Amazon Roulette

by C. M. Gleason

  Marina settled back in her seat, mouth full of pizza. She seemed to take a long time to chew and swallow it. “There’s been no news from her? How long ago was this?”

  “Two days ago. No news,” Helen said. She was watching their hostess closely.

  “Rue Varden was here,” Marina said abruptly. “Today.”

  Gabe nearly lost his pizza. “What?”

  Helen sat up straight and pulled an iPad from her briefcase. As she began touchscreening on it with a fancy stylus, she glanced at Marina. “Care to elaborate?”

  “He was here when I got home today, bleeding all over my office. I—uh—stitched him up and after he passed out, I went upstairs to change. But he sneaked off.” She looked at Gabe. “That’s why I texted you.”

  He swore under his breath. “Why the hell did he come here? You stitched him up?”

  “I wasn’t going to let him die.” She leveled a look at him.

  Helen’s phone rang, and the high, shrill noise drew everyone’s attention. “I haven’t figured out how to change the ring tone,” she said, fishing it from her discarded suit jacket pocket.

  “The sooner the better,” Gabe commented. But he was still eyeing Marina with irritation. She claimed she hadn’t been in touch with the Skaladeskas, but Rue Varden had showed up here. Injured. Only days after the Skalas were in Chicago.

  What had made Varden think he’d get help from Marina?

  Helen finished her low, terse conversation then put the phone down. “We’ve got a dead body at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. In Chicago. With the Skaladeska mark on him.”

  Gabe sighed mentally. There went his hopes for a visit with Marina.

  TWELVE

  September 24

  Flint, Michigan

  As an ER physician, Brenda Hatcher counted it a good day when no one died, and a bad day when she was so busy she didn’t have enough time to do her job the way she wanted to.

  Yesterday’s shift—which finally ended at eight a.m. today—had been a particularly bad day. Mind-numbingly busy, plus she’d lost not only the forty-nine-year-old man with the bugs, but also an eighty-year-old woman who’d had an intracranial bleed with a golf-ball-sized hematoma. Of course, she could judge the ten-hour shift by how many lives she’d saved—four—or how many excellent diagnoses she’d made because of her instincts and training, but it was the days when she lost someone that really sucked.

  Which was why Brenda was aimlessly perusing Facebook, a mug of hot cocoa in hand, on her evening off. She drank hot chocolate year round—even in Michigan when it often got into the upper nineties during the summer—because it was a better option than the bottled margaritas to which she’d once been addicted.

  That was also why she was alone on this humid September night, with the sliding door to her apartment open to let in a breeze, and no one to talk to or to touch. Since Sly left two years ago, Brenda had been running solo and just trying to keep it together so her mom didn’t worry. She couldn’t even have a pet because of the hours she worked. Even if she was scheduled off at a certain time, she couldn’t just walk out the hospital door if she had a patient, or if a big rush came in. So often a scheduled eight-hour shift turned into ten or twelve hours. She worked midnights and afternoons, and an occasional day shift—the variety of which screwed up not only her sleep schedule but her personal life.

  Which was, again, why on her night off she had nothing to do and no one to spend it with but her friends online or her TV remote. But the pickings there were slim because she’d eschewed the cable bill in favor of her student loan payments once her ex-fiancé moved out, and generally resorted to DVDs or whatever she could legally stream for free off the Internet.

  Fortunately, Brenda had several friends who had just as little of a life as she did: friends from med school and residency who kept odd hours and didn’t have the money or the time to be social either. They’d set up a private online hangout through one of the free services, and it was here she and her friends sought solace—as well as the opportunity to brush it off and put the bad days behind.

  “You have to learn to move on,” they reminded each other when it got tough. “Put it out of your mind.”

  The truth was, if Brenda hadn’t gotten pretty good at compartmentalizing, she’d have never made it out of residency. But there was no denying some days really sucked big donkey balls.

