Do No Harm (2002)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  He swayed back and forth on his rear end to bring the pocket closer to his bound, gloved hand, his fingers straining pronged and stiff. He snagged the ragged edge of a bill between his second and middle fingers and managed to pull the clip halfway out, but it caught on the fabric pulled tight by his shifting motion. The tin square containing the lozenge, pressed beneath the clip in his pocket, dug into his thigh with a sharp corner.

  He released the money clip and wiggled several more times before timing a better grab, his fat thumb and forefinger clamping shut around one of the rearing horses, fake turquoise against hammered brass. Breathing in small, repetitive grunts, he slid his body down as far as the restraints allowed, pressing his rear end down into the mattress so he'd drag his loose scrub bottoms with him.

  The money clip popped free.

  He rested for a few minutes, his face a red, sweaty globe. He shifted the money clip in his hand, then wriggled his thumbnail into the slender groove that lifted the blade from the clip. The blade pulled slightly open, then snapped shut. He tried again and again until his thumb ached near the cuticle from the pressure. He wasn't able to get the blade far enough open so it would hold until he could reshift his hand and thumb it the rest of the way.

  Finally, he raised the blade just far enough to slide his index finger beneath it before it could snap shut. When he released his thumb, the spring pulled the blade home, slicing down through the thin latex glove and his flesh. He bit his lip, eyes watering, and quickly repositioned his thumb and flicked the blade fully open.

  A stream of blood found its way from the neat slit of the wound down over his knuckle. He turned the money clip in his hand so the blade protruded down toward the restraint. The leather cuffs themselves were far too thick to cut through without better leverage and a serrated blade, but they were connected to the gurney rail by a thin band threaded through a small buckle and hasp.

  With some effort, he slid the blade between the restraint and the band, and turned the sharp edge up until it tented the thin leather strip. Rocking gently on the mattress, he began to saw.

  At 3:17 A.M., a gurgling scream from Exam Room Fourteen sent both officers rigid on their feet in Hallway One. One fumbled at the door handle as the other stood back, already searching for an ER nurse.

  Made unusually unsteady on his braced legs by exhaustion and a mild irritation at being called out of his warm bed at three in the morning to assess a shotgun wound to the groin, Peter was nearly startled off his feet by the scream. He froze a short distance up the hall, leaning in the open doorway to Procedure Room One.

  The first officer swung open the door to Clyde's room, the gurney coming slowly into view, and the gruesome, twisted body strapped to it. Clyde's torso was literally doused in blood, broad streaks flowing down his arms and crossing his bare, burn-pocked chest. His head wavered drunkenly as he raised it to regard the cop, and then sank back to the pillow, eyes rolling to thin white bands.

  The officer's voice hiked high when he spoke, approaching the bed. "Find a doctor," he said. "We have a suicide." The other cop's footsteps faded down the hall.

  Clyde's body flopped listlessly, a caught fish losing life. The officer stepped forward again, adrenaline blooming red in his cheeks. The restraints all seemed to be in place. One of Clyde's cheeks, impossibly, was smudged with blood. His head lay still on the pillow.

  The body tensed, then lunged at the officer with a bellow, arms swinging free and fast. The officer leaned back, fumbling for his pistol, but Clyde whipped his wrist around, armored with the hard leather restraint, and caught him across the forehead with the metal hasp. He pounced on the officer as he fell, and yanked the Beretta from the holster with a blood-slick hand. The officer raised his hand as if to deflect a bullet, but Clyde kicked him across the face instead, and he went limp on the floor.

  Clyde darted to the door, shirtless and bloodstained, restraints still banded around his wrists and legs like cuffs and ankle weights. He sprang into the hall as the other cop bore down with a nurse. An old man wearing an oxygen mask lay on a parked gurney between them, awaiting transport to the wards. The cop noticed Clyde first and he yelled something, fast-drawing his pistol.

