The waiting
room smelled like burnt coffee and antiseptic, and Faith had been sitting in it
for forty minutes before anyone in scrubs looked at her twice.
“Family of the
male in bay four?” a nurse finally asked, scanning the room.
“I’m not, I
just found him,” Faith said, standing anyway. “On Route 9. Is he going to be
okay?”
The nurse’s
expression didn’t give her much. “He’s stable. Lost a lot of blood. We don’t
have an ID on him , no wallet, no phone.
You didn’t happen to see anyone else
out there?”
“No. Just
him.” Faith hesitated. “His jacket, is that with his things?
There’s a
monogram on the collar.”
The nurse
checked a clipboard. “D.S., looks like. We’ll run it against missing persons.
For now he’s John Doe.”
D.S. Faith
turned the initials over and felt something she couldn’t explain , a static hum
at the edge of a memory too old to reach. She told herself it was nothing.
Plenty of names started with D.S.
A woman in a
gray suit was waiting by the nurses’ station when Faith came back out from
giving her statement badge clipped at her hip, tired eyes that missed
nothing. “Ms. Bennett? Detective Elena Vasquez, Ravenswood PD.
I hear you had
an eventful night.”
“Is it true
someone shot him?” Faith asked. “Before the crash?”
Vasquez
studied her for a beat too long before answering, the way cops did when they
were deciding how much a civilian needed to know. “Single gunshot wound, entry
from the driver’s side window. Whoever did it want it to look like he lost
control on a wet road and went off it on his own. If you hadn’t stopped, that’s
exactly what the report would’ve said.”
The static hum
got louder. “Do you know who he is yet?”
“Working on
it.” Vasquez’s radio crackled; she stepped half away to answer it, and in that
half-second of quiet, Faith found herself walking, almost without deciding to,
toward bay four.
He looked
younger asleep than he had bleeding out on the roadside dark hair damp
against the pillow, a fresh line of stitches disappearing into his hairline, an
IV taped to the back of one hand. On the tray beside the bed, in a clear
plastic evidence bag, sat the muddy bracelet the paramedics had pulled off his
wrist.
Faith picked
it up without asking anyone’s permission and, for the first time, saw it
clearly under the fluorescent light: a small sunrise rising behind three peaks,
engraved into tarnished silver.
She went very
still.
It was the
same mark burned into the corner of the photograph she had kept hidden in a
shoebox for twenty years the one of two grinning men in front of a half-built
factory, one of them her father.
Somewhere in
the parking lot below the window, though Faith didn’t see it, a black sedan had
pulled in without its headlights on and idled at the far edge of the lot,
engine running, waiting.
Inside bay
four, the man the hospital was calling John Doe stirred for the first time, his
lips moving around a name he didn’t consciously remember and couldn’t have
explained if asked.
“Faith,” he
said, to no one. “Wait for me.”
She froze with
the bracelet still in her palm, certain impossibly, and without a shred of
proof that she had just heard a stranger say her name.
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