page45 (2/2)

“Morning, Doc,” he said “Mighty good to see you How you feeling?”

“Not bad, I guess, considering soh my chest”

“You should see the other guy,” he said

The other guy “Hamilton?” He nodded “I think I did,” I said “Or maybe I just dreamed I did He was on fire, and he flew across the sky like a cohed a little at the absurdity, and it hurt a lot, so I quit “Some dream, huh?”

“Pretty close to right, actually I got there just in tiri over your head because I shot hie” He looked away, then back at me “He wouldn’t have survived those burns,” he said “I didn’t really need to shoot him”

“I think you did,” I said “If you hadn’t, he ht even have jumped on us, flames and all, to finish us off”

He gave a slow nod, and so ot there?”

I told him the story as best I remembered it I started with the moment in the bone lab when I matched the burned frontal sinus with Parnell’s X-ray-the moment I realized that Hamilton had murdered the ho to fake his own death with Billy Ray Ledbetter’s skeleton I finished with the asoline, the moment I fished the matches from my pocket and struck them on the basement floor

O’Conner shook his head “Auy with a357”

“I like to think of it as virtue triuht you and your shotgun there in the nick of time?”

“Miranda,” he said “She phoned fro up at the fire scene, she didn’t knohat, but she orried”

Miranda She hadn’t been in the room the first time I’d awakened, I realized, and her absence was ominous I remembered how hard her head had struck the concrete and how faint her pulse had been, even before the world erupted in flame “Jim, tell me about Miranda,” I said “I’m afraid to ask, but I need to know”

“What do you need to know?”

The voice caht my heart would burst at the sound of it Miranda! Her head was clouded in bandages, but her eyes shone clear as the

“Miranda,” I breathed “Jesus, I thought you were dead The way your head hit that slab…”

“I’m pretty hardheaded,” she said “You know that”

Jiave my knee a squeeze, and left the room

I studied Miranda’s head, turbaned in gauze She lifted a hand and touched the gauze gently, posing like a led a thumb horizontally, halfway between thumbs-up and thumbs-down “I have a brand-new cranial suture under here,” she said, “so they’ve duct-taped ether for now But once the bone knits and the hair grows, I’ood as new”

“That’s pretty daht, and she could almost have passed for a medieval saint, the ones with the dinner plates painted behind their heads