Your humble servant, David.

Amen.

David heard the breath catch in the nurse’s throat.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

Opened his eyes and followed hers to the rhythm on the scope. Then the pulse within the rhythm.

ANDY SPENT THE NIGHT and half of the next day sitting with Nick. Watched the monitors and the rise and fall of his brother’s chest. Thought about what David had done. Or God. Or a miracle of medicine.

When he couldn’t sit and think one minute longer, Andy trudged to the waiting room. Bought coffee from the machine. Asked about the condition of Cory Bonnett. Critical. No change. No change. He wandered the floors and finally came to Bonnett’s room, easily identified by the uniformed San Diego sheriff’s deputies standing outside. They turned him away ten feet from the door and gave him no information whatsoever.

Back in the waiting room lobby Andy poured dimes into the pay phone trying to get information on the car chase and the shoot-out. The more calls he made the less he understood what had happened.

He couldn’t locate a single witness. He found no reports except one-Lobdell’s. Bonnett’s friends had allegedly sped away in a stolen pickup truck, but Lobdell hadn’t been able to get the plates. There were no stolen vehicle reports taken that night in National City. Nobody knew where Nick’s “shot-up” Country Squire wagon was. Or why he had driven his personal car to arrest an international fugitive at the border. Andy began to understand that Lobdell was lying.

National City Police were evasive. Chula Vista Police spent three hours “confirming” his employment at the Orange County Journal. The San Diego Sheriff’s public information line rang, then went dead over and over. The Orange County Sheriff’s was just as cool and uninformative as they’d been since the day Andy had criticized his brother in print as ordered by Jonas Dessinger.

Nick drifted in and out of consciousness. Andy sat with Katy and the kids. Had lunch with them in the cafeteria. Max and Monika, too. Max tender with the grandchildren. Monika tense as a plucked guitar string.

After lunch Andy saw Sharon Santos crossing the lobby to the desk. Another miracle, Andy thought, that Katy and the kids were in with Nick right then. He headed Sharon off and told her Nick was going to make it. Told Sharon that if Katy saw her she’d put two and two together in about one second. Walked Sharon back to her car.

David had left the night before as if his mission was completed and his skills needed elsewhere. He appeared stoic and unsurprised. Resigned. This mystified Andy, who had hoped to write with insight about the miraculous recovery of his brother. But there wasn’t much to see into. All he had to go on was David’s brief narrative of what had happened in the operating room after Nick had died.

God brought him back to life.

The doctors and nurses were as puzzled as Andy, but vibrantly pleased. All said this kind of thing happens. Some suggested that the heart monitor was somehow at fault.

No one answered David’s office or home phones.

Just after two that afternoon Jonas Dessinger demanded by phone that Andy file a more detailed story than last night’s “prick teaser.” He wanted it by 5 P.M. for tomorrow. And he wanted to know why none of the San Diego County papers had run a story about the hero Nick Becker. Maybe the story from Lobdell was bullshit. Maybe he was covering something up.

Dessinger ordered Andy to get Cory Bonnett’s side of things if the suspect didn’t croak first.

Teresa’s secretary told him that she had gone home sick. Andy let the phone at their house ring for over a minute but nobody answered. She had sounded fine when he talked to her late last night. Although loaded. Kept asking him when he was coming home. Their wine-and-pot nights often left Andy wobbly in the morning, but Teresa usually popped right out of bed like an Olympian in training. Maybe she’d picked up a flu bug.

Andy had just hung up when he saw a red Country Squire station wagon roll past the smoked lobby windows. Thick layer of tan dust on it. A side window frame crusted with blown-out safety glass. Lobdell with one hand on the wheel and the other dangling a cigarette out the window.

Andy intercepted him halfway to the lobby.

“How is he?” asked Lobdell.

“Okay. Serious but the vitals all steady.”

“We gotta talk,” said Lobdell. Face and shirt and glasses caked with tan dust.

“I think so.”

“Let’s sit in the wagon.”

Lobdell gave him the Mexico story just once. Wouldn’t let Andy take notes. Wouldn’t let him interrupt. Wouldn’t let him ask questions. But Andy listened and the story held tight, made sense from the friend named Cortazar to the white-handled switchblade, and Andy knew the truth when he heard it.

“You can’t print one word of it,” said Lobdell. He was sweating profusely and smelled bad. “It’ll ruin Nick and me. Make deep trouble for the sheriff, maybe even the U.S. government. Probably get Bonnett off. You gotta go with the story I told you last night. Play it down and let it go away. Stop pestering the cops and the deputies down here. They’re with me for now, but any pressure and they can’t cover. This isn’t any of your business. Nick and I got our man. The public doesn’t care so long as justice gets done. You stay out of it.”

“I understand.”

“You have to more than understand it, Andy.”

Andy stared down at the dusty dashboard of the Red Rocket. Noted the thin, sticky blood on the seat between his legs. Turned to see the two blown-out side windows. Looked out the smeared windshield at the bright October day.

He could lie for Nick. Probably get it past Dessinger if he created a source or two, manufactured a few quotes, maybe got Katy to say why Nick and Lobdell had taken down the family car. Bury Dessinger in details, invented or not. Yes, he could probably get away with it, for now. It would be an act of bravery. The same as the rumble by the packinghouse when he was a kid, jumping Lenny Vonn. But Andy knew he wasn’t a child anymore and this lie would not be a child’s thing. It might cost him his career. It would surely lump him in with the politicians and police and businessmen and bureaucrats and thieves and hustlers and murderers he wrote about. With anyone who put what was practical ahead of what was true. It would finally make him a part of the corruption that had always stabbed his sense of right and wrong.

And what would happen to the truth? You couldn’t treat it like that. It was too big to go away. Too strong. It would never stay down, no matter how high you piled the lies on top. It would bust loose someday, huge and furious, and it would bite off and spit out the heads of everyone who had tried to keep it down. And how would he explain why he had done such a thing? So a couple of cops could break the law they had sworn to uphold?

“You and Nick mess up and I’ve got to toss eight years of honest reporting to cover you.”

“It’s a real pile of shit, Andy. There’s eight dead men. Eight! How many widows and fatherless children does that make-thirty or forty? I don’t even know.”

“You saved Nick.”

“He’d have done the same,” said Lobdell. “It’s just reflex. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Andy wasn’t sure he understood this. “I’ll go with your story,” he said.

“You’re doing a good thing even if you don’t see it.”

“I never thought lies were good,” said Andy.

“You change when you get older.”

“I feel older now. Feel like I learned something I don’t want to know. I feel like hiding.”

“Same shit Adam went through before God kicked him out of paradise.”

“I feel thoroughly kicked out.”

“Me, too,” said Lobdell. “I can’t even remember what it looked like. How old are you?”