Death and the Intern

by Jeremy Hanson-Finger

  Janwar can hear breathing.

  “Mmm?” he ventures.

  “Mmm.” A female voice. “Mmm mmm mmm.”

  Janwar humps his body over toward the voice. Susan. He can tell from her body that’s who it is. Good thing he is so familiar with it now. He feels further along Susan’s body with his face, the only part of him he really has dextrous control over, until he gets to her hands, which are also zip-tied.

  “Mmm,” he says, he hopes reassuringly, and then twists his body around so he can get his hands near her hands. He tries to picture the video of how to get out of zip ties with a credit card and translate how the zip ties feel to how they look. Thank Christ he hasn’t trimmed his fingernails in the last few days.

  He manages to locate the tab that holds the zip tie shut and digs his fingernail into it, which is a strangely sexual process. He suggests through grunts and thrusting his back against her back that she try to pull to the right, which, after a few tries, he manages to communicate, and after a few tries of his lifting the tab and her pulling to the right, the zip tie slides open. Susan reaches forward and rips the tape off her eyes and mouth.

  “Amazing,” she whispers, as she attempts to locate his face in the dark. “How did you know how to do that?” She rips the tape off his eyes and mouth.

  “Ow. Bullying.”

  “You were a bully?” Susan obviously a little woozy still.

  “No, I was bullied.”

  “You can fill me in later. What are we going to do now?”

  “I’m going to get your ankle zip tie off so at least one of us is fully mobile, and then you can do me. I’ll walk you through it.”

  “Can we turn on the light?”

  “Someone could see from outside the door. Pull your feet to the right.”

  Now Susan’s feet are free. “How do I get you out of these zip ties?”

  “What holds the zip tie closed is a bar that rests against the ribs. You just need to get your fingernail between the tie and the bar, and then it will slide out.”

  “Okay.”

  But before Susan has a chance to get her fingernail in the right place, Llew swings the door open, illuminating the room. They’re in the storage closet. Janwar scans the room for a weapon. He catches a glimpse of wood. Llew has returned his bat to the tub in the corner. Janwar jerks himself to his feet with the world’s largest pelvic thrust. “Susan, grab the bat—in the Rubbermaid.”

  He hops toward Llew, who backs away, closing the door. Janwar crashes into the door and falls on Llew. With neither his hands nor feet, free he can’t put Llew in a wrestling hold. Llew rolls on top of him. Janwar’s face is in Llew’s side, which smells of sandalwood, presumably aftershave. He can’t see anything, but he hears and feels the impact of hickory wood against old Welsh skull.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bobby Dasler – Ball and Chain – Body Count – Manville

  Wednesday, July 16

  A detective-constable from the Ottawa Police took his statement bedside. Now, Janwar’s in the Ottawa General Hospital, which is eleven kilometres from the Civic. Kurt Rickenbacker spoke in rapid-fire bursts, and as far as Janwar could piece together from the bald detective’s telegraphic delivery, Llew was going downtown for kidnapping and assault for sure, but unless he had a snitch jacket on under his lab coat and rolled over on the rest of the anaesthesiologists in order to reduce his prison term, this would likely be a “Forget it, Kurt, it’s Civichospitaltown” sort of deal with respect to the Diego business. Rest assured, Kurt would keep an eye on the Civic Hospital from now on, and Janwar was certainly welcome to leak the real-estate scam to the papers if he thought it was defensible—given slander and libel and all that.

  Janwar knows the man’s right; he doesn’t have any hard evidence of a criminal conspiracy. Connecting Llew to Diego’s death would be very difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt in court. Kurt is the one straight shooter Janwar has met in the entire city, and Janwar is effusively thankful for him, possibly to the point of making Kurt uncomfortable, but then again, what detective wouldn’t want to be thought of as a straight shooter, even if it’s by a dark, handsome East Indian med student and not a leggy blonde?

  How’s his leggy blonde doing? Janwar doesn’t have his phone near him. He reaches over to the bedside table and switches on the radio, and, against all odds, the newscasters are talking about Susan.

