The Eve of the Dragon
Page 1
The Eve of the Dragon
Michael Dunn
Shadowleaf Publishing
Shadowleaf Publishing,
Printed in United States of America
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2019 by Michael Dunn.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any mean, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.
First Shadowleaf Publishing Printing July 2019
ISBN-13: 978-0-9894129-1-9, 978-0-9894129-2-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
DEDICATION
To my wife, Elizabeth, for putting up with the stupid, stupid things I do.
CONTENTS
Contents
Chapter One: The Doctor Checks Out
Chapter Two: Dr. John Miller
Chapter Three: Dr. Dan Carter
Chapter Four: Dr. Steven Pierce
Chapter Five: The Airport
Chapter Six: The Flight to Italy
Chapter Seven: Night on the Town
Chapter Eight: The Next Day
Chapter Nine: Kidnapped
Chapter Ten: Where Did Dan Go?
Chapter Eleven: Meeting the Professor
Chapter Twelve: Arriving at the Hospital
Chapter Thirteen: The Magical Orb
Chapter Fourteen: The Next Day
Chapter Fifteen: The Castle of the Count and Contessa
Chapter Sixteen: A Mobster’s Revenge
Chapter Seventeen: Dan’s Visitor
Chapter Eighteen: Evening Preparations
Chapter Nineteen: Dinner with the Count
Chapter Twenty: At the Children’s Museum
Chapter Twenty-One: The Sacrifice
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my beta readers who read the book and gave me feedback:
Elizabeth Dunn, Peter O’Neill, Alicia Bany, Kristi Tysdal, Matt Johnson, Sharon Jackson, Collette Fox-McCune, Bill Berezowitz, Alec Lachman, Erin Clavey Gruenholz
Chapter One: The Doctor Checks Out
“Sonofabitch,” Roberto “Tex” Romano whispered to himself in American English.
The terrified hotel manager and housekeepers shouted in rapid Italian. Tex nodded, heard their concerns, and assured them everything would be fine. The hotel staff wanted this mess cleaned up quickly and quietly. Tex fixed similar delicate situations for the Sabella crime family from Naples. The Fratelli crime family owned this resort in Milan and permitted the other crime families to use its facilities. The hotel was a neutral territory for visiting criminals as long as they behaved.
The naked man dangling in the closet from a belt, dead from autoerotic asphyxia, was Dr. Ricardo Ricci, the Sabellas’ plastic surgeon on retainer.
Dr. Ricci’s dishonorable departure left a mess, and Tex’s crime family needed his skills in the next couple days. The plastic girls were on route carrying some valuable property. A third party had paid the Sabella family to retrieve the Orb of Genoa, a small, crystalline, green marble which allegedly possessed magical powers. Tex knew nothing about any magical features, but he knew it had cost some innocent shop girl in Bonn her life. Some things were better off not knowing. All Tex cared to know was how to retrieve it. The plastic girls required a plastic surgeon upon arrival and Tex was clueless where he would secure a plastic surgeon who was not local (local doctors like to talk) in time. He needed to focus on the matter at hand.
Dr. Ricci had been a competent, but disgraced doctor, who had nearly lost his license from narcotics use. Prior to Dr. Ricci’s trial, the Sabella family found an opportunity and used its influence with the Italian medical board to reduce their findings to a mild rebuke on the doctor’s record. In return, Dr. Ricci worked exclusively for the Sabella family, if he promised to stay clean. The Sabellas paid for his rehab stint and Dr. Ricci understood what would happen if he did not stay clean. However, life as a mob doctor consumed his body and soul the same as heroin would, just slower. He withered away until the hotel staff found his naked body in the closet, suicide by porn.
Tex complied with the hotel staff until their complaints became overwhelming.
“Shut up!” Tex screamed in Italian. They obeyed.
He ordered them, “Unstrap the body, dress it, clean the room per usual. I’ll call this ambulance service, one friendly to our families; and then we forget this ever happened.”
Tex handed out cash to the manager and the maids as if he was Father Christmas. The maids received more money from the fixer than they earned in one year. Then, the hotel staff went to work.
Tex called the ambulance service and used the code phrase for discreet body pick up and removal. Then he called a moving company friendly to the Sabella family to dispose the things from the doctor’s home. Dr. Ricci would be a missing person whom no one would miss.
Once the staff dressed the body and vacated the room, Tex called his hotel contacts to inform him if any foreign surgeons had arrived from abroad. No locals and no Italians. It was a slim chance, but Tex hoped one would arrive for a conference or something.
The ambulance crew entered and Tex told them what to do and handed them thousands of Euros a piece for their service and their silence. Tex exited the hotel in Milan after the body disposal unit removed the corpse.
Heading back to Naples, he received a call from a concierge. Three surgeons from Miami were visiting Naples for a month-long vacation. Tex thanked him and hung up.
The fixer could not believe his luck. Three doctors from his homeland were landing in his new hometown. He thought about how weird and coincidental it was, like a granted wish. It seemed all too easy.
