Sudden Prey

angry. “You know what he means . . .”
    Sloan opened his mouth and shut it again: A few years earlier, Lucas had gone through an episode of clinical depression, and since then, Sloan had thought of his friend as somewhat . . . delicate was not quite the right word; dangerously poised, perhaps. He said, “Well . . .” and let it go.
    A nurse poked her head in, spotted Lucas and said, “Weather’s up.”
    Lucas pushed himself out of the chair and said, “See you guys later,” and hurried down the hall after the nurse.
    Weather had a private room, and when Lucas walked in, she was on her feet, in a hospital gown, digging into a lockerlike closet for her clothes. Her face was intent, hurried.
    “Weather . . .”
    She jumped, turned, saw him and her face softened: “Oh, God, Lucas.” She reached toward him.
    “How are you?” He wrapped her up in his arms and her feet came off the floor.
    “If you don’t smother me, I’ll probably be okay,” she gasped.
    He put her down. “Probably?”
    “Well, when they had me sedated, they talked me into this ridiculous hospital gown.” She pulled it out to the side, as if she were about to curtsy. “Every doc I know has been down to check on me, and every one has taken a good look at my ass.”
    “Just like you: bringing light into people’s lives.”
    “I gotta get out of this gown,” she said, digging into the locker again. “Shut the door.”
    Lucas shut the door, and as she tossed the balled-up gown on the bed, he said, “Really now—don’t bullshit me. How are you?”
    She was pulling on a blouse, and stopped, suddenly, as her hands came through the cuffs. “I’m sorta . . . messed up, I think. It’s the weirdest thing.” She rubbed her temple, looking up at him. Then her eyes drifted away, focused in the middle distance past his shoulder. “I’ll be going along, thinking about something else, and then all of a sudden, there I am again, back in the hall with this man and you’re standing there and then . . .”
    She shuddered.
    “Don’t think about it,” Lucas said.
    “I’m not thinking about it. I refuse to think about it. But it’s like . . . like somebody else holds up a picture of it, right in front of my eyes. It just comes, boom!” she said.
    “Post-traumatic stress,” he said.
    “That’s what I think,” she said. “But in some way, I never really believed in it until now. It’s like people who had it were . . . weaklings, or something.”
    “It’ll go away,” he repeated. “There in the hall—I didn’t know what was happening with you and LaChaise, I couldn’t take any chances, there wasn’t any way to really know.”
    “I worked that out,” she said. “And God, the whole thing was my fault. What was I doing here? When he came in the OR, I thought I was dead. I thought he’d kill me right there, and all my friends, the people with me. I felt so stupid . . .”
    “You can’t anticipate lunatics,” Lucas said. “None of this made any sense.”
    Weather was rambling on: “Then he made the fatal error. I didn’t see it, because we were talking so . . . normally. But I see it now: he’d maneuvered himself, by what he’d done, the way he was acting, into a spot where all the solutions were drastic and narrow. Thinking about it, I’m not sure he would have surrendered. At the time I thought he would: No, I was sure of it. But now, I’m not sure. When we were talking, he’d keep changing his mind, like . . . like . . .”
    “A child,” Lucas said.
    “Yes . . . Well, not quite. Like a crazy child,” she said.
    She was staring out the window when she said that, looking down at the trees along the Mississippi, when suddenly she focused again, and turned to look up at him. “What about you?” she asked. “We heard about the policeman, that he was killed and you were there . . . are you all right?”
    “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” He stood back from her, holding on to her shoulders but at arm’s length, looking her over. She seemed so bright, so focused, so normal, so all right , that he suddenly laughed.
    “What?” she asked, trying on a smile.
    “Nothing,” he said. He wrapped her up again, and her feet came off the floor again. “Everything. Especially the way that gown showed your ass off.”
    “Lucas . . .”
    •  •  •
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