  “Now, here in Canada we live in a just and democratic society. Ms. Jonestown herself is facing charges of assault for concussing Dr. Cadwaladr, while allegedly freeing Mr. Gupta.”

  “Does she play baseball, Bobby?”

  “I’m seeing here she played on a rec team at university called— Oh, no way.”

  “What?”

  “The Bunter S. Thompsons.”

  “Don’t stop here, this is—”

  “Although she did a heck of a number on him, there does seem to be evidence that it was self-defence.”

  “Dr. Cadwaladr paralyzed Mr. Gupta against his will with rocuronium.”

  “That’s one of the drugs, which, correct me if I’m wrong, Juliana, one of the drugs that the State of Virginia recently started using as part of their lethal injection procedure?”

  “That’s right, Bobby. Although as far as I understand, it’s not the drug that stops the prisoner’s heart. It’s the drug that stops him or her from twitching and spasming, for the sake of the observers.”

  “Isn’t that messed up, Juliana?”

  “It sure is, Bobby.”

  “Anyway, Ms. Jonestown claims that Dr. Cadwaladr was withdrawing a syringe with an unknown substance in it from his pocket and threatening Mr. Gupta with it when she grabbed the baseball bat and hit him in the head. A spokesperson for the police said that a syringe containing GHB was found in Dr. Cadwaladr’s hand, which lends some truth to her story.”

  “Why was there a baseball bat?”

  “I think that—”

  “Sorry to interrupt you, Bobby, but Dr. Cadwaladr is now in stable condition, I’m hearing from the hospital.”

  “That’s good, Juliana. Nobody deserves to die for their crimes without due process.”

  “I thought nobody deserved to die for their crimes period. This is Canada, Bobby.”

  “Sorry, Juliana, just having a back-home moment there, I guess. We at the Bobby Dasler Show are firmly anti–death penalty. We’ll keep you posted as new developments reach us. And that’s it for the news on CHEV 95.3, Ottawa’s best country. Now here’s some Johnny Cash, with ‘Twenty-Five Minutes to Go’—”

  Janwar turns off the radio and closes his eyes. His anxiety hasn’t come back yet. He focuses on the hum of the machinery and lets his mind drift like a continent.

  Susan is still being held at the main police station, near the Pretoria Bridge.

  “Why’s she still there? Hasn’t she had a bail hearing yet?” Janwar asks Detective-Constable Rickenbacker.

  “Above my pay grade.” He’s managed to wrangle Janwar a visit first thing in the morning on Thursday, however. “Ten minutes,” the man says. “All I can.”

  Susan’s saying goodbye to a long-haired man wearing overalls as Janwar arrives. Who’s that? A brother? An ex? He feels a twinge of jealousy.

  She looks okay. She’s wearing her usual clothes—that is, boots, tights, denim shirt. Janwar isn’t sure whether he expected an orange jumpsuit or just imagined it that way.

  “Hi, Susan,” Janwar says. “They were talking about you on the radio.”

  “Oh yeah? Who was?”

  “The hosts on the country station. CHEV.”

  “What did they say?”

  Janwar’s mind blanks.

  “Janwar?”

  “That you played on a baseball team.”

  “Well, that’s true. Speaking of which, everyone seems satisfied that I swung at Llew in self-defence.”

  “So why haven’t you had a bail hearing yet?”

  “Red tape, I guess. Or maybe all the justices of the peaces got shit-face
d last night and didn’t show up for work? Legally it’s got to happen today.”

  “And if they all agree it was self-defence, you’ll get to go home soon. I can’t imagine why they’d deny bail. We have to make this quick, but here’s what Llew told me while I was paralyzed. I don’t have any evidence at all, but I figured you had to know.”

  “Hit me up.”

