7

The supervising nurse in the critical care unit of Nuestra Hermana de Perdón Hospital in South Nazareth, where Pace had been taken to recover from his wounds, was named Anita O’Day O’Shea, whom everyone on the hospital staff called Lady O. Lady O was seventy-six years old and in her fifty-fifth year of service. Still vigorous, sharp-minded and tart-tongued as ever, her expertise was well-respected by doctors and nurses alike. It was she who oversaw Pace’s case and was the only person with whom he was allowed by the doctors to have a conversation. These exchanges were necessarily brief and consisted mostly of Lady O’s relating to Pace her theory regarding spacecraft having landed on Earth thousands of years before, as recorded in the Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.

“Ezekiel was a son of Bunzi, a priest, and he witnessed the heavens open and from out of a fiery cloud came an amber-colored spaceship. Four four-winged creatures appeared, walking upright, each with four faces: one a man’s, one a lion’s, one an ox’s, and one an eagle’s. Their vehicle was metallic and formed in the shape of a wheel. When Ezekiel told the elders of Israel about this visitation, they refused to believe him and he was exiled to Babylonia. Mind you, this was around 600 B.C., so there’s the first reliable proof that men from outer space been checkin’ out our planet since forever. You feelin’ better today, son?”

The bullet that pierced Pace had traveled through his back into his heart and exited from his chest. That he had survived was, in the words of the head surgeon at Nuestra Hermana de Perdón, a freak event. Lady O called it a miracle, a sign that God had plans for Pace.

“This is His way of tellin’ you you got work left to do, Mr. Ripley,” said Lady O. What that might be, I can’t pretend to know, but He don’t spare folks for no bad reason.”

“I don’t consider myself a Christian,” Pace told her. “I don’t hold much for organized religion of any kind, though I respect your beliefs and I am thoroughly grateful for your encouragement as well as your ministrations and devotion to my well-being.”

During the earliest stage of his recovery, Pace had been under heavy sedation and had experienced an alternately entertaining and troubling, if not horrifying at times, series of dreams. In one, he found himself being devoured by an enormous crocodile, helpless to prevent it; but then Pace became the crocodile, gorging himself on a Chinese girl, a child, really, swallowing her head first, watching her legs kick until her top parts were chomped to bits. In another, Pace was in a city that was a combination of Paris, France, and Chicago; it was winter, snow was falling, and he wandered through the dimly-lit streets until he saw a woman he thought was Siempre Desalmado getting into a taxi. Pace ran after the taxi but he could not catch up. It disappeared and he fell down in the road and was soon covered by snow.

When at last his dreams became less intense, Pace forced himself to recall what happened, that he had been gunned down in the woods in a hunting accident but had somehow survived. When Lady O asked Pace if a bullet through his heart could not kill him, what could? Sailor and Lula’s only child said, “That’s not the only question I don’t have the answer to.”