But voice or no voice, I doubt I would have said much to Wesley Dawe. He struck me as sad and weak, and I couldn’t shake the image of a little petulant boy who’d stirred up all this trouble—whether intentionally or not—simply because he needed to throw a snit. His stepsister was dead, and I couldn’t blame him, exactly, but I didn’t feel much desire to forgive him either.

When he visited my room a second time, I pretended to be asleep, and he slipped a check from his father under my pillow and said, “Thank you. You saved me,” in a whisper before leaving the room.

Since Bubba and I were both stuck in Mass General for a while, we ended up beginning our physical therapy together, my arm withered and his right hip replaced by a metal one.

It’s an odd sensation to owe your life to another. It humbles you and makes you feel guilty and weak and your gratitude is sometimes so immense, it feels like an anvil tied to your heart.

“It’s like Beirut,” Bubba said one afternoon in hydrotherapy. “What’s done is done. Talking about it won’t do any good.”

“Maybe not.”

“Shit, dude, you’d have done the same for me.”

And sitting there, I felt a calming certainty in my chest when I realized he was probably right, though I’m not sure that with one bullet in my hip and another in my thigh I’d have been capable of what he pulled off against a guy like Scott Pearse.

“You did it for Ange,” he said. “You’d do it for me.”

He nodded to himself.

I said, “Okay. You’re right. I won’t thank you anymore.”

“You won’t talk about it anymore either.”

“Cool.”

He nodded. “Cool.” He looked around the collection of metal tubs. Mine was beside his, and there were six or seven other people in the room, all soaking in hot, bubbling water. “Know what would be really cool?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Some weed. Right about now?” He raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it, though?”

“Sure.”

He nudged the middle-aged teacher in the tub beside his. “Know where we can score some pot, sister?”

The woman Bubba had shot when we’d first entered the bunker was identified as Catherine Larve, a onetime model from Kansas City who’d specialized in print ads for midwestern department stores during the late eighties and early ninties. She didn’t have a criminal record and very little else was known about her during the years since she’d left Kansas City with the person neighbors had assumed was her boyfriend—a handsome, blond man who drove a ’68 Shelby Mustang.