Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  But, as you know, the trial ended before that was necessary.

  One night Sam Freed came to my cell. At midnight. He wouldn’t talk to me until a guard had taken us to the office where Freed and I had first met, and left us alone there.

  “Look, kid,” he said then. “Something’s about to happen. I’m not going to tell you what it is, because I want you to focus on what I’m saying. And when you find out, you’re not going to be able to focus on anything.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that shit—” I said.

  “I’m giving it and you’re taking it. So listen. I made you an offer that would have been the best thing that ever happened to you. You could have been a goddamned doctor, like your grandfather. You could have been anything or anyone you wanted to be. Want to join the country club? I could have made you a WASP. You hear me?”

  “I never wanted to be a WASP.”

  “You hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will do everything I can to get that offer back for you after everyone calms down,” he said. “But for a while things will be squirrelly, and out of control. Just remember people will come to their senses eventually. You testifying against David Locano will always be worth something to the DOJ. Are you hearing me?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You will tomorrow morning, believe me. So spend tonight thinking about what I’m telling you—about taking a deal if I can get you one. With your permission, I’ll call your girlfriend and give her my number. Can I do that?”

  “Well...yes, but...”

  “You’ll understand it all tomorrow morning,” he said. “And when that happens—for Christ’s sake, use your head.”

  At eight the next morning, the judge dismissed all State and Federal charges against me on grounds that the Hand should have been discovered under Brady v. Maryland after all. Six hours later they let me out of a holding cell. Donovan came and got me and took me out to lunch and told me what the hell had happened.

  My defense team had had the Hand DNA-tested. They figured the public wasn’t as stupid about that kind of thing as they had been during O.J., and what could it hurt. When the results had come back they’d had the Hand examined by a radiologist. Then a PhD in anatomy, and then a zoologist.

  The Hand was not a hand. It was a paw. From a bear. A male bear. And just like that, it was over.

  That afternoon, the prosecution tried to seal the record. There wasn’t any point. The headlines started immediately:

  “ESCAPE CLAWS.” “BEARLY LEGAL.” “WITLESS FOR THE PAWSECUTION.”

  Those fuckers never had a chance.

  Which wasn’t fair. Everyone went on and on about what a colossal fuckup it was, and how stupid someone would have to be to mistake a bear paw for a human hand. But I was in that courtroom, and so were a lot of other people. And not one of us doubted it for a second. In photos, at least, it was impossible to tell.

  Even after I got to med school I was amazed by the similarities—particularly if you take off the claws, which people do when they skin bears. Bears are the only nonprimates that can walk on their hind feet. They look so much like people when you skin them that the Inuit, Tlingit, and Ojibwa all thought bears could become people by taking their skins off. And the Inuit, Tlingit, and Ojibwa dissected a lot more bears than some drunk at the FBI ever did. Let alone the New York Post.

  Anyway.

  That, kids, is how the Bearclaw got his name.

  19

  I’m standing by the curtained-off bed next to Squillante’s in the recovery room, rolling the two empty potassium vials around in one hand. I should be rounding on my patients, then getting the fuck out of the hospital. Or else forgetting about my patients, and going straight to the getting-the-fuck-out part.

  What I should not be doing is standing here trying to figure out who killed Squillante. I mean, who cares, and what difference does it make? Is there some hitman still in the hospital who’s about to get a call saying “Wait up. While you’re there, would you mind whacking the Bearclaw, too?” Unlikely. I probably have about ninety minutes.

  But no one’s ever whacked a patient of mine before, and I can’t get past it. It pisses me off in a whole new way.

  I give myself one hundred seconds to think.

  The obvious suspect is someone from Squillante’s family. Someone who was hoping Squillante would die in surgery so there could be a big malpractice suit, but was willing to take matters into his or her own hands when Squillante pulled through. So an insurance beneficiary.*

  But it’s also someone who knew to use two whole vials of potassium. Any less than that might have allowed Squillante to live, or even helped him. Any more would have been pointless, and would have caused streaks in his aorta that would scream out on autopsy.

  But if the person wanted to hide the fact that it was murder, why inject Squillante so quickly that his EKG spiked? The insurance company would love that. The money’s never coming out of probate.

  Maybe the person did care, but didn’t have the time or training to do it right.

  Again, though, who gives a shit? Enough time wasted. I’ll go see those of my patients who might die if I don’t, and leave the rest to Akfal.

  Then get the fuck out.

  I know: Sterling. And fuck the Pakistani, eh? But he might as well get used to it, since I doubt I’m coming back.

  In the hallway outside the recovery room, though, I run into Stacey. She’s still in her scrubs, and she’s crying.

  “What happened?” I ask her.

  “Mr. Squillante died,” she says.

  “Oh,” I say. Wondering how it’s possible to hang out with Dr. Friendly and still be surprised by the death of one of his patients. Then I remember Stacey’s new on the job. I put an arm around her.

  “Hang in there, kid,” I say.

  “I don’t know if I can deal with this job,” she says.