  Like having to tell Mike Wiley’s wife that her husband had died early this morning while at the emergency room—which some people found impossible to believe; especially if they presented with something seemingly as innocuous as a rash—and then leave the tearful, disbelieving, shell-shocked Mrs. Wiley and immediately walk into a different room where a big, burly man lit into her because she hadn’t been in to see his son with an earache soon enough.

  “We’ve been waiting three hours,” he yelled, his round face reddening into purple. “Don’t you people have any respect for us, making us stick around here all day long? You think we got nothing else to do?” The son started crying, holding his ear, and it was all Brenda could do to keep from crying herself.

  Or from telling the father to do something anatomically impossible.

  His kid had an earache. Mrs. Wiley’s life, on the other hand, had been irreparably and horribly altered.

  Brenda was glad to see that one of her favorite people had already logged in to—was just hanging out in—their virtual videoconference room. Hyram always had great stories, most of them about a crotchety old doc he worked with in his own emergency room. The tales were usually good for a laugh or a roll of the eyes in commiseration.

  “Had one of those days we don’t like to talk about, Hy,” she said once they were connected and she had her headset on. “So I need a distraction. Got any new Doc Westin stories?”

  “Sorry to hear that. How bad was it?” His face was only half onscreen because of the position of his laptop; he looked like he was doing something on the table in front of him.

  “Two. One from a bug bite.” A spot on her hand itched in empathy, and Brenda scratched at it, remembering how awful Mike Wiley’s skin had presented, covered with that oozing, cottage-cheese-like rash.

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, here’s one to get your mind off things. Just happened yesterday, in fact. Westin’s got this girl, twenty-three or so, waiting for him. They triaged her and she’s complaining of fever, being too hot, sweating profusely. He walks in and she’s sitting there in the gown, open in the front, and, man…he says it’s a sight to behold. Her breasts are showing—and according to Westin, they’re a very nice set, full and high and damn near perfect, and she’s wearing this pale purple, lacy triangle of panties—and nothing else. Of course, even though the old guy can’t get it up on his own, he can’t help but notice, you know, and then he looks all the way up and sees the gal’s face. She’s all made up like she’s going out—lipstick, eye shadow, hair’s done, everything…but she’s got a full beard and mustache.”

  Brenda almost spewed her hot chocolate at the computer screen, but managed to salvage it at the last minute. “Oh no,” she managed to gasp.

  “Right. So Westin looks at the chart, looks at the girl—or guy; obviously he’s in the process of changing over—and says, ‘You feeling a little hot? A fever—or maybe like you’re getting hot flashes?’ Patient nods, looking surprised. Doc says, ‘Let me guess…you stopped taking your estrogen shots.’ The woman—guy—whatever—looks at him like, ‘Wow. How’d you know?’”

  Brenda snorted a laugh and absently rubbed another itchy spot on her arm. “Westin always seems to get the unusual ones. I have to meet this guy some day.”

  “Next time you get to Chicago, you just come on by and I’ll make sure you meet the old bastard.” He flashed a smile, his face coming into full view for an instant before he turned away to shove a bite of pizza into his mouth.

  “Will do.”

  “I’ve got another one,” he said as he finished chewing. “You�
�ll love this one. This old Italian lady—eighty-seven—comes in. She’s complaining she’s got snakes in her belly.”

  “Gastric upset? Too much garlic in her Alfredo sauce?”

  “No, literally snakes. And she’s got the damned x-rays to prove it.” Hyram was grinning, his face grainy on the video chat.

  “Okay…”

  “Yeah. So she’s been hospital-hopping, trying to get someone to get these snakes out of her stomach. She’s got the films and she brings them when she comes in, and she shows Westin, shows him the snakes. And…the snakes she’s pointing to, what’s got her all freaked out? It’s her intestines.”

  “Awww…no way.” Brenda felt a flash of pity for the old woman.

  “Yeah. She sees them in the films, you know, and she will not believe these aren’t snakes. She can see them and she wants them out. And she’s not going to take no for an answer.”

