He used that word hero too much, and in my wheezy way, I asked him not to use it again.

I felt crushingly tired. I didn't want to fall asleep before I'd seen Stormy. I asked them to bring her to me.

Their lack of an immediate response to my request scared me again. When my heart thumped hard, my wounds throbbed in sympathy, in spite of any painkillers I was receiving.

They were worried that even a five-minute visit would put too much strain on me, but I pleaded, and they let her come into the ICU.

At the sight of her, I cried.

She cried, too. Those black Egyptian eyes.

I was too weak to reach out to her. She slipped a hand through the bed rail, pressed it atop mine. I found the strength to curl my fingers into hers, a love knot.

For hours, she had been sitting out in the ICU waiting room in the Burke amp; Bailey's uniform that she dislikes so much. Pink shoes, white socks, pink skirt, pink-and-white blouse.

I told her that this must be the most cheerful outfit ever seen in the ICU waiting room, and she informed me that Little Ozzie was out there right now, sitting on two chairs, wearing yellow pants and a Hawaiian shirt. Viola was out there, too. And Terri Stambaugh.

When I asked her why she wasn't wearing her perky pink cap, she put a hand to her head in surprise, for the first time realizing that she didn't have it. Lost in the chaos at the mall.

I closed my eyes and wept not with joy but with bitterness. Her hand tightened on mine, and she gave me the strength to sleep and to risk my dreams of demons.

Later she returned for another five-minute visit, and when she said that we would need to postpone the wedding, I pushed to remain on schedule for Saturday. After what had happened, the city would surely cut all red tape, and if Stormy's uncle wouldn't bend church rules to marry us in a hospital room, there was always a judge.

I had hoped that our wedding day would be followed at once by our first night together. The marriage, however, had always been more important to me than the consummation of it-now more than ever. We have a long lifetime to get naked together.

Earlier she had kissed my hand. Now she leaned over the railing to kiss my lips. She is my strength. She is my destiny.

With no real sense of time, I slept on and off.

My next visitor, Karla Porter, arrived after a nurse had raised my bed and allowed me a few sips of water. Karla hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, on the brow, and we tried not to cry, but we did.

I had never seen Karla cry She is tough. She needs to be. Now she seemed devastated.

I worried that the chief had taken a turn for the worse, but she said that wasn't it.

She brought the excellent news that the chief would be moved out of the ICU first thing in the morning. He was expected to make a full recovery.

After the horror at the Green Moon Mall, however, none of us will ever be as we had been. Pico Mundo, too, is forever changed.

Relieved to know the chief would be okay, I didn't think to ask anyone about my wounds. Stormy Llewellyn was alive; the promise of Gypsy Mummy would be fulfilled. Nothing else mattered.

SIXTY-FOUR

FRIDAY MORNING, JUST ONE DAY AFTER CHIEF PORTER escaped the ICU, the doctor issued orders for me to be transferred to a private room.

They gave me one of their swanky accommodations decorated like a hotel suite. The same one in which they had let me take a shower when I'd been sitting vigil for the chief.

When I expressed concern about the cost and reminded them that I was a fry cook, the director of County General personally assured me that they would excuse all charges in excess of what the insurance company would be willing to pay.

This hero thing disturbed me, and I didn't want to use it to get any special treatment. Nevertheless, I graciously accepted their generosity because, while Stormy could only visit me in an ordinary hospital room, she could actually move right in here and be with me twenty-four hours a day.

The police department posted a guard in the corridor outside my room. No one posed any threat to me. The purpose was to keep the news media at bay.

Events at the Green Moon Mall had, I was told, made headlines worldwide. I didn't want to see a newspaper. I refused to turn on the TV.

Reliving it in nightmares was enough. Too much.

Under the circumstances, the Saturday wedding finally proved to be impractical. Reporters knew of our plans and would be all over the courthouse. That and other problems proved insurmountable, and we postponed for a month.

Friday and Saturday, friends poured in with flowers and gifts.

How I loved seeing Terri Stambaugh. My mentor, my lifeline when I'd been sixteen and determined to live on my own. Without her, I would have had no job and nowhere to go.

Viola Peabody came without her daughters, insisting that they would have been motherless if not for me. The next day she returned with the girls. As it turned out, Nicolina's love of pink had to do with her enthusiasm for Burke amp; Bailey's ice cream; Stormy's uniform had always enchanted her.

Little Ozzie visited without Terrible Chester. When I teased him about the yellow pants and the Hawaiian shirt that he'd worn to the ICU, he denied that he would ever "costume" himself in that fashion because such "flamboyant togs" would inevitably make him look even bigger than he was. He did, he said, have some vanity. As it turned out, Stormy had made up this colorful story to give me a smile in the ICU when I badly needed one.

My father brought Britney with him, full of plans to represent my story for books, movies, television, and product placements. I sent him away unsatisfied.

My mother did not visit.

Rosalia Sanchez, Bertie Orbic, Helen Arches, Poke Barnet, Shamus Cocobolo, Lysette Rains, the Takuda family, so many others…

From all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died.

Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished.

What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?

Local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies had studied the quantity of plastic explosives in the truck and estimated that it would have brought down the entire department store plus a not insignificant portion of the south side of the mall.

Estimates are that between five hundred and a thousand would have been killed if the bomb had detonated.

Bern Eckles had been stopped before he killed more than the three security guards, but he'd been carrying enough ammunition to cut down scores of shoppers.

At night in my hotel-style hospital room, Stormy stretched out on the bed and held my hand. When I woke from nightmares, she pulled me against her, cradled me in her arms while I wept. She whispered reassurances to me; she gave me hope.

Sunday afternoon, Karla brought the chief in a wheelchair. He understood perfectly well that I would never want to talk to the media, let alone entertain offers for books, movies, and television miniseries. He had thought of many ways to foil them. He is a great man, the chief, even if he did break that Barney the dinosaur chair.

Although Bern Eckles refused interrogation, the investigation into the conspiracy had proceeded rapidly, thanks to the fact that a man named Kevin Gosset, having been run down by a forklift, was talking his hateful head off.

Gosset, Eckles, and Varner had been bent a long time. At the age of fourteen, they developed an interest in satanism. Maybe it was a game for a while. Quickly it grew serious.

On a mutual dare, they killed for the first time when they were fifteen.