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A gunshot. There’d definitely been a gunshot. Jo remembered the way it had echoed, loud and wide, the collapse of a silhouette on the hard floor of the rooftop. She hadn’t heard their muttered conversation at the end, but she’d seen the struggle, and she’d heard the gunshot.
It must have been Henry that collapsed, because whoever was left standing had bent over to continue working with the cylindrical canister of poison. Jo had tried to move--had been trying to move all the while--but it was like her mind and her muscles had disconnected, like she was being pushed down by a lead blanket, emphasizing a piercing, throbbing pain radiating out from her middle.
Henry had gotten up, though. He’d forced himself to his feet again, and he’d charged Koehler... knocking them both from the roof. The silent, swift shifting of an awkward shape over the railing; there, then gone.
Henry was dead, wasn’t he? He’d... killed himself to save all those people. Thrown himself off of a roof. What had he been doing there at all? He was an M.E.; why had she brought him along to such a dangerous situation in the first place?
The light was harsh, piercing, but the worst of the pain had gone. What was left thudded weakly in her chest, like the warmth of a fire from the far side of a wall. She felt weak, pressed-down; the lead blanket had only lessened its load on her, rather than vanished entirely.
There was one silhouette, in this room. Just like there’d been one silhouette out on the roof. But this time, it was Henry.
Henry. He was standing there, right in front of her.
Henry... had been shot. At least, he’d collapsed after she heard the gun go off, and Koehler had seemed fine. Then they’d both toppled from the roof, breaking the fence. She remembered staring at the hole in the fence, thinking about Henry, about the weirdly-smart, weirdly-... weird doctor she’d only just begun to know.
He was dressed in all white; for a fraction of a second, Jo thought they’d both died, and he was greeting her on the other side. But her pain was too real for this to be anything other than life. And besides, if she had died, it would have been Sean extending a hand to her across the divide. Not some doctor she barely knew.
Henry smiled. If she was alive, then... so was he? He’d survived the fall?
“Are you alright?” she asked, before she thought it through. Henry laughed and strolled closer to her bedside.
“You’re the one who was shot, and you’re asking me if I’m alright?”
“I’m the one...” she echoed. It was hard to talk, slow to get her thoughts in the right order. “We were both shot. I saw you collapse.”
“I only slipped. Embarrassing, and dangerous given the situation, but hardly fatal. You needn’t worry about me.”
Was that right? She hadn’t seen any blood. Maybe the shot had missed, and he’d only slipped.
“But you fell. You both fell off the roof.”
Henry looked concerned. “Both of us? How is that possible? Trust me, I’d like to be a bit more heroic, but I assure you that’s the morphine talking. Koehler jumped off the roof alone. A last-minute suicide.”
That didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t what had happened. It wasn’t the awkward shifting shape of two struggling men.
“What about the poison?” she asked.
“I guess he thought better of it.”
He was... lying to her.
He was lying to her face, taking advantage of the situation to influence her own memories. But she knew what she’d seen: Henry had forced himself up from the floor and tackled Koehler. A bulky two-man silhouette had toppled from the roof. A crash and a car alarm. After that it had been empty for a while, quiet, a long, lingering, painful moment of her knowing, absolutely knowing, that Henry had died to save everyone in the building below.
Jo studied his face, those knowing brown eyes. He had died... or at least fallen off of the roof. No, he couldn’t have died, could he? He must have caught himself on something and climbed back up after she’d passed out. It was the only thing that made sense; if he’d hit that car, the crash and alarm she’d heard echoing from the skyscrapers stretching up above her, he’d be dead. Or at least gravely injured and laid up in a hospital bed himself.
The room’s phone interrupted her thoughts. Henry, bemused, picked it up for her and offered her the headset. Jo accepted it, her movements slow and heavy.
Could she have dreamed it...?
No. No, she couldn’t let herself head down that path. Waking up from a dream was the feeling of certainty that what came before was not real. When Jo woke on the hospital bed, it had been with the continued, real, heavy persistence of what she’d seen.
“Hello?” she said to the phone, letting out a sigh.
“Hello.” She didn’t recognize the voice on the line. “May I speak with Dr. Morgan?”
Had he told his friends where to reach him? After watching his oddities these past few days, it shouldn’t have surprised her. “Yes, hold on.”
Henry had turned away. Jo held the headset away from her face, bemused. “It’s for you.”
He turned around, looking oddly surprised. He accepted the headset and put it up to his ear. “Hello?”
If he’d given out her hospital room information just so that his friends could reach him here, then why was he surprised? But then he smiled, like it was a friend of his after all.
“Yes, fine, thank you,” he said as he turned around again, facing the window. “What is it that you want?”
He’d lied to her face. Sure, maybe he hadn’t gotten shot. Maybe the shot had missed and he’d slipped, or been knocked over. But he’d lied about falling from the roof, she knew that. Why? He must have caught himself on something and climbed back up, or maybe made it onto some lower floor. A stroke of luck, definitely. But why lie about it?
She watched his back, the light-colored overcoat she hadn’t seen before, and the answer hit her.
He wasn’t a police officer. He was a medical examiner; a civilian who hadn’t had a very good reason for having come along in the first place. If he admitted to her that he’d done something as reckless as jump off a roof, she would have no choice but to forbid him from accompanying her again. She’d have to consider him a liability.
And he loved investigative work. She’d noticed the gleam in his eye each time they pieced something together, the way he whole-body dove into the case and what it could have meant. He wanted to keep working with her, wanted to stay in the field, now that he’d had a taste of it; and if she were to be honest with herself, she wanted to keep working with him. He knew so many eclectic things, and had already saved her life with knowledge that her and Hanson would not have had access to.
Henry turned back around and hung up the phone. “I better go,” he said awkwardly, and turned away. The conversation had sounded tense; she hadn’t been listening to the words, but his tone had gotten darker with each new muttering. Now there was something distracting him that hadn’t been before, not even as he’d lied to her.
“Henry,” she said, when he was halfway to the door. “ Are you alright?”
He glanced back and matched her half-smile. “I’ll survive.”
Henry left. Jo laid back and closed her eyes.
He’d lied to her, yes. But he hadn’t had a choice. He didn’t want to ask her to lie for him, so he tried to convince her of something that wasn’t true. She hated that--really hated it, that he would even think to do that--but if he loved her job as much as it seemed, then it was the only way he could count on doing it again.
She’d let it pass this time, because he saved her life. But he
was
a liability. If he ever put himself in harm’s way again, then she’d call him on this lie and bench him, like she should have done already.