Bill Pronzini - The Hidden

He’d been scared then, still was after all of her ministrations, and yet, strangely, it was a dull, detached kind of fear. He felt disjointed, as if only part of him harbored the anxiety, while the other part was apathetic and resigned. I don’t want to die, he thought. But there was a lack of emotion in it, as though the thought had been: I don’t want to go out in that storm again.

He lay quiet on the couch, taking in oxygen in slow breaths, watching Shelby watch him. Feeling better now, the symptoms all mostly gone thanks to her. If she hadn’t been here when it happened, he’d probably be dead now. He’d never doubted that she was good at her job, but until now he hadn’t realized just how calm and skilled she could be under pressure, in a personal crisis. Quite a woman he’d married. A woman he was probably still going to lose, assuming he survived.

“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Shelby said, “but there’s no other choice. You need to be hospitalized ASAP.”

“Where’ll you go?”

“The Lomaxes. Ask Claire to come stay with you until I can get a medical response unit out here.”

“Those locked gates … he won’t open up for you …”

“Let me worry about that. If he has a chain saw, he ought to be able to cut away enough of the tree to let me drive through.”

“What if he doesn’t have a chain saw?”

Shelby said, “No more talking,” and went to quickly don her raincoat, tie the hood under her chin. “While I’m gone I want you to lie still, be as quiet and comfortable as you can. If the oxygen in the cannula runs out before I get back, use the D bottle on the floor there—you know how it works.”

He nodded.

“If the fire gets too low and you’re feeling well enough, you can get up long enough to toss on another log or two.”

Nodded again.

“I’ll be back as fast as I can,” she said, and in a brief slash of cold air, she was gone.

And he was alone.

He listened to the storm hurl rain on the roof, bludgeon the walls and windows.

The moan of the wind was like a woman in the throes of orgasm. Before long the sense of disjointedness left him and depression moved in in its place, bleak and black. He’d never felt more helpless. Or less of a man. Swaddled up like a baby waiting to be coddled, burped, and diaper-changed.

He almost wished the coronary had killed him—a sudden crushing blow, then straight out of his misery. But no, that would’ve been too easy, too quick. This way he was facing a future filled with hospitals, doctors’ offices, reduced activities, bland food, loneliness if Shelby went through with the divorce and a life of dependency whether she did or didn’t, and no worthwhile job prospect in either case because who’d hire a man with one foot in the grave? Months, years of suffering, causing suffering, until another attack took him out or he took himself out. Hell, why not just get up and run around in circles naked until his heart quit beating from the strain, put an end to it right here and now?

Stupid thought. Selfish. He was a long way from the suicide stage yet; self-preservation was still too strong in him. More important, he couldn’t do a thing like that to Shelby. Not now, after all she’d done and was out there doing to try to save his sorry ass.

Bitterly he found himself thinking back to the week before Christmas. He’d had the arrhythmia and shortness of breath for a while before they finally alarmed him enough to do what Shelby’s urgings hadn’t—send him to his doctor, who had shuttled him on to the cardiologist, Dr. Prebble. A stress test confirmed the diminished capacity in his heart. So then they’d put him in the hospital overnight—he’d called Shelby and lied to her about an all-night poker game at Ben Coulter’s—and administered a bunch of tests, including an echocardiogram to determine the location of the blockage. There’d been some talk about “cathing” him—inserting a minicam in his veins and running it up into the heart to look for other blockages—but the cardiologist had finally determined that the procedure wasn’t necessary.

Diagnosis: CAD—coronary artery disease. How could a thirty-five-year-old man have CAD? That had been his first reaction. Age was no factor in heart disease, Prebble had told him; people of any age could have it. Usually it was genetic, but not always. His reaction to that had been the typically self-pitying one: Why me? Took a while to get over it and reconcile himself, but he’d managed it. Or thought he had until now.

His CAD required bypass surgery, double, triple, maybe quadruple, they couldn’t be sure until they opened him up and inspected the damage. Prebble’s dry, professional voice telling him this, and then explaining what the surgery entailed: ten-inch-long incision in the middle of his chest, his breastbone separated to create an opening to view the heart and aorta; connection to a heart-lung bypass machine that circulated the blood through his body during surgery; the possible use of the saphenous vein in his leg, or an internal mammary artery, or the radial artery in his wrist to create grafts around the blocked areas; then his breastbone reconnected with wire and the incision sewn up. Five to seven days in the hospital, the first few hours in ICU, and the balance of his recovery at home. Good as new in time … maybe. If he didn’t die on the operating table from traveling blood clots or immediately afterward from infection or some other post-op risk. Or end up having a fatal myocardial infarction despite the bypass.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Macklin. Happy New Year.

Dr. Prebble had wanted him to have the operation right away. He’d balked. Couldn’t it wait until after the holidays? Yes, though it was always best to act quickly in cases like his. Talk it over with your wife, the doctor told him, before you decide definitely to wait. He said he would, but he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t. Instead he’d lied to Prebble, saying he and Shelby both agreed he should wait until after the first of the year. That way, he figured he could enjoy what might be his last Christmas and his last auld lang syne, accept Ben’s offer to use the cottage in between … stick his head in the sand like an ostrich. The risk in waiting was relatively small as long as he didn’t overexert himself, watched his diet and cut down on his alcohol consumption, got plenty of rest, and faithfully took the little white nitroglycerine tablets Dr. Prebble prescribed. That was what Prebble had told him and what he’d made himself believe.

And they’d both been wrong.

And now he and Shelby were paying the price.

E I G H T E E N

IT WAS FULL DARK now, the night alive with shifting, rain-drenched shadows just outside the reach of the Prius’s headlights. The twin rays seemed to reflect off rather than penetrate the downpour, tingeing the wild scurry of clouds with a faint luminescence. The surface of the lane between the cottage and the Lomax house was heavily puddled and greasy; in Shelby’s haste she nearly lost control on the one slight curve, turned into the skid just in time. Thank God there were no more toppled trees or other obstacles in her path.

She pulled up at an angle in front of the closed gates, so that the headlight shine illuminated them. Left the engine running and the lights on. Thunder made a drumroll riff in the distance; a few seconds later a lightning fork etched jagged yellow patterns on the canopy of darkness above the ocean. The lightning burst lit up the house for an instant, too, gave it a surreal look like something out of a neo-Gothic horror film.

She took hold of the gates, shoved them apart as far as they would go so she could see through to the front of the house. Dark. The flickers of light she’d seen as she drove up were at the rear. The Lomaxes must be in the sunken living room with logs blazing in that massive stone fireplace; ragged streamers of smoke poured from the chimney, faintly visible before the gale tore them apart.