Stress Test

by Richard Mabry

  Matt’s aching shoulders cried out. Nothing was working. He was about to give up when he felt the tape’s grip on his wrists loosen. Had one strand separated? He worked furiously now, sawing through more layers, until at last he felt his hands come free.

  Matt pulled the remaining tape from his wrists. Sharp stabs of pain signaled the resumption of blood flow into hands too long and too tightly restrained. He struggled to move his fingers, but at that moment they might as well have belonged to someone else. He flexed them and bit his lip in pain as restored circulation brought fire to his fingertips.

  Now Matt fumbled with the tape that encircled his head. He took a deep breath, winced at the pain it caused, and steeled himself against what he knew was next. He ripped away the tape with a continuous unwinding motion that felt as though it took not only his day-old beard but also a layer of skin and a good portion of his hair. Tears coursed down his cheeks. His face felt like a pound of hamburger. But this was no time to stop and feel sorry for himself.

  He reached down to free his ankles and felt more of the painful, electric tingle as blood flowed to his feet again. He’d done it. He was free. But how was he going to get away?

  The car moved slowly now, probably taking side streets. Matt was certain that once his captors stopped, his chances of escape were somewhere between slim and none. He had to do something and do it quickly.

  He could think of only two options. He could arm himself with something like the spike end of a flare or the fire extinguisher and fight his two assailants, counting on the element of surprise to help him overpower both of them. The second option was to try to escape before his captors reached their destination. As far as Matt was concerned, the choice was obvious.

  But how was he to escape his steel prison? He remembered that, when he bought the car, the salesman reached into the trunk and pointed out the emergency release. Matt hadn’t thought much about it then, just recognized that it could be a lifesaver for a child accidentally locked in a trunk. Well, he wasn’t in this trunk by accident and he wasn’t a child, but that release just might save his life . . .

  He groped above him in the darkness until he could wedge the numb, blood-soaked fingers of one hand into a crevice in the under-surface of the trunk lid. With the other hand, Matt searched until he found a T-shaped lever. He pulled, but his bloody fingers slipped off the slick plastic. He wiped his hand on his pants and tried again. This time he was rewarded with a satisfying click as the latch released.

  Matt eased the trunk open just far enough to glimpse his surroundings. The car was moving along a paved street, slowing and occasionally swerving to miss a pothole, then speeding up again. There were no other cars in sight.

  Matt figured they were somewhere in the Trinity Industrial District. The occasional dim light from deep inside the buildings around did nothing to keep the darkness at bay. The few streetlights that hadn’t been shot out or succumbed to target practice with rocks provided little illumination.

  The car slowed again. It was now or never. Matt released his hold on the trunk lid and rolled over the sill and out. When he hit the pavement, there were new waves of pain, and he clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. He thought he heard another crack from his injured ribs. He forced himself to roll to the side of the road, then scrambled to his feet and made for the nearest buildings. He glanced back in time to see the car move ahead for perhaps fifty yards before the brake lights came on and two forms piled out.

  Matt didn’t wait to see what they would do next. He already knew what he was going to do.

  Run for his life.

  THREE

  Lou glanced up at the rearview mirror and looked away. His eyes snapped back as his mind processed what he’d seen. The trunk lid was open, bouncing with each rough spot in the road. He brought his foot off the accelerator and hit the brake pedal hard enough to make the chest strap of the seat belt cut into him. He jammed the gear lever into park and was out the door while the car still rocked on its springs.

  Behind Lou, Edgar’s door slammed. “What happened?”

  “He got out,” Lou rasped. “But he can’t go far.”

  The headlights lit an empty street ahead. Lou pivoted to look behind him. The industrial district was deserted. Buildings were dark. The only illumination came from a distant streetlamp and an occasional security light shining dimly through dirty windows. Alleys, black as the inside of a coal mine, divided each building from its neighbor. Lou completed a full turn but saw nothing except Edgar, motionless beside him, his eyes darting left and right. He cocked his head to listen.

  There were no cars around; no sign of life anywhere. Their captive couldn’t have gone far. They’d find him—they had to.

  Lou heard a faint metallic scrape to his left. He swung around and cupped his hand over his ear, the way he’d seen his almost-deaf aunt do. There it was again, coming from that alley. Lou pointed first to Edgar, then to the source of the sound, and jerked his head. The little man nodded once and together they edged slowly forward.

  Lou’s snakeskin Gucci loafers, although elegant and guaranteed to impress the ladies, were not designed for this kind of activity. The leather heels clicked with every step; the leather soles slipped and slid over oily patches in the road. At that moment, he would have traded his five-hundred-dollar shoes for a pair of Converse high-tops. He forced himself to slow his pace and tread carefully, like a hunter moving through the jungle.

  At the entrance to the alley, Lou stopped and looked back at Edgar, who stood five yards behind him, his head on a swivel. Lou pointed first to himself, then into the alley. He indicated Edgar and gestured for him to stay put. His cohort pulled a revolver from his waistband and nodded his understanding.

  Lou opened his coat and drew his own gun from its shoulder holster. He cursed himself for not taking the time to search the car for a flashlight. Maybe the lighter in his coat pocket would do. If he lit it after he was in the alley, it might spook the fugitive into running. Lou would fire as soon as he saw the man. If he missed, Edgar was ready at the mouth of the alley. Either way, they had him dead to rights. Lou chuckled silently at the pun.

  He thumbed the safety of his Beretta to the firing position and cocked the hammer. He had ten rounds in the semiautomatic. The fugitive had nothing. Nothing fair about this fight, but then again, Lou gave up any pretensions of fighting fair long ago. He held the pistol firmly in his left hand, finger inside the trigger guard. He stretched his right arm in front of him, stuck out his foot, and, like someone walking through a minefield, took a careful step forward. Ready or not, here I come.

  Matt paused before moving deeper into the alley. He took a few deep breaths, and each one brought a new wave of pain that threatened to immobilize him. He clutched his white coat around him against the early morning chill and, for a few moments, felt marginally warmer. Then he looked down and realized the coat was like a white beacon in the dim light. Be warm or be a target for men trying to kill me? Not much of a choice.

  With a sigh, he rolled the coat into a tight ball and shoved it behind one of the dozens of trash cans lining the alley. Now the wind that swirled around him seemed to go right through the thin material of his surgical scrub suit. His teeth chattered, from both cold and fright. He shivered, and each muscle twitch caused more pain.

  He was in a narrow passageway between two industrial buildings. Ahead in the dark was a veritable obstacle course. He didn’t know if there was escape at the end of the alley. All Matt knew was that he had to keep moving.

  Matt stretched his hands in front of him like a blind man entering a strange room. He moved close to the right-hand wall and worked his way into the darkness. As his eyes adjusted he could make out dim shapes. He circumnavigated garbage cans, empty crates, and piles of debris, following an irregular course along the wall, moving steadily deeper into the alley. He encountered metal doors at irregular intervals. He checked every one. Locked.

  He mentally kicked himself—he could call for help. Matt
felt at his waist for the cell phone usually clipped there. Gone, knocked loose at some point. Perversely, his pager was still at his waist on the other side. He thumbed it to the off position and dropped it behind a pile of debris.

  Matt’s heart sank as his dark-adjusted eyes showed him a wall a few feet ahead. This was a blind alley. He was trapped.

  He heard a series of faint shuffling noises behind him. They’re here. