They dipped their heads as they went past a filthy window in the back of the lockup and paused at the metal door. Culbeau noticed that it was open a half inch. “See, it’s unlocked,” he whispered. Feeling he’d scored some kind of point against O’Sarian. Then wondering why he felt he needed to. “Now, I’ll nod. Then we go in fast, spray ’em both—and be generous with that shit.” He handed O’Sarian a thick bag. “Then throw that over his head.”

O’Sarian gripped the canister firmly, nodded at the second bag, which had appeared in Culbeau’s hand. “So we’re taking the girl too.”

Culbeau sighed, said an exasperated, “Yeah, Sean. We are.”

“Oh. Okay. Just wondered.”

“When they’re down just drag ’em out fast. Don’t stop for nothing.”

“Okay…. Oh, I was meaning to say. I got my Colt.” “What?”

“I got my .38. I brought it.” He nodded toward his pocket.

Culbeau paused for a moment. Then he said, “Good.” He closed his big hand around the door handle.

… chapter twenty-two

Would this be his last view? he wondered.

From his hospital bed Lincoln Rhyme could see a park on the grounds of the University Medical Center in Avery. Lush trees, a sidewalk meandering through a rich, green lawn, a stone fountain that a nurse had told him was a replica of some famous well on the UNC campus at Chapel Hill.

From the bedroom in his town house on Central Park West in Manhattan, Rhyme could see sky and some of the buildings along Fifth Avenue. But the windows there were high off the floor and he couldn’t see Central Park itself unless his bed was shoved right against the pane, which let him look down onto the grass and trees.

Here, perhaps because the facility had been built with SCI and neuro patients in mind, the windows were lower; even the views here were accessible, he thought wryly to himself.

Then wondered again whether or not the operation would have any success. Whether he’d even survive it.

Lincoln Rhyme knew that it was the inability to do the simple things that was the most frustrating.

Traveling from New York to North Carolina, for instance, had been such a project, so long anticipated, so carefully planned, that the difficulty of the journey had not troubled Rhyme at all. But the overwhelming burden of his injury was the heaviest when it came to the small tasks that a healthy person does without thinking. Scratching an itch on your temple, brushing your teeth, wiping your lips, opening a soda, sitting up in a chair to look out the window and watch sparrows bathe in the dirt of a garden….

He wondered again how foolish he was being.