  Fisting the Beretta, Clyde leapt at the gurney, his foot knocking the lever to release the brake when he landed, his momentum sending the gurney hurtling toward the cop. The old man rose with a moan as he flew forward, oxygen mask tangling around his neck. The front of the gurney struck the cop crotch level and his chest flopped forward onto the mattress as he fell, legs scrabbling on the slick tile. His gun went off, blowing out an overhead light, the recoil kicking it from his hands. Peter, who'd been shuffling up the hall behind the second cop and the nurse, ducked his head inside a doorjamb.

  Rather than running for the exit, Clyde sprinted toward the heart of the hospital, sidearming the cop's head with a restraint-heavy wrist as he passed. Nurses and interns screamed, scrambling for cover. As Clyde passed Procedure One, Peter swung a leg out to trip him. The thick metal brace caught Clyde across the shins, spilling him onto the floor. Clyde tumbled once, crying out, his bare chest slapping the tile and leaving a bloody Rorschach. His face tightened as he turned and glowered at Peter over a shoulder, haunches already rising beneath him.

  His feet slipped for his first few steps, then he hit a crazed sprint, patients and doctors leaping out of his way. By the time the security guards arrived, he had disappeared into the hospital's interior.

  Chapter 28

  HORACE Johnson McCannister, a high school dropout with mouselike facial features and a sharp osmotic mind, hummed as he pulled on his shoe covers. His feet had plenty of room at the bottom of the white plastic boots, and the elastic held the tops tight around his scrub bottoms, just below the knees. He always wore shoe covers now, having learned his lesson his first day as a Lab Tech II at UCLA's Center for Health Sciences, when he'd accidentally sawed into a swollen length of colon and splattered shit across his brand-new Rockports. His particular wing of the hospital's seventh floor, the Three Corridor, remained quiet when the med students weren't tinkering with bodies in the gross anatomy lab next door, and it was deathly still now at three-thirty in the morning.

  He tossed his keys and cigarette pack on the counter and adjusted his surgical cap before turning to regard the two new bodies wrapped tightly in sheets before him. The prep room shone with metal--stainless sinks and cabinets, countertops and gleaming tools, and, in the middle, the scrubbed-dull embalming table. To Horace's back, the twelve-foot door to the anatomy crypt rose like a castle gate, a wooden rectangle with dark metal latches.

  Plastic Surgery had requested ribs still attached to musculature for a 7 A.M. talk--an unusual lecture focusing on the innervation of the teres major. He could see already that one of the bodies was too obese to be of much use to the med students. He'd junk that one for parts and preserve the other intact. The obese body lay supine, wrapped like a mummy. He prodded the bulge of its stomach, debating where to dig in.

  It would be a messy process.

  Hands sheathed in thick blue gloves, he picked up his autopsy gown but hesitated a moment before pulling it on. He'd had two cups of coffee on his way over, trying to chase reminiscences of sleep from his hazy head, and he'd have to stop soon and take a leak. He opted to go now, before he got sticky.

  Shuffling out in his oversize shoe covers, he headed down the empty hall to the bathroom and pissed long and hard, smiling to himself afterward while he fumbled in his autopsy gloves to zip up his fly. Walking back down the hall, he punched a four-digit code into the Omnilock and reentered the prep room.

  If he sneaked a cigarette, all lingering traces of smoke would be long dissipated by the time the first students began to arrive in a few hours. He searched the counter, but his cigarettes were gone. Maybe he'd misplaced them on his way to the bathroom. Shrugging on a blue autopsy gown, he slid a surgical mask over his head. The built-in eye shield, a rectangle of clear plastic atop the mask, would be helpful once the sawing
began.

  He started with the obese body, electing to leave the smaller one for later. Moving it to the embalming table gave him some trouble, but he managed. He used trauma shears to free the cadaver from the white sheets. A bluing elderly gentleman with sagging jowls and a thick mustache, funeral-dressed in a dark suit. The rose in his lapel had wilted. Probably moved straight from the convalescent home to the parlor to the hospital. Once they arrived, bodies were brought to Horace's happy workplace by the freight elevators, which rode up and down the shafts on the backside of the passenger elevators. Hospital staff did their best to keep the bodies out of the patients' sight. Nothing chills the sick like a fresh reminder of mortality.

