The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [109]
The seventeenth floor, where she was headed, had an eighty-by-forty gray-stone terrace, which looked out over the East River; that big old Pepsi sign; the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. As hospitals went, it was the most impressive and beautiful one she’d ever been inside.
On that afternoon in the spring, Sarah went directly to Stefanovitch’s room, actually his seventh room so far. Each room had been on a different floor inside the sprawling medical center.
Stef was up and waiting, as she’d expected. His mother and father, Nelson, Nelson’s wife, Hallie, were all crowded into the room.
“Well, this is quite a happy Fizzies party, isn’t it?” he said when Sarah arrived. He had his best smile turned up full. He brought to mind soldiers recovering in army hospitals.
He was peering across the sun-spattered hospital room. He seemed to be carefully studying his visitors. There was a wonderful twinkle in his eyes. Sarah didn’t know how he managed it—especially today.
Finally, Sarah’s eyes found Michael Petito, the tall, balding neurologist who had been to see Stef every day for the past nine months. It was nine months now since three killers had broken into her apartment, and tried to murder both of them. They had succeeded in inflicting two horrifying gunshot wounds, one in Stef’s side, the other in the small of his back.
Dr. Petito had made the decision to operate two days after the shooting. At the time, Stefanovitch had been listed in very critical condition. A half-dozen family members had driven up to New York from Pennsylvania. He hadn’t been expected to live.
Stefanovitch had been in intensive care when his mother and father, Sarah, and Dr. Petito had come to visit. “You don’t look so bad,” Petito had told him. “I’ve seen worse after pro football games.”
Stef had liked the irreverent doctor immediately, maybe because Michael Petito had come up from the streets of New York, and acted a little like it. Or maybe because Petito was the team doctor for the New York Giants, a specialist on back and leg injuries.
He told Stefanovitch that he wanted to operate on his back again, that the new bullets had to come out of there anyway.
“What are the chances?” Stef had asked, struggling with every word.
“About sixty-forty, your way. Let’s say fifty-five—forty-five, that you don’t end up a full quadriplegic.”
“The other doctor said eighty-twenty, the other way. The last time I got shot up like this.”
Petito shrugged. “Overly conservative, in my opinion. Your other doctor was protecting himself, in case he screwed up. I won’t screw up, but those are the real odds. And they’re not great. Especially the prospect of being a quadriplegic.”
Stefanovitch had agreed to sign the necessary releases. He had gone in for the operation, one that could leave him paralyzed from the neck down. As Dr. Petito had said, though, the new bullets had to come out anyway.
Nine months later, he was still in New York Hospital.
The pain following the operation had been unbearable; it seemed to be endless. Petito hadn’t told him about that, the excruciating pain after a second major back operation.
Day after day, Stefanovitch was rolled upstairs to physical therapy, where they thought it was an occasion for champagne if he touched his index fingers together once out of every couple of times, or wiggled his big toe. Every day, as he was wheeled back to his room from therapy, he was soaked to the skin, his entire body screaming from pain.
If he had been forced to do it again, he didn’t think he could. Sarah had been there every day, for nine months straight. Sarah and Sam. Bringing him presents, and dinners from Rusty and Abe’s Steak House, and most of all, hope.
“Sixty-forty my way? Those are the odds?” John Stefanovitch asked now.
His voice suddenly sounded hollow and distant. His family and Dr. Petito were