  “She really thinks her small intestine is a snake?” Her empathy strained even more. How terrible and terrifying it must have been for the poor woman to truly believe she had snakes growing in her belly.

  “Yep. Poor thing. But she’s determined. And Westin—probably the only one in Chicago to give her the time of day—talked to her for thirty minutes, trying to explain to her that they weren’t snakes. But she’s pointing at the picture, showing him, insisting there are snakes in her belly, and she’s really getting agitated. He leaves, comes back a little while later, tries again because the old lady won’t leave. She’s determined that someone’s got to get the snakes out of her stomach.”

  “Geesh.” Brenda put her empty mug down and wished for her own pizza. But the phone number was on the fridge, and she was comfortable here on the couch. “What’d he do?”

  “Well, he finally convinced her it wasn’t snakes. He’s got her settled down, and she understands there are no snakes in her stomach. So—true story, Bren, I swear it—he goes for the door, and she stops him and she says, ‘Could it be a squid?’”

  “Noo…!” She was half laughing, half appalled, and collapsed back on her sofa.

  “Right. So Doc goes turns around and goes back to her and says—straight face and all—‘Impossible. Squids are saltwater creatures, and there’s no saltwater around here. You been to the ocean recently, Mrs. Whatever Her Name Was?’ ‘No,’ she says. ‘Then there you go. There’s no way a squid could get inside you then.’”

  By now Brenda was half hysterical on the couch—partly from exhaustion, partly from disbelief, and partly because she simply couldn’t imagine having a conversation like that with a patient…but, in fact, she could. She had. There were all kinds that came into the ER. “Thanks, Hy. You made me feel a lot better.”

  “Glad to hear it. When you going to come here and visit me? It’s only five or six hours, right?”

  “Soon, I hope. When I get a weekend off. Maybe in a couple months.”

  “So about this bug bite—you don’t have poisonous bugs in Michigan, do you? What kind of bug was it?”

  “I’m not really sure it was a bug that caused it. The guy wasn’t lucid and he was waving around a plastic baggie with a couple of beetles in it. I kept it, just in case, and I let the ME know about it.” She looked down at her hand, which had continued to itch, and saw that it was getting red in patches. Huh. Must be that new laundry detergent she’d tried. So much for buying the cheap stuff. “But he was in a bad way—just covered with boils and an ugly rash. Spiked a fever of 104, heart rate accelerated. I’d’ve thought it was a drug reaction. Like that underground Russian drug.”

  “You mean Krokodile? That shit’s bad stuff, but we don’t see that here in the US. At least, not yet,” he added.

  “I know. But I just saw that write-up from the CDC about keeping an eye out for signs that it’s come over here—especially after the Olympics in Sochi. Did you see it?” Hy nodded and snatched up another piece of pizza as she continued, “Sounds ugly. Maybe it was just on my mind; anyway, I’ll wait to see what the ME says. He did go into cardiac arrest, so it might have been unrelated to the rash or the bug bite.”

  “Let me know, Bren. And let me know when you’re going to come and visit. I’ll show you a good time.”

  “I know you will.” After a few more minutes of chatting, she disconnected. Her hand was really itching now, and she noticed her other arm was feeling prickly and itchy too.

  Brenda frowned, glancing at the kitchen counter, where she’d left the plastic baggie with Mike Wiley’s bugs in it.

  No. That was silly. The bugs were long dead—there was no way she could have been bitten by them. She’d poked at one in the bag with her finger and got some of that black stuff on her, but that was just dirt, and she’d washed it off anyway.

  It had to be that new laundry detergent.

  Or maybe she was getting a strawberry allergy like her mom.

  Brenda shook her head. Talk about psychosomatic hypochondria.

  It was time to order pizza.

  THIRTEEN

  September 24

  St. Louis

  “So what do you think?” Charles Akinowski leaned on the counter, impatiently watching the man across from him.

  “I think,” said Dr. Wendell Svirishna, looking up from the lump of charred insects, “that I’ve never seen an insect like this in my life. Even burned to a crisp as it is.”

