End of Innocence
Chapter 25
Cabin, Cimarron, Colorado
Reese went out for a time after that. He took it slow - and walking the center of the drive down to the main road, he didn't have to wade through the deepest snow. Only an inch or so had fallen since Chase'd come through with his plow.
Good to get out of the cabin. He'd seen enough of the walls in there. The air felt cold on him but fresh in his lungs, and the walk helped to clear his head.
At first, he admitted he'd been pissed. This thing with Shaw had messed with him.
Reese was used to doing things on his own, taking care of himself in his own way. He'd patched himself up for most of his life, but things were different once he'd landed in New York.
Seems like he'd attracted more than his share of hard knocks. And once Shaw joined, she'd always been around when he'd shown up hurt. Didn't have much patience for the way he'd try to fix things. She'd just take over, shove him out of the way, and fix things her own way. The doctor way, he figured.
He'd never given it a lot of thought until that night – that night. When he'd cornered Alonzo Quinn in his safehouse and nearly had his gun taken away from him. Quinn wasn't the kinda man to lose any sleep over shooting a wounded man. Woulda made things easier to get away.
If Finch and Shaw hadn't shown up when they did, he knew he wouldn't have made it. Too much blood gone. Too weak to stand by then. Easy prey. The only thing keepin' him alive back then was the burn inside for revenge.
They'd dragged him outta there, back to Finch's library office. Somehow, they'd done without taking him to a hospital. The staff would've called in the NYPD. People showing up in the ER with bullet holes attracted the wrong kind of attention. He still didn't remember much of it – the next week or two – between the fever dreams and all the meds she'd pumped in to keep him out of it. That mighta been the closest he'd ever come to dying.
Can't say he'd have cared at the time.
Reese had made it to the end of the driveway, where the main road cut across in front of him. But, with all the heavy snowfall, there weren't any places left to walk now. Plows had pushed all the snow up high on the sides. So, Reese turned around and started the half-mile back, instead.
No wind on him, but the sun was going down, and the air would chill even more soon. He shivered inside his coat. The wound on his side pulled at him every time he raised his leg to take a step. Probably ache tonight. He still had another set of pills to take, and then the packing change to do. He knew Shaw'd wanna be there to see it. She'd stare at him with those dark, serious eyes. No emotion, like before in her room.
Assassin's eyes, he thought. Cold, ruthless – and yet ready to scrape him off the floor and patch him up again.
He didn't get it. Why'd she bother?
Library Office, Manhattan, December 2013
Another sweep of her COMs; still silent out there.
But, silence wasn't always a welcome sign, she'd learned. Percentages dictated that danger could still be hidden behind a silence.
She played those last bursts of messages between the parties again. Encrypted of course, so odds were low of cracking the code.
More important, then, was their timing. She'd noticed a pattern between the coded transmissions and the missile strikes in Turkey – each one of them preceded by a set of transmissions. The timing between wasn't the same for each of the pairings, though, so she couldn't use them to predict the time for a next missile strike. The closest she could manage would be a range of times. Not much help for any of the troops stationed there, like sitting ducks down there.
One theory she'd entertained was that the timing might be part of the packet of coded message itself. And that shifted one of her tasks to studying the message bursts over and over, searching for any pattern suggesting a time. Some of her attention would go to those iterations. The repetition in that kind of task was something akin to meditation for her. Soothing, like an old habit.
Another effort went to monitoring calls into and out of key embassies in Ankara, Istanbul, and Adana. This one had already borne some fruit. Discernable patterns had shown up there, as well, ping-ponging among the embassies and their consulates. The sheer volume of calls between Washington DC and Ankara appeared to herald something big, complex in the works. Which splashed out into dozens of possibilities, each branch branching until a new decision tree had formed. More iterations - down their rabbit holes: each, all at once, in parallel, simultaneously.
But that burst of coded messages out of Hong Kong kept nagging at her. What was she missing?
Cabin, Cimarron
By the time he'd walked the half-mile back to the cabin, Reese was breathing hard. Not like him, he thought. And then he remembered what Shaw'd said about his blood count. She'd warned him about feeling short of breath up here in the mountains. Reese scowled. This wasn't the way he'd wanted to spend his time.
Starting to feel more like a cripple than a soldier. An image of his grandfather came to mind, unwanted – hobbling around indoors all the time, breathless, and then with the oxygen on in his room at night. He shivered again as he got to the door.
Inside, the place was quiet. Too quiet.
Shadow had fallen across the cabin with the sun going down, and none of the lights were lit inside. Odd. Why hadn't she turned on the lights? An old habit instantly returned. He found himself stopping just inside the door, waiting. He tested the air with a sniff. A jumble of scents inside: pine, hardwoods from the fire, coffee and bacon from this morning's meal. Nothing random.
