Read Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) Online
Authors: Laurence Dahners
Habitats (an Ell Donsaii story #7) (11 page)
But then she saw Ben’s assistant John
Parker grasping his arm and crouching over it.
***
Raleigh, NC—A shooting last night at Slade’s Bar and Grill involved Mack Williams, the estranged husband of Shelly Williams, his intended victim. It has been claimed that Ell Donsaii prevented him from killing his former wife but that someone else was injured. The injured person has not been identified as yet…
Ell sat, elbows on knees and chin on fists. Her mind’s eye constantly replayed the horrifying moments when John stood up, gripping his right proximal forearm in his left hand. Everyone stared at the shredded stump of his arm. His hand dangled beneath it, held on by a few strips of skin and a couple of tendons. Ell kept her eyes on the floor because she couldn’t bear to look at John’s wife Lisa.
Lisa
sat across from Ell in the surgical waiting area, her face stricken as she sat staring sightlessly into space. Ben nudged Ell and she looked up to see the surgeon approaching.
Ell glanced at Lisa and saw her look
up hopefully at the surgeon, then blanch in horror as the surgeon shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said
. “There really wasn’t anything we could do.”
Lisa gasped and leaned forward, throwing her arms around her own knees
and beginning to rock slowly back and forth.
Ben got up and moved to the seat next to Lisa, clumsily patting her on the
back. Ell wondered if she should try to comfort Lisa somehow, but the horrible guilt she felt over the loss of John’s hand kept her from it. If Ell hadn’t thrown the cue ball—of course, then Shelly would almost certainly be dead. If she’d caught the gun before it went off. If she’d reacted as soon as she noticed the man and thought he looked strange. If, if, if...
The surgeon had stepped away and now returned with a box of Kleenex. “I’m so sorry.
I’m Dr. Hanson. Are all three of you family members?” She looked at Ben and Ell, apparently without recognizing Ell.
Ben shook his head. “No, Lisa here,” he nodded at the sobbing woman, “is John’s wife.
John’s parents and Lisa’s Mom are flying in from Texas but won’t get here until morning.”
Lisa blew her nose in the Kleenex and wiped her eyes. “There wasn’t anything you could do?”
Dr. Hanson shook her head wearily. “All the structures in the distal forearm were shredded by the blast injury. We just don’t have the ability to reconstruct that many different kinds of missing tissue.”
“Will he… will he be able to have a prosthesis?”
“Yes, though… they aren’t nearly as good as we’d like them to be.”
“Ohhh,” Lisa almost moaned, “Will he be able to work? He… loved his work.”
“Yes, light work. Prosthetic arms aren’t up to heavy physical work. And it will be many months. We’ll have to wait for his wounds to heal and his stems to osseointegrate. Then he’ll have surgery to install transcutaneous stems onto the osseointegrated stems. Then more months for them to stabilize before he can be fitted with a myoelectric prosthesis.”
“
Osseo-int?”
“Yes, we put
porous metal stems into the ends of the bones of his forearm. The bone will grow into the pores. Once they are solidly attached to the bone we’ll implant stems that protrude from the skin. They have special surfaces to prevent infection from entering around the stems.
Then
we can mount a prosthesis on the stems.”
Lisa stared uncomprehendingly, “I thought that the artificial arm just slid on over his, his stump.” She obviously had a hard time saying the word.
Hanson said, “That
is
how it used to be done. The osseointegrated system is much more comfortable and functional than the old style ‘sockets.’ They tended to slide around over the skin of your amputation stump causing sores and giving you poor control.”
Ell thought
either option sounded pretty awful and, judging from the expression on her face, Lisa did too. “Lisa,” she said, “John doesn’t have to work, D5R will be happy to continue his salary. But if he wants to work, we’ll be happy to have him back. It’s his mind the company values, not his hand.”
Lisa looked at the floor, then back up into Ell’s eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, “and thank you for trying so hard to
catch that gun.”
Fighting to speak through the frog in her throat and the guilt on her soul, Ell croaked, “If I hadn’t thrown that cue ball,
the shotgun wouldn’t have fallen and John wouldn’t have been shot.”
Lisa shook her head, “You couldn’t let him shoot Shelly,” she
whispered raspily, putting a hand on Ell’s arm, “you did the right thing. We’re just lucky you actually did hit Mack and kept him from killing Shelly.”
“I don’t know,” Ell said, tears streaming down her face, “there must have been something
better I could have done… I just couldn’t… couldn’t seem to think of it.”
Chapter Four
Chief of Police Eddy Stewart let himself into the interview room. He was a little embarrassed, feeling that the other cops were going to think that he just wanted to see their famous guest. And they’d be right, he admitted, though only to himself. He was justifying it as an attempt to make sure no bad publicity was generated for the department by “overzealous young investigators.”
