Velocity

enjoyed a quality of life worth living, she might have changed physicians. But she had not known.
    “She was such a vibrant, involved person,” Ferrier said. “She wouldn’t want to just hang on like this, year after year.”
    “She’s not just hanging on,” Billy said. “She’s not lost at the bottom of a sea. She’s floating near the surface. She’s right there.”
    “I understand your pain, Billy. Believe me, I do. But you don’t have the medical knowledge to assess her condition. She’s not right there. She never will be.”
    “I remember something she said just the other day. ‘I want to know what it says… the sea, what it is that it keeps on saying.’”
    Ferrier regarded him with equal measures of tenderness and frustration. “That’s your best example of coherence?”
    “ ‘First do no harm,’” Billy said.
    “Harm is done to other patients when we spend limited resources on hopeless cases.”
    “She’s not hopeless. She laughs sometimes. She’s right there, and she’s got plenty of resources.”
    “Which could do so much good if properly applied.”
    “I don’t want the money.”
    “I know. You’re not the kind of guy who could ever spend a dime of it on yourself. But you could direct those resources to people who have a greater potential for an acceptable quality of life than she does, people who would be more likely to be helped.”
    Billy tolerated Ferrier also because the physician had been so effective in pre-trial depositions that the maker of the vichyssoise had chosen to settle long before getting near a courtroom.
    “I’m only thinking of Barbara,” Ferrier continued. “If I were in her condition, I wouldn’t want to lie there like that, year after year.”
    “And I would respect your wishes,” Billy said. “But we don’t know what her wishes are.”
    “Letting her go doesn’t require active steps,” Ferrier reminded him. “We need only be passive. Remove the feeding tube.”
    In her coma, Barbara had no reliable gag reflex and could not properly swallow. Food would end up in her lungs.
    “Remove the feeding tube and let nature take its course.”
    “Starvation.”
    “Just nature.”
    Billy kept her in Ferrier’s care also because the physician was straightforward about his belief in utilitarian bioethics. Another doctor might believe the same but conceal it… and fancy himself an angel—or agent—of mercy.
    Twice a year, Ferrier would make this argument, but he would not act without Billy’s approval.
    “No,” Billy said. “No. We won’t do that. We’ll go on just the way we have been going.”
    “Four years is such a long time.”
    Billy said, “Death is longer.”
     
     
     

Chapter 42
     
    Six o’clock sun on the vineyards filled the window with summer, life, and bounty.
    Beneath her pale lids, Barbara Mandel’s eyes followed the action of vivid dreams.
    Sitting on the barstool by her bedside, Billy said, “I saw Harry today. He still smiles when he remembers you called him a Muppet. He says his greatest achievement is never having been disbarred.”
    He didn’t tell her anything else about his day. The rest of it would not have lifted her spirits.
    From the standpoint of defense, the two weak points of the room were the door to the hallway and the window. The adjoining bathroom was windowless.
    The window featured a blind and a latch. The door could not be locked.
    Like every hospital bed, Barbara’s had wheels. Thursday evening, as midnight approached, Billy could roll her out of here, where the killer expected to find her, and put her in another room, somewhere safer.
    She wasn’t tethered to life-support systems or to monitors. Her food supply and pump hung from a rack fixed to the bed frame.
    From the nurses’ station at midpoint of the long main corridor, no one could see around the corner to this west-wing room. With luck, he might be able to move Barbara at the penultimate moment without being seen, then return here to wait for the freak.
    Assuming it came to that crisis point. Which was a safe if not happy assumption.
    He left Barbara alone and walked the west wing, glancing in the rooms of other patients, checking a supply closet, a bathing chamber, reviewing possibilities.
    When he returned to her room, she was talking: “… soaked in water… smothered in mud… lamed by stones…”
    Her words suggested a bad dream, but her tone of voice did not. She spoke softly and as if enchanted.
    “… cut by flints…