Read Online Winter Moon by Dean Koontz - Free Book Online

line, which was probably inserted in a vein on the back of his hand, disappeared under the cuff.
        Hesitantly she touched his cheek. He looked cold but felt feverish.
        Eventually she said, "I'm here, babe."
        He gave no sign he had heard her. His eyes didn't move under their lids. His gray lips remained slightly parted.
        "Dr. Procnow says everything's looking good," she told him. "You're going to come out of this just fine. Together we can handle this, no sweat. Hell, two years ago, when my folks came to stay with us for a week? Now, that was a disaster and an ordeal, my mother whining nonstop for seven days, my dad drunk and moody. This is just a bee.sting by comparison, don't you think?"
        No response.
        "I'm here," she said. "I'll stay here. I'm not going anywhere. You and me, okay?"
        On the screen of the cardiac monitor, a moving line of bright green light displayed the jagged and critical patterns of atrial and ventricular activity, which proceeded without a single disruptive blip, weak but steady. If Jack had heard what she'd said, his heart did not respond to her words.
        A straight-backed chair stood in one corner. She moved it next to the bed. She watched him through the gaps in the railing.
        Visitors in the I.C.U were limited to ten minutes every two hours, so as not to exhaust patients and interfere with the nurses.
        However, the head nurse of the unit, Maria Alicante, was the daughter of a policeman. She gave Heather a dispensation from the rules. "You stay with him as long as you want," Maria said. "Thank God, nothing like this ever happened to my dad. We always expected it would, but it never did. Of course, he retired a few years ago, just as everything started getting even crazier out there."
        Every hour or so, Heather left the I.C.U to spend a few minutes with the members of the support group in the lounge. The faces kept changing, but there were never fewer than three, as many as six or seven, male and female officers in uniform, plainclothes detectives.
        Other cops' wives stopped by too. Each of them hugged her. At one moment or another, each of them was on the verge of tears. They were sincerely sympathetic, shared the anguish. But Heather knew that every last one of them was glad it had been Jack and not her husband who'd taken the call at Arkadian's service station.
        Heather didn't blame them for that. She'd have sold her soul to have Jack change places with any of their husbands-and would have visited them in an equally sincere spirit of sorrow and sympathy.
        The Department was a closely knit community, especially in this age of social dissolution, but every community was formed of smaller units, of families with shared experiences, mutual needs, similar values and hopes. Regardless of how tightly woven the fabric of the community, each family first protected and cherished its own. Without the intense and all-excluding love of wife for husband, husband for wife, parents for children, and children for parents, there would be no compassion for people in the larger community beyond the home.
        In the I.C.U cubicle with Jack, she relived their life together in memory, from their first date, to the night Toby had been born, to breakfast this morning.
        More than twelve years. But it seemed so short a span. Sometimes she put her head against the bed railing and spoke to him, recalling a special moment, reminding him of how much laughter they had shared, how.much joy.
        Shortly before five o'clock, she was jolted from her memories by the sudden awareness that something had changed.
        Alarmed, she got up and leaned over the bed to see if Jack was still breathing. Then she realized he must be all right, because the cardiac monitor showed no change in the rhythms of his heart.
        What had changed was the sound of the rain. It was gone. The storm had ended.
        She stared