I tapped the comm.
“Moving to Mt. Auburn. Wiley’s intact.”
“Copy,” Dane said. “Eamon’s in the ambulance with Patterson. They’re three minutes ahead of you.”
“Conscious?”
“Was when they loaded him. They put a line in him on the sidewalk.”
“Through and through?”
“Don’t know. Eamon said low chest. That’s all I have.”
Low chest. Christ. That could be a lung, or it could be the liver.
“Cabot?”
“He’s right here and quiet.”
“Tell him Wiley is fine.”
“He heard you. He’s two feet away from me.”
I closed my eyes for one breath.
“Farrow,” Dane said.
“Yeah.”
“You got him out. You did the job.”
“Don’t make it a thing, Dane.”
“I’m not.”
Collins made the turn onto Memorial. The Charles River opened on our left, gray and flat under the late autumn sky.
Wiley spoke. “He was twenty feet from the door. He was almost inside.”
“Yes.”
“They waited until he was almost inside, Farrow.”
“I know.”
Collins took the turn to the hospital. We went up the long drive without speaking.
The waiting room was at the end of a corridor that smelled like floor polish and industrial-strength antiseptic. There were two rows of bolted chairs in harvest gold. A vending machine hummed at one end of the space.
It was the wrong room for what was happening. That was the thing about hospitals. The architecture never quite lived up to the news being shared inside it.
I put Wiley in a chair against the back wall, nothing behind him but cinderblock. I took the chair beside him without sitting all the way back.
Eamon joined us four minutes later. He had dried blood on the cuff of his right sleeve. He sat across from us in a chair with a broken armrest.
“He’s in their hands now,” he said.
“Surgery?” I asked.