"San Diego Police detective Thomas McMichael is in stable condition tonight at General Hospital, one day after his dramatic fall from the Coronado Bridge. Channel Eight's Manny Alonzo has the story…"
McMichael viewed the television screen with the grateful disbelief of anyone who has given himself up for dead. Manny was standing on the bridge, where the SUV had flipped over. The rain poured down around the edge of his umbrella and the lights of Coronado twinkled in the background.
"Don't turn it off," said Hector. "I want to see the good part again."
McMichael watched through a Vicodin haze, his left leg in a half cast for a broken tibia, his left shoulder relocated, his head shaved and wrapped in gauze and bearing twenty-six staples, his wrists lacerated by the plastic ties and needing fourteen stitches to close. He felt like Frankenstein. His concussion was relatively mild, according to Dr. Miles Fellon, who used this as a basis for jokes about the hardness of McMichael's head.
"… and it was here, on the Coronado Bridge, where the tragic high-speed chase finally ended," said Alonzo. "The sport utility vehicle driven by Patricia Hansen literally flipped over this railing right here, plummeting almost two hundred feet into the icy waters of Glorietta Bay. Hansen, granddaughter of former San Diego mayor Pete Braga, was killed in the fall. Her husband-Shred! executive Garland Hansen- who was a passenger in the car with Detective McMichael, is missing and presumed dead. Now, San Diego Police are still trying to piece together last night's bizarre events…"
McMichael half closed his eyes, half listened to the report.
Gabriel, legs splayed by casts, sat in his wheelchair on one side of the bed. He'd been infernally chatty, jabbering all afternoon how a broken calf bone was nothing compared to the two thighbones that he had to deal with. He said the pain made him feel closer to God but frankly questioned if that was a good thing, nipping regularly from a dark pint bottle he kept under his butt.
Hector sat on the other side of McMichael's bed, leaning forward on his thick forearms to catch himself on the tube again.
"Yeah, look, Mick- here it is."
McMichael drowsily watched the footage from last night: a pale and silent Hector pulling his partner from the black water of the bay. McMichael, bound and barely conscious, looked dead. Hector looked fine. He'd jumped off the bridge when he saw the SUV go over, pausing just long enough to toss his gun, shoes and wallet into the car. He told McMichael later that landing in the bay was like having your balls walloped against a frozen sidewalk.
"… Police are still not saying how- or even if- these events are connected to the brutal murder of Pete Braga just over two weeks ago in his Point Loma home. Many questions here. Manny Alonzo on the Coronado Bridge in the Coronado rain- back to you, Julie."
McMichael watched the pretty anchorwoman lock her blue eyes on the TelePrompTer and frown very slightly.
"I never got to talk to her," Hector noted gravely.
"In a related-"
"I could relate," said Hector.
"Sally Rainwater, the twenty-eight-year-old premed student at-"
"And total babe," said Hector.
"She's the one, son? She looks just like your mother did!"
"- was released from the women's jail in Santee late this afternoon. All charges against her have been dropped- charges that stemmed from the still-unsolved murder of San Diego's Pete Braga. As if this case could get any more complex, Ms. Rainwater and Detective McMichael are believed to have been romantically involved during the early days of the investigation. Ms. Rainwater stayed inside her beachfront Imperial Beach home, and did not speak to reporters."
Gabriel fixed McMichael with a wickedly complicitous smile as he leaned over and worked his bottle back out.
"Send her some flowers, Mick," said Hector. "Tell her you spent the whole morning with lawyers, just for her. Tell her you're sorry. Tell her your whole body hurts and you need a nurse."
McMichael aimed the remote at Hector and turned him off. Then his father. He picked up the phone, sat it on his belly, and called Victor again.
Johnny and Stephanie came later that evening. McMichael could smell the puppy on his boy when he hugged him and he thought it was a wonderful smell. Johnny brought him a picture of the little chocolate Lab, not much bigger than a football, pointed out his good features, stated that Brownie was almost housebroken. Stephanie rolled her eyes and smiled at McMichael with a full-body wince.
They stayed almost an hour. During that time McMichael drifted in and out of pretending that they were a family again. It was so easy: these moments connected directly back with other moments, and the time between them was banished. He remembered coming home after day shift in the summers years ago, cracking a beer and sitting in the little living room with the view of the harbor and the freeway, with Johnny climbing on and off his lap, yapping about the events of the day; remembered Stephanie in her simple sundresses, hair up for the heat, how fresh and content she seemed; he could smell her, even- this bulk-sized body lotion that to McMichael was better than any perfume; he remembered the neighbor's radio and the jets lowering toward Lindbergh and the bedroom where their nights ended and their days began.
