Creature (5 page)

Sharon sighed ruefully. “Well, that’s going to be something else for Mark to adjust to. I have a feeling he thinks Robb’s going to be just the same as he was three years ago.”

“Nothing stays the same,” Elaine observed, then made an expansive gesture. “So what do you think of it all? Not like San Marcos, is it?”

“Not at all,” Sharon agreed. “But I think I like it.”

“You’ll do more than like it,” Elaine assured her. “Within a month you’ll love it and won’t know how you ever lived anywhere else. Clean air, a small town, nice people, skiing, hiking, the film festival at Telluride—it’s like I died and went to heaven.”

“And what if you get transferred?” Sharon asked, not trying to conceal the edge in her voice.

But Elaine only shrugged. “I’ll deal with it when it happens, and from here there’s nowhere to go but up. And speaking of things that have gone nowhere but up, look who’s coming!”

Sharon glanced out the window, and barely recognized the boy who had left San Marcos three years before. The thin
and wiry Robb Harris who had been only a little taller than Mark, and slightly asthmatic as well, was now a solidly built young man whose features had matured into a husky handsomeness. His wide-set blue eyes seemed to have become brighter with adolescence, and his blond hair, cropped short, appeared even lighter in contrast to his deeply tanned skin. Catching sight of her through the open window, he grinned, exposing a perfect set of even teeth.

“Hi, Mrs. Tanner,” he called. “Welcome to Silverdale. Where’s Mark?”

“Out back,” Sharon replied vacantly. The change in Robb was so startling, she hardly knew what to make of it. As he headed on down the driveway toward the garage, she turned back to Elaine. “My God,” she said. “He’s gorgeous! But what about his asthma? Ever since he was a baby—”

“It was the smog,” Elaine said. “As soon as we got him out here, it cleared right up! I always half suspected it, but that quack in San Jose always insisted it was psychosomatic. But either way, it’s gone.”

Sharon shook her head, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost wistful. “I wish it could be that easy for Mark,” she said. But unfortunately, there was nothing either smog-related or psychosomatic about the aftereffects of rheumatic fever.

Elaine, understanding perfectly her friend’s feelings, said nothing.

There were times when silence was better than any kind of sympathy.

3

Andrew MacCallum, who had been known as Mac almost since the day of his birth thirty-two years earlier, gazed glumly at the stack of X rays on his desk. When Rick Ramirez had first been brought into the hospital nearly three hours before, Mac hadn’t thought the boy looked too bad. Indeed, his first instincts were that Rick had simply been knocked out.

Now he knew better.

Two vertebrae in the boy’s neck were broken, one of his kidneys was ruptured, and three of his ribs had been cracked. Two of the ribs had punctured his left lung, which had collapsed, and in the few hours since he’d been in the hospital, his condition had deteriorated to the point where he was now on life-support systems.

The job of explaining to the boy’s mother what had happened had, of course, fallen to Mac MacCallum. He left his office and turned down the hall toward the waiting room, then decided to have one more look at Rick. Perhaps, with luck, he might find some scrap of improvement that would soften the news he had to give to—he glanced quickly at the Next of Kin entry on the boy’s chart—Maria Ramirez.

Susan Aldrich, whose shift had just been ending when the ambulance arrived with Rick Ramirez strapped to a stretcher, sat by the boy’s bed. When Mac glanced at her questioningly, she only shook her head, her lips tightening.

Mac picked up the boy’s limp left arm and quickly checked his pulse, then glanced at the array of displays on the monitors above Rick’s bed. Nothing had changed: his pulse still erratic, his blood pressure low. Only his breathing, assisted by the respirator next to the bed, appeared normal. But Mac knew that without the machine, Rick’s breathing would soon stop.

“No changes at all?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

Susan shook her head again. “It’s so strange,” she said, her voice quavering. Her eyes wandered to Rick’s face and she gazed silently at his calm expression, which seemed to indicate a peaceful sleep rather than a struggle for life itself. “I keep thinking he’s going to wake up and say something, and everything’s going to be fine. But he’s not, is he?”

Mac shook his head. “I’d better go talk to his mother.”

He gently closed the door behind him, then continued down the hall to the small waiting room where Maria Ramirez, her face pale, rose shakily to her feet as he entered. She looked so young to Mac—so vulnerable.

