by Jude Hardin
And I wasn’t above fudging on the law from time to time, especially when it was for a good cause. This didn’t really qualify, but doubling my normal rate went a long way too.
“I’ll need some money up front,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“I’ll need to get some more information from you.”
“Okay.”
I stood up and walked over to the living room and grabbed the spiral notebook I’d thrown on the sofa. I looked around for a pen or a pencil, couldn’t find one anywhere.
“Got anything to write with?” I said.
“Sure. Out in my car. I’ll be right back.”
He got up and walked outside. I opened the refrigerator, grabbed the two-liter of Sprite, poured the last of it into his glass and tossed in a couple of ice cubes. I was getting hungry, so I pulled a hot dog out of the meat tray and gobbled it cold. It was terrible, but I figured the fat would absorb some of the alcohol in my gut. I ate a couple of saltines with it and some jalapeño slices from a piece of pizza I’d been meaning to throw out. Someday, I’m going to write a cookbook: Meals at Home in Under a Minute. I’ll make a fortune.
I sat back down at the table, and I must have nodded off. When I opened my eyes, it was 4:26. I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed. It could have been thirty seconds, or it could have been thirty minutes. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed long enough for Everett Harbaugh to have walked out to his car for an ink pen. Maybe he’d decided to take his business elsewhere. Maybe he’d hired me and fired me the same day.
I got up and peeked out the window. Everett’s car was still there, but I didn’t see him anywhere. I slipped into my topsiders and walked outside. Looked around. Called his name.
Somehow, my client had disappeared.
This concludes the excerpt. If you would like to finish the entire novel, COLT is now available for purchase.
Thanks again, and happy reading!
Jude
THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS
JUDE HARDIN
About THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS
A series of journals, penned by a genius, gathering dust in a Swiss library since the 1940s…
Discovered recently by a visiting American professor, the notebooks outline a medical procedure that is nothing short of astonishing.
But will it work?
There’s only one way to find out: clinical trials.
Camden A. Retro…
Forced into an extreme version of the Federal Witness Protection Program, Retro now resides in Amberjack Heights, a small laidback beach community on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Fishing, swimming, golf, tennis. Seems like the ideal location for a former secret agent posing as a private investigator.
Until people start disappearing.
PROLOGUE
Sometimes, when you least expect it, you find just what you’ve been searching for—even though you might not have known that you were searching at all. It’s a remarkable thing when it happens, and it happened to me recently on a trip to Zurich. I was there on pleasure, just visiting a friend, and I decided to take a train to the university one afternoon while he was at work. I ate lunch and strolled around the campus for a while, eventually ending up where I always end up, at the science library. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just browsing through some archived lecture material when I ran across a series of journals written by a surgeon named F.T. Blood. Long forgotten, apparently. Nothing on the Internet, and the name didn’t ring a bell. Which was astounding, really, because the volumes I started flipping through had obviously been penned by a genius of the highest caliber. There were four notebooks in all, three of them outlining the procedure Dr. Blood had been working on at the time, and one filled with a variety of extremely complex chemical formulas. The earliest entry was from 17 October 1942, the latest from 28 January 1947. The pages had yellowed and some of the ink had faded, but enough of the text had been preserved for me to know that I was looking at something extraordinary. When I read through some of the pages and started considering the possibilities, I knew that the notebooks had to be mine. I still feel sort of bad about taking them, but I doubt they’ll ever be missed.
And I think they’re going to do me a world of good.
Part 1
Thrasher
1
He couldn’t get her out of his mind.
Not that he wanted to. He was enjoying thinking about her, and there wasn’t much else to do at the moment anyway.
Kei Thrasher was sitting on a plastic chair in the emergency room, waiting to be seen for an infection. It had started out as a paper cut, of all things, a slit about the size of a mouse whisker on the print side of his left index finger. He’d been opening envelopes and shredding their contents, had gotten a little carried away and a little careless. That was a week ago. Now his finger looked like a steamed hotdog.
Thrasher should have sought treatment sooner, but he didn’t. He’d put it off, and now he was going to have to be admitted to the hospital for a course of IV antibiotics. He knew this because he used to be a doctor himself.
His finger was red and fat and it hurt like crazy.
But he still couldn’t get her out of his mind.
She had been working in the deli at the supermarket where Kei shopped. He was passing by on his way to the fresh produce one day when he noticed her for the first time. Green eyes, olive complexion, smile radiating like some kind of magnetic force, beaming past the stainless steel meat slicer and straight to Kei Thrasher’s heart.
“Can I help you?” she said.
Kei glanced down at her nametag. Anna. She wore a hairnet and an apron and black leather shoes. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“Sandwich,” he said.
“You want a sandwich?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t usually order anything at the deli, couldn’t afford to, but at that moment he would have handed over his entire paycheck for one slice of cheese.
“What kind of bread?” Anna said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She looked across the counter at him and laughed.