"We have to go, Johnny," said Steffy. She reached her face toward McMichael hesitantly, like a pecking bird, kissed him on the third try, then backed away with tears in her eyes. Johnny looked at her with an uncomprehending expression.
Then the chief, ADA Gerald Dale again, Barbara Givens and Mark Hatter, a couple of the old Metro/Vice faces, even Andrea Robb from Internal Affairs. Then Hector, on his way to the Gaslamp to "cash in" on his fifteen minutes.
Dr. Fellon came by just after dinner and told McMichael he wanted to keep him overnight "to be on the safe side." If the swelling in McMichael's head went down and he was feeling capable, he could go home in the morning.
"Turned out to be Patricia's prints on the gloves," Hector said, lowering McMichael into the passenger seat and sliding the crutches into the back.
It was Saturday morning and the rain had turned to showers. McMichael watched Hector roll the wheelchair back to the hospital entrance and tried to digest what he had just been told, tried to imagine Patricia swinging the bloody club, over and over, again and again. What possible unappreciation could account for that?
Hector plunked into the driver's seat.
"That doesn't make sense to me," McMichael said.
"And they found Garland half an hour ago, washed up dead on the navy beach."
"That does."
They made it halfway to McMichael's apartment without talking.
"Mitzi Bland is going to make it," said Hector. "That's what the doctor said. See? Good news. I'm trying to cheer you up."
McMichael spent a few hours on the phone, then hobbled around his apartment on crutches, getting the hang of them. For the first time in his life he was glad his place was small. The worst part was the throbbing down in his left calf, the deep-down ache of broken bone. And his wrists hurt, too, with the pressure of his weight and the cuts of the plastic fasteners that had sliced into him. A little blood had seeped up through the dressings. But even with all this nagging him, he couldn't get Patricia out of his mind. Like a brain thorn, only bigger, he thought. A brain tree. A brain forest.
Raegan came for lunch and stayed almost all afternoon. She brought food and flowers and one of her best cigars, which McMichael fingered and smelled but didn't light. She straightened and dusted and sorted the mail and talked about this guy she'd met at Libertad a couple of nights back: funny and good-looking and she liked his eyes and the way he talked. He was from Wichita Falls, Texas, just brought up by the Padres from AAA, a ninety-two-mile-an-hour fastball. McMichael told her to step out of the box if she needed more time. She wasn't sure of the baseball metaphor but left him with a big pot of stew on the stove and a vivid lipstick smudge, he saw later, on his cheek.
When Raegan was gone he finally mustered the courage to call Sally Rainwater. No longer in service and no new number.
He spent the evening and early night in his bed, head and cast resting on pillows. The rain had slowed to light showers and the wind was slapping the palm fronds against the windows.
He kept thinking about Patricia's penchant for destruction. There was the thrill of it. For as far back as he could remember Patricia had been the one to flaunt the rules. Openly. Proudly. Happily. Maybe it was like any other exciting thing: you needed more and more to get the same feeling. Drinkers. Dopers. Speed freaks. Adrenaline junkies. Thrill seekers. It takes you over. There was always something of the show-off in it, too: look at me, me, me. She had always thought of herself as larger than life, better than the rest. In some ways she really was. He wondered if the bottom of it was self-hatred. If the destruction of things was just a long warm-up for destroying herself. But maybe it was simpler. Maybe she wanted to go out like her mom and dad had, join them somehow. Or maybe there was just a kink in her wiring, some faulty relay that might have shown up on a PET scan as a small red ember where there should have been an ocean of cool blue. Maybe you had to put all the conjecture together and stir it to know why a bright and beautiful woman would do what she had done. Maybe you could never know.
Many years ago he saw in Patricia what he thought was lacking in himself: spirit and passion and the courage to take a chance. Gabriel had proved to him long before how one mistake can ruin you and those you love. What a towering lesson that was. So McMichael had pulled for Patricia to prove the opposite: that you can turn mistakes to your advantage, outrun the consequences if you have to, do what you want and let the world sort it out. Even as roadkill he still wanted her to pull it off. It worked for her, for a while. It worked a while for most of the guys he sent to prison, too.
He closed his eyes and listened to the wind and fell asleep with the image of Patricia's smiling face still luminous in his mind.