When she left him, he sat down at her desk in the quiet, and wished, with everything inside him, that he could make the rest of it vanish as easily.
Reva waylaid her on the way outside. “I don’t have time,” Eve said curtly and kept moving. “It’ll only take a minute. I want to apologize. I asked you to give it to me straight, and when you did, I didn’t handle it. I’m sorry, and I’m pissed off at myself for reacting the way I did.”
“Forget it. Are you going to handle it now?”
“Yeah, I’m going to handle it now. What do you need?”
“I need you to think. Where he might go, what his next steps would be in a crisis. What’s he doing now besides trying to find a way out? Think it through, lay it out. Have it ready for me when I get back.”
“You’ll have it. He’d have to work,” she called out as Eve streamed out the door. “His art wasn’t just a cover, it couldn’t have been. It’s his passion, his escape, his ego. He’d have to have a place to work.”
“Good. Keep it up. I’ll be back.”
“That was well-done.” Tokimoto stepped out of the parlor, into the foyer.
“I hope so. I’m not doing so well otherwise.”
“You need time to adjust, to grieve, to be angry. I hope you’ll feel able to talk to me when you need someone.”
“I’ve been talking you black-and-blue so far.” She sighed. “Tokimoto, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
He stiffened like a rod. “That would be inappropriate under the circumstances.”
“Because I might still be married or because you’re not interested?”
“Your marriage would hardly be a factor, considering. But you’re not in a state of mind where . . . An advance of a personal nature is clearly inappropriate while your emotions and your situation are in flux.”
She found herself smiling, just a little. And found something opening inside her again, just a little. “You didn’t say you weren’t interested, so I’ll just say I don’t think I’d mind. If you worked up to hitting on me.”
To test it out, she rose on her toes and touched her lips lightly to his. “No,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I’d mind. Why don’t you think about it?”
She was still smiling, just a little, as she started back upstairs.
19 QUINN SPARROW WOULD live. He might, with several months of intensive therapy and treatments, walk again—if he had the same level of will and guts
Reva Ewing had called upon to recover from her injuries.
It was, to Eve’s mind, a solid kind of justice.
He had broken bones, a fractured spine, and a concussion among other insults. He would require reconstructive surgery on his face.
But he would live.
Eve was glad to hear it.
He was and would remain in Intensive Care for at least forty-eight hours. He was sedated, but Eve’s badge and some bullying got her through.
She left Peabody posted at the door.
He was either sleeping or zoned when she walked in. She was banking on the zoned and shut off his IV drip of blockers without a twinge of remorse.
It only took a few moments for him to surface, moaning.
He looked considerably worse for wear, brutally bruised around his bandages, with a skin cast on his right arm, another along with a stability cage—that looked a little like one of Bissel’s sculptures—around his right leg.