The Vigilantes (Badge of Honor) - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,96

going to die from his burns or suffer a long recovery and never be the same again.”

Matt nodded.

“But Becca,” she went on, “nonetheless is feeling responsible, saying they wouldn’t have been there if Skipper hadn’t wanted to make her happy with some of those goddamned drugs. To get past this damned survivor’s guilt, I sent her to Amy.”

“That’s interesting,” Matt said. “Amy never mentioned she was now Becca’s shrink.”

“She’s a doctor, sweetie. Just because she’s your sister doesn’t mean she’s going to tell you and break the physician-patient confidentiality.”

He shrugged.

Amanda said, “There can be a variant of survivor’s guilt among doctors. They get a guilty feeling that they didn’t do enough to save a patient. Luckily, I’ve never had it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it. And I know that those who do have it need to look at the glass as being half full, not half empty, confident in their skills that they did the right thing.”

I’ve had a few of those myself, Matt thought.

It wasn’t that long ago that I held Susan Reynolds in my arms as her very life poured out from that bullet hole in her head.

And I loved her like I love Amanda.

Right down to the roadside cottage with the picket fence.

I endlessly questioned if I could’ve done anything different to save her from that madman of a killer.

And, bottom line, the answer was I couldn’t.

Still, finally realizing that didn’t ease the pain of loss.

He took a sip of Scotch as he glanced at Amanda.

Am I about to lose Amanda . . . ?

Amanda was saying: “I also understand that sometimes things play out the way they do no matter what anyone does. In fact, in some cases we probably prolong the inevitable by taking the heroic measures. Which was why someone in a wise moment came up with DNRs.”

“Do Not Resuscitate orders,” Matt said.

She nodded.

He sipped his drink again and tried to understand where she was going with this.

Maybe it’s her body clock ticking. The abduction was a real wake-up call for her sense of mortality.

And maybe that’s some manifestation of survivor’s guilt—in part because she lived while that young teen Honduran girl, after being forced into prostitution, died a brutal death.

Then she said: “Two months ago, Matt, I went to Hawaii for an M and M.”

I know she can’t mean candy.

“It’s a conference doctors attend,” she went on, as if reading his mind, “Morbidity and Mortality.”

This is about mortality!

He said, “I heard those conferences are really just an excuse to write off trips to fancy places, like Hawaii, so you can play and take a business deduction.”

“The idea of M and Ms is peer review. We look at how others cared for patients and how it could have been done better. Particularly cases in which a mistake was made and the patient died. Being head of the burn unit, I tend to be the one doing the reviewing. It’s not exactly a pleasant task. No one likes to be told they screwed up, but we do want to do right by our patients—First do no harm—and the peer review, while sometimes painful, does help. You learn to modify behavior. And avoid repeating mistakes.”

She looked at him a long moment.

“Matt, I don’t like repeating mistakes. I can’t.”

“Of course not. I understand. There’re lives at stake.”

“Yes, there are. Ours.”

What?

She said: “We’re at a critical time in our lives. I feel we’ve both been given second chances, and I want us to get this next one right.”

“Oh.”

“I had a long talk with my father.”

Matt had met Charley Law only once, but had heard stories about him from Jason Washington, who’d known Law during his twenty years with the department in Northeast Detectives. Washington had said that her old man always had been full of commonsense gems, that he’d been a good cop because he could quickly strip away the bullshit and cut right to the chase.

Law had been off duty when he took a bullet to the hip. He’d walked in on a robbery of a gas station on Frankford Avenue. Returning fire, he’d shot the critter dead then and there—and wound up being offered disability and retirement. And he’d taken it, saying he was glad to get the hell out, if only to get past all the lame jokes about his name—“Well, well, here comes The Law.”

When Matt had first tried dating Amanda—right before the abduction—she had made it damn perfectly clear what a toll her father’s job had taken on their family.