“What do you have to say for yourself?” Muller demanded.
“The guy who wanted to kill me was arrested yesterday. The FBI has him,” Jack said carefully. He amazed himself by saying it so calmly. Somehow it seemed a trivial matter compared with his wife and daughter.
“This is all your fault, you know.” Muller had been rehearsing this for hours.
“I know,” Jack conceded the point. He wondered how much more he could back up.
“Daddy –” Cathy started to say.
“You keep out of this,” Muller said to his daughter, a little too sharply for Jack.
“You can say anything you want to me, but don’t snap at her,” he warned.
“Oh, you want to protect her, eh? So where the hell were you yesterday!”
“I was in my office, just like you were.”
“You had to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong, didn’t you? You had to play hero — and you damned near got your family killed,” Muller went on through his lines.
“Look, Mr. Muller.” Jack had told himself all these things before. He could accept the punishment from himself. But not from his father-in-law. “Unless you know of a company on the exchange that makes a time machine, we can’t very well change that, can we? All we can do now is help the authorities find the people who did this.”
“Why didn’t you think about all this before, dammit!”
“Daddy, that’s enough!” Cathy rejoined the conversation.
“Shut up — this is between us!”
“If you yell at her again, mister, you’ll regret it.” Jack needed a release. He hadn’t protected his family the previous day, but he could now.
“Calm down, Jack.” His wife didn’t know that she was making things worse, but Jack took the cue after a moment. Muller didn’t.
“You’re a real big guy now, aren’t you?”
Keep going, Joe, and you might find out. Jack looked over to his wife and took a deep breath. “Look, if you came down here to yell at me, that’s fine, we can do that by ourselves, okay? — but that’s your daughter over there, and maybe she needs you, too.” He turned to Cathy. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
Ryan left the room. There were still two very serious state troopers at the door, and another at the nurses’ station down the hall. Jack reminded himself that a trooper had been killed, and that Cathy was the only thing they had that was close to being a witness. She was safe, finally. Robby waved to his friend from down the hall.
“Settle down, boy,” the pilot suggested.
“He has a real talent for pissing me off,” Jack said after another deep breath.
“I know he’s an asshole, but he almost lost his kid. Try to remember that. Taking it out on him doesn’t help things.”
“It might,” Jack said with a smile, thinking about it. “What are you, a philosopher?”
“I’m a PK, Jack. Preacher’s Kid. You can’t imagine the stuff I used to hear from the parlor when people came over to talk with the old man. He isn’t so much mad at you as scared by what almost happened,” Robby said.
“So am I, pal.” Ryan looked down the hall.
“But you’ve had more time to deal with it.”
“Yeah.” Jack was quiet for a moment. “I still don’t like the son of a bitch.”
“He gave you Cathy, man. That’s something.”
“Are you sure you’re in the right line of work? How come you’re not a chaplain?”
“I am the voice of reason in a chaotic world. You don’t accomplish as much when you’re pissed off. That’s why we train people to be professionals. If you want to get the job done, emotions don’t help. You’ve already gotten even with the man, right?”
“Yeah. If he’d had his way, I’d be living up in Westchester County, taking the train in every day, and — crap!” Jack shook his head. “He still makes me mad.”
Muller came out of the room just then. He looked around for a moment, spotted Jack, and walked down. “Stay close,” Ryan told his friend.
“You almost killed my little girl.” Joe’s mood hadn’t improved.
Jack didn’t reply. He’d told himself that about a hundred times, and was just starting to consider the possibility that he was a victim, too.
“You ain’t thinking right, Mr. Muller,” Robby said.
“Who the hell are you!”
“A friend,” Robby replied. He and Joe were about the same height, but the pilot was twenty years younger. The look he gave the broker communicated this rather clearly. The voice of reason didn’t like being yelled at. Joe Muller had a talent for irritating people. On Wall Street he could get away with it, and he assumed that meant that be could do it anywhere he liked. He was a man who had not learned the limitations of his power.
“We can’t change what has happened,” Jack offered. “We can work to see that it doesn’t happen again.”
“If you’d done what I wanted, this never would have happened!”
“If I’d done what you wanted. I’d be working with you every day, moving money from Column A to Column B and pretending it was important, like all the other Wall Street wimps — and hating it, and turning into another miserable bastard in the financial world. I proved that I could do that as well as you, but I made my pile, and so now I do something I like. At least we’re trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to take it over with leveraged buyouts. It’s not my fault that you don’t understand that. Cathy and I are doing what we like to do.”
“Something you like,” Muller snapped, rejecting the concept that making money wasn’t something to be enjoyed in and of itself. “Make the world a better place, eh?”
“Yeah, because I’m going to help catch the bastards who did this.”
“And how is a punk history teacher going to do that!”
Ryan gave his father-in-law his best smile. “That’s something I can’t tell you, Joe.”
The stockbroker swore and stalked away. So much for reconciliation, Jack told himself. He wished it had gone otherwise. His estrangement with Joe Muller was occasionally hard on Cathy.
“Back to the Agency, Jack?” Robby asked.
“Yeah.”
Ryan spent twenty minutes with his wife, long enough to learn what she’d told the police and to make sure that she really was feeling better. She was dozing off when he left. Next he went across the street to the Shock-Trauma Center.
Getting into scrubs reminded him of the only other time he’d done so, the night Sally was born. A nurse took him into the Critical Care Recovery Unit, and he saw his little girl for the first time in thirty-six hours, a day and a half that had stretched into an eternity. It was a thoroughly ghastly experience. Had he not been told positively that her survival chances were good, he might have broken down on the spot. The bruised little shape was unconscious from the combination of drugs and injuries. He watched and listened as the respirator breathed for her. She was being fed from bottles and tubes that ran into her veins. A doctor explained that her condition looked far worse than it was. Sally’s liver was functioning well, under the circumstances. In two or three more days the broken legs would be set.
“Is she going to be crippled?” Jack asked quietly.
“No, there isn’t any reason to worry about that. Kids’ bones — what we say is, if the broken pieces are in the same room, they’ll heal. It looks far worse than it is. The trick with cases like this is getting them through the first hour — in her case, the first twelve or so. Once we get kids through the initial crisis, once we get the system working again, they heal fast. You’ll have her home in a month. In two months, she’ll be running around like it never happened. As crazy as that sounds, it’s true. Nothing heals like a kid. She’s a very sick little girl right now, but she’s going to get well. Hey, I was here when she arrived.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rich Kinter. Barry Shapiro and I did most of the surgery. It was close — God, it was so close! But we won. Okay? We won. You will be taking her home.”
“Thanks — that doesn’t cover it, Doc.” Jack stumbled over a few more words, not knowing what to say to the people who had saved his daughter’s life.
Kinter shook his head. “Bring her back sometime and we’re even. We have a party for ex-patients every few months. Mr. Ryan, there is nothing you can do that comes close to what we all feel when we see our little patients come back — walk back. That’s why we’re here, man, to make sure they come back for cake and juice. Just let us bounce her on our knees after she’s better.”