What she said was a little surprising, but it made sense as Randy noticed that the pain from the wound in his back, while still substantial, had been reduced to a dull throb. Someone had been busy fixing him up.
As he tried to sit up, the man he was waiting for walked in. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, was a little younger than his wife, and had black hair that was only beginning to go gray on the fringes. ”My name is Doctor Terrence Kletz,” he said, “and this is my wife Dorothy. Are you aware that you committed a home invasion here last evening?”
Randy fought to clear his head. Another bad impression was the last thing he needed. “I think you’re aware that I’ve committed much worse than that lately.”
“Indeed I am, but there’s a difference,” the doctor replied. “We are not involved in your conflict, but you’ve made us involved.”
“That’s not what I meant to do. I want it to stay between me and them.”
“We gathered that from your video,” the doctor replied, then shifted in his seat with a look of deep consideration. “How does your back feel right now?”
“Hurts like hell, which is a big improvement. I take it you had something to do with that?”
“You have a four inch laceration across the lower medial part of your back, followed by a shallow three inch penetration wound with an exit out the left side. No nerve damage or serious penetration into muscle tissue. It’s been disinfected and stitched up, but you’ll need a course of antibiotics.”
“You wouldn’t have something for pain, would you?”
“You can have Tylenol. We have stronger painkillers too, but I doubt if you’ll want those under the circumstances.”
“I’ll take the Tylenol. Thanks.” Dorothy got up and went to the bathroom to get his pills, and Randy decided it was time to start talking business. “Can you tell me why you didn’t call 911 right away?”
The doctor considered his answer for a moment. “I learned the hard way once that if you want to treat a bullet wound in a timely manner, you need to do it before the police are involved. So I set about taking care of that first, and while I was working on that was when your video appeared on the news.”
“So the video is the reason?”
“You appear to have insights that others don’t. And there are some things I need to know.”
* * *
At Rosemary’s house, Elena hadn’t slept nearly as well as Randy had. She had gotten up repeatedly to turn on the TV and try to get some news about Randy, and finally Rosemary had slipped a percocet into her water to make her sleep. The pill did its magic and she didn’t awake until late in the morning.
When she finally came downstairs, Rosemary already had breakfast ready. Elena said good morning to her, and headed for the TV again.
“They haven’t found him yet,” Rosemary said. “They wouldn’t waste any time announcing it if they had.” Elena didn’t disbelieve her, but she stayed in front of the TV, wanting to know for herself. “Please sit down and eat. We have a long day ahead of us.” Elena did as she was asked.
It was a pretty fancy breakfast Rosemary had prepared, as though she expected it might be Elena’s last good breakfast for a while. “Trying to figure out what to do now?” she asked, and Elena nodded. “I have something in the works, if you’re interested.”
“What is it?”
“Well, if you want to get people behind you, you have to speak to them. And I mean all of them.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I used to work in media. And I have a lot of friends who still do, more than a few of whom owe me favors.” Elena stopped eating as this began to sink in. “If you want a broad audience to tell your side of this to, it’s yours.”
* * *
Guy Phillips liked the Guard, but he hated guard duty, or so the pun went. He was twenty-six, and liked to be working an assignment he could sink his teeth into. Something like Iraq or Afghanistan, both of which he had been to. He didn’t have that kind of patience for standing around waiting for things to happen, and that’s what he was currently doing on the East side of Forest Hill.
He was managing a roadblock, where he and five others were checking every car going in or out of town for Randy, and on this back road there weren’t very many. Even under the current circumstances people had a hard time with being subjected to a roadblock. But Guy and his team kept their smiles on and did their jobs with the minimum exertion of authority required. Experience had taught him that the less unhappy people were with you, the less likely they were to shoot at you. It was a lesson that he suspected the local police were learning for the first time.
If it weren’t for the news reports and radio chatter, you could hardly tell anything was different. Traffic moved about town normally, people went about their business like nothing was wrong.
“Requesting backup, nineteenth and union.” The call came over the police scanner and caught Guy’s attention. “Request SWAT deployment.”
“Dispatch copies, what’s happening?”
“Got a van, driver won’t open the back up, and I think he’s hiding something. Also got some bystanders acting hostile about it.”
“Copy, all available units are en route.”
Calling SWAT on somebody who wouldn’t consent to a warrantless search, with citizens already showing anger about his treatment? If he’d ever pulled something like that in the Middle East he’d have been court martialed.
Guy began to suspect he had an idea what had led to this chain of events.
* * *
Randy was still wearing the handcuffs, but they were in front of him now. That made them a lot less uncomfortable, and made it a lot easier to eat as he sat at their table.
The three of them were having a late lunch, as they watched the latest news on the TV. The news program detailed the continuing manhunt, explaining how the town had been sealed off by the National Guard and other agencies while the local police continued the search. That could be useful to know, Randy thought, if he ever got back to business. Not that it appeared likely he’d be doing so.
