Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

He holds it out. He can barely look at the growing spot of black on her beautiful pale cheek. “Please?”

She lifts the ice pack from his hand.

Casper follows him down the hall. Cielle is tucked in again, but wide awake. He sits at the edge of her bed. Casper curls up in the pink nest she has made for him from an old comforter. He keeps a wary eye on Nate, which shatters Nate’s heart anew. When they are out, Casper will not allow strangers to get between him and Cielle, and that is how Nate feels now-like a stranger.

He says, “I’m so sorry I scared you.”

She says, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.” She stares up at him with her rich brown eyes, and he strokes her nose once with his finger.

“Why can’t it be like it used to?” she asks.

He swallows around the lump inside his throat. “It just can’t right now, baby.”

“Why not? Don’t I get a vote? I never get a say in any thing.”

“We don’t always get a say in what happens to us,” he says gently. He kisses her on the forehead, breathes in the no-tears-shampoo scent of her.

He strokes her back until she falls asleep, then goes downstairs to try to catch his breath. As he paces the unlit living room, it strikes him that he is denying himself his wife and daughter as a punishment for cherishing them so much that he couldn’t unlock his legs on that helicopter and leave them behind. He pauses before the family portrait. The three of them falling over, laughing, propping one another up. He vows to get back to that place.

What he’s dealing with, it’s just temporary.

And yet five years pass.

Five years that see further dismantling of the life he knew. Nate’s journey through that time is weightless, stunned, much like his flight from the spiraling helicopter. The point of impact comes in a medical office, from a bearded neurologist with kind, wise features-precisely how one wants one’s neurologist to look, particularly when he’s delivering a diagnosis like this. And Nate realizes that up until that moment, when it came to bad news, he’d never had a sufficient yardstick for comparison.

He drives away in a daze, cloaked in a black cloud of dread. He pictures his mother languishing in her hospice bed, dying by millimeters, her features caving in on themselves. How his father, too, was eaten from the inside, hollowed out like a rubber Halloween mask, the eyeholes empty. As a nine-year-old, Nate had vowed that if he was ever lucky enough to have a family of his own, he would never, ever let it erode like that.

And so he tells no one-not Janie, not his daughter. At all costs he will spare them the suffering he learned all too well in his own childhood. Soon enough he will not be able to control the deterioration of his grip, the drying out of his eyes, the strength of the breath in his lungs. But he can pick a time and a date and a ledge high enough to offer a good view and a long drop.

He just has to do it while he still can.

And pray that nothing interrupts. Like, say, six hooded thugs robbing a bank.

Because then he might find himself sitting on an exam table with a neatly stitched stab wound, alive against his own goddamned will.

Leaving the hospital, Nate rode shotgun in the unmarked sedan, ignoring the throbbing in his shoulder and doing his best to keep up. Abara-who’d given no first name-drove fast and talked faster. Easy confidence, slender athletic build, dense hair shaved to the bronzed flesh at the sides and back. He could’ve been thirty, or twenty-four. “So first of all, forget that shit you’ve seen on TV,” Abara said. “We don’t always travel in twos, we’re not all dickheads, and”-a gesture to his charcoal golf shirt with the gold seal at the breast-“we don’t have to wear suits and ties.” He flashed an unreasonably handsome smile, complete with dimples. “Also, we play well with others. We do have juris, but LAPD’s got a talented team over at Robbery Special, so I’m not gonna march in there and bark about how I’m taking over their case.” He picked a speck of lint off the spit-polished dashboard. “You sure you don’t need to go home, catch your breath, change?”

Nate looked down at his crisp new T-shirt, donated by the hospital. Crease marks at the chest and stomach from where it had been folded, presumably piled in a stack of other clothes awaiting stabbing victims. “Nah, I’m fine.”

They reached the police cordon, and Abara slowed the Chevy Tahoe and flashed his badge. “Marcus Abara, FBI. I got the hero with me. Gonna go walk the scene.”

The cop’s eyes were hidden behind a pair of Oakley Blades, but he lifted the reflective band of glass to Nate and said, “Nice work in there.”

Nate’s heartbeat was quickening in proximity to the bank. He nodded. “Thanks.”

Beyond the sawhorses, media and rubberneckers had massed. One woman was crying and kneading her sweater in her fists-a sister of a victim? It struck Nate that she could also be a relative of one of the men he’d killed this morning.

He had to rewind the thought: One of the men he’d killed this morning.

One head lifted higher than the rest, rising above the crowd as if on a stick. A man’s rough-hewn face-lantern jaw, mashed nose, slash of mouth. Flat eyes fastened on Nate as his gaze swept across. Nate did a double take, but the face was gone.

Abara’s eyes were on him and then on the sea of folks. “What?”

“Just a guy in the crowd. Looked … I don’t know. Menacing, I guess.”

He put it down to nerves but couldn’t help noticing Abara file it away in some private place.

They drove through and parked on the sidewalk. Before leaving the hospital, Nate had filled in first a patrolman, then two detectives, and finally Abara on what had gone down in the bank-or at least a version of what had gone down. Assumptions had been made before Nate had been sutured up and available to correct the record. By the time he’d entered the discussion, he was already party to the lie, and the lie had ossified into something hard and immovable. It went like this: Nate had been in the bank bathroom; he had heard shots; he had climbed onto the ledge, inched his way around, and saved the day. The questions-which had been detailed and copious-had picked up mostly at the saved-the-day part. And he’d been happy to pick up there as well. Did everyone need to know he’d been planning to pancake himself into a Dumpster? He would be made the subject of a suicide interventionist, and then there’d be a seventy-two-hour psych hold-no, that wouldn’t do at all. So rather than lay himself bare to be probed and picked at, he’d help through a few steps of the investigation, resort to Plan B, and let everyone figure it out when he wasn’t around to feel stupid about it.

Walking toward the bank entrance, Nate was surprised to hear his name shouted out. Instinctively he stopped and looked at the swarming reporters, and the agent had to press a hand to the small of his back to keep him moving. In the elevator Abara knuckled the button for the eleventh floor. As they rose, Nate thought about the last time he’d ridden up in this car, how he’d been sweating through his shirt in anticipation of taking the leap. And yet, implausibly, here he was again, back in the same little box, ascending to the same floor, Sisyphus in the age of technology. Abara caught him smirking at himself, and it seemed to pique his interest.

“You seem remarkably steady,” the agent said, “given, you know, everything.”

“I must be faking it well,” Nate said.

“Impressive stuff. The ledge, the window, the timing. I mean, six armed men. ” Abara whistled. “Guess that high-end military training kicked in.”