bullet missed the major organs and lodged in the wall of his chest. It did some damage to a lung, and of course filled the pleural cavity with blood. We’ve removed the bullet and inserted a tube to drain the excess fluid and reinflate the lung. The damage to his lung is minimal. Apparently he was shot from a distance, and with a nonfragmenting bullet, thank God. The damage will heal. It helps that he’s young and in great physical shape.”
“Can I see him?” Kilraven asked quietly.
He hesitated. But he was a kindly man, and these two people loved his patient. He wondered if the woman was a girlfriend. She was certainly concerned.
“In a few minutes,” he told them. “We’ll move him into recovery temporarily, then he’ll go to ICU for a day or two. Just as a precaution,” he emphasized when he noted his two listeners going pale. “We want to make sure complications don’t develop that might retard his progress. We’ll keep him for three or four days after that, again, to make sure he’s progressing as we think he should. But I think he’ll be fine,” he added gently.
“They’ll come to get us, when we can see him?” Kilraven asked, glancing at Joceline as if it were a given that she’d go in, too.
“I’ll send a nurse,” he promised. “He’s an FBI agent, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Kilraven replied. “One of the best.”
“We do a big business in gunshot wounds in our emergency room,” the doctor said with a heavy sigh. “Sadly there are more guns than trauma surgeons in this area.”
“One day that will change,” Kilraven said.
The doctor only smiled. “Not in my lifetime, I’m afraid. I’ll get back to work. They just brought in a child of seven, victim of a drive-by shooting.” He shook his head. “In my day, drugs were only whispered about. There was no wide-scale distribution, no gangs with guns, no …” He shrugged. “It was a less tolerant world, but far less violent.”
“They did this experiment,” Kilraven said quietly. “I read about it. They put rats in a confined area until they were so crowded that they could barely move. They became aggressive and began attacking the others and even cannibalizing them.”
The doctor nodded. “We are too many, with too few resources, in too little space in cities on this planet. Nature has a way of thinning the population without any help from us.” He glanced toward the emergency room. “However, I must add that I prefer nature’s approach. Guns and knives are messy.”
“I agree,” Kilraven said. “I’ve seen my share of the results.”
Nobody added that he’d helped a few criminals into emergency rooms.
The surgeon smiled reassuringly and went back to work.
Joceline was trying to avoid letting Kilraven see her tears.
“Hey, now,” he said in a teasing tone. “Don’t do that. Never let them see you cry.”
She laughed with a hiccup and brushed at her eyes. “He’s an awful boss,” she muttered. “Keeps me working late, throws things, insults me …”
“Jon insults you?” he asked, shocked.
“He asks me to make coffee,” she scoffed. She brushed away another tear. “Imagine that!”
“He’s just tired of threatened lawsuits from visiting attorneys who have to drink the coffee the agents make,” Kilraven explained.
“Then they should stop letting Murdock make coffee,” she pointed out.
“That’s been suggested,” he replied. “At the same time, they mentioned dirt and shovels …”
“There’s a large potted plant in our office that could use a jolt of fertilizer,” she mused. “However, Agent Murdock is far too large to plant in it.”
“We could …” he began enthusiastically.
She held up a hand and glowered at him. “Please! This is a hospital!”
“Just a thought.” He sighed. “I bring my own coffee now when I visit Jon at his office, though.”
At the sound of her boss’s name, she relaxed a little. “I’m glad he’ll be all right.” She hesitated. “I guess I should get going.”
“You can see him first.”
She was uncertain. “You and Winnie should go in.”
“Winnie will say that you should,” he said with a gentle smile.
“Thanks,” she murmured huskily and wouldn’t look up.
Kilraven didn’t say what he was thinking. Joceline and Jon had been antagonistic toward each other for a long time. But there was one night when they’d actually gone to a party together, about four years ago. The Bureau had been providing protection for a young woman who was dating a foreign dignitary’s son, and avoided a kidnapping. She’d insisted that Jon, the agent in charge of the case, come to her birthday party and bring a date. So Jon had made Joceline go with him. He hated parties. He hated socializing. So did Joceline. But she went.
Funny, Joceline had acted oddly afterward and tried to quit her job. Jon had talked her into staying. He hadn’t said much about the incident, just that he’d had way too much to drink and Joceline had been forced to drive him to the hospital. It turned out that someone had spiked Jon’s drink with a hallucinogenic drug, trying to be funny. The culprit, a foreign dignitary’s son, had fled the country shortly thereafter and never returned.
He hadn’t thought about that for a long time. His brother never drank as a rule. He was very straitlaced. Today, it had hurt terribly to see Jon lying on a gurney with blood seeping from the wound on his back. He loved his brother. Cammy was going to go ballistic. She’d lived in fear of this all during Jon’s career in law enforcement. She kept rosaries everywhere, even in the glove compartment of her car, and she prayed constantly for his safety. At least she wasn’t driving herself to the hospital or there might be two tragedies. Kilraven would have gone to get her, but he’d been afraid to leave Jon—as if by his own physical presence he could keep Jon alive.
The nurse beckoned to them a nerve-racking few minutes later. Neither Kilraven nor Joceline really believed that Jon wasn’t going to die. They had to see him for themselves, to be sure.
He was in a hospital gown, but his chest was bare. He was white as a sheet. There was dried blood on his firm, chiseled mouth. He was laboring to breathe, even with the tube that ran out of his chest to drain off the fluid. There was a drip feeding from a tube on a pole into his arm. There were oxygen tubes in his nostrils and he was hooked up to half a dozen monitors. His long, jet-black hair was tangled on the pillow. His eyes were closed.
Besides the beep of the monitors and the electronic sounds, there was only the sudden jerk of Joceline’s breath, almost a sob, which she quickly smothered.
“He’d hate having his hair tangled,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
He glanced at her, noting that she didn’t have much more color in her face than Jon did in his. She was
