Read The Debt Collector for Free Online

hurt, but it looks like they’re going to be okay. Your little boy and your daughter, Tammy I think she told me her name was, is it Tammy?”
    The woman was watching her, watching her face.
    â€œTammy has your little boy, she just now carried him outside, and he’s fine—scared, though, but they’re all fine, ma’am. Rusty will have to spend a night or two at the vet, but he and your husband really saved the day.”
    Joy Stinnet turned her head sideways and tears leaked from the edges of the oxygen mask. The hands, clutched between Sonora’s, were going icy. Joy Stinnet’s sobs softened and faded and her eyes lost focus. Chris jerked his head, and Sonora, at last, stood up and out of the way.

8
    There was a certain beauty in watching someone do something well, something they cared about. If you looked at it right, you could see the restrained intensity in Gillane’s fingers, conducting the symphony of life over the woman on the narrow metal pallet.
    Joy Stinnet’s heart had stopped in her bedroom. The EMTs had not been able to start it back up, not with electric shock, fluids, or prayers. Gillane was having no better luck. The woman was gone, Sonora had no doubt, she was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
    She had always loathed doctors, hospitals, and their implements of destruction and resurrection. But in Gillane’s gloved fingers, white, wormlike, strong, in the focus drawn by the line of his jaw and the squint of his eyes, in the way he applied himself to a task he had done many times and knew very well, he had all the assurance of routine and none of the boredom. He was there, mind clicking, powerful intellect focused, with an odd but constant air of being on the verge of discovery.
    For just one second Sonora felt something like jealousy for the woman on the pallet. So vulnerable, so out of the loop, surrendered to the care and focus of a doctor so talented that he was like a painter, confronted with a canvas on which some heinous event had drawn a picture of death, armed with sterile instruments like brushes he would use to change those lines of death to life, resurrection, and his best attempt at wholeness.
    Sonora wondered if she had done right to lie to this woman, to give her an easy way out. Would she still be alive if she’d had children to avenge? Would anger and pain have kept her going long enough for Gillane to work his emergency-room magic?
    She watched him, tall and fit, saw his catlike eyes in profile, the well-shaved cheek, a handsome man. The frantic movements slowed, plowing on relentlessly, but she saw the subtle heaviness that seemed to infect his neck, shoulders, and jaw, and she knew that he had come to the same conclusion.
    â€œLet her go,” he said.

9
    Sonora stood with her back to the cold tile wall, arms folded, one foot propped behind her. She checked her watch, wondering how long it would be before Sam arrived to pick her up on his way back to the bullpen.
    An intern held Joy Stinnet’s baby high in the air, under the eye of two nurses and one respiratory technician. One of the nurses fluttered her hands, as if she were on the verge of snatching the baby away.
    He brought the little girl close and tucked a kiss into the folds of her neck. She had been bathed and snugged into a pink cotton nightie that was so long her tiny feet were a memory. The sleeves had been carefully folded back over the round pink balls of baby hands. She gave him a wide-mouthed grin, drool lapping over the rosy gums.
    Sonora remembered how it had been, holding Tim and Heather up like that when they were babies, skin soft and new, growing their first serious head of hair, eyes wide. Holding them high and smiling at them, watching them extend their legs and smile wide gummy babies smiles. They had been so cuddly, snapped into little terry-cloth suits.
    Baby smiles and soft promise. No doubt Joy and Carl Stinnet had done the same with their three