LOVING HER SOUL MATE (25 page)

“In the hospital at the moment.”

“This hospital?”

“No, sir.
 
I didn’t want him anywhere near Shay.”

Norris nodded.
 
“Good man,” he said.
 
And then he
looked at the blood spatters on John’s shirt in a new light.

And they all just stood there, the three of them,
and stared down at Shay.
 
It was an awful
sight for all three of them, and John could not only feel her parents’ pain,
but was experiencing his own.
 
But he
knew he had to remain strong.
 
For Shay.
 
He
therefore went and got coffee for the parents and all three of them eventually
settled in chairs around the bed, and silently prayed for Shay’s full
recovery.
 

It would be some hours later when a male’s voice
would penetrate the silence.
 

“What are you doing here?” he said at the room’s
entrance and John and Norris turned to the sound.
 
It was Lonnie Resden, looking dapper in his
Valentino suit.
 
John immediately remembered
him as the ex-boyfriend.
 

John stood to his feet.

“What are you doing here?” Resden asked again.
 
“What’s he doing here?” he then asked Norris
Turner.

“You know him?” Norris asked Resden.

“He’s the cop that tried to arrest me,” Resden
said.
 
Then he finally looked at
Shay.
 
“Wow, look at Shay.”
 
He walked over to her and effectively stood
beside Annabelle’s chair.
 
“I didn’t
think it would be this bad.”

“He arrested you for what, Lonnie?” Norris asked
him.

“He tried to arrest me,” Resden said, still staring
at Shay.

“Yes, Lon, but what for?
 
Why would he even try?”

“I had a little unpleasantness with Shay.”

“Unpleasantness?”
John
snorted.
 
“Oh, is that what they call
beating the crap out of a woman now?
 
Unpleasantness?”

“Kiss my ass!” Resden said.
 
“She was the one who beat on me, and you know
it!”

“I don’t know shit!”

“All right, that’s enough,” Norris said.
 
And then he exhaled.
 
“May I see you outside, Captain?” he asked
John.
 

John looked at Resden again, and Resden snarled at
him, but neither one of them felt compelled to make a scene at a time like
this.
 
Especially with Shay in such bad
shape, and her mother, who didn’t appear to have paid attention to any of their
conversation, in such
distress.

John looked at Shay again, and his heart pounded
against his chest.
 
This was bad enough.
 
He didn’t need to add to it.
 

“No problem,” he said, and he and Norris Turner
walked out of the room.

“I’m a blunt man, Captain Malone,” Norris said as
soon as they entered the corridor.
 
“So I
won’t make small talk or pretend I called you out here for anything other than
why I called you out here.
 
What are you
to my daughter?” he asked pointblank.

John knew it was still a relationship in its
infancy, and they were still working through the cobwebs, but he wasn’t going
to pretend, either.
 
“She’s my girlfriend,”
he said firmly.

Norris was surprised by his bluntness.
 
He stared at him.
 
“You’re a sight older than her.”

“That’s correct.”

“I would guess you’re closer to my age than hers.”

John felt slightly embarrassed when he put it that
way.
 
“That would probably be an accurate
guess,” he said.

“But you have feelings for her?”

“Yes,” John said heartfelt.
 
“Very much so.”

Norris continued to stare at him.
 
And John knew the older man was sizing him
up.
 
“Funny she never mentioned you.”

She never mentioned you, either, John wanted to
say.
 
“We’re just getting off the ground,
to be honest with you.
 
She wouldn’t
have.”

Norris nodded his head.
 
John liked his thoughtfulness.
 
And the fact that he didn’t
dismiss their relationship out of hand.

“I know she and Lonnie had broken up.
 
I didn’t know he had put his hands on her.”

“He did,” John said.
 
“That’s why I don’t want him in there with
her.”

Norris stared at John.
 
Then he walked over to the hospital room,
opened the door, and asked Resden to come out.
 
Resden took his pretty time, but he came out.

“What’s up, Norris?” he asked Mr. Turner.

“I want you to leave.”

“Leave?” Resden said.
 
“Is this bastard telling you
---
”

“It has nothing to do with Captain Malone. I’m
telling you to leave.
 
You put your hands
on my daughter.
 
I know her.
 
She wouldn’t want you here.”

“You’re going to listen to this guy?” Resden
asked.
 
“All I did was slap Shay.
 
She’s the one who beat me up.”

“I’m not going to ask you again, Lon.
 
Leave.”

“I wouldn’t have come.
 
Your wife called me.
 
She wanted me here.”

“My wife has illusions of her daughter marrying a
successful man, that’s all that phone call was about. If she would have known
that you’d laid a hand on
Shay, that
would have been
one phone call she would not have made.
 
I assure you of that.
 
Leave.”

Resden stared at Norris.
 
“I’ll go and tell Annabelle goodbye,” Resden
started saying.

“No, you won’t,” John said.
 
“The man said leave.
 
