Gregg Hurwitz - You're Next

‘Honey, listen. Mommy…’ He took a deep breath, let it out as evenly as he could. The last photo he had of his wife was in the phone he’d just smashed into the thin carpet. ‘Mommy is-’

The other cell, the sleek Batphone, rang. Mike snapped it up. ‘Shep?’

‘Yeah,’ Shep said. ‘It’s me.’ A rare hesitation.

‘What?’ Mike said. ‘What is it?’

Shep said, ‘She’s alive.’

‘Don’t you dare,’ Mike said. ‘Don’t you fuck with me.’

‘I’m at the hospital,’ Shep said. ‘They have her at Los Robles Med Center.’

‘I saw her. I saw the body.’ He was fighting, now, through a different sort of denial. Hope felt too dangerous, a wobbly tightrope.

‘The body?’ Kat’s voice, flat with dread. ‘What happened to Mommy?’

Mike covered the phone. ‘She was… hurt.’

‘How bad?’

‘I don’t know.’ Back to the phone. ‘I need to see her.’

‘You can’t come here,’ Shep said. ‘Cops crawling all over the place.’

‘She needs me-’

‘She doesn’t need anything right now. Kat needs you – alive. Now, I managed to grab the doc alone in the hall. I’m gonna put you on with her.’

‘Wait, I-’

‘Mr Wingate?’ A cool, feminine voice. ‘This is Dr Cha. I’m a trauma surgeon. We have Annabel stabilized. That’s the good news.’

‘Stable? I was with her when she died. She had no pulse anywhere. She was blue .’

Kat was crying, Mike holding up a hand for her to wait, just wait. It was going down fast and wrong, exactly how he didn’t want to break the news.

Dr Cha was talking in his ear already. ‘The blade slipped between her sixth and seventh ribs, slicing her spleen and puncturing a lung, causing it to collapse. The collapse is called a tension pneumothorax – that’s what made her lose breathing and pulse. The hypoxia – low oxygen – is what caused her to look blue. The paramedics needled her on site, got that lung inflated. She had some blood in her chest from a nick in the artery. We rolled her to the OR and got her spleen out, but I didn’t move on the artery. I’m hoping it clots off on its own so we don’t have to crack her chest. She’s only lost a few hundred cc’s of blood over the past few hours, and it seems to be slowing down. We’re continuing to transfuse her, of course.’

Kat was on her knees on the bed, her face focused and alert. Mike circled the room like a caged animal, rubbing the back of his head, emotions sawing back and forth, cutting him to the quick. His wife, alive. But alone and injured. And him not there. He started for the door, his feet moving him before his brain slammed into drive. He halted.

‘The bad news?’ he said faintly.

‘She’s not coming fully back online. We’re looking for her to initiate her own breaths – she’s intubated – and show some pain response, wiggling toes or fingers, anything. Right now she’s not. It’s early yet, and we hope that it’s temporary, but only the next couple of days’ll tell.’

‘How… what does that mean?’

‘The longer it goes, the worse it’ll look. Now, as her husband, you’re her health-care proxy, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You might want to get down here.’

He fought with himself, excruciatingly aware of Kat, her pained face hammering home his responsibility to protect her. Annabel’s voice came at him again, a ghostly imprint: Promise me.

‘I can’t. I – There’s a threat. To me, my daughter. The people who hurt my wife-’

‘There are plenty of police officers here.’ The silence spoke volumes. ‘I see. That side of it is not my concern. I am Annabel’s advocate here. Not the cops’. And I need to make sure I can talk to you if we have to make a tough medical decision.’

‘Can I transfer-’

‘Health-care proxy responsibilities? No. Are you reachable?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You might want to figure that out in a hurry.’

‘Okay. I can be. Through Shep.’

‘Is he family?’

‘Sort of,’ Mike said.

‘Just so you know, if there’s a major decision, we need to see you in person, or we’re going to require something in writing, a fax, whatever. If not, the decision making passes to the backup proxy.’

Annabel’s father. Jesus.

‘I’m handing you back to your friend now.’

And she was gone.

Mike reached for the bed, lowered himself down, light-headed with relief and a new host of concerns.

Shep again. ‘The doc told me there’ll be security and on-call nurses with her through the night shift, so she’s safe through morning. No one’s gonna pull anything with this many bodies around.’

‘I need…’ Mike lost his train of thought, found it again. ‘I need you to call Hank Danville, my private eye. He’s former LAPD.’

Kat was rocking herself and moaning. He lowered his voice so she wouldn’t hear. ‘See if he can find out why dirty cops are gunning for us. What they want from me.’

Shep said, ‘Where are you?’

Mike gave him the hotel name and room number.

Shep said, ‘Contact no one. I’ll see you in three, four hours.’

Mike hung up. Kat was staring at him, her face ashen. He fought for focus. ‘Your mother’s injured. She’s at the hospital.’

‘Is she gonna be okay?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

She stiffened, recoiling from the words. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She was stabbed.’

‘Like in the movies?’ She stood abruptly, hugging her stomach, shifting from shoe to shoe so quickly it seemed she was stamping her feet. ‘I want to go see her.’

‘We can’t, honey. Daddy’s in some trouble. I’m not sure what’s safe right now.’

‘Why don’t we call the police?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know which cops we can trust.’

‘You mean they hurt Mommy?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t have many answers. I know that must be really scary. But I’m going to figure this all out and keep you safe. We’re gonna be fine.’

‘And Mommy, too?’ He swallowed hard.

Her face seemed to collapse. He sat on the corner of the bed and rocked and shushed her until her jagged breathing settled.

He said, ‘We need to stick together. I won’t let anyone hurt you. But I need you to be strong as we figure out what to do. If you can be strong, we’ll get through this. Deal?’

She nodded against his chest, her face flushed in streaks. Her tiny hand poked up, and they shook. ‘Deal.’

Fifteen minutes later they were in Target, a dead-on-their-feet march through the aisles. Wonder Bread, peanut butter, baby monitor and batteries, a powder blue child-size sleeping bag. He wouldn’t let Kat out of his sight, not around a corner, not for an instant. She trudged beside the cart yawning, scratching her head, rubbing her eyes. The black vinyl bag, filled with cash, strained on his shoulder. It occurred to him that Kat had left her eyeglasses back in his truck, but there was nothing he could do about that now, and besides, she only really needed them to read. In a bin on the checkout lane, Beanie Babies stared out with doleful stuffed-animal eyes. Mike plucked a polar bear from the heap, wiggled it at Kat. ‘Snowball II: Bride of Snowball?’

She read the tag. ‘Its name is Aurora,’ she said flatly.

Its .

He bought it anyway.

The checkout lady said, ‘What a pretty girl you have.’

Mike’s thumb had moved to the cool gold of his wedding band. He had to concentrate to get his mouth to move. ‘Thank you.’

The woman looked at him, uneasy, and rang them up without another word.

Back at the Bates Motel, he loaded batteries into the baby monitor and tried the reception with the connecting door closed and Kat on the other side. ‘Testing one two three,’ she intoned. ‘Testing one two three.’ Some static, but it worked well enough. The parent unit had a belt clip, which he hooked onto his waistband. It maintained a decent connection to the edge of the parking lot and down to the front desk.