He refreshed his grip on the neck of the bottle of Kentucky bourbon, turned his back on his wife and walked out onto the patio. He did not look back as Loretta vented a string of expletives before stamping out of the house.
The tyres of her convertible squealed loudly on the driveway.
And then Captain Reggie O’Connell of the Los Angeles Police Department was alone in the quite of the Hollywood Hills gulping bourbon like it was going out of fashion.
As he drank he contemplated the color of despair.
It was darkly amber; like the hue of the whisky in his glass.
As he drank, the darkly amber vortex of his premonitions reached out for him and dragged him down, down, into its drowning depths.
Chapter 44
In the last fortnight most of the patients who could safely be moved to hospitals and rehabilitation centers in Maryland, Virginia and farther afield had departed the NNMC. The hospital had returned to its pre-Battle of Washington status; the corridors were unblocked, the building was undergoing a systematic deep cleansing exercise and the relatively superficial external damage caused by nearby fighting was being made good. In many wards there were empty cots and the medical staff had stopped working seven day fourteen hour long shifts over a week ago.
Depressingly, despite the normalization of hospital life every time Dan Brenckmann looked out of the window from Gretchen Betancourt’s fourth floor room the devastation of the great city was undiminished. In fact, as the clearance work progressed the true scale of the monumental reconstruction task ahead became more graphically evident.
Gretchen had reached that stage of her recovery which experienced clinicians often call the ‘tetchy phase’. She was well enough to have a small reserve of energy with which to rail against the iniquity of fate; and it was not in her nature to hold back when she was upset about something.
The fact that in the last few days a little normal color had come back into Gretchen’s cheeks had done a great deal more to raise Dan’s personal morale than the sudden, rather unexpected rush of job offers he had received. Notwithstanding that he guessed Gretchen’s father had to be behind these offers, he was a little baffled. Not least because he had no idea what the majority of them entailed and there was hardly anybody left in DC he could ask.
Gretchen was propped up, half-sitting in the big bed under the windows when he walked in that evening. She had been ‘tubeless’ the last four days and Dan was pleased and mightily relieved to see that for the fourth day in a row nothing had gone sufficiently awry to necessitate any of the discarded tubes needing to be plugged back in. He had got used to thanking his lucky stars for every small mercy in the last month.
It was a measure of Gretchen’s gradual improvement that she was getting very bored. Today a paperback book lay opened on the covers of the cot; proof positive that at some stage earlier that day she had had the strength to open it and read it unaided. Dan instantly felt a pang of guilt; he ought to have come in earlier and either held the book open for her or read to her.
“Before you ask I’m fed up with being in here and pissed off that nobody will answer a straight question when I ask one!” Gretchen complained feebly, her voice a hoarse, reedy parody of its former customary stridency.
Gretchen’s previously sculpted dark brown hair had been shaved away soon after she was admitted to the NNMC — at the time surgeons were afraid she had bleeding on the brain and were ready to crack open her skull and operate at short notice — and it was growing back in a boyish fuzz. Every bandage, plaster and suture had been removed from her face and scalp, likewise the metal cage initially used to keep her head and neck immobilized. A lightweight gauze bandage still obscured her throat below her chin where Dan had been assured that the tracheotomy wound was healing ‘nicely’.
Dan greeted Gretchen’s complaint with an apologetic smile as he approached, then he leaned over her and planted a pecking kiss on her brow; as he had done every day he had visited her since he discovered her registered at the hospital as a Jane Doe on the fourth day after the outbreak of the Battle of Washington. He had been afraid she would not pull through that first day, later he was worried that she would be horribly crippled by her injuries. Each day the news had either been no worse, or perhaps, a fraction better and that kiss had become a superstition.
Gretchen was supposedly engaged to be married to one of her second or third cousins, a banker called Joseph van Stratten whose mother was related to Eleanor Roosevelt. According to Gretchen’s father the worried fiancé had made a duty call to him a couple of weeks ago to inquire about his ‘intended’s’ wellbeing but otherwise shown no great interest whatsoever in her situation. Since Dan thought Gretchen was the most marvellous woman in the world he found Joseph the Banker’s indifference odd and frankly, inexplicable.
Dan sat down beside the cot.
“Ask me a straight question and I’ll see if I can help, Miss Betancourt,” he invited amiably.
“My legs and toes are tingling a lot,” Gretchen frowned, “nobody will tell me if that’s a good thing!”
“It is a good thing,” he assured her blithely.
“Um. I suppose you are going to tell me I’ll be running around in no time?”
Dan shook his head.
“No. But that’s good news, too.”
“How so?” Gretchen murmured, knowing he was gently teasing her.
“You can’t run away so I get to have you all to myself a little longer.” He was not about to start lying to her about a thing like that!
Gretchen wearied very fast.
“You’re working for father…”
“I seem to be,” he admitted. “But I’ve had a lot of offers of work lately. A couple of them are real humdingers. Probably, also your father’s doing. The Judge Advocate’s Department is recruiting assistant defense counsels ahead of the first tranche of trials arising out of the rebellion. I think the Army is still calling it that, not a coup d’état. Personally, I think it was a coup d’état, but that’s by the way. I’m not sure I’m really very keen defending people who tried to blow up the Capitol and to overthrow the Government.”
The death toll for the Battle of Washington climbed daily. Not as fast as it had climbed in the week after the end of the main fighting but fast enough as more bodies were discovered and the lists of the missing were slowly whittled down to the dead, the injured and the displaced.
A fresh accounting was issued by the Office of the Military Government of the District of Columbia at noon every day, and the centralized name and casualty lists updated accordingly.
Dan had picked up a copy of the release at the Judge Advocate’s temporary office that morning after his preliminary interview for an assistant counsel position.
Known to have died as a direct result of the insurrection in the fighting, associated civil disorder and as a result of the breakdown of customary urban services between 08:12 hours 12/9/63 and 1/19/64: 8,688 persons.
The total for those listed as missing: 2,051 persons.
The total number of those listed as injured or wounded surviving as of this day: 27,005 persons.
Of the dead and missing: 1,117 were members of the United States Armed Forces (including National Guardsmen), 392 were members of the Washington DC Police Department, 363 were members of the Washington DC Fire Department and 407 persons were civilian members of working for or affiliated to these services. These figures include 288 civilians who are known to have died at the Pentagon. The overall figure for deaths includes 1,681 persons (of whom 34 are women) believed to have been materially involved in the insurrection.