Raney & Levine Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing later. For
     now it makes me crazy to hear
any
child called evil
- a baby, for
     God’s sake!
Don’t you just want to see?
What if the cops and cameras
     miss something?”
    “They won’t.” David patted the bed. “Let’s just lie down for
     twenty minutes. Maybe we won’t get called right away and we can - ow, my arm
     doesn’t bend that way.”
    She was yanking on a sleeve of his camouflage jacket, and he
     let out a resigned breath. Jill was Jill, he knew. Relentless yet vulnerable,
     worried about everyone, and eerily smart. Saw and sensed things that others
     didn’t. Got into trouble too, sometimes bad trouble. Could be headed for a
     shouting match out there.
    He pulled on his other sleeve and a Denver Broncos cap.
    “No,” she said. “The whole world knows you’re from Denver.”
    He muttered something under his breath and switched to a
     Yankees cap.
    She wriggled into a long, striped poncho and pulled her
     shades and cap back on. Minutes later they exited the hospital not via the
     ambulance bay, but from its teeming front entrance.
    They blended. Passed TV vans and busy reporters,
     approached the rear of the crowd and edged into it midway. Excited spectators
     pushed against the yellow barriers cops had up to protect the E.R. entrance.
    The Zealot had taken a position away from other signs,
     stiff-backed to his stretch of barrier, facing the jammed sidewalk and yelling
     into his megaphone. He had wild, graying dark hair and was on the scrawny side.
     Mid forties maybe, red-faced and in a tan jacket. Sounded even angrier than
     before, probably because onlookers were hassling him.
    “That child up there is evil!” he hollered, pointing. “He
     has no soul! He isn’t even eligible for baptism!”
    “
You
go take a bath,” someone said, heading back to
     the pro-IVF signs.
    “Skip the bath,” someone else said. “Go to hell!”
    The crowd cheered. Zealot glared, redder-faced, just
     furious. Jill and David got out their cameraphones and snapped pictures.
    “Doesn’t God love all children?” asked a woman. Another
     woman in a sari cried, “What about Hindu children?” And a gray-haired man said,
     “What would you
do
with that baby if you got hold of him?”
    “That’s no baby!
He’s the spawn of the devil!
The
     world must be saved from him!” Zealot turned and jabbed his finger up to the
     hospital.
“AND the devil’s workshop that created him!”
    His wheeling hand brushed a woman, whose husband had had it
     and lunged at the guy, raising his fist. It was caught by two uniformed cops
     protecting the peace and the First Amendment. They calmed the couple, who left
     muttering and shaking their heads. Gawkers came and left. Watched the Zealot
     like they’d watch any New York sidewalk performance, then edged away to watch
     the reporters, the cheering IVFers, or the SAVE AN EMBRYO bunch.
    Seeing people leave infuriated Zealot even more.
    “So you are in league with the devil?” he shouted at a
     departing back, eyes bulging in fury as he got the finger. “And you and you?”
    Jill leaned uneasily to David. “The hospital is the devil’s
     workshop?”
    “Maybe just obstetrics,” he said absently. She looked
     quizzically at him, then followed his gaze to one of the onlookers, a wiry man,
     maybe forty, with long, curling dark hair in a brown corduroy jacket. He was
     the only one really listening to Zealot, his intent, small-featured face taking
     in every word. The corners of his small mouth turned up as Zealot dealt with
     his detractors, turned down when Zealot went overboard.
    “Is that a fan or do they know each other?” David said low.
     He snapped a picture. Jill subtly snapped several. “Maybe both,” she whispered,
     watching as the wiry man stepped forward, smiling, to talk to Zealot; then
     smiled again as a young blond woman, very soccer mom, came forward too to hand
     Zealot a pamphlet, which he looked positively thrilled to autograph.
    They snapped