the heart or brain, killing him or causing substantial brain damage,
though Jack was medicated to reduce the danger of that complication, it
was the one that most deeply concerned him.
He worried, as well, about Heather and Toby. They were alone, which
troubled him in spite of the fact that Heather, under Alma Bryson’s
guidance, seemed to be prepared to handle everything from a lone
burglar to a foreign invasion.
Actually, the thought of all those weapons in the house–and what the
need for them said about Heather’s state of mind–disturbed him nearly
as much as the thought of someone breaking into the place.
Money worried him more than cerebral embolisms. He was on disability
and had no idea when he might be able to work again full time. Heather
was still unemployed, the economy showed no signs of emerging from the
recession, and their savings were virtually exhausted. Friends in the
Department had opened a trust account for his family at a branch of
Wells Fargo Bank, and contributions from policemen and the public at
large now totaled more than twenty-five thousand dollars. But medical
and rehabilitation expenses were never entirely covered by insurance,
and he suspected that even the trust fund would not return them to the
modest level of financial security they had enjoyed before the shootout
at Arkadian’s service station. By September or October, making the
mortgage payment might be impossible.
However, he was able to keep all those worries to himself, partly
because he knew that other people had worries of their own and that
some of them might be more serious than his, but also because he was an
optimist, a believer in the healing power of laughter and positive
thinking. Though some of his friends thought his response to adversity
was cockeyed, he couldn’t help it. As far as he could recall, he had
been born that way. Where a pessimist looked at a glass of wine and
saw it as half empty, Jack not only saw it as half full but also
figured there was the better part of a bottle still to be drunk. He
was in a body cast and temporarily disabled, but he felt he was blessed
to have escaped permanent disability and death. He was in pain, sure,
but there were people in the same hospital in more pain than he was.
Until the glass was empty and the bottle as well, he would always
anticipate the next sip of wine rather than regret that so little was
left.
On his first visit to the hospital back in March, Toby had been
frightened to see his father so immobilized, and his eyes had filled
with tears even as he bit his lip and kept his chin up and struggled to
be brave. Jack had done his best to minimize the seriousness of his
condition, insisted he looked in worse shape than he was, and strove
with growing desperation to lift his son’s spirits. Finally he got the
boy to laugh by claiming he wasn’t really hurt at all, was in the
hospital as a participant in a secret new police program, and would
emerge in a few months as a member of their new Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtle Task Force.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s true. See, that’s what all this plaster is, a
shell, a turtle shell that’s being applied to my back. When it’s dry
and coated with Kevlar, bullets will just bounce off.”
Smiling in spite of himself, wiping at his eyes with one hand, Toby
said, “Get real, Dad.”
“It’s true.”
“You don’t know taste kwon do.”
“I’ll be taking lessons, soon as the shell’s dry.”
“A Ninja has to know how to use swords too, swords and all kinda
stuff.”
“More lessons, that’s all.”
“Big problem.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not a real turtle.”
“Well, of course I’m not a real turtle. Don’t be silly. The
department isn’t allowed to hire anything but human beings. People
don’t much like it when they’re given traffic tickets by members of
another species. So we have to make do with an imitation Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtle Task Force. So what? Is Spider-Man really a
spider? Is Batman really a bat?”