Dean Koontz: Winter Moon

"You should be, Toby. Your dad's a hero."

He nodded but couldn't speak. His face was screwed up as he strained to avoid tears.

"You be good for Mae."

"Yeah."

"I'll be back as soon as I can."

"When?"

"As soon as I can."

He sprang off the chair, into her arms, so fast and with such force he almost knocked her off the stool. She hugged him fiercely. He was shuddering as if with fever chills, though that stage of his illness had passed almost two days ago. Heather squeezed her eyes shut, bit.down on her tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, being strong, being strong even if, damn it, no one should ever have to be so strong.

"Gotta go," she said softly.

Toby pulled back from her.

She smiled at him, smoothed his tousled hair.

He settled into the armchair and propped his legs on the stool again.

She tucked the blankets around him, then turned the sound up on the television once more.

Elmer Fudd trying to terminate Bugs Bunny. Cwazy wabbit. Boom-boom, bang-bang, whapitta-whapittawhap, thud, clunk, hoo-ha, around and around in perpetual pursuit.

In the kitchen, Heather hugged Mae Hong and whispered, "Don't let him watch any regular channels, where he might see a news brief."

Mae nodded. "If he gets tired of cartoons, we'll play games."

"Those bastards on the TV news, they always have to show you the blood, get the ratings. I don't want him seeing his father's blood on the ground."

The storm washed all the color out of the day. The sky was as charry as burned-out ruins, and from a distance of even half a block, the palm trees looked black. Wind-driven rain, gray as iron nails, hammered every surface, and gutters overflowed with filthy water.

Louie Silverman was in uniform, driving a squad car, so he used the emergency beacons and siren to clear the surface streets ahead of them, staying off the freeways.

Sitting in the shotgun seat beside Louie, hands clasped between her thighs, shoulders hunched, shivering, Heather said, "Okay, it's just us now, Toby can't overhear, so tell me straight."

"It's bad. Left leg, lower right abdomen, upper right side of the chest. The perp was armed with a Micro Uzi, nine-millimeter ammunition, so they weren't light rounds. Jack was unconscious when we hit the scene, paramedics couldn't bring him around."

"And Luther's dead."

"Yeah."

"Luther always seemed…"

"Like a rock."

"Yeah. Always going to be there. Like a mountain."

They rode in silence for a block… Then she asked, "How many others?"

"Three. One of the station owners, mechanic, pump jockey. But because of Jack, the other owner, Mrs. Arkadian, she's alive."

They were still a mile or so from the hospital when a Pontiac ahead of them refused to pull over to let the black-and-white pass. It had oversize tires, a jacked-up front end, and air scoops front and back.

Louie waited for a break in oncoming traffic, then crossed the solid yellow line to get around the car. Passing the Pontiac, Heather saw four angry-looking young men in it, hair slicked back and tied behind, affecting a modern version of the gangster look, faces hard with hostility and defiance.

"Jack's going to make it, Heather."

The wet black streets glimmered with serpentine patterns of frost-cold light, reflections of the headlights of oncoming traffic.

"He's tough," Louie said. "We all are," she said.

Jack was still in surgery at Westside General Hospital when Heather arrived at a quarter past ten. The woman at the information desk supplied the surgeon's name-Dr. Emil Procnow-and suggested waiting in the visitors' lounge outside the intensive care unit rather than in the main lobby.

Theories of the psychological effects of color were at work in the lounge. The walls were lemon yellow, and the padded vinyl seats and backrests of the gray tubular steel chairs were bright orange-as if any intensity of worry, fear, or grief could be dramatically relieved by a sufficiently cheerful decor.

Heather wasn't alone in that circus-hued room. Besides Louie, three cops were present-two in uniform, one in street clothes-all of whom she knew. They hugged her, said Jack was going to make it, offered to get her coffee, and in general tried to keep her spirits up. They were the first of a stream of friends and fellow officers from the Department who would participate in the vigil because Jack was well liked but also because, in an increasingly violent society where respect for the law wasn't cool in some circles, cops found it more necessary than ever to take care of their own.

In spite of the well-meaning and welcome company, the wait was excruciating.

Heather seemed no less alone than if she had been by herself.

Bathed in an abundance of harsh fluorescent light, the yellow walls and the shiny orange chairs seemed to grow brighter minute by minute.

Rather than diluting her anxiety, the decor made her twitchy, and periodically she had to close her eyes.

By 11:15, she had been in the hospital for an hour, and Jack had been.in surgery an hour and a half. Those in the support group-which now numbered six-were unanimous in their judgment that so much time under the knife was a good sign. If Jack had been mortally wounded, they said, he would have been in the operating room only a short while, and bad news would have come quickly.

Heather wasn't so sure about that. She wouldn't allow her hopes to rise because that would just leave her farther to fall if the news was bad after all.

Torrents of hard-driven rain clattered against the windows and streamed down the glass. Through the distorting lens of water, the city outside appeared to be utterly without straight lines and sharp edges, a surreal metropolis of molten forms.

Strangers arrived, some red-eyed from crying, all quietly tense, waiting for news about other patients, their friends and relatives.

Some of them were damp from the storm, and they brought with them the odors of wet wool and cotton.

She paced. She looked out the window. She drank bitter coffee from a vending machine. She sat with a month-old copy of Newsweek, trying to read a story about the hottest new actress in Hollywood, but every time she reached the end of a paragraph, she couldn't recall a word of it.

By 12:15, when Jack had been under the knife for two and a half hours, everyone in the support group continued to pretend no news was good news and that Jack's prognosis improved with every minute the doctors spent on him. Some, including Louie, found it more difficult to meet Heather's eyes, however, and they were speaking softly, as if in a funeral parlor instead of a hospital. The grayness of the storm outside had seeped into their faces and voices.

Staring at Newsweek without seeing it, she began to wonder what she'd do if Jack didn't make it. Such thoughts seemed traitorous, and at first she suppressed them, as if the very act of imagining life without Jack would contribute to his death.

He couldn't die. She needed him, and Toby needed him.

The thought of conveying the news of Jack's death to Toby made her nauseous. A thin cold sweat broke out along the nape of her neck. She felt as if she might throw up, ridding herself of the bad coffee.

At last a man in surgical greens entered the lounge. "Mrs.

McGarvey?"

As heads turned toward her, Heather put the magazine on the end table beside her chair and got to her feet.

"I'm Dr. Procnow," he said as he approached her. The surgeon who had been working on Jack. He was in his forties, slender, with curly black hair and dark yet limpid eyes that were-or that she imagined were-compassionate and wise. "Your husband's in the post-op recovery room… We'll be moving him into I.C.U shortly."

Jack was alive.

"Is he going to be all right?"

"He's got a good chance," Procnow said.