Free Black Lightning by John Saul Page B

her husband’s health?
    Should she have seen the heart attack coming? Should she have found signs of it in Glen’s face? Were there stress lines she hadn’t even noticed, or a tiredness she’d ignored? A leaden weight of guilt began to settle over her as more and more questions formed in her mind, questions to which she had no easy answers.
    “Hey, Jeffers, come on,” Mark Blakemoor said as if reading her thoughts. “What happened to Glen wasn’t your fault. You haven’t treated him the way I treated Patsy. Jesus, there were times when she didn’t see me for days at a time.”
    “And have I been in Seattle the last few days?” Anne asked, her voice edged with self-accusatory sarcasm. “Oh God, Mark, I keep thinking I should have seen it coming, that I should have realized he was working too hard and made him slow down.”
    “That would have been the pot calling the kettle black,” Blakemoor remarked. But his face wore a smile.
    For the rest of the flight, Mark Blakemoor managed to keep the subject of conversation off both Richard Kraven and Glen Jeffers’s heart attack. The only subject left that came readily to mind was his own divorce, and to his surprise, he found himself telling Anne everything about it. What surprised him most was that by the time the plane landed in Seattle, he’d discovered two things: the divorce had been just as much Patsy’s fault as his own, despite his ex-wife’s insistence that she’d been a wronged woman; and that he could talk to Anne Jeffers about anything that came into his mind. He’d never felt that way about a woman before, and as he followed Anne off the plane at Sea-Tac airport, he wondered what it meant.
    He also found himself wondering exactly how strong Anne’s own marriage was. If she should ever be single—
    Jerking his own reins up short, Mark Blakemoor tried to banish the thought from his mind. It was already planted, though, and he knew it wasn’t going to go away. So what was he going to do now? Fall in love with another man’s wife?
    Swell! Just fucking swell!



CHAPTER 9

    T he taxi pulled up in front of the Group Health Hospital entrance on Sixteenth East, and Anne, distracted, fished money out of her wallet to cover the fare and a tip.
    “Thanks, ma’am,” the driver said in an accent so thick she could barely understand him. “I hope whatever’s wrong will be better real soon.”
    Nodding her own thanks, Anne lifted her suitcase, hurried through the main entrance, then asked for the Coronary Unit.
    “You want Critical Care,” a man in a red jacket replied. “Down the hall, first elevators on the right, then left on the third floor. You can’t miss it.”
    As she stepped off the elevator into the third floor lobby, Anne found herself surrounded by a color she instantly recognized as “flesh,” the long discontinued and totally unmissed hue the crayon people had apparently thought resembled the skin tone of some race of men that neither she nor anyone else had ever seen. The peculiar shade of the walls was set off by a faintly deco white trim, a depressingly institutional decor which Anne knew her husband would detest—if he were well enough even to notice it. Then she was in an anteroom outside the closed double doors to the Critical Care Unit, facing a sign instructing her to use the red phone in the waiting area. Before she could even look around for assistance, she heard Heather’s voice: “Mom? In here!”
    A second later Anne was hugged in a three-way embrace with both her children. “How is he?” she asked. “What have they told you?”
    “He’s going to be okay,” Heather said. “They’ve got him hooked up to about a billion machines, but the doctor says it’s mostly just to watch him.”
    As the pent-up tension in her body was suddenly released, Anne sank exhausted onto one of the chairs that sat next to the door. There, on a table a few feet from her, was the red phone the sign had mentioned. Now that she knew Glen was