Part 5
I was roused by the clench of a blood pressure cuff. I took a silent inventory of my various pains. My head throbbed. A dull ache radiated below my neck and my entire body felt battered and bruised. I attempted to swallow some saliva and winced at the searing throes of my raw throat. The nurse noticed I was awake.
"Hello there," she chirped and flashed a penlight into my eyes. "Can you tell me your name?"
"Evan?"
"No, that's not it. Can you remember your name?."
"Evan?" I croaked. "How is he?"
"Oh, you're asking about the other man who was attacked. He's fine. He's tried to see you several times. Now can you tell me your name?"
"Alan... Eberson."
"And can you tell me where you are, Alan?"
My voice was a gravely rasp. "It feels like hell."
The nurse laughed at that. "I bet it does. You're in Hillcrest Hospital, Alan. You've been here three days but you're going to be fine. Your poor body has been through a lot. Do you remember how you got here?"
I didn't at first. It took me a moment to recall. "That psycho broke in. He slashed Evan with a knife."
"That's right, Alan. And do you remember what happened next?"
I didn't. Not at first. My mind tried to recall, but the events it sought were deep in an inky black place. I sensed them. I could feel them in the darkness, just out of view, lurking. A foreboding made my breathing quiver, my pulse pound.
I felt myself hurtling, swooping toward my prey. Then I was jolted in a flash of memory, of crashing onto him, my naked body enveloping him like talons, the force shattering my bones. Then tumbling and crashing again. My brain colliding with the interior of my skull.
A distant voice was crying in alarm: "You're safe now, Alan. Relax. Just relax. You're in the hospital and safe."
Then the memory of choking, of grappling with death for one gulp of sweet air. Terror. The swirling descent of demise. Quaking in horror, I saw my life's last moment loom.
A soothing voice, "You're safe, Alan." A panicked holler, "I need help in here now! Stat!"
I saw my hand. A blade. A beastly form. I saw gore, the evisceration of flesh and bone and heart. I saw myself as the dreaded angel of death. I felt the searing power of annihilation, of destroying a mortal soul. I shook so hard all my hurting places shattered anew.
Then a needle prick and I was engulfed by numbness and sleep.
The surgeons redid the work of splinting my collarbone with screws and rods. The doctors kept me sedated. The nurses tended to my needs. The therapists revived me patiently without a repeat of my panic. It takes a village. I emerged into a dull, sterile world of beeping monitors and IV tubes.
The nurses had been thoughtful enough to save the newspapers. The reports told the kind of story that sold failing papers and the local media milked it for every blotch of lurid ink. The narrative they spun began with the gangland slaying of Lucas in front of a seedy strip joint. The plot was propelled by extortion, harbored quarry, muscled threats, torched vehicles. It ended with the bloody deaths of two dangerous and demented criminals. Evan was portrayed as the hapless victim of sexual abuse and blackmail. The cops were painted as bumbling and inept. I came off as the valiant hero that slayed the villain with his own sword. Barehanded, so to speak.
The final part was blessedly obscure. The fact that I was butt naked during the assault had escaped the media's attention. There was not the slightest suggestion that I was anything but chaste and heroic in the harboring of Evan. I knew I had Hardesty to thank for that omission. I owed him for that.
Regardless, the newspaper accounts filled in the gaps of my understanding. It seems the cops had brought in the Feds and were building a narcotics case against the two thugs. A couple of rookie DEA agents had been tasked with surveillance and were tailing the SUV when the sociopath spotted them in his rearview mirror. In a characteristic display of stupidity, he floored the gas pedal. The agent made a rookie mistake and followed in hot pursuit.
The high-speed chase careened into a residential area. When the sociopath took a shortcut across a stately manicured lawn, the psycho bailed out and did a tuck and roll for cover. Unseen by the lagging pursuit, he escaped on foot.
By then, half the cop cars in town had joined the chase, racing down thoroughfares and weaving through startled traffic. The sociopath ran a red light and crashed into a pick-up truck, sending two blameless bystanders to the hospital. The collision allowed the cops to surround the thug's smashed SUV. A stand-off in a major intersection ensued. It ended the only way it could. The sociopath came out guns a-blazing and was cut down in a pool of blood that the media portrayed as a fitting bookend to the assassination of Lucas.
Meanwhile, the psycho had carjacked a vehicle that he drove to the vicinity of the golf course. He calmly traversed the fairways and furtively scaled the roof of my garage then entered my condo undetected through a second story window. That part was my bad. When my security system was installed, they recommended sensors on the second floor, but I figured no one would break in there. Penny wise, pound foolish as they say.
Evan had escaped the attack out the back door and was rescued by a foursome on the thirteenth fairway. One of them was a doctor who staunched his bleeding. Another called 911. The golfers were courteous enough to let the next foursome play through.
I finished the newspaper accounts and lay with them splayed across the hospital bed, silently quaking and staring out the window. A faint knock at my open door roused me. Evan stood there smiling. He whispered, "Hi."
A wave of joy and relief swept over me as he came to the bedside and briefly took my hand. The last I had seen him, he was fleeing the Psycho, slashed and bleeding. Now we just grinned stupidly at one another feeling strangely embarrassed and uncertain what to say. Finally, Evan scanned the open newspaper and offered, "Well, that was a lot."
I laughed with a wince of pain. "Things got gnarly pretty fast. How are you?"
"How am I?" he asked incredulously. His hands did a comic chronicling of his body, "Thirty-seven stitches to a superficial wound and I'm fine. You, on the other hand..."
Evan started counting on his fingers the insults to my being "... Shattered clavicle--which I learned is the collarbone--cracked ulna--that's your left forearm--and, finally, a worrisome fracture of your skull. They had to induce a coma to let the swelling in your brain subside and intubate your throat to prevent you from being strangled by your swollen esophagus. But me? I'm doing pretty good."
