Blindside

took them without a fuss.
    “Oh, no,” she said, “where are the kids?”
    “I’ll take care of the kids. It’s still early. When they’reup, I’ll tell them that you’ve got a bit of a stomach bug and to leave you alone until you decide to appear. Okay?”
    “I can tell you’re a parent. You’re good. Thank you, Miles.”
    He paced the room in front of her, then turned back to face her. “Katie, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this. I think you did the right thing. We don’t know how Sam and Keely are going to be this morning, how yesterday’s trauma will affect them, but I do know that if they knew you’d been shot, it would be much worse. So thank you. Now see that you heal while I think about how I’m going to keep the police away from you as long as possible.”
    “I’ll be just fine. Say early afternoon?”
    She fell asleep ten minutes later with just a pinch of pain in her hip.
    Miles stood a moment in the doorway, then looked down at his watch. It was only six-thirty in the morning. The kids would be up any time now. He hated lying to them, but not this time. He hoped they could carry it off. He didn’t want to see any more blank pain in Sam’s eyes for as long as he lived.

39
    A t eight o’clock that evening, only three hours after leaving Detective Raven down at Metro Headquarters in the Daley building, Savich came to stand in the kitchen doorway, watching Sherlock wipe spaghetti sauce off Sean’s mouth. Sean quickly replaced it with the next spoonful. What with all the excitement, they’d gotten home very late, and Sean was hungry, tired, and really hyped up. As for Sean’s parents, they both hoped some of Savich’s spaghetti would put him out. Savich said to Sherlock, not taking his eyes off his boy, “Are you ready for something you’re not going to believe?”
    Sherlock straightened midswipe. “I heard you talking on the phone to Miles. What’s going on?”
    “The shooter today. It seems he wasn’t after me. He was after Katie.”
    “After Katie? What do you mean?”
    Savich didn’t say anything for a moment as Sean clattered his spoon to his plate, climbed down from his chair, and made a beeline for his orange plastic ball in the corner. They both, for a moment, listened to him tell the ball that he was going to bounce it, good.

    When she looked up at him, Savich said, “He shot Katie.”
    “ What? How? But that isn’t possible! She never said a word, she never acted wounded, she—”
    Savich leaned his head back against one of the cabinets, closed his eyes. “He shot her in the hip and she managed to hide it from all of us. The bullet went in and through. She’ll be okay. Miles called from the emergency room while the nurse was getting Katie into a robe. Turns out she didn’t say a word about it until after they’d gotten home and put the kids to bed. Then she tells him. He’s still so shaken up he could barely speak straight.”
    “She’s really okay?”
    “Yes, soon to be out with a smile on her face from the morphine. Just a couple days rest, and she’ll be fine.”
    Sherlock picked up a hot pad and hurled it across the kitchen. It calmed her and didn’t make any noise to frighten Sean. “I don’t believe this, Dillon. It’s ridiculous, just plain dumb. She’s wounded and doesn’t even let on? No, that can’t be right, it can’t.”
    “She didn’t say anything because she didn’t want the kids any more frightened than they were. If you think about it, you can see Katie’s point. It was an adult decision, hers to make, I guess.”
    Sherlock’s heart was still pumping wildly. She threw another hot pad at the wall, calmed herself down. “It was brave of her.” She drew in a deep breath. “I hope I would have the presence of mind to do that. But wait, Dillon, if the shooter hit her—”
    “That means I wasn’t the target. Or, I really was the target, and he could have shot at her first, for the fun of it.”
    Savich straightened, shrugged. “Maybe he, whoever he is, just wanted to scare us. At this point, any guess is as good as any other. Who knows, it might have been a random shooting.” Neither of them believed that for an instant.
    Savich picked up Sean, who was tightly clutching his orange ball, and walked to the front window in the livingroom. He stared out into the calm dark night. A storm was expected to hit Monday, winter coming with a grand announcement. And the temperature would plummet. Sean dropped his ball,