Читать книгу The Fall and Rise of Cain - Greg T. Nelson - Страница 7
Chapter 4
ОглавлениеKaty:
We were in the air again, an hour from Houston. My thoughts jumped around like a badly edited film. I had known where he was the past year. I could have called him or gone to him anytime, except for…. except for what?
Well, there was the fact that I had left him for no good reason or that I had let those assholes use me to blackmail him or maybe it was the ache I still had whenever I thought of him lying there hurt. The mighty Richard Cain hurt? The very possibility was enough to make me shiver, but it had been more than his leg, more than nearly dying, the last time I saw him, and he looked defeated. It had never occurred to me that anything could do that. Injure him? Yes. Kill him? Maybe. But defeat him? Never. When we were married I had been afraid of a lot of things. The stories his friends would tell me about him. Working alone all the time and always winning, no matter what. There were also the whispered stories about the women who mooned over him before I came along and maybe some after I came along. Ed Forney told me once the gangsters referred to Richard as Batman because he always wore those hideous black suits and could sneak up on the worst street scum. I tried to get him to expand his wardrobe but he never would.
I thought about the baby and my eyes welled up. He had been in the hospital with a concussion when I told him. I don’t remember how it happened exactly; something about a pervert snatching kids and Richard had rammed him off the road to catch the guy. He had saved a seven-year-old boy that night and the department suspended him for ten days for improper use of force. Seems the pervert had suffered a broken shoulder some ten minutes after the wreck. The broken shoulder is rumored to have been how Richard found out where the boy was.
Thinking back, I don’t think he minded the suspension. He was just lounging there in the emergency room with an icepack on his head and wearing that smile even while that idiot Haden was yelling at him. Oh…that smile... Ed said that smile scared some people, but it made me want to sit in his lap. I had done just that after the others left the room. I pulled his face close to me and told him straight out, “Rich, I’m pregnant and I’m much too busy to be a single mom so you have to cut this shit out, you understand. Whether you believe it or not, the Mighty Cain can Fall.”
The smile had faded for a second then it came back and he put the ice pack down. Then he kissed me “Sure kid, I promise” Bad idea Katy. He had kept his promise. The thought of a baby made him happy. We bought baby stuff, talked about names and bantered over whether it would be a girl or boy. Things were good for three whole months after that. He transferred over to a fraud unit and spent eight hours a day chasing con artist. Then, gradually, he got edgy and a little cold and I knew why. Richard Cain had to stand up for victims. It was part of him, like the smile. Without a windmill to tilt at, Richard Cain was a little lost. We didn’t exactly fight. We just stopped being a part of each other. We stopped being one and turned back into separate people.
Then I lost the baby. Richard did all the right things, he held me and told me he loved me. But all I could think was I had let him down. I had made him give up what he loved and then let him down. He never acted like a martyr but I treated him like one. It hurt to look at him, he was so lost. Then one day when I was on my way back from New York I got a room at the Hilton instead of going home. I don’t remember having a reason except if I didn’t have to see him I didn’t have to feel so sad. When I sent the divorce papers, there was a daydream in my head that he would rip them up and carry me back home. Instead, he sent a sweet note and moved out of the house.
For the next year, we kept seeing each other. I made up favors I needed, a party I had to have an escort for or some furniture to be moved, anything to get him near me. I kept using his name instead of going back to Kathryn Black. I kept needing him to hold me. We never talked out loud about getting back together, I was still afraid. We never talked out loud about anything really, not about the baby, the divorce or how I bailed on him. It was like if we weren’t OFFICIALLY together. I didn’t have to worry about him getting killed, I wouldn’t be the widow Cain. Then after that mess at the ship channel, he was just gone.
Richard:
I watched the video Philly was obviously playing for my benefit, a perfect view of the whole thing. First upright then tilted as the camera had fallen onto its side next to the dead operator. The wide angle showed Judith taking the hit to the chest before the first two assholes went down. She had fallen at the beginning of the fight and I hadn’t noticed. In the video, I could see what I had suspected. She coughed and strangled for over a minute as her own blood filled her airways and spilled out onto the pier’s cement. One of the CSI teams had figured she was crouching down reloading her glock and one lucky shot had come tumbling through the car window and torn through both lungs.
The Cameraman was dead and I never heard what became of the reporter. Two of the bad guys lived to the hospital then died in the ER. The van was gone before backup got there and they didn’t even know what to look for it until they watched the tape. I was in no condition to tell them.
I was unconscious for four days and two surgeries as they moved arteries around, grafted bone in and then finally just waited for me to heal or not. I healed, sort of.
Captain William Haden stepped in the door once and he started to fire questions at me. “Why were you on Pier 11? I distinctly told you PIER 21 damn it, Cain…” I managed to throw a bedpan at him. It was empty. If they hadn’t taken my gun I probably would have shot him. Ed Forney came and tried to help me. He took my statement so I wouldn’t have to talk to one of the pricks that had sent cops to direct traffic instead of backing us up at the ship channel. He tried to make me feel better with hero talk. It didn’t work and he knew it. But he was trying so I took it easy on him. Ed and I had been partners a few times and friends for twenty years. He was a good guy but working with me had made his wife nervous. I left the hospital after two months, then three more in a rehab center then four more taking a cab every other day from my apartment. Ed took me a few times. My parents died when I was 26 and my friends, well I guess I made them nervous and I wasn’t good company, there were few visitors.
The Police Association tried to help. They sent support counselors, citizen group leaders, and even a local priest. They all had the same message. Don’t say anything that might embarrass the City. Finally desperate they sent in the big gun, Katharine Cain, ex-wife of a hero.