When Letty walked in, she put both fists on her hips and said, “You better get well. I’m not putting up with some blanket-covered invalid shit.” He heard her say that, then dropped into a drug-induced hole, remembering it when he came back up.
A doc told Weather that Lucas had apparently been hit by a full metal jacket round, which left a cleaner wound than a jacketed hollow-point would have. Rae confirmed that a day later, after the shooting site had been worked over, saying, “One of the SWAT guys said some of the hard-core assholes use full metal jackets because they think they’ll punch through vest plates.”
And that was what Weather talked about. The technical stuff. She cried occasionally, looking at him, even when he was smiling at her, and the rest of the time she went all technical with the docs, looking at videos of the MRIs and other electronic probes and talking SWAT tactics with Rae and how it should have been done.
Lucas’s back muscles now contained tiny bone splinters that would always be there; a surgeon would do more damage taking them out than if they were left alone. He also had a carbon fiber patch over the hole in his shoulder blade, held in place with screws, to stabilize the bone, which had cracks radiating from the bullet hole. The cracks would eventually heal, but the patch would remain.
Letty had said, three days after the shooting, “You’ve actually got a hole in your back. I mean, like a hole. I could stick my thumb into it.”
“Don’t do that,” Lucas said. “It already hurts a lot.”
By June, with the help of the skin grafts, the hole was gone.
* * *
—
NAST AND A MAN named Randy Vincent had been killed in the raid. Nast had been firing the full-auto .223 that had taken Lucas down. Nast had been riddled with bullets—he’d probably been hit three or four times before he fired the last burst that hit Lucas, and maybe ten times afterward. Vincent, who’d been firing a 9mm pistol, had been hit once in the eye and killed. He was the man who owned the car registered to Jacob Barber.
The fourth man, who owned the BMW and was the one seen at the breakfast place by Bob, was identified by his fingerprints as John Rogers Cole, who’d done seven years in prison in Nebraska for robbing a credit union.
He’d gotten a heavier than normal sentence because a pre-sentencing investigation by the Nebraska authorities suggested that he’d probably done at least eight other credit unions in Nebraska and in Kansas. He showed one other arrest in Omaha, when he was eighteen, for peeping. That charge had been nol-prossed and he walked. The file didn’t say whether the charge had been sexual or likely the prelude to a burglary.
“We should have done more research,” Rae said. She and Bob were sitting next to Lucas’s bed, two days after the fight. “These guys had been living there for three years. We thought it was strange that they’d all be in there like a dormitory. They weren’t.”
“They weren’t?” Lucas’s voice sounded like a rusty gate.
Bob shook his head. “Nope. They also owned the house behind the one we were watching and they’d planted a double hedge between the two. You couldn’t see it, and we didn’t see it until we’d been there for an hour and had been all over the yard. The two hedges ran parallel to each other, two feet apart, at the edge of the backyard, up a slope to the house behind. You could go from one house to the other without ever being seen. They set it up that way in case there was trouble at one house, they could make it to the other.”