  Something occurs to me. I say, “Yeah.” Then I count to five as she sniffles. Then I say, “Stacey, do you have any potassium chloride samples?”

  She nods her head slowly, confused. “Yes...I don’t usually, but I’ve got two of them in my bag. Why?”

  “Why do you have them now, if you don’t usually have them?”

  “I don’t do the ordering. They just FedEx me the stuff and I bring it into the hospital.”

  “They FedEx it to your office?”

  “I don’t have an office. They FedEx it to me at my apartment.”

  I’m amazed. “You work out of your home?”

  She nods again. “So do my roommates.”

  “Do all drug reps work out of their homes?”

  “I think so. We’re only supposed to go in twice a year, for the Christmas and Labor Day parties.” She starts sobbing again.

  Jesus, I think. Every day’s a lesson.

  “You wouldn’t have any more Moxfane, would you?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says through the tears, shaking her head. “I’m all out.”

  “Go home and get some sleep, kid,” I tell her.

  I’m doing respirator settings on a patient I haven’t mentioned and won’t mention again, dripping time like blood, when I get a page from Akfal. I call him back.

  “Assman’s got jaundice,” he says.

  Great. It means his liver is malfunctioning so badly that it’s stopped correctly processing dead blood cells. My own arm has started to feel a bit better. But he, at least, is fucked.

  I should skip it. Not so much because it can wait, which it sounds like maybe it can’t, but because I can’t think of what to do for him even if I take the time. I know if I called WITSEC and said “I really should run for my life, but I’ve got a patient who’s gone from ass pain to liver failure in less than eight hours due to an unknown, spreading pathogen,” and they knew what they were talking about, they’d say “Run for your life. You might as well save someone.”

  Or maybe they wouldn’t. WITSEC is not th
e most sympathetic organization in the world. Their universal word for witness is “scumbag”—which is fine for actual criminals like myself, but gets a bit grating when they’re talking about a young widow with a baby who’s just testified against three gangsters who came into her store and shot her husband in front of her.

  And most relocated witnesses are lucky to get a job at a Staples in Iowa. So you can imagine how the Feds feel about me, who as far as they’re concerned got placed in a gold-plated, tax-dollar Porsche en route to a golf course, with a license plate reading, “FUKUFBI.”

  What actually happened is that I got placed into the two-year premed program at Bryn Mawr, which I paid for myself. But even that was only because I had Sam Freed backing me. Sam’s retired now. If I get relocated again, it’ll be to paint fire hydrants in Nebraska. It will never be to work as a doctor.

  Of course, I could run without being relocated. Participation in WITSEC is strictly voluntary. In fact, if you do something they don’t like they kick you out, and half the time “accidentally” rat you out in the process. But to keep my name, and therefore my MD, I’d have to find some shithole so far away the mob couldn’t find me to mail me a bomb. And even those places have surprisingly strict licensing requirements. Like wanting to know who you are.

  The fact is, once I leave this hospital I leave medicine, almost certainly forever.

  The concept is dizzying. I race up to Assman’s room.

  As I’m passing the nursing station, the Jamaican charge nurse calls out: “Doctair.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say. The Irish crone is asleep on her computer keyboard, drooling into the AS/ZX region.

  “There’s a woman keeps calling to talk to you. Leaving a number,” the Jamaican one says.

  “How long’s she been calling?”

  “Several hours.”

  So it’s possibly legitimate. “Can I have the number?” I say.

  She slips it across the counter to me, written on a prescription pad.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Don’t let your friend electrocute herself.”

  She scowls and holds up the unplugged cable from the computer keyboard. “This is a hospital,” she says.

  I make the call. A woman says, “Hello?” There are traffic noises in the background.

  “This is Dr. Peter Brown,” I say.

  “You’re Paul Villanova’s doctor?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He was bitten by a flying rodent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I hear the clunk you can only get these days by hanging up a payphone.

  I enter Assman’s room.

  “How you feeling?” I ask him.

  “Up yours,” he says. I touch his forehead. He’s still burning up. I feel a bit guilty about the fact that my forearm barely hurts anymore, and that I have movement back in my fingers.

  “You ever been bitten by a bat?” I ask. Not that a bat is a rodent—it’s a chiropteran. But sometimes you need to put yourself in the shoes of the common man to practice medicine correctly.

  Plus, no one gets bitten by a flying squirrel.

  “No,” Assman says.

  I wait for him to equivocate, but he doesn’t. He just keeps his eyes closed and sweats.

  “Never?”

  At least it gets his eyes open. “What are you, a retard?” he says.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I think I would probably remember that.”

  “Why? You can’t even remember the last four presidents.”

  He rattles them off.

  “Or what day of the week it is.”

  “It’s Thursday,” he says.

  So at least his mind’s still working. Mine, meanwhile, is blurring.

  “Are you married?” I say.

  “No. I wear this ring to keep supermodels from rubbing up against me in the subway.”

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “Is she in the hospital?”

  “You mean as a patient?”

  “Any time you want to stop being a smartass,” I say to him.

  He closes his eyes and smiles through the pain. “She’s around here somewhere,” he says.

