“How is he?” Gage asked.

“Alive.” Kishore pressed her fingertips against the green surgical scrubs covering her breastbone. “It’s not just damage from the slugs, the CAT scan shows his brain absorbed a tremendous shock when he fell. Unfortunately, he’s now slipped into a coma.”

Gage smothered the urge to ask the questions to which he knew Kishore couldn’t have answers: How long would it last, and how would it end.

Kishore looked at him apologetically. “We put him on a ventilator. We couldn’t count on his brain functioning well enough to maintain his breathing.”

A timer started counting down in Gage’s mind. The science hadn’t changed that much in the quarter century since he’d left SFPD Homicide. Given his age and the severity of his injuries, three weeks was all Burch had to fight his way out of the coma and avert a descent into a lethal vegetative state-if he survived the next few hours.

Kishore cast an expectant look toward the emergency entrance. “Has his wife been called?”

Gage nodded, finishing her sentence in his head: In case he doesn’t make it.

“She’ll be here by ten o’clock. She and my wife-”

A glimmer of a question caught him short. He fought his way back from an uncertain future to the image of Burch raising his hand-and to his own past as a young detective: riding in ambulances, then following gurneys to operating room thresholds, pursuing facts binding a victim to a shooter, or a dying declaration linking a wounded killer to his crime.

“Do you know what he was trying to say?” he asked Kishore.

The doctor shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s all there was.”

They stood silently for a moment, then Kishore furrowed her brows as if she’d taken a wrong turn in a familiar city. “I assumed you’d be Australian, too.” She inspected Gage’s graying brown hair. “Maybe his older brother.”