by J. G. Jurado
She turned around, discomforted. Spooky Dave was back.
I ran off and locked myself in my consulting room, and felt bad that I had treated her that way, but I needed to be alone for a few minutes to relax.
I collapsed into my chair. That sort of overreaction would not help to keep the Patient’s identity secret. The morning couldn’t have gotten off to a worse start, and it would get miles worse yet.
9
I couldn’t skulk in my cave for too long. I had to go see my patients. I wasn’t down to be with the residents that day—thank God for small mercies—but I couldn’t shirk the rounds. I had already reached a decision: I would seek out a cell phone and wangle a way to call the one person in the world who could help me.
The problem was whether she’d be up for it.
At about ten thirty, an hour later than usual, I had mustered enough presence of mind to emerge. At noon I had an unavoidable appointment, so I couldn’t delay matters another minute.
I began with Mr. Melanson, a retired lawyer on his fifth wife. His aneurysm must have been because of her, a blonde whose body ought to have scored on the Richter scale. If being hot were against the law, that woman would have had a SWAT team on her tail constantly. For now, a pair of residents, an attendant and another patient’s husband were buzzing around her by the coffee machine.
“Good morning, Roger.”
“What’s she up to?” he blurted at me. He looked strangely younger with the post-op bandage covering up his bald pate.
“She’s hitting on a bunch of juvenile delinquents by the coffee machine.”
“Damn, and with me stuck here. When the hell are you going to let me go?”
Not five days ago, Melanson had been in my operating theater, with an aneurysm in the Sylvian fissure which literally blew up in my face when I tried to close it off. That old bruiser’s blood had spattered my mask, glasses and apron while I cursed and went through hell to perform an arterial bypass and save his life. Had I not operated in time, that skinny, lively old man with mischievous eyes would now be a plant pot, taking his meals through a straw and dumping them in a diaper.
“That aneurysm was about to kill you. Hit the brakes a little. What’s the hurry?”
While I checked his readings, I stole a sideways glance at his bedside table. I needed to get hold of a cell without anyone knowing. I would have to borrow one temporarily. And Melanson’s was nowhere to be seen.
“I feel like finding me a new Mrs. Melanson, doc. That one’s past her sell-by date.”
“That’ll be number six! Haven’t you had enough?”
“Number seven, really. There was a two-day fling in Vegas that was never on record. Well, as long as they keep signing the watertight prenups, then bring ’em on.”
I couldn’t help laughing out loud.
“I see you’re in fine fettle, Roger. So barring surprises we’ll discharge you the day after tomorrow. But only if you promise to put off the search for a month or two.”
“I promise,” he said, then crossed his heart. “But make no mistake, if she finds me, I’m not accountable.”
I came across the soon-to-be ex–Mrs. Melanson in the doorway. She simply mumbled a “Hi” while she eyed her phone to check out the gossip on Facebook. I must have flashed her bedroom eyes because she got the wrong idea about where my look was aimed and gave her neckline a snide tug.
I shook my head as I stepped into the passageway.
The next three on my list were very simple cases whom I would discharge that same week. But relatives and friends accompanied them all, and there was no chance to purloin a cell phone. Under my breath I cursed the jobless rate, which was giving people all that time on their hands, as I turned the corner and entered the Warton Memorial suite.
They had remodeled the specialist neurosurgery wing in 2010 thanks to an endowment from Josephine Warton, an agoraphobic and very reclusive multimillionaire, whose sole purpose had been to keep herself apart from the other millionaires when she had treatment for her epileptic fits. In practice the unit comprised a single room with a reception area furnished in execrable taste, and a small nurses’ station that was nearly always deserted: a super-exclusive area in an exclusive hospital.
It would have a very eminent occupant on Friday. Ironically, that morning a patient with an entirely different background was recovering in the Warton Memorial suite: poor Jamaal Carter.
Medical Director Wong had given the order to accommodate him there to keep him and his sidekicks, a motley group of teenagers with no particular academic inclinations, away from the paying patients.