“Are you serious?” she said.
“Yeah. I don’t care. Just pick something.”
She opened the clear plastic bin where the fresh bread was stored, pulled out a twelve-inch sub roll, one of the brown ones with flaky stuff on top.
“Did you want a whole sandwich, or just half?”
“Half.”
She kept asking him questions, and he kept responding with one-word answers. The exchange went on for several minutes, and Kei finally walked away from the counter with some kind of meat and some kind of cheese and lettuce and tomatoes and spinach and cucumbers on some kind of bread. He headed straight for the checkout aisles, completely forgetting about what he’d come for in the first place.
Several weeks and a dozen or so sandwiches later, he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.
“Mr. Thrasher?”
A pretty young woman in scrubs stood at the entrance to the examination rooms. Clipboard, purple stethoscope. She smiled, held the door open with her shoulder as Kei rose and grabbed his gym bag and marched forward. He followed her to an area with a big 3 painted on the wall, climbed onto the padded table while she pulled the curtains around.
His finger was throbbing.
“I’ve been out there for five hours,” he said. “I need something for pain.”
She looked at her clipboard. “I’m going to get your vitals and ask you a few questions, and then I’m going to draw some blood. After that, the doctor will—”
“I don’t want to wait that long,” Kei said. “I need something now.”
She sighed, looked annoyed. Kei knew what she was thinking. Another addict seeking narcotics.
“Are you allergic to anything?” she said.
“No.”
She snapped open the curtain and walked away.
Kei’s first date with Anna was like something out of a dream.
A wonderful dream.
They ate dinner at a nice seafood place, and then they walked along the beach holding hands in the moonlight. Kei couldn’t remember what they talked about, but he could hear the waves gently lapping the shoreline and he could smell Anna’s long black hair and he could feel the cool January breeze coming off the Gulf. They stopped and kissed and he held her tight and never wanted to let go.
The nurse came back with two white tablets in a little plastic dosing cup.
“What is this?” Kei said.
“Ibuprofen.”
She handed Kei a cup of water. He swallowed the pills. She took his blood pressure and temperature, inserted an IV in his left forearm, drew several tubes of blood for the lab.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Kei said, referring to her skills with a needle.
“I get lots of practice.”
She said it in a cold, matter-of-fact way, as if she didn’t enjoy her work very much. Maybe she was just having a bad night, Kei thought. She started him on normal saline at 100 ml an hour, hooked him up to an EKG monitor, gathered her things and hurried off to check on another patient.
A young male resident named Bennington came in a few minutes later and told Kei what he already knew, that they were going to admit him and start him on antibiotics. They would monitor his blood work for a couple of days, and then maybe discharge him with a special IV line so he could continue therapy at home.
“After you’re discharged, a nurse will stop by your house and administer the medication once a day,” Dr. Bennington said.
“Would it be possible for me to have a private room while I’m here?”
“Actually, that’s all we have at this facility. One patient to a room, even on the regular floors.”
“Good.”
Kei didn’t bother telling anyone that he’d once been an emergency room physician himself. He didn’t want any special treatment, and he didn’t feel like going into the story behind why he wasn’t a doctor anymore.
It was after midnight by the time they wheeled him into his room on the fourth floor. He climbed into bed and switched on the television, kept the volume low and tried Anna on his cell.
No answer.
It had been four days since their date, and she hadn’t responded to any of his calls or texts or emails. Which seemed absurd, based on the great time they had and the last words she’d said to him after he kissed her goodnight.
“Talk to you soon,” she’d said.
Kei wondered if her definition of soon was different than his. He’d wanted to talk to her five seconds after he drove away from her house.
A man wearing white scrubs and a long white lab coat walked into Kei’s room pushing a medication cart, one of the newer ones with a computer monitor mounted on top.
“My name is Brent,” he said. “I’m your nurse tonight.”
“Hello, Brent.”
“How are you doing?”
“I could use something for pain.”
“I’m still waiting for your admission orders to come through. How would you describe your pain on a scale of zero to ten, zero being no pain at all and—”
“About an eight right now,” Kei said.
“Okay. I’m sure the doctor will order something, and I’ll get it to you as soon as it’s available. In the meantime, I’d like to do a quick physical assessment and go over some questions with you.”
“Sure.”
Brent grabbed a pair of gloves from the dispenser on the wall, pulled his stethoscope out of his lab coat pocket and listened to Kei’s chest and belly. He performed a basic neurological exam, and then he took a long look at the infected finger.
“How did you cut yourself?” he said.
“On an envelope. It was nothing, just a paper cut, but then it kept getting a little worse every day. Now it feels like someone sliced into it with a hacksaw.”
“Don’t worry,” Brent said. “We’ll get you fixed up.”
“I hope so.”
