The Baby Gamble (Texas Hold'em)

Category two.

“And aside from my nocturnal pal, an engine backfired on the way to work this morning and I almost ran my car into a ditch.”

Category three.

And the seal on Blake’s fate. With symptoms in all three categories, he still fit the official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

A fate almost worse than death, as far as he was concerned, as it trapped a man in an emotional whirlwind that prevented him from living a normal life. Interfered with relationships. With family ties. With a man’s very ability to love.

“Any outbursts of anger? Problems concentrating?”

“No.” Not since those first couple of months.

“What about relationships? Other than the soldier, how are you getting along with the people in your life?”

What people? Blake had all but isolated himself—another symptom of what those terrorist fiends had stolen from him.

“Had drinks with Cole last week. And went to visit an old man in the hospital, but I knew he was unconscious.”

“So why’d you go?”

Because it was easy. There were no expectations when someone was comatose.

And because he wanted help, Blake looked deeper. And deeper. As Dr. Magnum had taught him. Quieting his mind until he could work through the layers of thoughts and emotions and figure out what his psyche was telling him.

“I’d saved his life,” he said slowly. “Maybe he’d know I was there. Maybe he’d feel me somehow and reach toward me.”

“Come out of the coma, you mean.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Uncomfortable with her pushing, Blake nevertheless appreciated that she was only doing what it took to give him what he sought—emotional health.

“Yes,” he said after another long moment. “Yes, I suppose I thought maybe my presence could bring him out of his coma.”

“Because you’d bonded with him.”

“I’d given him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“That was a physical act, Blake. Bringing him out of his coma simply by being there suggests something else. I think we’re talking about the emotions.”

The impact of her words hit him hard. “I formed an emotional bond,” he said, staring at her.

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t much in the large scheme of things, bonding with an unconscious man, but it gave him pause for thought. A big pause. And that was more than he’d had since he could remember.

Blake took with a grain of salt the rest of Dr. Magnum’s reassurances that he was doing fine, that his nocturnal relapse was to be expected, a product of seeing Annie again. In the doc’s world, and by her clinical definitions, he was fine. In the world that Annie inhabited, he never would be.

SHANE HAD EATEN A BROWNIE laced with methamphetamine. Though she’d worried that she was doing the right thing, Annie had called Becky, rather than the paramedics, and her friend had been able to get Shane in for an injection of a drug that reversed the effect, without the police being notified that he’d been high.

He’d have been let go as soon as they found out that the youngster hadn’t been aware the potent drug was in the brownie he’d had, but still, he could have been arrested. In spite of the fact that the grandfather with whom he and his mother shared a home was the retired sheriff of River Bluff County.“He’s asleep,” Becky said, joining Annie in the kitchen of the home she’d grown up in and moved back to after her divorce when Shane was two. Her father had helped the women get Shane out to the farmhouse.

Still dressed in the smock and white shoes she’d worn to work, Becky looked rumpled and exhausted. Her footsteps were heavy on the hardwood floor as she came to the table.

Her father, Hub Parker, had retreated to his large workshop out back as soon as they’d returned home from the clinic with a confused Shane in tow. Annie knew, as she was sure Becky did, that Hub wasn’t angry with his grandson, or even with the kids who’d laced the brownies, but with whoever had sold them the stuff to begin with.