Read Online Winter Moon by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online Page B

bankrupt a good friend like Mae,” Heather said, and the boy’s giggle was sweet music.

    To be sure she didn’t interfere with the nurses, Heather leaned against the wall beside the door that led out of the ICU. She could see Jack’s cubicle from there. His door was closed, privacy curtains drawn at the big observation windows.
    The air in the ICU smelled of various antiseptics. She ought to have been used to those astringent and metallic odors by now. Instead, they became increasingly noxious and left a bitter taste as well.
    When at last the doctors stepped out of Jack’s cubicle and walked toward her, they were smiling, but she had the disquieting feeling they had bad news. Their smiles ended at the corners of their mouths; in their eyes was something worse than sorrow—perhaps pity.
    Dr. Walter Delaney was in his fifties and would have been perfect as the wise father in a television sitcom in the early sixties. Brown hair going to gray at the temples. A handsome if soft-featured face. He radiated quiet authority, yet was as relaxed and mellow as Ozzie Nelson or Robert Young.
    “You okay, Heather?” Delaney asked.
    She nodded. “I’m holding up.”
    “How’s Toby?”
    “Kids are resilient. He’ll be all right as long as he can see his dad in a couple of days.”
    Delaney sighed and wiped one hand down his face. “Jesus, I hate this world we’ve made.” Heather had never before seen him angry. “When I was a kid, people didn’t shoot each other on the street every day. We had respect for police, we knew they stood between us and the barbarians. When did it all change?”
    Neither Heather nor Procnow had an answer to that.
    Delaney said, “Seems like I just turned around, and I’m living in a sewer, a madhouse. The world’s crawling with people who don’t respect anyone or anything, but we’re supposed to respect
them,
have compassion for the killers because they’ve been so poorly treated by life.” He sighed again and shook his head. “Sorry. This is the day I donate time to the children’s hospital, and we have two little kids in there who were caught in the middle of gang shootings—one of them three years old, the other six. Babies, for God’s sake. Now Jack.”
    “I don’t know if you’ve heard the latest news,” Emil Procnow said, “but the man who shot up the service station this morning was carrying cocaine and PCP in his pockets. If he was using both drugs simultaneously…well, that’s psycho soup for sure.”
    “Like nuking your own brain, for God’s sake,” Delaney said disgustedly.
    Heather knew they were genuinely frustrated and angry, but she also suspected they were delaying the bad news. To the surgeon, she said, “He came through without brain damage. You were worried about that, but he came through.”
    “He’s not aphasic,” Procnow said. “He can speak, read, spell, do basic math in his head. Mental faculties appear intact.”
    “Which means there’s not likely to be any brain-related physical incapacity, either,” Walter Delaney said, “but it’ll be at least a day or two before we can be sure of that.”
    Emil Procnow ran one slender hand through his curly black hair. “He’s coming through this really well, Mrs. McGarvey. He really is.”
    “But?” she said.
    The physicians glanced at each other.
    “Right now,” Delaney said, “there’s paralysis in both legs.”
    “From the waist down,” Procnow said.
    “Upper body?” she asked.
    “That’s fine,” Delaney assured her. “Full function.”
    “In the morning,” Procnow said, “we’ll look again for a spinal fracture. If we find it, then we make up a plaster bed, line it with felt, immobilize Jack from below the neck all the way past the filum terminale, below the buttocks, and put his legs in traction.”
    “But he’ll walk again?”
    “Almost certainly.”
    She looked from Procnow to Delaney to Procnow again, waiting for the rest of it, and then she said, “That’s all?”
    The