  Horace pulled the clothes off the cadaver and tossed them in a corner. Then, humming Vivaldi's "La Primavera," he shaved the skull with a pair of barber clippers. He used a scalpel to peel the scalp, the fresh meat yielding a steady current of blood. The slant of the table caused the blood to flow toward the feet to a drain, which was hooked up to a sink against the wall. Bodies also yielded viscid fluids and tangles of tissue. Clogged drains here were a bitch and a half.

  Once he had the skull adequately peeled, he began to cut a large circle around the top with a Stryker saw. The circular blade did not spin; it vibrated ever so slightly. Horace had, on occasion, slipped and touched the oscillating blade to his hand, but it wouldn't cut flesh, only hard surfaces like bone. The end of the saw heated up, sending up thin tendrils of smoke that he could smell through his mask--a pungent odor like burning hair, like the dentist-chair stench of a tooth being hollowed.

  Once he finished, he popped the skull lid off, lifted the frontal lobe of the brain, and cut the connective tissue, starting with the optic nerve, then moving through the other nerves, the arteries, and finally the spinal cord. Wiggling his fingers beneath the brain, he gently peeled it up out of the head.

  Passing a string under the artery so the brain dangled from the middle, he lowered it into a bucket filled with formalin and snapped the lid on quickly, clamping down on both ends of the string. Inside the bucket, the brain hung upside down in the fluid, a perfect natural specimen. Had he not suspended it, it would have sunk to the bottom and hardened with a distorting flat spot, and he never would have heard the end of it from neurobiology.

  He switched to a pistol-grip Sawzall, an old-fashioned reciprocating saw. Pressure on the trigger sent the straight blade, which protruded from the saw's long body, hammering up and down. Horace sawed off the feet next, wrapping them in a red biohazard bag and dropping them into a top-loading freezer that ran the length of the east wall. The fire red wrapping would tip off the podiatrists that they were dealing with fresh material--ripe, bloody, and possibly contaminated.

  Next he attacked the knees and elbows, severing the limbs about ten inches off the joints on either side but keeping the skin and muscles intact. There wasn't a big call for hands, so he left them attached. He dropped all four units in the freezer, praying that would buy him some time with the orthopedics guys, and turned to the big chore of the day--the musculature-attached ribs needed for the morning lecture.

  The Sawzall got him through the ribs in short order, the soft organs throwing a good splatter across his gown, then he cut a quadrant around the shoulder and removed the lungs from the ribs with a scalpel. The table's blood gutters grew choked with debris. He bagged the specimen and set it aside, prepped and ready for the talk.

  He decided to remove the spine as a favor to a professor in neurosurgery. Flipping the cadaver over, he sawed down three inches on either side of the spine, cutting through ribs and pelvis. He removed all organs from the interior, cutting through the mesentery and along the visceral cavity walls. He scooped out the bowels and rectum as one unit, trying to hold his breath, though the stench still managed to work its way into his system. The neurosurgeon wouldn't care that the brain was missing, so he kept the topless head attached to the spine. Having whistled his way through "L'Inverno," he stepped back to admire his work. It was beautiful. All the vertebrae were intact, from neck to ass.

  Every body had so much to give. At times, Horace viewed his job simply as playing Santa Claus to the various medical departments.

  He laced his hands and raised them above his head, cracking his knuckles. Things would slow down soon enough--this was the last week of summer session gross anatomy for the med students--and then he'd have the entire area to himself for a few blissful weeks until regular classes started up again in September. His gown sported a mishmash of fluids and bits of viscera, and an unidentified string of pink matter clung to the bottom of his eye guard. The saw swayed at his side, a warrior's tool.

  It was time for body number two.

  Body number two proved to be a woman, midforties, with a shock of bright orange hair. It was much easier to move her to the embalming table, and her vivid hair quickly succumbed to the clippers. Horace made a three-inch incision just below her clavicle and raised her carotid artery and jugular vein so they protruded from the cut like fat soda straws. A pump system was strategically positioned on a table nearby, one wide cylinder containing the alcohol-based, five-percent-formaldehyde solution. A tube attached to the pump terminated in an enormous needle, which he sank into the carotid. He knotted a string around the end of the artery so the needle wouldn't fly out when he turned on the pump.