Then he let the feel of the air currents on his face settle in. You could tell a lot from the way the air moved, or didn't.
Air in a room layered out after a time; you could sense it on your skin – whether someone had been through ahead of you – and stirred the air. Noticing had saved his life more than once.
The air felt dead inside. Layered out like no one had been there for hours. She'd been in the bedroom when he'd left. Maybe she'd fallen asleep back there.
Didn't feel right.
All the while he'd started moving inside, searching the places where someone could be, another part of his brain was busy making sense of this. Nothing wrong. No one here who didn't belong.
His gun. He'd left it on the hutch across the room. Reese lowered himself, skirting the couch and one of the chairs on the way. Silent. So dim in there he'd be hard to see.
In his hand the heavy feel of an iron rod – he'd grabbed the poker on his way past the stove. Just the embers left inside; only a dim red glow now. Nothing to give him away. Stepping, stepping. At the arch now. His eyes swept the hutch. Couple of crocks, a box of bandages, Shaw's notebook, a pen. No gun.
He gripped the poker a little harder in his hand.
The back door creaked; felt the cold on his cheek. Light blinked on, and he raised his hand to shield his eyes.
"That for me?" she said, smirking. Reese lowered the poker and cursed under his breath.
"Good way to get yourself killed."
Reese turned away, back to the stove, where he stowed the poker. Racked his brain on the way back: his gun. Where'd he put it? If he asked Shaw, she'd think he was losing his mind. Reese returned to the hutch, and made it look like he was getting the box of bandages together for the dressing change.
He rummaged inside, and then stopped, like he wondered where some missing item might've gone. Checked a drawer, then the other. His gun, lying on its side in the drawer. He palmed it and slipped it into his coat pocket.
"So, where were you?" he asked, glancing over to Shaw. She was slipping out of her coat and boots at the back door.
"Had a couple a calls to make," she said.
Reese flinched. She'd been doing that – stepping out on the deck to make her calls back to New York. Why? What was she hiding? A million questions popped in his brain. And then the brakes came on. Wait a minute – I'm not supposed to care anymore.
He let himself nod back, like he'd heard but hadn't paid much attention. She'd never been particularly good at reading him. Maybe he'd squeak through now.
"Lemme know when you wanna get the dressing change done," he said, changing the subject, too. Shaw glanced at the clock.
"Half an hour? We'll get it out of the way and then it won't interfere with dinner."
Reese agreed. He turned around to slide his coat off and noticed the trails of snow he'd left on the floor. The footprints were melting, leaving puddles where he'd walked. He shook his head.
"Gotta mop this up."
Shaw watched him pull a couple of lengths of paper toweling off the roll in the kitchen. He folded them into two separate packets. One, he dropped at his feet and stepped on it in his boots. After a minute, he stepped off and started to slide the towel forward on the floor, sopping the puddles into the toweling as he went.
When that first one had taken all it could, he dropped the second one on top and flipped the bottom over the top to keep going. At the front door, he glanced back to be sure he'd gotten all the wet spots. Lowering himself to fetch the towels wasn't the bad part. It was pushing off to get up that strained the wound.
He grimaced and laid his hand over the spot to press. Seemed better with a little support. Reese suppressed a flare of irritation. A return to normal couldn't get here fast enough.
When the time came for the dressing change, Reese gathered his supplies on the table. Shaw reminded him about the pain pill. He'd thought about it. The pain had kicked up a notch after the walk outside. But that only made him more determined to get out each day and push himself. Wanted to feel like a soldier again.
"Don't think I'll need it," he said. Went to wash up, and then came back to check his temp. When the beep sounded, he took a look, and then turned it around for Shaw to see. She nodded and he sat the unit on the hutch, checked the clock for the time, and wrote the numbers in the book.
Now for the hard part.
Thought he'd try it standing up this time. Fiddled with the mirror and swung it around to catch the best light. Readied the field, the gauze strip for the packing, and a dressing for later.
He'd lost some weight since the ambush, and he still had more to gain back. Had to wear a belt, even though the leather pressed on the skin near his hipbone. Glad to get it off for a while. He slid his zipper down and rolled the top of his jeans down on the right. Better not lose any more weight, he thought. The jeans'd slide right off him.
He'd taken to wearing boxers for a looser fit against the wound. Slid the waistband down low enough to clear the gauze. Then, he ran his finger around under the tape. It barely stuck at all on the skin.
First layer of gauze and the tape – gone. The next layer could be stuck down on the wound, so he needed to take a little time with it. He put a pair of the vinyl gloves on, and used a pick-up to grab a corner. Little by little, he peeled it back. A blob of ointment in the middle of the gauze seemed to work well for keeping the gauze off the packing inside. The square peeled off without sticking.
