Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

justify yourself.”
    I was surprised by this show of backbone from such a soft, childlike man. I said to Brian: “Paul Schulman is a scumbag. He is not our people. We are nothing like this man. That isn’t what we are.”
    “You may have a big stick, but you are still a Jew, and one day you will learn that,” Abramsky said. “I hope, for the boy’s sake, that lesson doesn’t come at too great a price.”
    “If you feel like doing a mitzvah, call an ambulance for this schmuck,” I said to the rabbi. Then I turned to Brian: “Get your ass in the car. We’re done here.”

 
    5
    2009
    I was lying flat on my back on a soft mat in a windowless interior room, staring up into the fluorescent lights. Getting myself down to the floor had been accomplished with great difficulty, and not without assistance. Getting up would be painful.
    “Let me see you do two more sets of leg lifts,” said Claudia, who was a physical therapist or a rehab specialist or something like that.
    “I think I’ve had enough for today,” I said.
    “If you can swing that axe, Buck, you can give me a couple more leg lifts.” She pronounced her name “Cloudy-ah.” Her people were from someplace in Central America, and if she ever went back there, she was well qualified to work as a torturer for an autocratic governing regime. I’d had hurt put on me by some of the best, and this girl could hang with any of them.
    “I’m all worn out from the axe. The axe was a hell of a workout. I think it earned me a day off.”
    “There are no days off. There are just days when you get better, and days when you get worse.”
    This was the ninety-second day I’d done rehab therapy. This was the ninety-second day I’d spent paying the price for going after an old enemy and tangling with bad guys.
    I’d already done fifteen minutes of slow pedaling on the stationary exercise bicycle, and three sets of an exercise that involved pulling on a rope, which was supposed to help my core muscles. My core muscles were a mess. It turns out that getting shot in the back is real bad for the core muscles.
    Rose arranged to move us to Valhalla Estates while I was still in the hospital. It was a decision I wouldn’t have approved, but there was no choice, really. The house wasn’t accessible to me anymore. We had no grab bars or seats in the bathtub. We didn’t have a toilet I could slide onto from a wheelchair. The hallway leading back to the bedroom was now too narrow for the chair to maneuver, and even after all my therapy, I still needed somebody stronger than my wife to help me out of bed in the morning.
    Rose picked this place over a couple of less-expensive options, in part because it had an on-site rehab facility and a physical therapist on the staff. Using the same criteria, she could have just moved us to the prison at Guantánamo Bay; I hear they’ve got room there, since that Kenyan president turned all the terrorists loose.
    “You know, I’ve studied the biomechanics of walking,” Cloudy-ah said. “The human gait is a kind of negotiation with the gravitational pull of the Earth. The planet is always trying to pull you down toward its center, and your body has adapted itself to use that very force to propel you along the surface.”
    “Until one day, it doesn’t, and then you get buried,” I said.
    “That’s why we have to work to keep all those muscles in good condition. If just one of these complex systems goes out of whack, the whole machine breaks down.”
    My machine was a heap of junk; I was made of ground-down gears and worn-out belts, with load-bearing beams held together by spit and Spackle, and that was before I’d gone and got myself shot.
    For the elderly, healing is complicated. The doctors’ primary concern was something they called decompensation: essentially, I had become so fragile that the stress of a trauma could cause a cascade of organ failures that would most likely kill me.
    The way my doctor had explained it: “With