Change of Heart Read online

  Even if I hadn't been listed as Shay Bourne's emergency contact, I would have found him quickly enough at the hospital: he was the only patient with armed guards standing outside his door. I glanced at the officers, then turned my attention to the nurse at the desk. "Is he all right? What happened?"

  Father Michael had called me after the attack on CO Smythe and told me Shay hadn't been hurt. Somewhere between now and then, however, something must have gone drastically wrong. I had tried calling the priest now, but he wasn't answering his cell--I assumed he was on his way, that he'd been called, too.

  If Shay hadn't been treated at the prison hospital, whatever had happened must've been pretty awful. Inmates weren't moved off-site unless absolutely necessary, because of cost and security. With the hoopla Shay had generated outside the prison walls, it must have been a matter of life or death.

  Then again, maybe everything was when it came to Shay. Here I was literally shaking over the news that he'd been seriously injured, when I had spent yesterday filing motions that would streamline his execution.

  The nurse looked up at me. "He's just come back from surgery."

  "Surgery?"

  "Yes," said a clipped British voice behind me. "And no, it wasn't an appendectomy."

  When I turned around, Dr. Gallagher was standing there.

  "Are you the only doctor who works here?"

  "It certainly feels that way sometimes. I'm happy to answer your questions. Mr. Bourne is my patient."

  "He's my client."

  Dr. Gallagher glanced at the nurse and at the armed officers. "Why don't we go somewhere to talk?"

  I followed him down the hall to a small family waiting lounge that was empty. When the doctor gestured for me to take a seat, my heart sank. Doctors only made you sit down when they delivered bad news.

  "Mr. Bourne is going to be fine," Dr. Gallagher said. "At least in terms of this injury."

  "What injury?"

  "I'm sorry, I thought you knew--apparently, it was an inmate fight. Mr. Bourne sustained a severe blow to the maxillary sinus."

  I waited for him to translate.

  "His maxilla's broken," Dr. Gallagher said, and he leaned forward, touching my face. His fingers brushed over the bone below my eye socket, tracing toward my mouth. "Here," he said, and I absolutely, positively stopped breathing. "There was a bit of a trauma during the operation. As soon as we saw the injuries we knew that the anesthesia would be intravenous, instead of inhalational. Needless to say, when Mr. Bourne heard the anesthesiologist say that she'd begun Sodium Pentothal drip, he grew quite agitated." The doctor looked up at me. "He asked if this was a dry run for the real thing."

  I tried to imagine how it would feel to be Shay--hurt, aching, and confused--whisked away to an unfamiliar place for what seemed to be a prelude to his own execution. "I want to see him."

  "If you can tell him, Ms. Bloom, that if I'd realized who he was--what his circumstances are, I mean--well, I would never have allowed the anesthesiologist to use that drug, much less an IV tube. I'm deeply sorry for putting him through that."

  I nodded and stood up.

  "One more thing," Dr. Gallagher said. "I really admire you. For doing this sort of thing."

  I was halfway to Shay's room when I realized that Dr. Gallagher had remembered my name.

  It took several cell phone calls to the prison before I was allowed in to see Shay, and even then, the warden insisted that the officer inside the room would have to stay. I walked inside, acknowledged the CO, and sat down on the edge of Shay's bed. His eyes were blackened, his face bandaged. He was asleep, and it made him look younger.

  Part of what I did for a living meant championing the causes of my clients. I was the strong arm, fighting on their behalf, the bullhorn broadcasting their voices. I could feel the angry discomfort of the Abenaki boy whose school team was called the Redskins; I could identify with the passion of the teacher who'd been fired for being Wiccan. Shay, though, had sent me reeling. Although this was arguably the most important case I would ever bring to court, and although--as my father pointed out--I hadn't been this motivated in my career in ages, there was an inherent paradox. The more I got to know him, the better chance I had of winning his organ donation case. But the more I got to know him, the harder it would be for me to see him executed.

  I dragged my cell phone out of my purse. The officer's eyes flicked toward me. "You're not supposed to use that in here--"

  "Oh, piss off," I snapped, and for the hundredth time I dialed Father Michael, and reached his voice mail. "I don't know where you are," I said, "but call me back immediately."

  I had left the emotional component of Shay Bourne's welfare to Father Michael, figuring (a) my talents were better put to use in a courtroom, and (b) my interpersonal relationship skills had grown so rusty I needed WD-40 before employing them. But now, Father Michael was MIA, Shay was hospitalized, and I was here, for better or for worse.

  I stared at Shay's hands. They were cuffed at the wrist to the metal bars of the hospital gurney. The nails were clean and clipped, the tendons ropy. It was hard to imagine the fingers curled around a pistol, pulling a trigger twice. And yet, twelve jurors had been able to picture it.

  Very slowly, I reached across the knobby cotton blanket. I threaded my fingers with Shay's, surprised at how warm his skin was. But when I was about to pull away, his grip tightened. His eyes slitted open, another shade of blue amid the bruising. "Gracie," he said, in a voice that sounded like cotton caught on thorns. "You came."

  I did not know who he thought I was. "Of course I came," I said, squeezing his hand. I smiled at Shay Bourne and pretended that I was the person he needed me to be.

  MICHAEL

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  Dr. Vijay Choudhary's office was filled with statues of Ganesha, the Hindu deity with a potbellied human body and an elephant's head. I had to move one in order to sit down, in fact. "Mr. Smythe was extremely lucky," the doctor said. "A quarter inch to the left, and he wouldn't have survived."

  "About that ..." I took a deep breath. "A doctor at the prison pronounced him dead."

  "Between you and me, Father, I wouldn't trust a psy chiatrist to find his own car in a parking lot, much less a hypo tensive victim's pulse. Reports of Mr. Smythe's death were, as they say, greatly exaggerated."

  "There was a lot of blood--"

  "Many structures in the neck can bleed a great deal. To a layman, a pool of blood may look like a huge quantity, even when it's not." He shrugged. "What I imagine happened was a vasovagal reaction. Mr. Smythe saw blood and passed out. The body compensates for shock due to blood loss. Blood pressure lowers, and vasoconstriction occurs, and both tend to stop the bleeding. They also lead to a loss of palpable pulses in the extremities--which is why the psychiatrist couldn't find one in his wrist."

  "So," I said, pinkening. "You don't think it's possible that Mr. Smythe was ... well ... resurrected?"

  "No," he chuckled. "Now, in medical school, I saw patients who'd frozen to death, in the vernacular, come back to life when they were warmed up. I saw a heart stop beating, and then start up by itself again. But in neither of those cases--or in Mr. Smythe's--did I consider the patient clinically dead before his or her recovery."

  My phone began to vibrate, as it had every ten minutes for the past two hours. I'd turned the ringer off when I came into the hospital, as per their policy. "Nothing miraculous, then," I said.

  "Perhaps not by your standards ... but I think that Mr. Smythe's family might disagree."

  I thanked him, set the statue of Ganesha back on my chair, and left Dr. Choudhary's office. As soon as I exited the hospital building, I turned on my cell phone to see fifty-two messages.

  Call me right back, Maggie said on her message. Something's happened to Shay. Beep.

  Where are you?? Beep.

  Okay, I know you probably don't have your phone on but you have to call me back immediately. Beep.

  Where the fuck are you? Beep.