Читать книгу Storm Runners - Jefferson Parker - Страница 7

Days after the blast he briefly wavered up from unconsciousness at the UC Irvine Medical Center, sensing that he had lost everything. Later - time was impossible to mark or estimate - he fought his way awake again and registered the lights and tubes and the grim faces of people above him, then folded into the welcome darkness one more time.

When he was slightly stronger he was told by his brother that his wife and son were dead, killed by the same blast that had landed him here almost three weeks ago. It looked like we would lose you, said his mother. He could barely understand them because his eardrums had ruptured and now roared. A doctor assured him that a membrane graft would help.

Stromsoe lost his left eye, the little finger of his left hand, most of his left breast, and had sixty-four tacks removed, mostly from the left side of his body. The bomb makers had used three-quarter-inch wood tacks for close-range destruction. His torso and legs were a dense constellation of wounds. His left femur, tibia, and fibula had been shattered. Just as the bomb went off, Stromsoe had turned to his right, away from the blast, so his left side - and Hallie and Billy, who were two steps ahead of him - bore the fury.

A doctor called him ‘beyond lucky to be alive.’ His mother cried rivers. One day his father stared down at him with eyes like campfires smoldering behind a waterfall. Later Stromsoe deduced that his dad’s eyes had been reflecting a red monitor indicator.

‘They got him,’ his father said. ‘El fucking Jefe Tavarez is now behind bars.’

Stromsoe managed a nod before the immensity of his loss washed over him again - Hallie whom he loved and Billy whom he adored both gone and gone forever. The tears would have poured from his eyes but the empty left socket was wet-packed with gauze and saline in preparation for a glass implant scheduled for later that week, and the right eyelid was scorched so badly that the tear duct had yet to reroute itself through the burned flesh.

A month later he was released with one functioning eye and a German-made cryolite glass one, a four-fingered left hand, a surgically reconstructed left breast, seven pins in his leg, sixty-four wounds where tacks had been removed, and two tympanic membrane grafts. He had lost ten pounds and most of his color.

He rode the wheelchair to the curbside, which was hospital release policy. His old friend Dan Birch pushed the chair while a covey of reporters asked Matt hopeful, respectful questions. He recognized some of them from the endless hours of television news he’d watched in the last month. Motor drives clattered and video cameras whirred.

‘How are you feeling, Deputy Stromsoe?’

‘Good to be on my feet again. Well, kind of on my feet.’

‘Do you feel vindicated that El Jefe Tavarez was arrested and charged so quickly?’

‘Sure.’

‘You finally got him,’ said Susan Doss of the Orange County Register.

‘That’s nice of you to say, Susan.’

He rolled along in the lambent April sunshine. Iceland poppies bloomed in the planters. His ears were ringing but he had never in his thirty-five years been more aware of the magnificence of nature’s colors.

‘Do you look forward to testifying against Tavarez?’

‘I look forward to justice.’

‘What’s next for Matt Stromsoe?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

When they reached the car Stromsoe shooed away Dan and his father, and got himself into Birch’s Mercedes without much difficulty. Stromsoe pulled the door shut and Susan Doss leaned in the open window. He flinched because his peripheral vision was bad, then flushed with embarrassment because Susan was a reporter - young and pretty and intelligent - not someone about to kill him.

‘You went to high school with him, didn’t you?’ she asked.

Stromsoe had kept his relationship to Mike Tavarez a private thing, but not a secret.

‘He played clarinet in my marching band.’

‘He and your wife were an item back then.’

‘That came a little later.’

‘Will you talk to me about it? All of it?’

She gave him a business card and asked him for his home and cell numbers. He gave her his home but not his cell.

‘I can’t pay you for the interview,’ she said. ‘But I’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to other media. You’ll have offers from TV - real dollars.’

‘I turned them down.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll call you this afternoon, after you’ve had time to settle in and get some rest. You’re going to need rest, Matt.’

‘Give me a few days.’

‘Absolutely.’