  Janwar tells an abbreviated version of the story, trying to cover all the bases. “The whole anaesthesiology department killed Diego because by jeopardizing the condo project he was risking their investments. And the Oxy was just Shaughnessy and Horace initially, but when Lowell and Llew and Sylvie told Shaughnessy he had to shut down the trade and couldn’t work with Horace while they were play-acting the Mixers versus Pushers thing, Shaughnessy got the other Pushers involved instead, because they were supposed to be seen with each other. Which Llew still doesn’t know about. I just figured that out myself. So, you were right, in the end the Pushers did become pushers.”

  “Okay, so—”

  Someone clears their throat behind Janwar. The constable who escorted him down here has returned. “Time’s up.”

  “One sec,” Janwar says. “Go on.”

  “It’ll take me a while to figure out what to do about the Oxy and the dog walkers, but as soon as I can call someone I’m blowing the whistle on the Bronson Slope condos. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out who did all the shoddy insulation.”

  “That’s good. At least you get your story.” The only person Janwar feels any sympathy for is Fang, but she’s still been involved in premeditated murder.

  “When do you go back to BC?” Susan says.

  “This afternoon. But maybe I’ll come back out here.”

  “Am I supposed to say, ‘I’ll be waiting for you when you get back out here?’”

  “BC isn’t jail. I could visit.”

  Susan laughs. “I like you, Janwar, I really do, but you should find a nice girl in Vancouver. Come on, you don’t want a ball and chain with a ball and chain.”

  “But you’ll be released today.”

  She holds out her hand.

  Janwar squeezes it. His throat feels thick. Dr. Brank would tell him that there is no pattern, that each failed romance is its own unique circumstance, and it’s just bad luck that things haven’t truly aligned with him and a lady, like, ever. But it’s human nature to see patterns. And what’s the constant here? Good old Janwar, and an endless series of emotional investments that haven’t gotten Janwar what he wants, which he thought until now was an equitable long-term relationship with a pretty girl who cared about him, and who he could care about in turn, but which he has now redefined as “any sort of relationship involving Susan.”

  Sad-face emoji, he thinks: a frowning yellow blob looking down and to the side. He distracts himself by pondering the fact this is the first time he has thought in pictograph form. He really is a millennial. This is also depressing.

  He follows the constable back up the stairs. A group of military policemen in red berets push past him, going in the opposite direction.

  Police officers have invaded the hospital by the time Janwar returns to the Civic to get his stuff, which has been left for him at the information desk. Most of the people in line for the Lazarus Coffee by the door are wearing blue and they look tired enough that coffee might not do any good. A few are priests and they don’t look tired at all. Their driver idles the cart across the hall.

  The two cops Janwar saw the other day, the ones who stared at his beat-up face when he returned to work, are standing outside the ER entrance where the ambulances pull up. Janwar’s about to ask them what’s going on, but as he approaches, he overhears what the man is saying, which is, “Glad I wasn’t on duty there when buddy got snuffed.”

  Janwar freezes and backs up until he is mostly hidden behind a potted plant. He lowers his bags to the ground and stands still.

  “The boys and girls of the Ottawa PD look out for one another. Niles’ll be fine,” the woman says. “He doesn’t have any priors.”

  “He out hacking a dart?”

  “Peeing.”

  “Maybe the sergeant should have borrowed some catheters from the Civic if she wanted a single officer to stand watch over a perp who was probably going to roll over on a bunch of others.”

  Janwar’s knees start to ache. Someone killed Llew while he was under police custody. That’s why the hospital is full of police. He rotates his head so his right ear is slightly closer to the officers and curls his hand into a tube.

  “Have you ever had a catheter, Richard?”

  “That’s a little personal, eh?”

  “Don’t get snippy.”

  “Also, that word, snippy…”

  “Someone’s got a bit of anxiety around Little Richard. I’m just saying, do you have any experience with what you’re suggesting?”

  “Okay, maybe not a catheter. Maybe one of those astronaut diapers that woman wore when she drove across the States to kill her boyfriend’s new girl,” Richard says.

  “That wasn’t an astronaut diaper. She was an astronaut, but it was a regular adult diaper.”

  “Not sure about that, Tanya.”

  “Who was the stiff upstairs going to roll over on, again? This mess is so frigging complex.”

