The sound of applause. Ethereal. Or the beating of wings. The swirling white lights of angels, and a heavenly chorus rising like a whine. Then, blackness broken by a flickering gray wind and the faces of red pulsing demons all looking down at him. He, the center of attention, the focal point. It was how he’d imagined it might be, all but the strained faces of Hampton, Stubblefield, and Rotem glaring down at him like he’d done something wrong.
“Leave me alone,” he wanted to say. “Let me die in peace.”
If this was death, it felt anything but peaceful.
“He caught the insignia.” It was Rotem, shouting above the roar of the Bell jet helicopter-for that turned out to be the source of the wind and the drumming applause and the flashing red lights. The white spotlights came from the news choppers high overhead.
“Their sharpie caught the insignia on your jacket.” Rotem pointed out the white Fraternal Order of Police insignia on the chest of Larson’s borrowed windbreaker.
“Just as he fired, he jerked,” Hampton shouted. “Took your collarbone and a piece of your shoulder, but left you your heart.”
They had oxygen on him and intravenous in his arms. He tried to speak but could find neither the breath nor the ability to form any words. It was as if he were in someone else’s body and didn’t know the right controls.
The paramedics hoisted him up and passed him off to their colleagues in the helicopter.
“We’re right behind you,” he heard Hampton shout.
Larson felt his stretcher turned and placed down. A flurry of hands in thin plastic gloves rose above him as straps were pulled across him and tightened. If only he’d been able to ask, someone might have been able to answer, and so he tried again, his lips unwilling to cooperate, his brain a tangle of life-after-death and prayer and penance. An incomprehensible moment.
The red and white lights still flashed rhythmically, the only real things convincing him he might indeed be alive. How much a dream? How much wishful thinking?
And then he knew it had to be a dream, for as it turned out, the helicopter was made to carry two, not one. Two stretchers side by side with overhead stainless-steel hooks for the bags of intravenous fluid. There beside him she lay, her eyes open and moving to find his, which absolutely meant she must, too, be alive, or they were both dead and somehow sharing this moment, which wouldn’t have surprised him at all.
He saw on her legs inflated splints, and in her eyes a loving-kindness that confirmed in him this must be heaven, and he didn’t mind a bit.
Finally words did come, or at least he heard himself speak, and he would wonder in the days and weeks and months to come if he’d actually said anything to her. “She has your eyes,” he said.
Her hand twitched, its fingers stretched at the end of an arm bound by nylon straps. It reached for him, for his, and he too pushed with all his strength to move his index finger toward her. Her eyes brimmed with tears, which rolled down her cheeks, clearing tracks through the smudged dirt on her face.
Their fingers did not touch, only wiggled out in space toward each other as the helicopter shook and rattled and thundered as it lifted off. Larson tried to force the snarl of pain into something resembling a smile but didn’t know if it took.