They were gangbangers, in other words.
There were four of them, lounging on sofas in the lobby, with their feet up on a cheesy pink marble table with a brass stand. Behind them, a portrait of Warton—whose will had stipulated that the rich bitch should always preside over the room—frowned in stark disapproval. That prim old biddy, a close devotee of Ayn Rand, would have turned in her grave to see us treat Jamaal Carter pro bono in her suite. I wasn’t freaking out though. The hospital had cleared $128 million the year before. We could afford it. Respecting the codicil in that witch’s bequest was not a priority for me. All the staff were slaves to her, as it were, so every time I saw that portrait I felt like driving to the cemetery, breaking into the Warton vault and cracking her skull with her own tibia.
Three of the four gangbangers got up when I strode in and began to talk all at once.
“It’s about time a doctor came to see Jamaal. What kind of joint you all running here, dude?”
“Hey, doc. If there’s any problem with the green, you let me know, right?”
“Tell Jamaal we’re right here. That cop there won’t let us past.”
The speaker pointed to a well-worn officer who lolled in a chair behind a copy of the Post while he guarded the entrance to the Warton suite. Seeing the lawman there made my stomach turn. Every ounce of me wanted to run over, grab him by the uniform and beg for his help. I was fighting against that feeling when I got a text:
THINK CAREFULLY.
I bunched my fists inside my coat pockets and tried to hear myself think above the gang’s chatter. How could White know what was happening? He could not possibly have planted cameras or bugs there. The Secret Service had discreetly screened the place the week before, and would do so again the day after.
That confirmed what I had suspected since the night before: the son of a bitch was using my cell mike to spy on me. As long as I had it on me, he could hear everything that was said around me. And he had probably wired the camera, too. That put a wrench in the works.
On the spur of the moment, I stared at one of those kids, the one who had hadn’t moved when I came in.
“What’s up with you, pal?”
He looked wasted, was boring holes in the marble with his eyes, and his lower lip trembled.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with T-Bone, doc,” one of them butted in. “You get in there and take care of Jamaal.”
I guessed the kid was off his head on crack—how wrong I could be—and went into the suite, painfully aware the clock was ticking and I hadn’t gotten what I needed. I greeted the cop, who grunted as I went past. He didn’t raise his eyes from the sports page.
I had allotted four minutes but they turned into twenty owing to Mama Carter, the most persistently grateful human being I’ve ever met.
“Good morning,” I said on my way in. “I’m Dr. Evans.”
“Is that you!” shouted a lady in the visitor’s chair at the bedside. “Did you mend my little boy? Hallelujah! The Lord guided your hands to save Jamaal, praised be sweet Jesus.”
She ran over and began to kiss my hands, making me feel terribly uncomfortable. She must have been five feet tall and weighed one hundred eighty, and she had a face as sweet as pie. She was the perfect grandmother, apart from the slobbering kiss
es.
“Pray with me, give the good Lord thanks for granting you this gift to heal,” she insisted.
I have often come up against this attitude. Lots of patients thank Jesus for saving them on the operating table and get lawyered up when things go wrong. We doctors could live without the thanks if the suits were also addressed to Jesus.
“I will, Mrs. . . .”
“I’m Mama Carter. Jamaal’s grandmother. My daughter’s dead. She’s sitting at Jesus’s right hand, and every night she has corn bread and pork chops with him. That was her favorite food and the girl was truly a saint. Now she watches over us all and has sent you to heal my little boy.”
I succeeded in walking around her and to Jamaal’s bed. Dressed in no more than hospital PJs, he looked much smaller and slighter. He had angled his childlike face toward the window, like a dove gaping at unattainable freedom. He turned to face me as I approached. He had one foot cuffed to the bed frame, which jingled faintly. His grandmother hurried to cover him with a sheet. The futility of that move tore my heart out.
“How you doing, kid?”
He contemplated me with his big brown eyes and shrugged. His face crumpled in pain.