  Ake exchanged glances with his partner, Michael, who’d introduced him to Svirishna, then looked back at the other man. The scientist was an entomologist on staff at the St. Louis Zoo and had gone to the University of Illinois with Michael. He’d agreed to look at the insect on an unofficial basis because Ake was still not willing to believe a swarm of random bugs had caused a mega-state blackout—but Michael, who’d been hearing about it day and night, had made an executive decision and called his old friend.

  “So, do you think it’s possible it caused the blackout?” Michael asked.

  Dr. Svirishna was using his hands, encased in skintight purple gloves, to gently separate some of the insects from each other. Flakes of black fell onto the absorbent white paper on the lab table. He picked up a magnifying glass and peered through it, eyeing the residue.

  Michael squeezed Ake’s hand in warning when he would have pressed further. Ake glowered back. Didn’t any of them realize what sort of pressure he was under to find out what had happened? Practically everyone on Capitol Hill, not to mention in Jeff City, was crawling up his ass, demanding answers. And the only thing he had was this charred lump of rust-tinted coal. He kept his mouth shut, but gave Michael a look that told him he was going to need a very big glass of Pinot Noir tonight—not to mention something spectacular to eat—as soon as they got home.

  “Definitely Coleoptera, maybe family Meloidae…but any more, I can’t tell from this specimen. Not very much to work with. But it’s not native to this area,” Svirishna said, moving the crumbling black pieces around in a large flat-bottomed glass dish. He peered, poked, hummed, and even used a small pair of forceps with needlelike tips to conduct minor surgery while Ake waited impatiently, his grimace telling Michael this was a waste of time.

  Then, with sudden, excited movements, Svirishna took a small flake of black and put it in a smaller dish, then shoved it under a nearby microscope. Peering through the lenses, he shifted the dish around, used the forceps to move it, tipped it over, moved the fiberoptic light wand, and then popped his head up. “Copper. On the wing,” he said, faint red rings around his eyes. “Copper is very conductive of electricity,” he mused. “Hmm.”

  “Erm…yes,” Ake replied. “It does have a coppery look to it. Are you suggesting that copper was transferred to the bug—”

  “Insect,” Michael murmured.

  “Insect,” Ake said from between clenched teeth. “You think copper got on the insect when it flew into the wires? No chance of that.”

  “Well, there seems to be a residue of copper on the insect itself. If not from the wires, then I don’t know from where. I’m not a metallurgist, but that’
s what it looks like to me.”

  “Isn’t it possible if the insects had some of that metal on them, they might have caused a surge of electrical power when they flew into the wires?” Michael said. He looked at Ake from behind round glasses, his eyes owlishly hopeful.

  “No way,” Ake replied, more sharply than he probably should have. “It’s not possible that scant amount of copper dust would cause a power surge of that magnitude. And besides, what would cause a swarm of bugs—insects—to collect like that and fly in an organized swarm into a bunch of wires?” He was shaking his head even as he stared down at the burned-out mess. Yet…the same uncomfortable feeling he’d had when Nabbins first brought him the bugs was back, churning his stomach. It really wasn’t possible.

  Was it?

  “If you could find me another specimen,” Svirishna said from behind the microscope lens. “Preferably one that wasn’t burned to a crisp.”

  “I’ll get my guys on it right away,” Ake said, trying and failing to keep the sarcasm from his voice.

  Michael glared at him and lifted his chin in a manner that indicated Ake might have lost the chance for that spectacular dinner he needed.

  At least he’d get the glass of Pinot. He could open the bottle himself.

  “Even if you can just find more parts,” said the entomologist, seeming not to have noticed Ake’s irritation. “We can use them to identify the insect. It’s obvious they aren’t native.” He pulled back suddenly from the microscope, as if he’d just had an idea. “I have a friend who might be interested in looking at this. Eli Sanchez. This is right up his alley—he’s one of the best coleopterists in the world. Just won an ESA award, in fact, for his work on atypical insect metamorphosis.”