Then came the focus on the slain officers. One by one their pictures and names were shown, followed by interviews with grieving family members.
“How does it make you feel, knowing you caused all that?” the doctor asked.
“Sick to my stomach,” Randy replied. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“Over? They’re still after you, and they mean to make you suffer for this.”
“I know. But my war is over.” Randy turned his gaze from the TV to the doctor. “That is what you’re making sure of, right?”
“Truthfully, we haven’t decided whether to take any sides in this yet.”
Randy started feeling a twinge of concern. “Are you getting ready to go Dexter on me?”
The doctor and his wife both laughed, long and loud. “Far from it,” the doctor finally said. “But what I do want may not be entirely pleasant either. You’ve told people that you were set up for murder. And we also know the story of how your wife was nearly killed by the same department. You’ve been making noise and headlines about this issue for a long time, so you seem to be pretty knowledgeable about this sort of thing. Well, I’ve got my own story to tell, and I want you to help me understand what happened. It’s a story of a young man who arrived on my operating table.”
“What was his name?”
The doctor took a deep breath and told him.
* * *
The Tale Of Arnold McCaslin, Part Two
(as told by Doctor Terrence Kletz)
December of 2002 was kind of a shaky time for everyone. It was only a little over a year after 9-11, when they were still broadcasting the rainbow alerts, people were scared of getting anthrax in the mail, and everybody was still out of work because of the economy. Things were tense.
Dorothy and I had just moved to this area less than a year before. I had started work with the Everett Clinic branch in Lake Stevens. On the weekends, when they let me, I
did some extra work in the trauma center at Providence Hospital in Everett. It was on one of those nights they had a Life Flight come in with a gunshot victim. His name was Arnold McCaslin.
They wheeled him into the ER with a big police escort around him, and for some reason I didn’t have the sense that protecting him was their purpose. When the doors opened and the gurney came through, I could hear a female voice in the hall, yelling at the cops to let her talk to him, but they wouldn’t let her get close. I found out later it was his mother.
The aides took him straight toward surgery, but before I could follow, the police wanted to speak to me. I don’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was one of the senior officers, and he wasn’t the one who fired the shot. I remember him telling me that they needed me to concentrate on what I was trained to do, which was to save his life. I very nearly pointed out to him that he was taking time away from that task right then, but I held my tongue. Then he went on to say that they had already collected statements from everyone involved, including the young man who had been shot. They also said he was becoming delirious, rambling, and saying things that didn’t make any sense, so it would be counterproductive for me to try to converse with him. I asked him about how long this had been going on, and he said that information was on the EMT report. So, I took him at his word and headed in to get to work.
The EMT report was the first thing I looked at, and that’s where I saw that the time of injury had been nearly four hours earlier. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at, but there it was. You never, ever make a gunshot victim wait that long for treatment. The official story that I read later was that it took a long time to secure the scene for medics because of the hostile reactions they were getting from members of the public. That didn’t make a lot of sense either, because it seems like the last thing an angry bystander would want to do is impede medical care for the victim. But like everyone else, I’ve been trained to trust the people in charge.
So I headed into the operating room feeling like my mission was fairly clear-cut. But when the young man was in front of me, that’s when it didn’t seem like things were the way they were supposed to be. For one, he was a lot more lucid that the police had told me he’d be, despite the fact he was barely hanging onto consciousness. And second, the only thing he wanted was to tell me what happened. He was pleading that no one would listen, no one would let him talk, which seemed to directly contradict what I’d been told about everyone’s statements having been taken. I had to keep interrupting and telling him my job was a different one, and I had to concentrate on saving his life. I asked him all the questions that we doctors use to both find out what we need to know, and to keep the patient distracted from whatever’s happened to them, and it seemed to have the effect I wanted of taking his mind off that subject. When I say that it “seemed” to, what I mean is that it really didn’t. He just wasn’t saying so out loud anymore.
The anesthesiologist had the needle in his arm and was getting him connected to the IV. This was the part that really terrified me, because you can’t operate without anesthesia, and yet with the kind of blood loss he had, it’s really easy for anesthesia to kill. It’s the nightmare scenario of the trauma surgeon.
The IV drip started, and I asked him to count backwards from 100, like we always do. He made it as far as ninety-seven and stopped. I asked him if everything was ok, and he just looked up at me. He had the look of a person who had just seen everything they ever believed in ripped away from them, and just as the anesthesia kicked in, he said one word to me. That word was…
* * *
“…Planted.” Doctor Kletz had just finished a story he had clearly wanted off his chest for a very long time. It was a story that had weighed him down for a long time, and now having been told, would have to be dealt with. “You know how the rest of it ends. The anesthesia combined with blood loss was too much, and he didn’t wake up.”
Randy wore the look of a detective who had just seen a lot of pieces fall into place, and he didn’t like the picture that was coming together. “Did you talk to the family or their lawyer about this?” Randy asked.
