J. Jance - A more perfect union

"Okay," he said, "I'll let her know." He paused. "Don't kick yourself too much, Beau. You never would have done it if I hadn't been egging you on from the sidelines, remember?"

"Sure," I said, and we hung up.

I know Peters was trying to make me feel better, but it didn't work. When you've been flat on your back in bed for six months, you're allowed some lapses in judgment. When you're still supposedly dealing with a full deck, when you're still walking around upright, carrying a badge and packing a loaded. 38, it's a whole different ball game.

Ames came out of the bedroom again. He was dressed in a suit and tie, briefcase in hand. He found me sitting in the chair by the telephone, staring off into space. He set the case down on the table for a moment and stood there looking at me.

"You could always quit, you know," he said.

"Quit?"

"The force. You don't need to work if you don't want to."

The realization that Watty might fire me had shaken me to my very core, but the idea of quitting had never crossed my mind.

"It's what I've always done," I said.

Ames shrugged. "Maybe that's reason enough to make a change. Lots of men your age do, you know," he added quietly. He picked up the briefcase again and started toward the door. "What are you going to do today?"

"I don't know yet," I said. "I'm going to have to think about it."

After Ames left, the silence in the room was oppressive. I felt restless, ill at ease. Unbidden, Jimmy Rising came to mind. I remembered how much he had wanted to go to work the day he missed the bus, how proud he had been of the thermos and the lunch pail. Well, he wasn't going to work now. The micrographics department at the Northwest Center would have to do without him for awhile. Maybe forever. The burn unit at Harborview is good, but they can't always work miracles.

I wasn't conscious of making the decision. Like an old war-horse that doesn't have sense enough to quit, I got up, put on my holster and my jacket. With my hand on the doorknob I paused. Would going to the hospital to see Jimmy Rising be considered meddling in Paul Kramer's case?

No, goddamnit. Sergeant Watkins could fire my ass if he wanted to, but I was going to go to the hospital and pay my respects to Jimmy Rising come hell or high water.

When I got on the elevator at Harborview, force of habit made me push the button to floor four where Peters is instead of nine for the burn unit ICU. A couple of uniformed nurses who were also in the elevator were openly contemptuous when I got off, looked around in confusion, and then got back on before the elevator continued up.

I've been in the burn unit before. I know the routine. Because recovering burn patients are so susceptible to infection, visitors are required to don sterile clothing before entering patients' rooms. The problem was, whenever I'd gone there before, it was always as a police officer on official business which gave me the secret password for admittance.

This time, I had no such magic wand. It was easy to tell which was Jimmy Rising's room. A uniformed officer, crossed arms resting on his chest, was seated on a folding chair outside a closed door just up from the nurses' station. When I asked about Jimmy Rising, the ward clerk, a scrawny man with an equally scrawny beard, eyeballed me thoroughly up and down. "Are you a member of the family?" he asked.

"No, just a friend."

"Mr. Rising is in no condition to have visitors," the ward clerk announced firmly. "Family members are allowed in for a few minutes each hour, but that's all."

I stood there flat-footed with no possible argument or comeback. The guard glanced in my direction, and I gave him a halfhearted wave. What the threat of losing my job had failed to accomplish, hospital bureaucracy did without a moment's hesitation.

I must have looked crestfallen enough that the ward clerk took pity on me. "If you'd care to leave something for him, I'll be sure it reaches him," he offered.

Nodding my thanks, I made my way back down the short hallway to the main corridor. Leave Jimmy Rising something? What? A note, a card, flowers? Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a gray-haired clerk in the gift shop on the main floor, and I still hadn't made up my mind.

"May I help you, sir?" she asked.

"Some flowers, I guess," I answered stupidly.

She pointed toward a refrigerated display. "What we have available is right there. Is this for an adult? A child?"

I looked at the display. It was an uninspiring batch of tired flowers in equally tired receptacles-the milk-white, lumpy-glass kind so popular in hospitals, with one or two ceramic teddy bears thrown in for good measure.

"An adult," I said.

"Man or woman? Does this person have any particular preferences?"

She was trying hard to be helpful. The problem was, I didn't know anything at all about Jimmy Rising's preference in flowers. All I knew about him was what I had learned during that brief afternoon interview on his porch and the equally short ride to the Northwest Center in Seattle. I could still see him sitting there on the top step, carefully pouring orange juice into the cup from his thermos.

And all at once it hit me. I knew exactly what Jimmy Rising needed. It had nothing at all to do with flowers.

"Never mind," I told the startled lady behind the counter. "I don't think he likes flowers."

With that, I beat it out the door and headed for the car. Smiling to myself, I made my way down to Jackson Street.

Welch Fuel and Hardware has been doing business on Jackson for as long as I can remember. I first saw the store years ago when I was a rookie. Back then it was a hole in the wall next to a Safeway store. Gradually the neighborhood changed, transforming into Seattle's less than malignant version of inner-city squalor. The grocery store had pulled out altogether, but not the hardware store. It had quietly expanded to include both buildings. While the neighborhood around it had slowly deteriorated, the store itself had unobtrusively prospered.

The displays seemed crowded and jumbled. Just because some item was no longer manufactured didn't mean it wasn't still available in some hidden nook or cranny of the store. The clerks, all of them old hands, knew what they had and where to find it. When asked, one of them pointed me to an aisle halfway down the long room. "The lunch pails are over there," he said. "You'll find the thermoses there, too."

I found what I wanted without any trouble on a crammed shelf bulging with housewares. There was a huge shiny black lunch pail for $10.88 and a stainless-steel thermos for three times that. I took them both off the shelf and went up to the cash register.

"You do gift-wrapping here?" I asked.

The clerk gave me an odd look. I don't know if it was because requests for gift-wrapping are that unusual or because my two black eyes, not black so much as deep purple, made me look like death warmed over.

"Not here, we don't," he said at last.

With no further comment, he rang up my two purchases and put them in a plain brown paper bag. They were still in the bag a few minutes later when I carried them up to the nurses' station in the burn unit at Harborview. The same ward clerk was still on duty.

"I see you found something," he said.

"Yes," I answered. I took the thermos and lunch pail out of the sack and put them on the counter in front of him. He seemed dismayed by my choice. He was expecting flowers. I didn't bother to explain. "Could I use a paper and pen to write a note?"

"Sure," he answered.

I was just signing my name to a brief note when a woman's voice interrupted me. "What are you doing here?"

The voice was all too familiar. I had heard it before. I looked up quickly and almost dropped the pen. Linda Decker was standing right beside me, loosening a surgical mask that covered the lower half of her face. Without the gun she was much smaller than I remembered, but every bit as scary.