CHAPTER 35
JASON WALKED INTO THE ROOM AND STOPPED WHEN HE SAW THE empty bed. Then he noticed Gus in the bedside chair.
“You’re up early,” Jason said. “How’d you manage the chair?”
Gus grunted as he repositioned himself. “Nurse Ratched.”
Jason offered a confused look as he walked to the computer stand, opened Gus’s chart, and reviewed what he’d missed over the long weekend. “Thought you two weren’t talking.”
“We’re not. But we’re pretty good at grunting at each other.
I couldn’t sleep and she got tired of me constantly ringing the nurses’ station, so she helped me move at about three o’clock this morning.
And by helped me, I mean she threw my ass in the chair while wearing gloves and trying not to catch cancer. ”
“Glad you guys are working things out. But three hours is too long to sit, big boy. So back to bed.”
Gus shook his head. “I can’t do the bed right now.”
“Your other option is to stand for a while. Crutches or walker?”
“Walker,” Gus said without hesitation. He could see it caught Jason off guard. Gus had refused the goddamn walker every other time it had been offered, because it meant he needed to use his prosthetic.
Jason slowly nodded his head. “Be right back.”
A minute later, he returned with an ugly metal walker, the legs of which were capped with tennis balls to quiet the device from rattling against the linoleum floors of the rehab prison.
It was a hideous-looking thing meant for the weak and the elderly.
But the long holiday weekend had lit a fire.
Since three in the morning, when he finished watching the fifth hour of the documentary about Grace Sebold, Gus had a desperate urge to get the hell out of this place.
For the first time since retirement, when he handed over his badge and gun, he had something he needed to do.
He had something to chase other than an afternoon whiskey buzz.
Which, he had to admit, had been working just fine as a way to occupy his retirement until the pain started in his hip.
The cancer diagnosis had promptly taken away his whiskey afternoons back then, and without too much of an introduction, it stole his leg a few weeks later.
The black abyss of depression had licked at his heels during those tough days of chemotherapy, when the poison nearly killed him, but had no effect on the tumor.
More than once he’d considered allowing the despair to engulf him.
Give in to the depression and the cancer and just let it all end.
He had no kids, and his wife had passed more than twenty years ago, so no one would really miss him when he was gone.
And when his options had been laid out in front of him, Gus decided that he had no desire to live the rest of his days with only one leg.
He still wasn’t sure what had changed his mind, and he spent the last month wondering why the hell he had gone through with the procedure that had made his life worse than when his right leg was withered with cancer.
Now his leg and the cancer were gone, and a strange phantom pain was present that shot down to toes that weren’t there.
Apathy had overcome him in the days after surgery, so thick and heavy that it smothered all ambition to walk, to heal, to live.
But damn if he hadn’t found inspiration in the most unusual place. A documentary.
His leg was gone, his badge retired, and his romance with whiskey would likely never be the same.
But he had found over the weekend some unfinished business.
It had never stopped gnawing at him, and if he were the self-reflective type, perhaps he would even admit that what he’d found over the Fourth of July weekend could explain the reason he had gone through with the surgery.
Somewhere during the fifth hour of the Grace Sebold documentary, he decided that sitting in a goddamn hospital bed, feeling sorry for himself, was no way to chase down a woman who was guilty as sin.