He found the end of the packing strip on top, and lifted it up into his right hand. A gentle pull and the packing started to lift from the wound. He gathered the length of strip into his hand as he went.
Down near the bottom, that's where the packing typically welded itself to the raw lining of the cavity. Didn't seem much smaller yet. Still about the size of half-a-golf-ball deep.
Getting to the hardest part now. The last few layers before the ones that had stuck. She'd shown him a trick for loosening the layers with some sterile saline. Couldn't do that part standing up. He made his way back to the living room and laid down on the couch. Didn't lift his leg all the way up on top of the seat – just bent his knee and let his foot rest flat on the floor to steady himself.
Reese was just about to lift the square of sterile gauze he'd soaked in sterile saline, when Shaw stopped him.
"Hold up," she said. He frowned. Musta done something wrong. He went through the steps in his head and drew a blank.
"Your pick-ups," she hinted. Didn't help.
"Are they clean or dirty?"
"Damn," he said. He hadn't changed them over to the sterile ones yet.
Maybe it wouldn't have made much difference, she thought, but the better technique she could get him to follow, the more likely he'd get through the next two weeks without a problem.
"Lemme get it," she said.
Shaw donned a pair of sterile gloves and used a pair of sterile pick-ups to lift the gauze. She laid it gently into the cavity, and tapped it down with the smooth back of the pick-ups until it rested on the bottom of the wound. She'd watched his face out of the corner of her eye. Painful, but he seemed to handle it better today.
They needed to wait for the saline to do its magic, so Shaw used the opportunity to check the wound for the last time.
"Let's see how it's healing," she said, without looking at his eyes. Uh-oh. He lifted his head to watch her hands. What was she planning to do?
Shaw started by pressing around the edges first. The color looked good. A healthy shade of pink now, instead of the fire engine red that first night. And no heat coming off the skin, either, like the first night. She'd had to knock him out to break up the abscess and drain the infection then. So, of course the pain had flared even more after that. She could tell it still hurt when she pressed, but at least things were going in the right direction.
A little while later, it was time to lift the gauze out of the cavity with the points of her pick-ups. Underneath, the cavity had partly filled with saline draining off the gauze. She traded pick-ups again and used the old ones to lift the packing strip off his skin. If the saline had done its work, the strip would come up without yanking it.
As she lifted, she guided it into his right hand with the rest of the packing. She noticed he had his left hand clenched at his side. Better get this done. When the last of it peeled off the bottom, a sigh escaped from his lips and he shuddered under her hand.
"Never wanna get used to that," he said, glancing at her eyes.
But, she'd already changed her focus to the sides and bottom of the cavity. With her left hand, which she made sure hadn't touched anything to contaminate it, she pressed harder on the edges at the top of the wound, enough to deform the sides beneath it. Reese flinched with the pressure.
Nothing oozed out of the walls inside that she could see. More good news.
For the last step, she lifted a clean square of sterile gauze and lowered it into the wound. The fluid at the bottom wicked up into the dry gauze. Leaving the fluid there could macerate the tissue and make an opening for infection to start again. Best to take it out. Then, with an index finger, she poked down gently into the bottom of the cavity and pressed, exploring the depths with her touch.
Reese held for as long as she was there, but his face showed the strain. Her focus was on the wound, not on his pain. But then it was over.
Shaw was satisfied. Nothing to make her think it wasn't healing. This whole cavity would eventually fill in. The packing kept the process going smoothly while the cavity shrank in size.
"OK, we're done here. No more exploring. It's healing the way it's supposed to. The rest is up to you, Reese."
He let his head lean back on the arm of the couch, while he caught a breath. For a moment, while she'd been digging around in there, a flash had crossed his mind. Was she getting even with him for his 'moment' in the bedroom? He'd glanced at her face for a sign. Pure focus. Not a hint of malice in her eyes. Just focus.
"Good to be done," he said, licking his lips. Dry. He must have been breathing pretty hard through it.
"Let's get this buttoned up. I'm sure you'll remember what to do next time," she said. And with that, she took over the rest of the steps and finished up in no time.
While Shaw pulled all the debris off the field and walked it over to the trash, Reese lifted the band of his boxers carefully over the new dressing. He zipped up and loosely belted his jeans. Didn't need any extra pressure over the wound now.
He was sore – like toothache-sore – over the whole right side.
A pain pill sounded good right about now. Felt like he'd earned it, getting himself through that.
Shaw was standing at his shoulder then. A glass of water in one hand and one of the pain pills in her palm.
"No use letting you suffer," she said. He nodded and took the pill with a sip of water. Maybe he'd wait to move until the pill had kicked in.
Shaw left for the kitchen to clean up and process the sterile instruments for him.
Wasn't long before Reese could sense the first bits of relief rolling in.