Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

evidence collection team in here asap. I want to know who the dead guy is and I want pictures and samples of everything before we turn this place over to the NYPD.”
    “Roger that!”
    Riley looked at the mess in the room around him and sighed.
    It was going to be a long night.

CHAPTER FOUR

    “We need to talk,” Dr. Gardner said gently and Debbie Harris felt something break deep inside her at the tone of his voice. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good news; she knew that much before he said another word. She glanced at her son, Henry, lying unmoving in the hospital bed beside her and then followed the doctor out into the hall.
    Henry had done two tours in Iraq, driving a heavy truck for the U.S. Army. He’d been ambushed repeatedly, taken a bullet in the shoulder, and even had his vehicle blown right up underneath him by an I.E.D., but in the end he’d come home safe and sound and ready to start a life together with his girlfriend just they’d always wanted.
    The irony of it all was almost unbearable. To survive that hell overseas, to come home with body, mind, and soul intact - not an easy thing to do if the other veterans she’d met were any indication - only to be sideswiped by a drunk driver while coming home from the grocery store a week ago. The collision forced his car across the middle lane and directly into the path of an oncoming eighteen wheeler. The truck driver said that it happened so fast that he hadn’t been able to do anything and Debbie believed him. It hadn’t been the truck driver’s fault.
    The emergency personnel who’d pulled Henry from the wreck had been amazed that he was still alive, given the two-foot piece of steel embedded in his skull, entering above his left eye and exiting just behind his right ear. They transported him to the ER at St. John’s Hospital where the surgeons had immediately gone to work, removing the steel rod – a piece of the car’s steering mechanism as it turned out – and doing what they could to stop the internal bleeding. It had taken eleven hours to stabilize him, but that had only been the start. Long days of agonized waiting followed; the doctors needed the swelling to come down before they could even begin to assess the amount of damage done to Henry’s brain as a result of the injury.
    The results of that assessment must have just come in.
    Gardner led her a few steps down the hall to a set of plastic chairs. He took a seat, waited for her to do the same, and then launched into what it was that he’d come to say.
    “I’m sorry, Debbie, but the news isn’t good.”
    “The results from the CT scan came back and the situation’s even worse than I feared. The rod that punctured Henry’s skull damaged major portions of the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the cerebrum. If he were to regain consciousness – and I have to be honest, that’s a big if – he wouldn’t be Henry. At least not the Henry that you knew. The personality centers of his brain, the parts that made Henry Henry, have been irrevocably damaged. He would be an entirely different individual.”
    “But at least he’d be alive, right?” Debbie asked, reaching for the slim bit of hope she thought she saw lurking between the doctor’s statements.
    Gardner grimaced and shook his head gently. ”Alive, yes, but at what cost, Debbie? His ability to think and reason for himself is gone. You’d be caring for nothing more than an empty shell.”
    “What...what would you have me do?”
    “With all due respect,” Gardner said, “I would recommend that you turn off the life support devices and let your son die with the dignity he deserves.”
    Debbie stared at the doctor in horror. ”Turn off his life support?”
    “Yes. It is for the best. Honestly.”
    “For the best? Turning off his life support – killing my son – is for the best?”
    Debbie could hear her voice growing louder and more shrill as she went on, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Kill her son? He wanted