“Ricardo,” she breathed. “Please—is he going to be all right?”

Mac gestured her back into her chair as his eyes shifted to the man who sat next to her. “You are …?” he began, deliberately leaving the question hanging.

“Bob Jenkins,” the man replied. “I’m the coach of the Fairfield team.”

“I see,” Mac replied. “I wonder if I might have a moment alone with Mrs. Ramirez?”

But now it was Maria who shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said, her voice so low Mac could barely hear it. “He’s been a good friend to Ricardo—to both of us.… ” Though her voice trailed off, Mac could read perfectly the
situation as she gazed at the coach, who reached out and took her hand protectively in his own.

“I wish I could give you good news,” Mac began, and winced inside as Maria Ramirez’s eyes filled with tears.

“Ricardo,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “He’s …?”

“He’s alive,” Mac quickly reassured her. “But he’s in a coma, and he has a lot of internal injuries.” As gently as he could, he outlined the extent of the damage Rick Ramirez had sustained, but before he was done, Maria had buried her face in her hands and begun quietly sobbing.

It was Bob Jenkins who questioned him when he was finished. “What are his chances for recovery?” he asked, and the steadiness of his gaze as he met the doctor’s eyes told Mac he wanted no temporizing.

“Right now, I’d have to say somewhat less than fifty percent,” he replied. A small cry of anguish escaped Maria Ramirez’s lips, and Mac swallowed the lump that immediately rose in his own throat. “But that’s not to say things couldn’t change radically by tomorrow,” he added. “I’m afraid, though, that even if he survives, his chances of walking again are going to be very slim. The breaks in his vertebrae have damaged some of the main nerves.”

Jenkins’s eyes clouded. “But what about surgery?” he demanded. “I thought—”

Mac shook his head. “Right now surgery is out of the question. There’s no way Rick’s body could withstand the shock. Perhaps later—”

“No!” Maria cried. Her hands fell away from her face, and her eyes, wide and beseeching, fixed on MacCallum. “He can’t be crippled,” she pleaded. “Not my Ricardo. He’s all I have.… He—” But her voice failed her, and she collapsed against Jenkins, whose arm went around her to hold her close.

MacCallum watched them in silence for a moment, then signaled Jenkins that he’d like to talk to him alone. When he was sure the other man understood, he went back to his office.

Five minutes later Bob Jenkins let himself into MacCallum’s office and closed the door behind him. “She’ll be all right,” he said, reading the unspoken question in MacCallum’s eyes. He smiled tightly. “She’s a remarkable woman. She’s raised Rick by herself, and he was born when she was only fourteen years old.” His voice hardened. “She never told anyone who his father was, and her own parents kicked her out when they found out she was pregnant. But she’s never complained. She works as a waitress, and the last couple of years, since Rick’s been old enough, she’s been going to night school. She’s absolutely determined that Rick should go to college, so she has to get another job.”

“Jesus,” MacCallum whispered. He gestured Jenkins into the chair on the other side of his desk. “The boy’s going to need a lot of care. If he survives, and something can be done about his spinal injuries, he’s going to need a lot of physical therapy. But before all that begins, he’s going to be in the hospital for a long time. Perhaps,” he added, his voice dropping, “permanently. There’s a good chance he won’t come out of the coma at all. And if he does …”He spread his hands in an eloquent expression of unanswerable questions.

“All of which costs money,” Jenkins observed, and Mac immediately nodded. “Well, Maria doesn’t have any,” the coach went on.

“Insurance?” Mac asked.

Jenkins shrugged. “Maybe a little, but I’m sure it won’t be enough. And the school has some insurance, too, I suppose.” His lips twisted in an ironic smile. “I’m going to be in an interesting position,” he said. “I’ve been trying to convince Maria to marry me for two years, but she’s always said she won’t until Rick’s through college. She said it wouldn’t be fair to me. If only she’d married me, she and Rick would both be covered by my own insurance. So now I’m going to have to advise her to sue the school district I work for.”

MacCallum pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Or sue Silverdale,”
he suggested. “After all, what happened, happened right here, didn’t it?”

