During that time Shepherd left her room only once a day, for an hour, to go home, shower, shave, and change his clothes.
The doctors did what they could. They injected Ginnie with massive doses of methylprednisolone to minimize the swelling that could choke the blood vessels near her spine. They gave her morphine when her legs spasmed. They ordered soft-tissue massages to prevent the loss of muscle tone in her legs, and antibiotics to ward off infection.
Even so, after ten days they knew enough to tell Roy Shepherd that his wife was unlikely ever to walk again. Having suffered a complete transection of her spinal cord, she had neither feeling nor voluntary movement below the waist.
Shepherd remembered the blank stretch of time that followed his conversation with the doctors. Numb, disoriented, he walked blindly out of the hospital and stood on a walkway near a stand of palo verde trees. He blinked at the sun. He tried to think.
Then he saw a hummingbird alight briefly on a green branch before launching itself in hectic motion.
It flew so fast, with such ease, darting from bush to bush in search of nectar, wings strobing in the sun.
Ginnie had been like that once. Always moving, a blur of energy and purpose. Shepherd had loved that quality in her. He recalled walking with her in Reid Park when she abruptly challenged him to a race and started running, her legs swallowing distance in long strides, and her dark hair billowing behind her.
Shepherd had caught up with her and won, but what he recalled more vividly than the race itself was the electric charge that shivered through him when he saw her spring into action, this lithe creature who was all speed and air and laughter.
He thought of this, watching the hummingbird until it had darted away into a blue haze of distance and he was alone.
Then he went back inside the hospital to tell Ginnie the news. He said it gently, of course, but the truth was sharp-edged, and it could not be softened. When he was done speaking, he held his wife’s hand. Ginnie was silent for a moment, and then she said she wasn’t really surprised.
It looks like I’ll be spending more time in front of that computer than I’d counted on, she added, and incredibly she managed a brief, wan smile.
The smile told Shepherd that things would be all right. His wife’s spirit was intact, even if her body was not. She would recover.
That night, at Ginnie’s urging, he went home to sleep in his own bed. He was exhausted. He’d had perhaps twenty hours’ rest in ten days.
Yet he woke in the middle of the night, his heart racing, a headache inflaming his skull.
And he knew.
Something was wrong.
He threw on his clothes and drove to the hospital. When he got there at 4 A.M., he found a team of doctors and nurses engaged in a frantic rescue operation in Virginia Shepherd’s room.
Later he learned that she had suffered a condition called autonomic dysreflexia, common in cases of spinal cord injury. Despite the antibiotics, her urinary tract had become infected; because she had no sensation in the lower portion of her body, there had been no burning discomfort to serve as a warning of the problem.
Thirty minutes before Shepherd’s arrival, at perhaps the exact moment when he had awakened with a premonition and a pounding migraine, Ginnie’s blood pressure had spiked, stopping her heart, and her cardiac monitor had triggered an alarm at the nurses’ station.
Epinephrine and defibrillators were used to restart her heart, but her blood pressure continued to climb, and again she went into cardiac arrest.
The second time she could not be revived.
At 4:45, Shepherd was informed that his wife had died.
He stood in the hallway, trying to take in this news that was at once so simple and so impossibly complicated.
Did she feel anything? he asked the doctor finally. I mean… any pain?
The doctor said a sudden, severe headache was normally the only symptom the patient reported.
Shepherd nodded. His own headache, which had blinded him with pain for more than an hour, had gone away at 4:33 precisely.
It was the exact moment when Ginnie had gone away too.
He lived alone now, in the modest brick house in the cul-de-sac off Fort Lowell Road. His friends advised him to sell the place, put the memories behind him, but he wanted those memories, painful though they were.
He had changed nothing in the den where she worked. The computer was still there, untouched in two years. Sometimes he stood in the doorway of the small, untidy room stacked with books and paperwork, and he imagined that he saw her sitting at the keyboard, perhaps in a wheelchair, perhaps not.
The wheelchair didn’t matter one way or the other. Only she mattered, and she was lost to him.
And Timothy Fries?
He was back in an institution, no threat to anyone — at least until some new doctor recommended his release.
Someone would. Because there were too many people with soft hearts. People who didn’t know how to hate.
Shepherd wasn’t one of them, not anymore. He had learned hatred. There might be virtue in forgiveness, but there was no vigilance in it. Those who were quick to forgive, who prided themselves on their tolerance, were the ones who had dropped their guard and let the mad dog Fries out of his pen.
Now there was another Tim Fries on the loose. Not a man of thirty-two this time, but a woman of thirty-one.
She had shot her husband, escaped from an asylum, and she was obsessed with the doctor who had treated her, just as Fries had been obsessed with the clinic where Ginnie worked.
It was not Shepherd’s case, at least not primarily. But hell, he was handling it anyway.
He would get Kaylie McMillan off the street and see that she was locked up, in a jail cell or a mental ward, for the rest of her life.
He had found the red car.
Walter knew it. From the moment he saw the car in the motel parking lot — the red car, it was a red car, just like the picture from the Internet — yes, from that very moment he’d had a feeling that it was the one.
And he never, ever had feelings. He had heard people speak of such things — intuition, hunches — but he’d never had the least idea of what they were talking about.
Yet this time he himself, Walter Luntz, had experienced a genuine premonition, and he had even said aloud in the cramped confines of his Toyota Tercel, “This is it. This is the right red car.”
Wary of calling attention to himself, he parked on a side street, not in the parking lot, then doubled back on foot. Although he had been driving for what must have been a long time, he was not tired in the least. He could have driven for hours, for days.
In truth, Walter had little concept of time at all. Time was something he measured mainly by the meals he was served in the hospital commissary. There was breakfast time and lunchtime and, his favorite, dinnertime.
But today he’d had only breakfast, no lunch, no dinner, and so time, for him, had simply stopped, and there was only the task of driving and searching and now, finally, the delicious reward.
He crossed the parking lot to the red car and stood behind it, staring at the license plate until he remembered the slip of paper Dr. Cray had given him.
Carefully he unfolded it and compared the license number with the string of letters and numerals on the plate.
The same.
He checked again. He checked a third time. Then, because he was a conscientious person and he did not want to fail in his important mission, he checked once more.