Leave.”

Resden couldn’t stand the sight of that particular
cop, but he wasn’t about to tangle with him.
 
He barely escaped a charge the last time.
 
The District Attorney, a friend of Lonnie’s,
gave him a mighty break.
 
He wasn’t
pushing his luck twice.
 

He left.

Norris exhaled.
 
Turned his attention to John again.
 
“My daughter is a very private person,” he
said.

John nodded.
 
“I know.”

“She never, and I mean never discusses her personal
affairs with me or her mother.
 
That’s
why we didn’t know there had been an altercation.
 
She phones us once a week and we see her at
holidays.
 
That’s the way she prefers it,
and we’re pleased that she’s out here living her own life her own way.”
 
Norris frowned.
 
“That’s not to say that I don’t worry about
her, because I do.
 
I worry if she’ll be
okay.
 
But I trust her judgment.
 
I trusted it when she was head over heels in
love with Lonnie, although I never liked the young man, but he was an attorney
and showed good enough manners and my wife just loved him.
 
So I held my peace.
  
Now you say she’s involved with you and
also, apparently, with some sadistic co-worker---”

“She’s not involved with him.
 
She works with him, nothing more.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because I know Shay.
 
She’s not involved with Ronnie Burk.”

Norris stared at him again.
 
Nodded again.
 
“Okay.
 
But she is involved with you?”

John swallowed hard.
 
“Yes.”

“And you both are okay with the age difference?”

“Yes,” John replied, “although we never discussed
it.”

“And the race difference?”
Norris
asked, more to gauge how John responded, rather than the response itself.

“Yes,” John replied, “although, again, it wasn’t
something we sat around discussing.
 
It
just is.
 
All of it, my age, my race, her
age, her race, just is.”

“Quite true,” Norris said.
 
“Well.
 
Good.
 
I’ll stay out of it then,
as I’m sure Shay would want.”

And Norris smiled for the first time.
 
John smiled too.

John would eventually leave the hospital, to give
the Turners some private time with their daughter.
 
And they stayed by their daughter’s
bedside
for nearly a week.
 
John would come by in the afternoons, just to see Shay for himself, and
he and Norris would spend time talking about her progress.
 
The mother, Annabelle Turner, was still a
Lonnie Resden fan, so she pretty much ignored John.
 

Shay was in and out of consciousness the entire
time.
 
She’d always recognize her parents
and have cogent conversations with them, but she would always fall back
asleep.
 
It was the drugs mainly, to help
keep the pain at bay, so the parents did not complain.
 
They stayed at their daughter’s bedside for
nearly a week.
 
John paid to have Shay’s
home cleaned spotless by a professional cleaning crew, so that the parents
could stay at their daughter’s home during their visit.
 
They didn’t want to leave.
 
But they were both schoolteachers and had
classrooms filled with anxious students to return to.
 
They eventually said their goodbyes to Shay,
and to John, and left.

That next morning, after everybody had gone and
John should have been at work himself, he had been sitting at her bedside all
night.
 
She had had a rough night.
 
On three different occasions he had to call
for the nurse as Shay would toss and turn as if she was in tremendous
pain.
 
They would inject her with more
morphine just to get her through the next few hours.
 
By then John was too afraid to leave her
alone.
 
He, in fact, had contacted Aunt
Rae by early morning, and she had said she’d catch a cab and be there to
relieve him around nine.

And as that hour approached, Shay began to wake
up.
  
She had been in and out all night.

John moved to the edge of his seat and touched her
on the hand.
 
“Hello, babe,” he said.

“Hey.”
 
Her
eyes were no longer swollen shut, although her face still showed signs of
puffiness.
 
But she was able to get a
good look at John.

“You look terrible,” she said to him.

He laughed.
 
“Thank-you for your vote of confidence.”

Shay smiled, although it was still a weak
smile.
 
“I feel awful, if that’s any
consolation.”

“Well, you look marvelous to me because you’re
still alive.”

“Just barely.”

“With an excellent prognosis, kid, don’t push your
luck.”

Shay attempted to laugh but ended up coughing.
 
She eventually settled back down.
 
Then she frowned.

“It was Ronnie,” she said, forgetting that she had
already told him.
 
Countless
times.

John nodded.
 
“We know.
 
We got him, sweetie.”

 
“He’s behind
bars?”

“After a trip to the emergency room, yes, he was
placed behind bars.”

A puzzled look crossed her distressed face.
 
“I can’t believe he would do something like
that.”

John rubbed her hand.

“It was as if he thought I was in some kind of
relationship with him.
 
Like I was betraying him or something.
 
But that’s not true.
 
I never came onto him like that.”

“He’s a very warped individual,
Shay,
it had nothing to do with you.”

“You knew he was like that?”

“No. I doubt if anybody knew he was that
sadistic.”
 
Then John thought about what
he’d been dying to ask since this ordeal began.
 
But Shay kept talking.