Chapter 2: The Awakening

Dana was careful when she stepped over the side and onto her private dock. The young guy stumbled as she helped him step over the railing. Only her strong hold kept him from a fall into the water. Dana helped him stumble up the cement walkway running from her small dock to her house. Each step was agony for him.

"Come on, now, I know this hurts like hell, but you have to keep going. The doctor is waiting for us and he'll make you all better." It sounded almost as if she was talking to a small child. He responded to her urging and made the effort to take one more step and another and another, helped by the short, sturdy framed woman whose shoulder he rested most of his weight on.

Just as they arrived at her front door, it opened and her friend, Dim Doc stepped out and took the load away from her and slowly steered the young man into the bedroom. The doctor gently lowered his new patient onto the bed and opened his medical bag and got busy. He stitched the bullet hole that ran through the young man's left side, applied a medicated bandage and wrote prescriptions for antibiotics and pain pills.

"When he wakes up, feed him plenty of water and orange juice. Make him a rich chicken broth with plenty of garlic and only a little salt. He's pretty dehydrated, but not quite bad enough for a saline drip."

He paused and looked at her severely, "Is there any good reason why I should refrain from calling the police?" he asked.

"Oh no. Please don't call the cops. They shot me." The young man tried to rise up off the bed and collapsed.

"Could I have reasoned more eloquently on why not to call them?"

"You do know the most interesting people, Dana. What's his name?"

"I don't know who he is. I found him out due west of Santa Monica some twenty or so miles, half in and half out of a life preserver." She looked at the old doctor with a slight smile. "Finders keepers," she said. Her smile gave away more of her feelings toward the young man than she meant to show.

"I like you better as a lawyer than as Florence Nightingale," the doctor snorted. "You evidently know nothing about him, who he is or where he's from. He has a bullet hole in him and he doesn't want the police called in. Are you sure you know what you're doing? Don't let your glands do your thinking for you, Dana."

She flushed at his reference to her unattached status and lack of a social life. "Don't worry, I can take care of myself," she told him, and revealed even more of herself to her observant friend who just happened to be a doctor.

"I don't know if that is true here or not. This is a human being and not a stray puppy you are dealing with here. Remember, there is one thing both dogs and men have in common, they have been known to turn on their benefactors. Just be very careful here. I speak now as a friend and not as a doctor."

"Doc Dim, I am a twenty-eight year old virgin. I would like to at least have a chance to make a mistake. Right now I am the only untouched female in the state of California over the age of puberty. My god. I've never even had a chance to live and I want to be alive at least once." The lonely agony inside her was expressed more eloquently in her voice than in her words. "He is just so beautiful. Like a broken angel, fallen to Earth, just so beautiful..." Her voice trailed off.

The doctor patted her gently on the shoulder. "Just be careful. You are one of the finest..." He paused and continued, "Oh hell, you know what I mean, just be careful and call me if he takes a turn for the worse." He closed his bag and left. She stood there, head bowed embarrassed at her outburst and the way she had bared her soul to the man she looked on almost like the father she never had.

Dana looked down at still form and wondered if she was making a mistake. Perhaps the good doctor was right. After all, what did she know about him? Actually, she knew absolutely nothing. She decided to find out what she could about her new ward. She quietly turned and left the room, gently shutting the door behind her.

She crossed her large living room and entered a brightly lit smaller room she had made into an office, complete with a bank of four networked computers, each complete with its own Internet connection. When there was research to be done, she wanted nothing to stand in the way of speedy information retrieval.

On the first computer she began a search for any shootings that had occurred in the previous thirty days involving a white male under twenty-five years of age. She used multiple search engines and widened the search to cover the states bordering California. On the other three machines she set up searches for runaway blond males aged fourteen to sixteen beginning the previous five years and adjusting the age upward one year as the search progressed forward a year.

Over a hundred shootings involving white males over the past thirty days. No wonder she had been so busy when she worked as a public defender. She narrowed the search to where the victim was a white male blond. She blushed furiously as she envisioned where she had verified his "blondness." Good grief. What was the matter with her, drooling over the unconscious body of a young man who was probably ten years her junior maybe even more? She put her mind back to the task and refined the search and began to search harder.

There. There was a shooting in Sacramento between a Mexican gang and a White Supremest group. No white, blond casualties. Another shooting happened in San Diego between two high school students over a girl. Not the right one, either, both shooters were arrested. And so it went. Nothing fit the criteria she had set up in her search programs.

The same thing held true for her search for a run away. There were a few that might be the one, but none of them quite fit properly. He was a young man with no past and an iffy future. She smiled at the thought, Perhaps he was an angel after all. Now there was a thought for a short, dumpy, homely as a mud fence broad who considered herself an atheist. Well, she would think of him as her own broken angel, anyway.

She looked up at the clock on the wall above her bank of computers, three hours she had been sitting there researching her angel. Three hours and no results. Slowly, Dana stretched and turned toward the bedroom her guest was in. Feelings of anticipation went through her as she opened the door and entered. So still, barely seeming to breath, he lay there sleeping. Her usually hard and uncaring heart went out to him in an outpouring of sweet, warm emotion.