“You shouldn’t move your arms. You know you had a bullet in your back?”
“Yes, the nurses told me, and the cops that came by this morning. I don’t remember a lot about last night, but I remember you, talking to me. You remove the bullet?”
“Look hard at my finger and follow it with your eyes. Attaboy. Your toes . . . Good. Yes, it was me who operated on you. You came within a hair of spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair. You should think hard about that before you hang out with those guys out there.”
“They’re my blood brothers,” he said, bristling. That would have sounded real tough, except that he let out a squeak.
“Um, well, I don’t see how they’ve shed much blood.”
“Jamaal wants to thank you. Don’t you, Jamaal?” Mama Carter jumped in.
The kid nodded and looked away.
“They’ll transfer him to MedStar tomorrow,” I told the old lady.
“Can’t he stay here?”
“I’m afraid not, ma’am. We need the room.”
Mrs. Carter would surely have gone into shock had she known who they wanted the bed for.
“I like it here,” she said, pointing at the mahogany paneling on the walls and the Tiffany lamps. “I have some of my pension saved up. Couldn’t you—”
Some screams spared me the hassle of breaking the bad news to Mrs. Carter that a single night in the Warton Memorial Suite cost $27,500. The door burst open and the cop popped his head in, looking flustered.
“Doctor, you’d better come here. Something’s terribly wrong.”
I ran across to the door. Three of the gangbangers surrounded the fourth, the kid who didn’t stand up when I came in. He was sprawled on the floor, fighting for breath.
“Get back, get back for Chrissakes!”
His pulse was so weak I could hardly find it. That kid’s life hung by a thread. Damn, I thought. Just what I need right now.
“You,” I said, and pointed at the cop. “Go to that door and holler ‘Code Blue’ as loud as you can.”
“I have to stay on guard—”
“Haul your ass, for Pete’s sake! That kid’s going nowhere.”
I gave him no choice and wheeled around to tend to the kid.
I saw he had blood on his hands. I opened his coat to uncover a baseball shirt that was completely wet through.
“What’s up with him?” I yelled as I pulled his clothing aside.
“Er . . . He was okay. T-Bone was—”
“Your friend’s gonna die, pal. You’d better wise up.”
Underneath his shirt, a dressing hurriedly made from clothes torn into strips and duct tape had turned into an unmitigated disaster. That mess couldn’t have stanched a scratch from a blackberry bush. I squeezed as hard as I could to try to buy the kid some vital seconds.
“Was it a gunshot?”
“He . . . got poked up,” a voice behind me stammered.
“What?”
“A stab wound,” the cop explained.
“We didn’t say nothing, to keep him out of trouble. We thought he’d make it!”
The Code Blue team showed up just then, dragging a resus trolley with one hell of a ruckus and shoving the gangbangers out of the way. They were three, two men and a woman, the toughest mofos in the hospital. Our best resuscitation team, used to laughing in the face of death. They had steely arms and an iron will. To see them kneel beside me was a massive relief.
“Stab wound to the thoracic cavity, entry only. Pulse below minimum. Been losing blood for hours.”
“Fucking prick. Monica, the epinephrine!”
I was about to step back and leave T-Bone in better hands than mine when, between a muddle of knees, I glimpsed a cell phone on the carpet. I slipped it into my coat pocket.
I turned around to see whether anybody had noticed what I’d just done, but they all seemed to have their hands full. The cop looked on, aghast, and radioed for backup, obviously to question the other gang members, now that they had abruptly become witnesses to attempted homicide and who knew what else. Loyalty contended with prudence, then the latter won out and they brazenly headed off down the hospital corridor, followed by the old cop. I was taking no bets on who would reach the elevator first.
I spied the clock on the cell. It was 11:53.
I hardly had time. I ran down to the changing room while I hurriedly wiped away the bloodstains I still had on my fingers with a piece of gauze I’d grabbed from the resus trolley and got undressed.
