Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

He meant the girl, of course.

“She’s as good as gone, is my understanding.”

“That’s enough?”

“She’s brain-dead. And even if she wakes up, what’s she gonna say?”

“You don’t know,” Dax said. “That would be precisely my concern.”

Gerry flushed and swung his feet down.

“I understand my fucking liabilities, son. I don’t need your assistance with the big picture. I need you to bring me the phone. Now get out of here and do it.”

He didn’t like the way the kid studied him and then nodded and turned away as if he’d seen something in Gerry’s anger that interested him.

No, it was more than interest, Gerry thought as he stared at the closed door, Dax Blackwell’s footsteps reverberating across the tiled floor on the other side. That expression hadn’t been one of intrigue or curiosity but something deeper, something darker.

Like whatever he’d seen in his boss had made him hungry.

“He’s just a kid,” Gerry said aloud. The words echoed in the empty room, and when they bounced back at him, they weren’t reassuring. He sounded nervous, sitting in his own office and talking about his own employee. What in the hell was that about?

About the kid’s old man and his uncle, of course. Jack and Patrick were long gone, yes, but they cast long shadows too, a pair of dark smiling ghosts.

The best hitters you ever saw. So trust the kid, Gerry thought. At least a little longer. He was a beta-Blackwell. But if he bloomed? Well, then.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Dax had spent an hour the previous night listening to the idle chatter in Tara Beckley’s hospital room, enough time to confirm both that they’d kept his flowers and that she remained mute, but each day had the potential for new blessings, as the Team Tara Facebook page reminded him that morning, and so he checked back in after leaving Gerry Connors’s office.

The recorder he’d placed in the flower vase was of excellent microphone quality but he was disappointed with its computer interface and mobile options. He had to use the web browser to log in, and then he had to sort through multiple files that captured dialogue exchanges of longer than two minutes. He wished he’d used a better system, but Tara Beckley was only of value-added potential for Dax; she wasn’t a threat. With threats, you spared no expense. The microphones he had planted in Gerry’s office, for example, were cutting-edge, and he’d paid accordingly.

He sat in his car and updated himself on A Day in the Semi-Life of Tara Beckley. He listened to her mother talk endlessly and aimlessly, scrolled past that, found the same with the sister, and then some nurses chattering, and then...

What was this?

“Abby’s an investigator. She tells me she’s working on your behalf.”

That was the sister talking. The investigator, when she spoke, sounded nervous. Well, no surprise there — Tara’s empty-eyed stare and those tubes could be unsettling to some. Dax doubted many people had given her the kind of deep eye contact that he’d offered.

The investigator blathered on awkwardly, not saying much of interest, but then the sister said something that made Dax sit up straight.

“Nobody talked about her phone until your boss called.”

Her phone? Well, now. The investigator might be more interesting than Dax had thought.

He listened through more chatter, the investigator agreeing that Carlos Ramirez was at fault — apparently she didn’t yet know that Carlos was also in the morgue — and then carrying on about how she didn’t like Carlos’s story. Dax had to give her some credit for this because she seemed to understand the physics of it all in a way the police hadn’t, and thus she got what a colossal disaster Carlos Ramirez had been. Time-sensitive, make-it-an-undeniable-accident instructions be damned; Carlos had picked an awfully dumb way to go about the hit. Perhaps he hadn’t cared because he knew he’d be out of the country by the time anyone showed real interest. That was fine, but the mess he’d made of things reflected poorly not only on Carlos but on Gerry Connors. And since Dax worked with Gerry, there was the risk of contamination. The Blackwell brand could be damaged before he’d had a chance to re-introduce it if Gerry stumbled. You had to be careful who you worked for in this business. Independent contractors are not immune to the perils of poor management, his father had told him often.

For a hick insurance investigator, Abby was surprisingly astute. She was also scared, it seemed, which was interesting. Information and fear didn’t go together in Dax’s mind — knowledge was power, the cliché promised, and so far in his young life, he’d found that to be true. Then why was this woman so nervous?

Probably it was Tara’s dead-eyed stare. Abby the investigator kept pushing, though, almost grudgingly, as if she couldn’t help herself.

“And one of these,” Abby said, and there was a rustling sound, “belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”

“I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon said.

Dax Blackwell rewound and replayed that portion.

Another advantage of the train — beyond the fact that it didn’t make her heart thunder or her vision blur white in the corners — was that Abby could work while she traveled.

She typed up the details of the visit with Shannon Beckley (and Tara Beckley, though that felt more like a visitation, a respectful glance into the casket) on her laptop while the Downeaster rattled back north. Or, as befitted its name, back down east, a term that referred to prevailing summer winds along Maine’s coast. In most places in America, down meant “south,” but in southern Maine, down took you north.

The visit had been as pointless as Abby had promised Hank it would be — nothing that she couldn’t have accomplished with a phone call. And yet she found herself more invested in the work because she’d made that pass by the casket, glanced down at the beyond-reach Tara Beckley in her comatose state.

Those eyes. Her eyes looked so damn alert...

But Abby knew they weren’t. She’d been through that cruel illusion before.

Luke was famous for his face, but the audience didn’t understand that his eyes were what made his face work. They were so alive, penetrating and laughing and alive . There was a reason he’d moved so quickly from sending in his head shots to getting auditions to being offered lead roles in blockbuster action films, and, yes, some of it was talent, and, yes, some of it was his physical beauty, but Abby knew the secret was his eyes.

When they made love, he kept his eyes closed. When they made love, she wanted to see him. Finally, one night, when he was on top of her and inside of her but somehow still absent, she’d put her hands in his hair and tugged his head back and said, “Look at me.”

He’d opened his eyes then, and even in the darkness she’d felt that strange, powerful energy, the unique sense of life that came from within his gaze. They’d finished together, face-to-face, clenching and shuddering and gasping but never breaking eye contact, the best sex of her life by far.

“I like to see you,” she’d whispered, and she bit his shoulder gently.

He’d laughed, the sound soft and low in the room, and said, “I’ll remember that.”

And he had. He always had.

That made those moments in the hospital even crueler.

Her phone rang, pulling her thoughts away from Luke. It was Hank, calling from the office. Abby answered just as a couple seated beside her burst into laughter.