Dead Anyway Read Online Free PDF

example, you need to work with our sketch artist. A little hard to explain that the suspect was described by a person in a coma. Certain people have to know to keep the investigation going, and the more people know, the harder it is to secure. Especially with a high profile case like this. Eventually, whether you like it or not, you’ll have to rejoin the living,” he said.
    “That’s what I intend to do, detective.”
    E ASIER SAID than done. The next two weeks were a cavalcade of frustrations. Cursed with full, morphine-free awareness, I was alternately whipsawed by existential rage and despair and the physical stress of my sadly impaired self. As hoped, my mobility returned relatively quickly, though the left side of my face, the one controlled by the damaged right side of my brain, had a slight, but likely permanent droop, as you often see in stroke victims. My left side also dragged behind the other half. The hole in my leg healed better than anyone thought it would, though the bullet wound would likely hamper movement forever. In other words, I had a limp.
    The clarity of my vision, on the other hand, came close to what I had before. Evelyn arranged for an optometrist to come to the house and fit me with glasses, which neatly compensated for the minor deficiencies—though I found the weight hanging off my face hard to get used to, even though half the world seemed to manage it with little complaint.
    Beginning with walks to the bathroom three times a day, I built up strength in my gunshot leg until I could go two miles at a time on the treadmill Evelyn kept in the basement. I had it set on the slowest speed, and would never move much faster than that, but steady was achievable.
    As promised, the sketch artist showed up and spent a few hours with me going through the well-known process. I expected a friendly person with a charcoal drawing pad. What I got was a crabby grey-haired guy with a laptop loaded with sketch art software.
    Seeing the man in the trench coat emerge from the screen was an exceptionally unsettling moment. Worse because I really had no idea if it was what the guy actually looked like. There’s a reason eyewitness testimony is often disallowed, even when the witness isn’t brain damaged. I shared this thought with the artist, asking whether he ever checked on the accuracy of his images after the fact. He said they were usually close enough.
    “Meaning the witness had a great memory, or the cops just arrested some poor schlub that looked like the sketch,” he said. “And no, I don’t care either way.”
    Maddox emailed a copy of the sketch to my office computer, which Evelyn had secured and brought to my bedroom.
    After that, I hosted a few of Evelyn’s buddies from the hospital who assessed my physical and mental state, clinically and otherwise. A psychiatrist, the neurologist Dr. Selmer, and a musculoskeletal specialist all weighed in. The result was inconclusive, mostly due to the relatively early stage of recovery, though everyone but the shrink thought I had a reasonable chance at regaining much of my original self. The psychiatrist told me and my sister that my cognitive acuity was remarkably intact, but my social affect, empathy and equanimity factors were nearly immeasurable. She attributed this, breezily I thought, to having been recently shot in the head and witnessing the brutal murder of my beloved wife. I told Evelyn I hoped we hadn’t overpaid for that diagnosis.
    My right hand was stiff, but still steady as a rock, though my famous grin, now rarely deployed, looked like a sneer. Worse, my sensory acuity was seriously jumbled. Selmer said it had something to do with damage to the parietal lobe, causing a pathology called optic ataxia, where your arms and legs essentially lose track of things your eyes have identified and fixed in the physical world. So I fell a lot and often misjudged the location of common objects like toilets, ottomans, serving dishes and household pets.
    This