I left my cell and pager in the locker and stepped into the shower with the gangbanger’s phone. It was a prepaid model and must have been a couple of years old. I silently prayed it had enough balance for a call.
I held my breath and dialed the person who held my daughter’s one hope in her hands.
Kate
Kate Robson raised an eyebrow when she saw an unknown number come up on-screen. Very few people had her number and they were all stored in her BlackBerry’s memory.
She pushed the reject-call button, leaned back in the porch rocking chair, and dug back into the novel she was reading. It was a nice day on the farm, and she didn’t feel like wasting it on some goddamned telemarketer.
Like all Secret Service officers, Special Agent Robson never turned the thing off. She was so used to having her days off interrupted after nine years in the service that she didn’t bat an eyelid when it happened. While on call, officers had to put up with brutal hours. Consequently in her family albums there was a host of empty chairs in pictures of birthday parties, graduations and other big events.
Kate hadn’t known how hard the job would be when she applied to join the Secret Service as she was about to start her third year at Georgetown law school. It had been a patriotic urge that had driven her to fill in the forms a week after the 9/11 attacks. She thought little more of it for months and had almost forgotten about the matter until she received a call from a supervisor asking her to come to an interview.
She went through the long admission process without getting her hopes up, but as the months went by she became more enthused by the idea, precisely because it was so difficult to get in. If there was one way to make Kate Robson relish a challenge, it was to underline its difficulty.
Finally, after an endless broadside of urine tests, lie-detector sessions, and fitness and shooting trials, Kate got a call shortly before graduation day.
“You have been admitted to the Secret Service, Robson.”
“May I graduate before I enlist? I’m not one to leave things half done.”
“I’ll put you down for the Federal Law Enforcement Center in September. Don’t make me regret it,” was the super
visor’s terse answer before he hung up.
The ink on Kate’s law degree was barely dry before she hit the road in late August 2003 and went to the Criminal Investigators Training Program, the basic training program for all federal law enforcement officers. It was an eleven-hour drive to Glynco, Georgia, and the whole way she was never rid of accusatory looks in the mirror from her father, who had dreamed of a future for his younger daughter as a lawyer and had forced her to enroll in a program she never really liked.
“Look at your sister on an anesthesiologist’s wage up in the big city. Do you really want to waste your life working for Uncle Sam?”
Kate didn’t argue. It would have been a waste of breath. She had long since given up as lost the ongoing battle over good-looking, wonderful, perfect old Rachel.
She preferred to drown her sorrows in whiskey that night.
Kate simply blew her parents a kiss and drove on.
Fourteen weeks there and another eighteen on the SATP, the special agents Secret Service training program. Eight physically and mentally strenuous months, topped off by a well-attended ceremony and a pittance for a wage. But that was the least of it. The real bonus was wearing a shield that only three hundred other women in the United States were entitled to. She felt like one in a million. And she was.
The BlackBerry rang again and Kate goggled at it, mystified. The morning was too perfect, and she needed to relax.
She stretched out, and her willowy legs glowed under the sun. She had a hard, wiry body, maybe a little below the ideal weight for someone as tall and with as demanding a job as hers. Her mother shook her head every time she saw her and tried to fill her up with prodigious amounts of meatloaf and stuffed tomatoes. Kate would guiltily try to burn it all off jogging along the stony, overgrown lanes around the Robson farm. The air was so clean and fresh there it wiped away all her woes. She could never get enough of filling her lungs with the smell of Virginia.
She had had precious little occasion to fill them those past nine years. They had assigned her to the Cleveland office when she finished her training, where her duties were above all to fight forgery and fraud. Although the public at large picture the Secret Service as presidential bodyguards, in reality a large part of their job is to crack down on monetary fraud. Cyber scams, printing phony bills, identity theft . . . That was officer Robson’s stock in trade, and after arresting her twentieth bartender on charges of cloning a client’s credit card, she began to wonder whether she had made the right choice by taking her life and career in that direction.
