done, and I was overcome with the joy of simply surviving. Thoughts of justice and vengeance were far away.
I looked over at Thorson. The paramedics were working on him, one of them sitting astride him, putting all her weight behind the heart massage, the other holding the oxygen mask in place. Still another zipping his prone body into a pressure suit. Backus knelt next to his fallen agent, holding his hand and rubbing his wrist, yelling, “Breathe, damnit, breathe! Come on, Gordo, breathe!”
But it was not to be. They couldn’t bring poor Thorson back from the dead. They all knew it but no one stopped. They kept working on him and when the stretcher and gurney were brought in through the blasted-out front window and he was loaded aboard, the paramedic took her spot straddled on top of him again. Her elbows locked, her hands locked together and pushing up and down, up and down, on his chest. They were wheeled out like that.
I watched Rachel watch the procession with not sad but distant eyes, then her stare fell from her former husband’s exit to his killer on the floor next to me.
I looked over at Gladden. He had been cuffed and no one was working on him yet. They were going to let him die. Any thoughts of what they might be able to learn from him went out the window when he drove that knife into Thorson’s throat.
I looked at him and thought, in fact, that he already was dead, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. But then his mouth moved and he said something I couldn’t hear. Then his head slowly turned toward me. At first, his eyes held on Rachel. It lasted only a moment but I saw their eyes lock and some kind of communication pass between them. Recognition maybe. Perhaps he remembered her. Then he slowly turned his eyes until he stared directly at me again. I was looking at his eyes when the life ran out of them.
After Rachel walked me out of Data Imaging, I was taken in an ambulance to a hospital called Cedars-Sinai. By the time I arrived, Thorson and Gladden had already been there and had been pronounced dead. In an emergency room suite a doctor looked my hand over, irrigated the wound with something that looked like a piece of black soda straw and then sewed it shut. He put some kind of balm on the burns and then wrapped bandages around the whole thing.
“The burns are nothing,” he said as he wrapped. “Don’t worry about them. But the wound’s going to be tough. On the positive, it’s through and through, no bones involved. But on the negative, the bullet chopped through that tendon there and you’re going to have restricted thumb movement if you leave it the way it is. I can put you in touch with a specialist who can probably reattach the tendon or make a new one for you. With the surgery and some exercise it should be okay.”
“What about typing?”
“Not for a while.”
“No, I mean as exercise.”
“Yeah, maybe. You’ll have to ask your doctor.”
He patted my shoulder and left the room. I was alone for ten minutes, sitting on the examination table, before Backus and Rachel came in. Backus had the washed-out look of a man who has seen all his plans turn to shit.
“How’re you doing, Jack?” he asked.
“I’m okay. I’m sorry about Agent Thorson. It was . . .”
“I know. These things . . .”
Nobody spoke for a few moments. I looked at Rachel and our eyes held each other’s.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah, fine. I won’t be typing for a while but . . . I guess I’m the lucky one. What happened to Coombs?”
“He’s still in shock at what happened but he’s all right.”
I looked at Backus.
“Bob, there was nothing I could do. Something happened. It looked like they suddenly knew who each other was. I don’t know. Why didn’t Thorson go ahead with the plan? Why didn’t he just give him the camera instead of going for his gun?”
“Because he wanted to be the hero,” Rachel said. “He wanted the arrest. Or the kill.”
“Rachel, we don’t know that,” Backus said. “We never will. The one question that can be answered, though, is why did you go in there in the first place, Jack? Why?”
I looked down at my bandaged hand. With my good hand I touched my cheek.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I saw Thorson yawn