Archie leaned over and gagged. Henry got a rose-colored plastic bedpan in front of him and he vomited into it, his body shaking. When he was done, he lay back in the bed, chest heaving.
Henry disappeared into the bathroom with the bedpan. Archie heard a toilet flush and the faucet go on and then Henry returned with the empty bedpan and set it on the tray next to the bed.
“You about done?” Henry asked.
Archie didn’t know what Henry was talking about.
“You’ve been vomiting for the last hour,” Henry said. “You don’t remember?”
Archie curled on his side. “No,” he said.
“Rosenberg came to see you,” Henry said. “And Fergus was here,” he said. “Remember that?”
Archie shook his head. He was covered with blankets, and he was still cold. He pulled the blankets up to his shoulders. His arms and legs were shaking. It felt like his bones hurt.
“He said you make it twelve hours on the naloxone, they can give you more pain meds. Taper you down.”
“How much longer is that?” Archie asked.
Henry looked at his watch and raised his eyebrows. “Seven hours,” he said.
Archie felt more acid rise in his throat and he turned over on his side and lifted his knees to his chest. “Keep talking to me.”
Henry sat down. “Susan was with me,” Henry said. “When we found you.”
Archie winced. He hadn’t meant for Susan to be put in danger. But he had known, when he gave the clue about Heather Ger-ber, that if she figured it out, she’d see it through. There was no way she was going to let Henry follow the lead by himself. If he’d gotten her killed, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. “She okay?” he asked.
“She’ll want to talk to you,” Henry said. “I told her she could write about all of it. If she keeps some details out.”
Henry proceeded to tell Archie about Susan’s escape from carbon monoxide poisoning and Bennett, who was still in a coma one floor up, and then about Susan identifying the other park bodies.
Archie thought of John Bannon and Buddy Anderson. “I need to talk to her,” he said. “But first,” he said, his gut cramping, “I’m going to need that bedpan again.”
The doctors and nurses came and went. He had thirty-five stitches in his neck. She’d missed the windpipe and the jugular. They continued to pump him full of naloxone.
Debbie was back. She hadn’t brought the kids and he hadn’t asked. It was better that they not see him like this. They had seen too much already.
“Did you get it out of your system?” she asked.
He closed his eyes. “No,” he said.
“What do you want, Archie?”
What did he want? He wanted to die. That had been the plan.
He turned his head away from her. “To sleep,” he said.
Archie saw a form in the doorway. It took him a moment to realize it was a kid. At first he thought it might be Ben. He smiled and tried to sit up. He wanted it to be Ben.
But it wasn’t Ben. It was the kid from the park. He motioned for the kid to come in, and he did. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing in the woods, a Ducks T-shirt and cargo shorts.
“Hi,” the kid said, raising a hand awkwardly.
“You remember me?” Archie asked. “From the woods?”
The kid looked for something to do with his skinny arms, crossing them and then putting his hands into his pockets. “Can I get my nest back?” he asked.
“It’s evidence,” Archie explained.
“Oh,” the kid said.
The colossal coincidence of the kid being there was dawning on Archie through his haze. Had he come to see Archie? “What are you doing here?” Archie asked.
The kid shrugged. “My mom works here,” he said.
Archie thought about that. It seemed plausible. “I want my partner to meet you,” he said.
The kid backed away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to go.” He lowered his voice. “You should go, too. My mom says that hospitals are dangerous.” He looked around the hospital room. “You can get secondary infections.”
“Hey,” Susan said. Archie had been dreaming. He glanced up at the clock on the wall. He had drifted in and out of consciousness all night and morning. Fergus had finally come at noon, and given him morphine. He had injected it into the IV, like Gretchen had done those last few days of his captivity.
“You awake?” Susan asked.
Archie looked around groggily for the boy from the park. “Where’s the kid?” he asked.
Susan glanced around the room and then raised an eyebrow. “There’s no kid,” she said.
Archie rubbed his face and looked at Susan. Henry had said that she had broken her nose, but Archie wasn’t prepared for the fact of it. She had a bandage and two black eyes that had probably come in overnight. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. “About Davis and Nixon. About Molly Palmer.”
“Who are Davis and Nixon again?” Archie asked.
“The bodies in the park,” Susan said impatiently. “Henry said he told you.”