Donsaii sat across from Sergeant Nevi
lle. Lieutenant Atassi sat at the end of the table, ninety degrees to Donsaii. Stewart stepped to the right and leaned up against the wall next to Brat 8ad Holwitz, his second in command. No patrolmen present. It looked like Stewart wasn’t the only one pulling rank to be in on this particular interview.
He looked at Donsaii again.
Lord, what a gorgeous young woman! Awfully young. Twenty or so? Could that be,
he wondered,
and be so famous?
He did a little mental arithmetic and decided she actually must be somewhere between 21 and 23.
Neville
frowned at Donsaii, “So you thought Mr. Williams ‘looked a little drunk’?”
Far from the arrogance Stewart expected from
such a celebrity, Donsaii quietly said, “Yes sir.”
“An
d so you picked up the cue ball?”
“When I saw him glaring at Ms. Williams, yes sir.”
Neville raised an eyebrow and whispered to his AI. Video of the incident from the AI of someone else who’d been in the room popped up on the big screen in the interview room. He ran back and forth through that part of the sequence until it was obvious that Williams’ eyes had focused on his wife and his face had turned red, though only a few frames before Donsaii picked up the cue ball. “You hadn’t seen anything to suggest he was going to cause anyone any harm at that point though had you?”
In a subdued tone Donsaii said, “No sir.”
“And, if you’ll look at these next frames you’ll see that you were transferring the cue ball to your throwing hand at the same time that he was opening his ‘pool cue case.’” He ran the bit of video in question showing Ell flipping the cue ball to her right hand in the foreground at the same time as the case was being opened in the distance.
“No sir.”
Neville tilted his head, “What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“Sir, I think if you go frame by frame you’ll see that the case was open enough to see the trigger and trigger guard before I
started transferring the cue ball.”
Neville snorted and carefully ran the video
back and forth through the few frames in question. Eventually he tilted his head and said, “Granted, but that’s not enough time for anyone to react.”
So quietly that Stewart could barely hear her, Donsaii
whispered, “Sir, I’m
very
quick.”
Neville rolled his eyes and said, “Granted, but I don’t think
anyone
can be that quick.” He stared at her a moment, “However, let’s go a little farther.”
“Sir, am I accused of something? Do I need to have counsel present?”
“No,” he said with an air of exaggerated patience. “No one’s accusing you of anything. We’re just trying to make sense of some very odd things on the video sequences from this incident.”
Lieutenant Atassi put her hand on Stewart’s elbow, “Sergeant, you mig Ceanm tht want to tone it down a little, you do sound pretty accusatory.” She turned to Donsaii and in a pleasant tone said, “Sorry, Ms. Donsaii, we are just trying to understand what ‘went down’ on the evening in question.
Some things on the AV record of the events don’t make much sense to us.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Now, here you’re cocking back to throw as he steps forward with the gun.”
“Yes sir.”
“And he reaches out with the gun and you start to throw the cue ball.”
“Yes sir.”
“What were you thinking?”
“That…” there was a catch in her voice, and Stewart saw a tear begin to trickle down her face. “That I didn’t… know what to do.”
“Yet you were throwing the ball.”
“I couldn’t think of anything else that might stop him in time.”
“You didn’t think of ducking like everyone else?”
“No sir, he wasn’t trying to shoot me.”
“So,” Neville said with a tone of disbelief. “You just wildly threw a cue ball? What were you hoping to do, distract him?”
“No sir, I was… hoping
… to break his arm,” she croaked.
“You expect us to believe that? That you were actually aiming for his arm? You weren’t just
throwing the ball to distract him and accidentally hit his arm?”
“Yes sir.”
“You were what, thirty feet away?”
“Yes sir.”
“And you were trying to hit his arm?”
“Yes sir.”
Neville snorted again, “Why not his head, or the shotgun itself if you’re such an accurate throw?”
“Sir, I didn’t want to
kill
him. And if I hit the shotgun it would likely just deflect the shot to hit someone else.”
“Which is exactly what happened, right?”
“Yes sir,” she whispered, burying her head in her hands.
Neville said in a tone of complete disbelief, “If we grant that you can hit
what you want—why his forearm?”
Without taking her head out of her hands Donsaii said, “Distal forearm. Because driving the wrist dorsally relaxes the tendons that move the fingers
, which would loosen his pull on the trigger.”
Neville looked down at his wrist and hand as he flexed his wrist back and forth watching what happened to his fingers. “So, if we believe you, in a few seconds you rationally thought out exactly where to throw that cue ball to make Williams drop the shotgun?”
Donsaii nodded her head; then lifted her wet cheeks from her han C fr”ds, “I should have been able to think of something better—but I… still haven’t figured it out.”
