Silence.
"Vishous. Hang up on me and go sit with her."
He didn't say anything further. Just cut the connection.
As she hit end on the phone, she cursed.
A split second later, she was dialing again, and the instant she heard a deep voice answer, she had to brush away a tear that for all its translucency was very, very real. "Butch," she croaked. "I need your help."
As what little was left of the sunset disappeared and night stamped its time card and took over the next shift, Manny's car was supposed to have gone home. It was supposed to have driven itself straight into Caldwell proper.
Instead, he'd ended up on the southern edge of the city, where the trees were big and the stretches of grass outnumbered the asphalt acres ten to one.
Made sense. Cemeteries had to have good stretches of pliable earth, because it wasn't like you could plug a coffin into concrete.
Well, guess you could - it was called a mausoleum.
Pine Grove Cemetery was open until ten p.m., its massive iron gates thrown wide and its countless wrought-iron street lamps glowing butter yellow along the maze of lanes. As he entered, he went to the right, the Porsche's xenon headlights sweeping around and washing over stretches of grave markers and lawn.
The site he was drawn to was a beacon that ultimately signified nothing. There was no body buried at the foot of the granite headstone he was going to - there hadn't been one to bury. No ashes to put in a canister, either - or at least none that you could be sure weren't mostly those of an Audi that had caught on fire.
About a half a mile of roping turns later, he eased off the accelerator and let the car glide to a stop. As far as he could tell, he was the only one in the whole cemetery, and that was just fine with him. No reason for an audience.
As he got out, the cool air did nothing to clear his head, but it gave his lungs something to do as he inhaled deeply and walked over the scratchy spring grass. He was careful not to step on any of the plots as he went along - sure, it wasn't like the dead would know that he was above their airspace, but it seemed like a respectful thing to do.
Jane's grave was up ahead, and he slowed as he approached what wasn't left of her, as it were. In the distance, the sound of a train whistle cut through the stillness - and the hollow, mournful sound was so f**king cliched he felt like he was in some movie he would never sit through at home, much less pay to see in a theater.
"Shit, Jane."
Leaning down, he trailed his fingers along the top of the marker's uneven edge. He'd chosen the jet-black stone because she wouldn't have wanted anything pastel-y or washed-out. And the inscription was likewise simple and unfussy, just her name, dates, and one sentence at the bottom: REST IN PEACE.
Yup. He gave himself an A for originality on that one.
He remembered exactly where he'd been when he'd found out that she'd died: in the hospital - of course. It had been at the end of a very long day and night that had started with the knee of a hockey player and ended on a spectacular shoulder reconstruction, thanks to a druggie who'd decided to take a shot at flying.
He'd stepped out of the OR and found Goldberg waiting by the scrub sinks. One look at his colleague's ashen face and Manny stopped in the process of removing his surgical mask. With the thing hanging off his face like a chin bib, he'd demanded to know what the f**k was wrong - all the while assuming it was either a forty-car pileup on the highway or a plane crash or a fire at a hotel ... something that was a community-wide tragedy.
Except then he'd looked over the guy's shoulder and seen five nurses and three other doctors. All of whom were in the same state Goldberg was ... and none of whom were rushing to pull other staff in for rotation or prep the operating rooms.
Right. It was a community event. Their community.
"Who," he'd demanded.
Goldberg had glanced back at his support troops and that was when Manny had guessed. And yet even as his gut had gone ice cooler on him, he'd held on to some irrational hope that the name about to come out of his surgeon's mouth would be anything but - "
Jane. Car accident."
Manny hadn't lost a beat. "What's her ETA."
"There isn't one."
At that, Manny had said nothing. He'd just ripped the mask off his face, wadded it up, and thrown it into the nearest bin.
As he'd passed by, Goldberg had opened his mouth again. "Not one word," Manny had barked. "Not. One. Word."
The rest of the staff had stumbled over themselves to get out of the way, parting as sure and clean as fabric torn in half.
Coming back to the present, he couldn't remember where he'd gone or what he'd done after that - no matter how many times he played that night back, that part was a black hole. At some point, however, he'd made it to his condo, because two days later he'd woken up there, still in the bloody scrubs he'd operated in.
Among the galling shockers of the whole thing was the fact that Jane had saved so many people who'd been in car wrecks. The idea that she'd been taken in that very way had seemed like Grim Reaper payback for all the souls she'd snatched out of the bony-handed reach of death.
The sound of another train whistle made him want to scream.
That and his cocksucking pager going off.
Hannah Whit. Again?
Who the hell -
Manny frowned and glanced at the headstone. Jane's younger sister had been Hannah, if he recalled correctly. Whit. Whitcomb?
Except she had died young.
Hadn't she?
Mad. Pacing.
God, she should have brought her track shoes for this, Jane thought as she marched around Manny's place. Again.
She would have left his condo if she'd had a better idea of where to go, but even her brain, as sharp as it was, couldn't seem to throw out another option -
Her phone ringing was not exactly good news. She didn't want to tell Vishous that forty-five minutes later she still had nothing to report.
She took out her cell. "Oh ... God."
That number. Those ten digits that she'd had on speed dial on every phone she'd owned before this one. Manny.
As she hit send, her mind was blank and her eyes filled with tears. Her dear old friend and colleague ...
"Hello?" he said. "Ms. Whit?"
In the background, she heard a dim whistle.
"Hello? Hannah?" That tone ... it was just the same as it had been a year ago: low, commanding. "Anyone there?"
That quiet whistle sounded again.
Jesus Christ ..., she thought. She knew where he was.
Jane hung up and flashed herself out of his condo, out of downtown, out past the suburbs. Traveling in a blur at the speed of light, her molecules went through the night in a twirling, swirling rush that covered miles as if they were but inches.
Pine Grove Cemetery was the kind of place you needed a map of, but when you were ether in the air, you could case a hundred acres in a heartbeat and a half.
As she came out of the darkness by her grave, she took a halting breath and nearly sobbed. There he was in the flesh. Her boss. Her colleague. The one she'd left behind. And he was standing over a black headstone that had her name carved in its face.
Okay, now she knew she'd made the right decision not to go to her funeral. The closest she had come was reading about it in the Caldwell Courier Journal - and the picture of all those surgeons and hospital staff and patients had all but snapped her in half.
This was so much worse.
And Manny looked exactly how she felt: ruined on the inside.
Jesus, that aftershave of his still smelled good ... and in spite of having lost some weight, he was still handsome as sin, with that dark hair and that hard face. His suit was perfectly tailored and pin-striped - but it had dirt around the cuffs of the precisely pressed slacks. And his loafers were likewise soiled, making her wonder where the hell he'd been. He certainly hadn't picked it up from the grave site. After a year, the soil was packed down and covered with grass -
Oh, wait. Her plot had probably looked like this from day one. She hadn't left behind anything to bury.
As his fingers rested on the stone, she knew he had to have been the one to pick the thing out. Nobody else would have had the sense to get her exactly what she would have wanted. Nothing froufrou or wordy. Short, sweet, to the point.
Jane cleared her throat. "Manny."
His head shot up, but he didn't look over at her - as if he were convinced that he'd heard her speak only in his mind.
Making herself fully corporeal, she spoke louder. "Manny."
Under any other circumstances, the response would have been a laugh riot. He wheeled around, then shouted out, tripped over her headstone, and landed flat on his ass.