Chapter Two: Dr. John Miller
Standing in radiology, two doctors studied an X-ray of the anterior of the skull of an unconscious adolescent rushed into the emergency room less than an hour before.
“What do you think, Dr. Miller?” Dr. Garrett Chang, chief of surgery at Miami General, asked his protégé.
Dr. John Miller studied the X-ray a little more closely. “Blunt trauma to the head and face. The nose shattered, broken in two places. Supraorbital rim fracture. Lateral wall orbital fracture. Bilateral nasal bone and septum fractures. Fracture of the medial-lateral and anterior walls or right maxillary sinus. There is a slight fissure in his forehead right here.”
Dr. Cheng nodded. “That’s what I thought too.”
John whistled and said, “What a mess. Did this kid lose a bar fight or something?”
“Afraid not. A bar fight would have been more interesting and less tragic.”
“What happened?”
“Car accident.”
“Drunk driving?”
“Nope. The patient is a seventeen-year-old Caucasian male, who sat in the back seat behind the driver. He didn’t buckle up. He was talking to his girlfriend, who sat in the passenger seat. The girlfriend was also unbuckled. She had her head turned while talking to her boyfriend. The driver, the girlfriend’s best friend, stopped short, sending the boyfriend flying, colliding with his girlfriend’s face at twenty miles per hour.”
John winced. “Ouch. How’s the girl?”
“She died on impact.”
“Yikes. What about the others in the car?”
"The driver raced here after her friends collided. She and another boy, who sat behind the passenger, are being treated for shock. The ER is waiting for their parents to arrive.”
“Who will perform the surgery?”
“Carter.”
“Oh,” John nodded with approval. “Despite his behavior, he is an excellent plastic surgeon.”
“Speaking of the devil, where is our person
al R-rated Patch Adams?”
“I know he’s around here somewhere. We had dinner together in the cafeteria hours ago.”
Dr. Cheng collected the X-rays and placed them into a folder. He pressed the PA button on the wall. “Dr. Dan Carter to the OR. Dr. Carter to the OR.”
Dr. Miller was about to leave the room when Dr. Cheng said, “I heard you passed your boards.”
“Yep, I’m an official plastic surgeon now.”
Dr. Cheng patted his protégé on the back, “Congratulations. I knew you could do it.”
“Thank you.”
They shook hands and left the radiology laboratory for the operating room.
John Miller became a doctor because he had lost a little sister to leukemia before he graduated from the eighth grade. Lisa Miller spent the better part of two years in the hospital, almost all of John’s junior high school years. John wore Lisa’s silver necklace every day since high school.
Despite all the platitudes Lisa would recover, John knew that would be a broken promise. He believed it at first, but over time, he watched her wither away a little more every day. Lisa had good days, and on those days, she and her older brother watched TV, played video games, and created stories together. Lisa, like John, was an avid reader. On Lisa’s bad days, all she wanted to do was sleep.
John became a familiar face around the hospital during Lisa’s stay and the younger doctors took a liking to him. The younger doctors would often help John with his homework and they watched out for him the best they could.
John’s grades and SAT scores earned him a spot at Princeton, but his parents could not afford to send him because of Lisa’s lingering hospital bills; John attended Florida State University.
He enrolled in a creative writing class to knock off a humanities elective, when he found that he loved to write. Storytelling came easily to him thanks to time he spent crafting stories with Lisa. In his free time, he wrote short stories to get them out of his head and onto paper so he could go back to studying.
During John’s sophomore year, he began a rather frowned upon romantic liaison with a graduate student getting her master’s in English. Melanie Goodwin was never his classroom teacher and they had met through mutual friends. She was twenty-seven, and he was twenty. She was the mousy librarian type, who understood books. John was blonde, blue-eyed, tall, and muscular.
Melanie was the first person John allowed to read his work. She told him his stories had potential as pulp thriller books; the male version of trashy romance novels. She taught him how syntactic intelligence in writing can create engaging cumulative sentences, which made the story flow, keeping the reader engaged.
Melanie edited his stories and helped John make his stories more palatable to the reader. They would rewrite together following their lovemaking sessions. He had written his novel during his long breaks between semesters.
John titled his first book, Backfire, a mistaken identity story of a vacationing family man whom murderous foreign spies believe is an international assassin.
Melanie was not jealous that John showed promise in creative writing, because that was not her forte. She preferred writing innovative nonfiction, cutting-edge technology books about things that would be commonplace in thirty years.
“John, do you know that someday a robot will take your job?” Melanie asked after finishing a research paper. “Someday doctors and surgeons will be largely replaced by robots.”
“Well, it is unlikely that will happen in my lifetime.”
“Maybe not completely replace human surgeons, but our androids and robots are getting more and more sophisticated. Hell, IBM is trying to get its Watson to be the prototype for the complete medical doctor. If it works, and someday a robot takes your job, what will you do?”
“As with all other industries, we will adapt or we will die. Who knows?”
She liked that answer and climbed on top of him.
Their student/teacher romance lasted just shy of eighteen months before Melanie transferred to work on her Ph.D. program.