Jenkins hesitated, then nodded. “I’d already thought of that,” he said. “Frankly, I didn’t mention it because of you. I mean …”

He hesitated, clearly uneasy, and MacCallum suddenly understood the man’s discomfort: Obviously Jenkins had assumed that he would automatically adopt the same defensive posture as Phil Collins had on the field.

Except that Mac MacCallum had long since come to the conclusion that the Silverdale of the past, the Silverdale he had come to immediately after his residency, no longer existed. TarrenTech had changed it all—changed it beyond recognition—and MacCallum no longer felt any great loyalty toward the town. Indeed, if anything, he felt a deep resentment for the changes that had taken place in the village, and an even deeper anger toward the company that had brought them about.

“I don’t work for the town of Silverdale,” he finally replied. “I work for the county, and besides that, my only interest right now is Rick Ramirez. He’s going to need a lot of help, and I intend for him to get it.” He stood and held out his hand to the coach. “I’ve arranged to have another bed brought into Rick’s room. I expect Maria will want to stay with him, at least for the moment.”

Jenkins stood up and grasped MacCallum’s hand. “Thank you,” he said. “Maria and I both appreciate everything you’ve done—”

But MacCallum cut him off. “So far, I haven’t done much, and I’m not at all sure of what I’m going to be able to do. But I’ll do what I can, and I’ll call in anybody else I think we might need. It’s going to be a long haul.”

When Jenkins had left, MacCallum returned once more to the room where Rick Ramirez lay unconscious in the bed.

In the half hour he’d been gone, nothing had changed.

MacCallum wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

* * *

Phil Collins was stretched out in the recliner that was the dominant feature of his living room, his fingers idly pressing the buttons of the television remote, when suddenly a low growl rose from the throat of the big German shepherd sprawled on the floor next to the chair. A split second later the dog rose to its feet, its hackles rising, and Collins kicked irritably at the animal. “Shut up!” he commanded as the door bell rang. “We’re not living in Chicago anymore.” He tossed the remote control onto the table next to the chair, then stood up. With the dog still growling softly, and preceding him by half a step, he went to the door and opened it. On the porch, his face only half lit by the dim glow of the porch light, he recognized Bob Jenkins. Collins’s brow rose a quarter of an inch, but he opened the door wider. “Down, Sparks,” he ordered curtly, and the police dog obediently dropped to its haunches. “Come on in,” he said. “I was sort of wondering if you might stop by. How’s your boy?”

Jenkins’s eyes glittered angrily as he stepped into the house, but he froze when the dog growled a warning.

“Don’t worry about Sparks,” Collins told him. “He’s all talk and no action. Anyway,” he added, a crooked grin half forming on his face, “I think he is. So far, nobody’s had the guts to challenge him.” The grin faded. “Your boy okay?” he repeated.

“My ‘boy’ is named Ricardo Ramirez,” Jenkins said, his voice tight. “And no, he’s not okay. His neck is broken, he has a lot of internal injuries, and he’s in a coma. Which you would very well know,” he went on bitterly, “if you or anyone else from your school had bothered to show up at the hospital.”

“Hey!” Collins protested, his eyes widening. “How was I supposed to know? For all I knew, the ambulance took him back to Fairfield!”

“Don’t try to act stupid,” Jenkins snapped, his voice rising. The dog, instantly sensing a threat to its master,
snarled dangerously. “And get that dog outside, Collins,” he went on in a more reasonable tone. “You’re not going to like what I have to say to you, and neither is your mutt. And believe me, it would give me great pleasure to sue you for every cent you’re ever going to be worth.”

Collins’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Instead, he led the dog to the kitchen, returning with two cans of Coors, closing the kitchen door behind him. He offered one of the beers to Jenkins but wasn’t surprised when the other man refused it. Popping the top of his own beer, he settled his heavy frame back into his recliner and indicated another chair for the Fairfield coach. But Jenkins remained on his feet.

“I came over here to tell you I’m going to be filing a complaint against your team, and Jeff LaConner in particular,” he said. “It seems like every year your team gets rougher, and now I’ve got a boy who’s seriously injured.”

Collins held up a conciliatory hand. “Now, hold on,” he said. “I know you’re upset, and I agree we better talk about this. But I don’t think you want to start talking about complaints, or lawsuits, or whatever else you’ve got in mind. Football’s a rough game—”