Brent pulled his rolling computer closer to the bed and started going through the questions on the admission database. By the time he finished, it was on record that Kei Thrasher was a forty-four-year-old Caucasian male with brown hair and blue eyes. He was six feet seven inches tall, two hundred and fifty-four pounds. No history of diabetes or cancer or heart disease. No drugs, no tobacco, one or two beers a day, maybe three or four on special occasions. He listed his occupation as bartender, although he was actually a promotion away from holding that title at the restaurant where he worked. No history of mental illness—at least none that Kei felt was relevant enough to share at the moment—and no physical complaints other than the finger.
“Who would you like for us to contact in case of emergency?” Brent said.
Kei thought about that for a few seconds. He didn’t have any family that he kept in touch with on a regular basis, and most of his friends had abandoned him when he lost his license to practice medicine.
Anna was the only person who came to mind.
“My girlfriend,” he said.
He gave Brent the name and number, knowing that she wasn’t really his girlfriend yet, unsure as to whether she even wanted to see him again.
“I think that’s all I need for now,” Brent said. “I’ll go check on your pain medicine.”
“Thanks.”
Kei clicked through the cable television channels, stopped on an old black-and-white monster movie. Brent came back about thirty minutes later, piggybacked Kei’s first dose of antibiotics into the saline drip the ER nurse had started earlier.
“And I have your pain medicine right here,” he said, reaching into his lab coat pocket and pulling out a capped syringe.
“What is it?”
“Morphine.”
“Okay.”
Brent clamped off the drip for a few seconds while he injected the contents of the syringe into the IV port closest to Kei’s arm.
Immediate relief.
“I’ll be back to check on you in a little while,” Brent said. “Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”
“Thank you. I think I’m good for the night.”
Brent switched off the overhead fluorescent on his way out, left the door cracked about six inches.
Kei adjusted the bed to a comfortable position. He wanted to watch the rest of the movie, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He turned the volume all the way down, drifted off, feeling no pain, resting better than he had in days.
And then a loud thump jarred him awake.
The light came on, bright and harsh and unsettling, and an old man wearing a hospital gown staggered into the room and started shouting for help. Kei sat up, squinted him into focus. He was bald and barefoot and his arm was bleeding where he’d ripped out his IV.
He was obviously confused. Kei had dealt with plenty of similar cases when he was a doctor. Kei pressed the call button, but before any of the nurses had a chance to respond, a man in a dark blue suit ran in and grabbed the old guy by the shoulders.
“Come on,” the man in the dark blue suit said. “We need to get you back to your room.”
But the old man didn’t want any part of it. He turned and started hitting the man in the dark blue suit with his bony fists, and then he turned back toward Kei, frantic and out of breath and pleading for help as if his life depended on it.
“It’s me!” he shouted. “Anna! Please help me!”
2
The man in the dark blue suit looked over at Kei.
Not a glance, closer to a stare.
Maybe it was Kei’s imagination, but it seemed as if the man in the dark blue suit was very nervous about something. Or maybe Kei was misinterpreting the expression on his face. Maybe it was one of concern rather than anxiety. The old man was probably his dad. Or grandfather, maybe. The man in the dark blue suit was probably around forty, and the old man appeared to be in his late seventies or early eighties.
The old guy was still shouting, pleading f
or help, emphatically trying to establish his identity to someone named Anna. Or claiming that his own name was Anna. He was obviously very upset about something, and it was difficult to discern the exact message he was trying to convey, but it was clear that the name Anna played a big part in whatever was going through his mind. His room must be right next door, Kei thought. He must have overheard Kei answering questions for the admission database. That was the only time Anna had been mentioned, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence for the old man to have picked the name at random.
Brent and two female nurses rushed in with a wheelchair and forced the old man to sit down, and then one of the women pulled out a hypodermic and injected something into his left thigh. Whatever it was, it calmed him down immediately. They wheeled him out of the room, and the man in the dark blue suit followed.
The entire occurrence had probably lasted less than a minute, but Kei was wide awake now, and his finger was hurting again. He gave the staff some time to get the old man settled back into his own room, and then he pressed the call button and requested something for pain.
“I’ll tell your nurse,” a female voice said over the intercom.
Kei waited, stared at the television, wondered how the movie had ended. Probably the same as most of them, with the monster being destroyed and the villagers living happily ever after—especially the man and woman who’d managed to fall in love along the way.
There was some kind of cop show on now. Guns and car chases and all that. Not really Kei’s thing, but he didn’t feel like going through all the channels again. He left the volume down, checked his cell phone for messages. Nothing. He tried not to worry about it too much. It was the middle of the night, after all. Maybe Anna would get back to him in the morning.
Brent came in holding a syringe in one hand and a liter of normal saline in the other. The bag from the ER was almost empty. Brent was staying on top of it. He was a good nurse. He hung the saline on the rolling pole next to the bed, ready to be changed over before the pump started beeping. He went through the pain assessment scale again, and Kei told him it was a seven this time.