“No.”
“Anyone else?”
“No one.”
“That’s exactly what they were hoping for.”
The doctor nodded slowly. “I sort of had that sense. After they told me the kid had given his statements to them already, and that nothing I could add would be of any value to the investigation, I took them at their word.”
Randy spent a moment considering how to say what had to be said next. This doctor was perhaps a little on the naïve side, but was a good man, and it wasn’t going to be easy for him to hear. “Sometime soon you need to do a web search on the terms ‘police’ and ‘let him bleed out.’”
“Why is that?”
“You get a lot of results on that search. This happens so much in cases of questionable shootings that it’s more or less their standard operating procedure now,” Randy said. “If McCaslin had lived, it would have been a nightmare for this department. He’d have exposed their lies about what he did and whether he was armed. He would have sued them, and when the dirt came out there would have been a much bigger uproar than what there was. Citizens would have demanded that some people get fired at the very least. As it is now, people are angry, but the department can file it away under the heading of ‘every shooting looks questionable to someone.’ But if he’d lived, this police department would have seen their stranglehold on power slipping away from them. So they had to prevent that from happening at all costs.”
“And what do you figure that entailed exactly?”
“It meant keeping the medics from reaching him until they were sure enough that he wouldn’t live. And it meant making sure no one heard his side of things before he died.” It hit Doctor Kletz pretty solidly to hear that he’d been a willing participant in that. And he didn’t need to be told that coming forward with all this likely would have made a difference. But Randy offered him a little bit of saving grace. “This isn’t all your fault though,” he said.
“Why not?”
“You’re a doctor. You’re the professional whose job is saving the people they bring you, and you can only work with what they give you. Handling the case right is supposed to be their job, and getting that job right is what you’re supposed to be able to trust them to do.”
The doctor clenched the gun in his hand, tight enough to make Randy nervous. “It’s beyond wrong,” he said. Randy could offer no disagreement, but he could not absolve the doctor any further either. The truth of the matter was that listening to the young man’s story while working to save him would not have been that hard a thing to do.
By this time it was getting late in the afternoon, and Randy decided he had been an intruder here long enough. Perhaps some good would come of this visit, but as it stood he had brought quite a bit of grief into this home.
“I think it’s time you made that call,” Randy said.
“Is that what you really want me to do?”
Randy shook his head. “No. After they get me they’re going to hold this up as another victory, and things around here might be even worse than they were before. But I fought to the finish, and I never gave up. That’ll have to do.”
“You have any idea what’s in store for you afterward?”
“I don’t expect that’ll be an issue.” The doctor and his wife both raised their eyebrows. “Soon as they show up, I’ll walk out the front door, and it’ll all be over quick.” Randy smiled. He was actually beginning the like the idea of it all being over.
“Suicide by cop?”
“I think that’s what they call it.”
“You’ll be leaving your wife alone,” Dorothy chimed in.
“What could I do for her by expecting her to spend her best years visiting me in prison?” Randy asked. “All I could accomplish is to rob her of the rest of her life.”
“Have you consulted with her on that?” Terrence asked. Randy look
ed up from the table and met his eyes. The man was beginning to sound like a doctor again. “I’ve had patients talk of suicide, and it’s not always the terminal ones. Some of them are just too scared to fight. Scared of the diagnosis, scared of the bills, scared of how their loved ones will suffer, and scared that whatever happens isn’t really going to be in their hands. You know what I tell them about?”
By this point, Randy was indeed interested. “No, but please tell me.”
“I tell them about that Kyle Huff character,” he said, and that raised Randy’s eyebrows. “I’m referring to the sonofabitch in Seattle who was pissed off at the world and therefore decided to kill those six kids at a party. You’ll recall that the moment he saw a cop coming to arrest him, he blew his own brains out.” Randy recalled that pretty vividly. It was a case that he had cited himself in contending with the officials in his construction company who wanted to impose a gun ban on their workers. “That’s the kind of person who kills themselves,” the doctor went on. “He could have surrendered, and lived, but you know why he wouldn’t?”
“Why?”
“It’s because it would mean facing up to what he did,” the doctor replied. “There’s a comparison to be drawn between that and those patients of mine. My patients weren’t just scared of what they were up against, they were scared of why it had happened. They were afraid that if some act of God had been wrought upon them, that they might be fighting to hold onto a life that was in some way unworthy. Well I spend my time curing illness and finding its cause, and I’m here to tell you God has nothing to do with it. The shit just happens, and it doesn’t discriminate, and God neither causes nor cures. But God did give us the brains to figure why things happen and how to fix them, both in medicine and in our worldly affairs, and to fail to draw upon that knowledge to make things right is the only really unworthy thing you can do.” Randy understood, but he didn’t like where he was being trapped. “Kyle Huff killed himself because he knew he was wrong. So the question is, are you wrong?”
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