  I pull the curtain and check on Mr. Mosby. He’s managed to undo his wrist restraints but has left the ankle ones on out of courtesy. He’s asleep. I check the pulses in his ankles and leave.

  I scribble “R/O bat bite per wife” in Assman’s chart,* then finish the note with two horizontal lines and a diagonal one. I don’t even sign it.

  Because right now I’m in a strange state of purity. One way or the other, “Dr. Peter Brown” will not exist long enough to be sued, or even to check lab results. There is nothing to do but actual medicine, and even then only what is strictly, imminently necessary.

  Or what I feel like doing. I check the speed on a couple of chemotherapy drips, then spend all of thirty seconds fixing the dressing on the girl missing half her head.

  Osteosarcoma Girl, in the next bed over, is ashen, staring at the ceiling. The bag on her knee is filled with blood and blood clots.

  Her other knee’s propped up. I pull her gown down to cover her pussy, which still has a blue tampon string hanging out of it, and which anyone walking into the room can see.

  “Who gives a shit?” she says. “No one’s going to ever want me again.”

  “Bullshit,” I say. “Thousands of people will want you.”

  “Yeah. Losers who think they can trade up by fucking a gimp.”

  Huh. Seems pretty astute to me. “Where’d you get a mouth like that?” I ask her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, sarcastically. “None of the boys are gonna want to take me dancing.”

  “Sure they will,” I say. “Down at the hop.”

  “You fucker!” she says.

  I wipe the tears off her cheeks. “I have to go.”

  “Kiss me, you asshole,” she says. I do.

  I’m still doing it when there’s a throat clearing noise behind me. It’s two surgery techs come to wheel her away so she can get her leg cut off.

  “Oh shit I’m scared,” she says when they lift her to the stretcher bed. She’s holding my hand, which is sweating.

  “You’ll be okay,” I say.

  “They’ll probably cut off the wrong leg.”

  “That’s true. But the second time they operate it’ll be harder to fuck up.”

  “Fuck you.”

  They wheel her away.

  When I get beeped to the ER by a doctor I know who works there, I think: No problem.

  It’s on my way out.

  Just outside the ER I pass the fuckhead who tried to mug me this morning. He still hasn’t been examined yet, since long wait times are how they discourage people without insurance from coming to the ER. His face is covered with blood, and he’s holding his broken arm. When he sees me he jumps off his stretcher and gets ready to run, but I just wink at him as I jog by.

  Under less extreme circumstances, I love emergency rooms. People who work there are as slow and calm as houseplants. They have to be, or they fuck up and burn out. And in the Manhattan Catholic ER you can always find the doctor who paged you, because it’s all been one open space since an incident you really don’t want to know about.*

  The doctor is hosing out a low-back knife wound on a patient who’s writhing and screaming but being held in place by a couple of nurses.

  “What’s up?” I ask her.

  “The ER’s a fucking nightmare,” she says, sedately.

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got a biker status post–motorcycle accident with heavily contused testicles.”

  “Okay.”

  “And he’s mute.”

  “He’s mute?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can he hear?”

  “Yes.”

  So he’s probably not mute.

  I look at my watch, like it’s going to
say, “Ten minutes to hitmen.”

  “Show me,” I say.

  She puts down the sprayer and takes me over.

  The biker’s not some jackass with a weekend Harley. He’s an actual biker-gang biker, like from Gimme Shelter. He’s got green tattoos and is wearing sunglasses in the Emergency Room. There’s a bunch of ice packs on his groin, with his purple and black water-balloon scrotum showing through them.

  “Can you hear me?” I ask him.

  He nods.

  I squeeze his nose shut. He looks surprised, but not as surprised as when he realizes he’s not strong enough to claw my hand off his face.

  Eventually he opens his mouth to breathe, and I take the bag of heroin out.

  I toss it to the doctor. “Okay?” I say to her.

  “Thanks, Peter,” she says.

  “Any time,” I say, wishing it were true.

  I walk out through the ambulance entrance.

  20

  After I got out of jail, I didn’t give a shit about anything but Magdalena.

  We moved into an apartment in Fort Greene, close enough but not too close to her parents, and spent all our time together. If she went out to play a gig I drove her and lurked nearby.

  Twice a week we went to see her family. Her parents were polite, but got teary-eyed every time. Rovo, Magdalena’s brother, seemed in awe of me, a fact that shamed but also flattered me.

  My other family, the Locanos, I avoided to the extent that I could. I owed them and they owed me, and beyond that everything was broken. I don’t know how many friends you can stand to hear talking about you on tape like that, calling you “The Polack” and appearing to give no shit whatsoever about what kind of trouble they’re getting you into. I don’t know how many friends could stand knowing you’ve heard those tapes, either. We started disentangling from each other, but slowly to be safe.

  Skinflick, meanwhile, just seemed bewildered. What we’d gone through together at the Farm was now useless to him. What was he going to do, come out now and say he’d whacked the Karcher Boys? Helped whack the Karcher Boys, even? Shot an injured fourteen-year-old in the head while I was off getting the car?