“On the other hand, if we believe what’s
actually
possible, you
recklessly
threw that cue ball in a room full of people and it was sheer luck you didn’t hit someone with it and cause serious injury. And if we believe Mr. Williams claim that he didn’t intend to shoot anyone, just to frighten his wife and her ‘boyfriend,’ no one would have been hurt if you hadn’t knocked the gun out of his hand.”
“The gun wasn’t on safe and he’d started to pull the trigger,” Donsaii
whispered disconsolately.
“What?
! Did you say the gun wasn’t on safe?”
She nodded.
“You don’t know that! Maybe getting hit by a cue ball and flying through the air took it off safe.”
“If you’ll look at the video from my AI you’ll see that the red ring around the safety
was visible.”
“What?” Neville frowned and spoke to his AI. A moment later video from Donsaii’s camera played the clip of Williams extending the gun across the table at his wife. “You’re full of crap,” Neville said. “No red ring is visible.”
Donsaii’s eyes dropped back to the table in front of her. “It was visible when Williams first took it out of the case.”
“Bullshit.” Nonetheless Neville ran the video back. There, as the gun came out of the case and lay flat, the red ring around the safety button was readily evident. Neville said, “OK, I’ll grant you that
it wasn’t on safe, but how do you know he didn’t put it on safe after he took it out of the case?”
Donsaii didn’t look up. “His finger never got near the safety.”
They all watched carefully as the sequence ran again. She was right, Williams’ finger never got near the safety. Without commenting on that Neville said, “And you’re claiming that he was pulling the trigger?”
“Yes sir.
On slow motion you should be able to see the muscles in his forearm contract and the trigger begin to depress.”
They watched the frames in question. To Stewart’s amazement, she was right.
Neville shook his head, “OK, I’ll grant you all that. Still, I don’t believe for one instant that anyone can be that accurate throwing a ball.”
Head back in her hands Donsaii shrugged her shoulders minutely. Atassi said, “Why don’t we let her try to prove
whether she’s that accurate?”
Neville snorted, “Go back to the bar and give her a cue
ball?”
“No, let her use that baseball you keep on your desk. She can throw it down the hall outside, it’s long enough.”
To Stewart’s astonishment, after some argument they all trooped out of the interview room to the hall. Neville went to his desk Ct taiming t and returned with the worn baseball he liked to handle when he was thinking.
When they handed Donsaii the ball, she looked at unseeingly for a moment then tossed it up a couple of times to get a feel for it. After a moment she said, “To be accurate, I’ll have to throw this really hard.”
“Knock yourself out,” Neville said.
“What do you want me to hit
?”
“The doorknob.”
“It’ll damage it.”
Several others had gathered around to watch the show and one of them snickered.
Neville said, “I’ll buy another baseball.”
“It’ll damage the knob too.”
“Lady, that doorknob’s steel. If you can damage it, I’ll buy another doorknob too.”
She shrugged, turned, cocked
, and threw the ball so suddenly that Stewart didn’t really realize that it had already happened until a loud bang from the end of the hall had him grabbing for his service pistol.
Then he saw the ball bouncing oddly back toward them from the end of the hall.
Its cover had split and it looked pretty deformed. He looked at the doorknob. It looked like it had a big crack in it.
He saw the others looking at one another in startlement. He told his AI to play back the video of what had just happened. The ball crossed the distance in just a couple of frames and struck the doorknob
dead in the center.
Atassi had picked up the ball and was turning it over. The cover had burst open on
one seam and strings were falling loosely through the gap.
Stewart turned to Donsaii. “I think we’ve seen enough Ms. Donsaii. You may go.”
Neville exclaimed, “But Chief! That could have just been luck!”
“Sergeant, we’ve seen the lady make two throws, hittin
g her target perfectly both times. If you can hit that knob from here one time in ten I’ll give you twenty bucks. Ms. Donsaii has, however, proven to my satisfaction that her throw of that cue ball was a well-reasoned and accurate attempt to prevent the death of Ms. Williams. It was
not
a reckless act with which she endangered people in the room.”
Neville said, “But Chief!”
Stewart held up his hand at Neville. He turned back to Donsaii. “Thank you for coming in Ms. Donsaii.”
She nodded minutely and
, wiping her eyes, turned to leave.
***
The spaceplane descended back toward earth and, as gravity returned, Gary’s nausea faded. He looked wonderingly at the large pile of gossamer material in his container. His “graphene spinner” had, to the best of his ability to test out here in space, worked perfectly. Ced mer materi It had taken some adjusting, so he was glad he’d actually flown up into space with the machine instead of trying to have someone else run it for him. Once he’d gotten the settings right… it had begun spinning a three inch wide strip of graphene as fast as the drum the carbon condensed onto could be turned with the motors he had. At first he hadn’t recognized it was working because the graphene was diaphanous as smoke and it wasn’t until quite a bit had piled up in the receptacle that he’d realized that the machine was working.
