Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

Another set of orderlies came in and sat on Ivers while the doctor in charge hit him with another and stronger sedative. Not three miles away, in the heart of the Waikiki district, information about the incident outside Fort DeRussy reached James Parry and scattered details were being discussed over the police band. The news had Parry instantly alert. Jessica, seeing his excitement, now listened intently as well.

“ This cop, Ivers… I know him,” Parry said. “He's a good man, but lately he's been a pain in the ass, calling every day, wanting to know the dispensation on the Kaniola case as he calls it. I keep telling the guy Kaniola's case is an HPD investigation, but he never bought it. He's shrewd.”

“ Sounds like he's badly injured.”

“ He's a moose of a man, but yeah… sounds bad. I'm going to get over to the hospital. You want to come?”

“ Sure, let's go see how your friend is.”

After informing the others in the stakeout party. Parry pulled away from the curb. Tony was walking the Ala Moana Boulevard route, working the street, and in close proximity to Terri Reno, checking in every hour on the hour, for what it was worth. Tern's partner, Kalvin Haley, was eyeballing them both from a nearby surveillance van, using a remote camera this time, hoping to find Terri's favorite street beau in his viewfinder, to get the creep on film.

Jessica held firmly now to the dash as Parry sped for the hospital, his strobe light flashing. Once they arrived, they found Ivers under sedation and in no condition to talk about his unfortunate experience; so Jessica went for his doctors, flashing her credentials and wanting to know the skinny on the patient in 211, while Parry held back to talk to the detectives assigned the case.

Jessica quickly located the doctor in charge of Ivers's case, a man named Flores who bitched about Ivers's behavior, saying he'd given the big cop enough sedatives to settle a horse.

“ So what's the prognosis. Doctor?”

“ Vital signs are remarkably stable,” Flores began, taking off his wire-rims to reveal black, Hispanic eyes beneath the hospital glare. “The man's like a bull, believe me. His chances for recovery are good…”

“ But?”

“ Too early to tell about the eyes.”

“ His eyesight is at peril?” Flores replaced his glasses and bit his lower lip. “We're calling in a specialist tomorrow. Can't do any more than we've already done for the moment.”

“ Will he be blinded for life?”

“ It's my considered opinion that he will come through it in time, but who can say. There's been serious damage to the soft tissue of the comea. If he does regain his sight, it will never be a hundred percent, no.”

“ Damn,” she muttered.

“ As for the rest of him, second- and third-degree burns up and down the left side of the body, throat, and head, but it hasn't sapped him of his strength. That much is in evidence.”

“ Meaning?”

“ Meaning it took me and four orderlies to restrain him.”

Jessica next located Jim Parry and huddled with him, informing him of his friend's condition in as positive a tone as she could muster. Parry swallowed hard at the “good” prognosis, and then he turned back to the waiting pair of detectives on the case who'd taken the brief respite from Parry's probing questions to flip back and forth through their notes, stopping now and then to sip coffee from paper cups.

“ They sedated the hell outta Ivers before we could get a word outta him,” said the taller of the two.

“ Hell, when we got here, they were sitting on him. He was trying to bust out, I guess,” said the shorter detective with some mirth.

“ He's like an ox.”

Parry nodded knowingly at them, and then he stared after the two detectives as they walked away. “HPD's finest,” he muttered to Jessica.

She placed a hand over his. “You all right, Jim?”

“ Hell, no. How about you?”

She forced a smile. “Hell, no.”

“ No call for you to hang here all night. Let me take you home,” he suggested. “It's damned near two in the morning.”

“ Fine… on one condition, Jim.”

“ Conditions… do you always place conditions on people who offer you a lift, Jess?” He didn't mean his tone to be quite so harsh, gesturing with the open palms for peace, flashing apologetic eyes; still, she knew that she was often guilty of placing conditions on people around her, especially those she cared about the most.

She couldn't blame him for the outburst. She momentarily thought about that well of pain she'd thrown pennies down all her life, reaching back to her relationship with her father, who was a great one for placing conditions on the people he loved. It was partially due to his military background and his own upbringing, not to mention his profession as M.E. No, Jim couldn't possibly understand fully the wellspring of fears and doubts she harbored, though he might understand the nature of her work, filled with shifty people and shifting inconstants. She was a meteorologist of murder, faced with the eddies of human “atmospheric” conditions. For in any investigation, circumstances altered constantly and prevailing “winds” were never the same if you blinked; unfortunately, it was little different in her personal life.

Jim reached out, touched her cheek and said, “I'm sorry. I had no right to say-”

“ Shhhhh,” she replied, a finger to her full lips. “Let it go.”

She briefly thought of all the men in her life, from her father to Alan Rychman. Conditions, shifting and ephemeral as nature, the sea, the clouds, the balmy trades… that was how she'd dealt with men all her life. Change, alter, shift them before they do it to you…

Sometimes she could feel Donna Lemonte, her shrink, breathing down her neck, looking over her shoulder like a second conscience. Dr. Lemonte was an excellent psychologist and had become the closest thing she had to a girlfriend these days. Donna had made the same connection between Jessica's “conditional” professional life and her relationships with men, the fact Jessica had to be in charge, that she had to make the ground rules by which all relationships with men were to be played out.

She had become, particularly since Otto Boutine's death, afraid to truly commit herself to anything other than her career ever again, for fear of loss. She'd lost her father and her mother, and then she'd tragically lost Otto, for which she still blamed herself.

Boutine and her father… tough act to follow. She had become a cripple in more ways than one since Matt Matisak's bloody attack on her. The butcher had shaken the faith and the belief system instilled by her father, that there was a reasoning power over all and after all, a power that set into motion the human drama, as flawed and cluttered with twisted monsters as it was, a power that held a hand over the abyss and over the chaos. Matisak had made her doubt this, for she could no longer feel the pulse of that great hand as evenly as she once did. Perhaps she never would again.

Nowadays she thought more and more of a shadow self, a Jessica Coran who might have been had she never encountered Matisak, or had she not chosen her father's way of life.

She and Donna talked of shadow selves, the person or persons either of them might have been, had they been born in a different place and time, chosen a different career, met by chance the right man. Under a set of different circumstances, given other givens, other conditions, other choices, who might she have become? And would she not shun someone like herself, even someone like Jim Parry, had she not been her father's daughter?

Parry's eyes were busily studying her, and she wondered how much he knew of her from information he'd gathered on her, how much from Zanek. and how much he'd surmised just being with her for so many hours on the case. Just his fatigue talking, she decided, letting his rancor slide.