  “Way I understand it, there are these two groups of doctors. The one the stiff wasn’t part of was running Oxy. And they were afraid he’d squeal on them to reduce his sentence for the kidnapping. So out came the pillow. But buddy who did it forgot about the security camera. Didn’t even wear a mask. Got his red hair and freckles lit up clear as day.”

  “What an amateur.”

  Sounds like Shaughnessy all right.

  A whoosh from opening doors rustles the leaves and the police glance over at the plant—Janwar’s contorted form is now revealed behind it, with his hand cupped to his ear.

  “What you doing there, bud?” Richard says.

  “Moving along,” Janwar says, realizing as he says it he’s breaking the No. 1 rule of talking to cops, which is never to skip ahead in the conversation, because it threatens their sense of control. Janwar unfolds himself and heads toward the taxi stand.

  “Hey, we’re talking to you, and we’re cops,” Tanya says, but Janwar keeps walking and they don’t follow him or shoot him, so all in all, his eavesdropping is a success.

  It’s all kind of poetic, in a way. Llew created a fake rivalry that turned into a real one. If not Pushers versus Mixers, maybe Pushers versus Llew, and at the very least Shaughnessy versus Llew. Perhaps now Shaughnessy will testify about the real-estate conspiracy to dial down his sentence and they’ll all go to jail, Pushers and Mixers alike. Janwar just doesn’t have the emotional energy left to evaluate how he feels about this new development. Two people are dead now, but all he wants is to go home. And, despite what he said to Llew, sleep.

  His phone is blowing up with messages from Ajay and Garati. He decides he might as well face the music in person and doesn’t respond.

  Janwar waits by the curb outside Dr. Flecktarn’s building. He wonders if Susan’s been released. He checks his phone to see if she’s texted him. She hasn’t. He needs to stop thinking about her. There’s no value in doing so. This encounter with Susan was a nice thing that happened, is how Dr. Brank would tell him to think about it, and to be thankful for that, not to mope about the fact that it wouldn’t continue.

  Good thing he’s got lots of other things to have feelings about.

  For starters, he feels foolish for being played. Maybe he’s a genius with a syringe and a ventilator, and maybe he did gather some key information and escape from Llew due to a handful of objectively clever actions, but that doesn’t mean he’s a smart person by any other metric. He was manipulated into killing Diego and he didn’t put together the various conspiracies until Llew spilled the whole story.

  He also feels generic for being so predictable that Llew was able to call his number in potentia, without even having met him
. Connect the dots on the med-student page in a draw-by-numbers book of occupations and you get a picture that could be Janwar or any of the other 286 students in his graduating class.

  And he feels cheated by absurd circumstance out of a great reference for a placement in which he technically excelled. All things considered, he did induce like a motherfucker. If he’d gone to Toronto Western, or Vancouver General, or Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, or Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, or even Whitehorse General, he’d have done just as good a job and none of this would have happened. Well, that’s not true. None of this would have happened to him. But regardless of what the police investigation turns up, if he’d gone somewhere else, there’d be no question at all of how he performed when it came to the crunch. His positive reviews from the classroom would have extended to his placement, and his life would have gone on as it should have… Instead, he killed a man, his supervisor, a criminal mastermind, was murdered, and everyone else in the department was at the very least an accessory to murder. This whole placement is a wash. He’ll probably have to graduate a semester late now.

  He can feel a chthonic breakthrough rising in his chest like fetid grey water in a backed-up sink. He’s been living minute by minute until now, but returning to his usual environment and thinking about the future is making him lose control. It was so stupid to imagine, even for a second, that his traumatic experience had somehow cured him—

  The taxi that pulls up is a navy-blue Crown Victoria. Janwar walks around to the back of the vehicle. The driver cracks his door.

  “—charged under the Security of Information Act, relating to the possession of classified information about the Canadian Rangers. And now on to weather with Andromeda Lau—” the radio anchor says, before the driver turns the sound off. Must be whoever those military policemen were going to the holding cells to see, Janwar figures, distracted for the moment.