After John earned his bachelor’s degree in pre-med, he took the plunge and got a literary agent who liked what she saw in John Lance Miller’s work and submitted his book for publication under the pseudonym, Michael Drach.
Backfire, re-titled The Accidental Assassin, sold well enough to help pay for medical school. Writing and publishing had been a pleasurable enough experience, so that John would write another seven books during his medical school years with varying degrees of success. However, becoming a novelist was never his end goal. His goal was to have this books make enough money for him to stay in medical school without accruing crippling student loans. He did not have a trust fund like Dan Carter, nor did he come from a family of doctors like Steven Pierce. Instead, John had found an alternative after-school job.
However, since graduating from medical school and going further into a specialty surgery residency, for which the hospital mostly paid, he had given up writing to focus on becoming the best surgeon he could be.
“I also hear you are leaving,” Dr. Cheng said, pulling John from of his trance.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I’m leaving for a month for a well-deserved and much overdue vacation.”
“Where are you going?”
“Italy.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I am going with Steven Pierce and Dan Carter. Dan is footing the bill. Well, I think Dan’s family is, anyway.”
“Lucky you. How did you pull that off?”
John shrugged. “The three of us have been close friends since medical school, and after Dan passed his boards, he believed, as I do, that a long vacation was in order. After all, we sacrificed our twenties to get here.”
“We all did, John. We all did.”
“True. Anyway, the three of us will use our long accumulated time off and heading for the beaches of Naples.”
“Nice time of year to go, tourist season. Where are you staying?”
“In a penthouse on the beach. Here, let me show you,” John showed his mentor pictures of the penthouse on his phone from the travel site.
Garrett Cheng whistled. “I’m envious. What are you going to do there?”
“Probably drink a lot and meet gorgeous women on the beach,” They both chuckled.
“And use the ‘I’m a doctor from America’ line as part of your seduction?”
John recited it back in Italian.
He and Dr. Cheng laughed.
“Most likely, Steven and I will have to try to keep Dan out of trouble.”
“Good luck with that.” Dr. Cheng scoffed.
“Thanks.”
“What does Nurse Fleming in obstetrics think about your vacation?”
John’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped.
“Oh, come on, John. It’s the worst kept secret in the hospital.”
John was reluctant to answer. “Our relationship is a friends with benefits situation. Neither one of us has ever spoken of exclusivity. She also thinks I’ll be Dan’s babysitter.”
They both chuckled until they saw Dr. Dan Carter walking into the OR dressed like a six-foot-two-inch surgical rabbit. He wore the usual white, papery, surgical garb from feet to head, but with paper bunny ears taped to his white, paper head wrap. He colored a black dot on his nose and whiskers with a black Sharpie. He was singing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” while he danced toward the OR to scrub. Both John and Cheng sighed.
Dr. Cheng said, “I can’t think why Nurse Fleming would say you would be Dan’s babysitter.”
Chapter Three: Dr. Dan Carter
“Good of you to make it, Dr. Carter,” Dr. Henry Wu, head of plastic surgery at Miami General, told his protégé.
“The great Lord ‘Intercom’ has summoned me here to…”
“And get those silly things off.”
“But this disposable surgical gown prevents us from infecting the patients with our germs, and I think it would be irresponsible if…”
Dr. Wu yank
ed the bunny ears off his head as Dr. Cheng and Dr. Miller stepped inside.
“Ow! You don’t see me grabbing you by your ears, do ya?” Dan protested.
In a bad imitation of an upper-crust British accent, Dan began, “Welcome to the operating theater, my good gentlemen. We hope you chaps will be good sports and enjoy this evening’s performance.”
Dr. Wu sighed and said, “Garrett, John, nice to see you. Dan, whenever you are ready, we have a long night of fixing this boy’s face.”
Garrett handed the folder with the X-rays to Dan, who attached them on the light panel. He studied them with Dr. Wu and then discussed how to repair the boy. They would have to do it piece by piece consulting the X-ray and 3D computer model regularly.
Dan took his position next to Dr. Wu and they worked on the boy’s face. During his procedure, Dr. Carter was silent, efficient, and hyper-focused while reconstructing the unfortunate boy’s nose and face. There were no jokes about giving the boy a thin, Hollywood-type of nose or having the boy come out resembling the Frankenstein Monster.
Garrett and John observed for a few minutes as Wu and Carter worked on the young man. Months before, Garrett had asked Henry about the progress on his newest plastic surgeon, Wu said, “He’s irritable, insufferable, and possibly insane,” Henry Wu told him. “However, when he is in the operating room, you won’t see a more focused and capable young surgeon. It is fascinating to watch him work. We work well as a team when we’re operating. Yet, outside of the operating theater, it’s like working with an obnoxious, hyperactive child, who needs his medication.”
*
Hours later, long after midnight, the surgeons finished the last of the reconstruction. Henry and Dan left the nurses close up, then clean up. They removed their surgical gowns and washed up.
“You did very well, Dan,” Dr. Wu said.
Dan whispered, “Thank you,” while he was washing up. He was still in his focused, almost hypnotic operating room mode.