Sammy Keyes and the Kiss Goodbye Read Online Free

seniors, then looked to the teens and added, “Do you need rides?” He focused on Marissa. “Not a good idea for you to go back to East Jasmine on your own this late at night.”
    “Oh,” Marissa said. Then her cheeks flushed as she explained, “We don’t live there anymore. We’re …,” she looked away, “nearby now.”
    Gil Borsch studied her for a moment, but only for a moment. He’d heard rumors of gambling problems and a divorce, but gossip was for bottom-feeders, and he made a habit of trying to swim in cleaner waters. “Well, Deb or I can give any of you rides. We have two cars here, and your parents would probably like you home.”
    “I can help, too,” Meg offered.
    So rides were given and teens delivered, and seniors left to wearily climb the steps they’d flown from earlier. And back at their little cottage on Elm Street, Debra washed her face and went to bed, telling her husband (who was sitting in the living room in the dark), “Hon, do not stay up all night broodin’. You cannot help Sam by broodin’. All you’ll be is tired tomorrow when she wakes up.”
    Words of wisdom, perhaps, but as the clock moved past midnight, Gil Borsch could still not shake the feeling that, regardless of how well she was monitored by the ICU staff, Sammy was alone.
    And unprotected.
    At last he moved his brooding from the living room to the shower (which he took in the dark), then tiptoed through the blackness of the bedroom to the closet, where he retrieved his uniform and regulation shoes. He dressed in the darkness of the kitchen, donned his personal holster and gun, and slipped out into the night.
    On his way back to the hospital, he focused on getting his story straight, reminding himself that a serviceable lie was always close neighbors with the truth, and that a lie that
should
be the truth was barely a lie at all.
    Then, knowing the hospital’s main lobby doors werelocked after nine p.m., he went back to the ER entrance and gained access to the main section of the hospital without being questioned. He then rode an elevator up to the fourth floor, followed the signs to the ICU, and strode confidently through the waiting room area and up to the nurses’ station. “I’ve been assigned watch on Samantha Keyes,” he said as he flashed his ID at the nurse sitting behind the counter. “Attempted homicide victim. The perpetrator is still at large.”
    Perhaps it was that violent-crime victims often landed in the ICU, or perhaps it was the authority with which Sergeant Borsch presented himself (or maybe just that it was the night shift, where energy supplies were limited and making easy things hard was just not worth it), but the lawman’s intentions were met with no resistance. The nurse simply checked her roster, pointed down the sterile corridor to her left, and said, “Room 411.”
    Rooms in the ICU were private, and 411 was located near the end of the hallway, on the right. Gil Borsch hesitated at its open doorway. A light was on inside, and the foot of Sammy’s bed was visible past a drawn curtain.
    In his many years on the force, Gil Borsch had seen his share of gruesome and tragic. If you joined the police force expecting to keep your cookies down, you learned in a hurry that you’d been one naïve chump. The first time an officer had to report to a scene where brains had been splattered against the wall, or a child had been hit by a car, or a decaying body had been discovered in a cellar … that was when the fantasy of the job instantly became the reality.
    That was when every cop became a cookie chucker.
    Including Officer Borsch.
    So the lawman had experience. He knew that turning the corner past the curtain that shielded his view of Sammy and stepping through the barrier between imagination and reality was something he couldn’t reverse after he’d done it.
    There was no undo command for what would be hard-written into his memory.
    Still. There was no turning back. No chickening out.
    No