  Pressurized at about fifteen pounds, the pump activated with a low hum, and began pushing the urine-colored embalming fluid into the carotid. The fluid would work all the way through the circulatory system, deep through the tissues, pushing the old blood and body fluids out the jugular ahead of it. The entire process would take about twenty-five minutes.

  Horace wiped his brow with the arm of the autopsy gown, accidentally leaving a moist crimson smear across his forehead. The saws sat still and bloody on the counter against the wall, beasts slumbering after a feast.

  It was time for a snack.

  Chapter 29

  THE phone rang, and David was instantly awake in his dark bedroom. "Yes?"

  Peter's voice. "You'd better come in. It's Clyde."

  "Did they kill him?"

  A pause. Sirens in the background.

  "No. He escaped."

  At 4:27 A.M., the ambulance bay festered with cop cars. Four security officers jogged past, radios bouncing on their hips. David braced himself as he walked past the parking kiosk and descended into the ambulance bay. Sandy had reached him in the car on his way over and poked around the issue in her incisive, aggressive way. He'd been vague; he could tell the call had left her displeased and unsatisfied, and her tone had seemed to hold some unspoken warning. David had called Peter back so Peter could fill him in on the escape. The realization had not yet fully hit; David moved with a dazed calm.

  An officer straight-armed David as he stepped through the sliding glass doors. David unclipped his medical badge and displayed it, as he had already done at the police perimeter by the parking kiosks. "I'm Dr. Spier. I run this division."

  "All right, sir," the officer said. "Be advised this entire area is a crime scene."

  David heard Jenkins yelling the minute he stepped through the swinging doors into Hallway One. Jenkins had cornered Ralph and was jabbing his finger in his chest. "You're the chief security officer. What the fuck do you mean you can't find him? He ran into your hospital!"

  Ralph calmly pushed Jenkins's hand, finger still extended, to one side. "Listen, cowboy, this building has twenty-nine miles of corridor, three-point-one million square feet, and fifty-seven exits. It's second only to the Pentagon."

  "We gotta shut this place down, move room to room with dogs and SWAT."

  "That would take weeks. Plus he probably already slipped out an exit."

  "This isn't exactly Where's Waldo. We're looking for a shirtless man covered in blood running around with a stolen Beretta. Figure it out."

  David slid past them and found Yale, who was crouched in Exam Fourteen, his back to the door. A few men in rumpled shirts and ties po
ked through the cabinets and the gurney mattress. David circled Yale and squatted beside him. Yale was examining an empty blood bag, turning it slowly on the end of his pen.

  "It was supposed to be picked up by the blood bank. They came down, but I was in with him. . . . " David squeezed his eyes shut tightly, regretfully. "That's what he smeared all over himself. To make it look like he'd attempted suicide."

  Yale nodded. He was chewing gum, something strong-scented and fruity. He pointed with his pen to the severed leather band. "Restraints," he said. "Once you get through one, the other three are a snap."

  David stood and regarded the empty gurney. Several strands of Clyde's hair remained behind on the pillow. A crime scene technician was lifting them with tweezers and depositing them in a clear plastic bag. "You can catch him again, right? It'll be easier this time?"

  "He never even coughed up a last name."

  David gestured to the technician taking hair samples from the pillow. "What about the forensics?"

  "We can run a DNA on the hair fibers, but unless he's been arrested and had blood drawn in the last five years, it won't do us much good."

  David's voice sounded increasingly desperate. "But you have fingerprints. . . . "

  Yale shook his head slowly. "He was wearing gloves the whole time. We don't book them and lift prints until we get 'em transported to Harbor." Yale studied David through a cool, even countenance.

  David felt his face go slack.

  Yale turned his gum over in his mouth and snapped it once, loudly. "If he was well enough to escape, he was well enough to be moved to Harbor. Now either you're a liar or a shitty doctor. Which is it?"