Page 17 of Never Alone
"Still here. We're holding them through the morning. They're in observation. Room four."
"Thank you."
I went down the hall.
The door to Room 4 was closed. There was a small glass panel at eye level, the kind built into hospital doors for the staff to check on patients without going in. I stopped a step short of it and looked through.
The boy was asleep in bed. The blanket was pulled up to his chin. He looked smaller than he had on the lawn, but I'd carried him out, and I knew how big he was. Nine years old looked nine years old in a hospital bed.
The mother was in the chair next to him. She'd pulled it as close to the bed as the room would let her. One of her hands was on his arm, where it had fallen out of the blanket. Her head had tipped to the side, and her hair had come loose from where she'd had it tied back. She was asleep. Both of them were.
I stood there for a beat I had no business taking.
She'd stayed up next to him until she couldn't anymore. The chair wasn't built for it. Her neck was going to hurt when she woke up. And she hadn't moved to the empty bed across the room because the empty bed wasn't where the boy was.
I made myself step back from the glass.
I'd come to know they were okay. They were.
I walked back out.
The next shift I caught was a quiet one. Quiet in the operational sense. Martinez had not stopped talking since he'd clocked in.
"Three days of my life," he said. "Three days I'm not getting back."
"You said," Davis said.
"Slipped on grapes, Davis. Grapes. In the produce aisle. The man's lawyer kept calling themthe produce. Like that was the dignified word for it.My client encountered the produce."
Davis turned a page of the newspaper.
"Did he win?" Davis asked.
"He won. Three days of my life so a man could get paid for stepping on a grape."
Martinez took a long pull of his coffee and turned his head toward me.
The grin had been building for two days inside a courthouse and was about to be deployed.
"Lieutenant," he started.
"No."
"Just tell me one thing."
"No."
"Is she single?"
"It's none of your business."
"It's a yes or no question."
"It'snoneof your business."
I'd known this was coming since the morning after the call. Here it was.
The crew had filled him in during his jury duty. I'd seen him texting back and forth with Davis through the days he'd been gone, the way Martinez always texted, in cryptic punctuation that said,I'm in court, I can't talk about the case, but tell me what I'm missing.He had two days of stored material now. He was going to use it.
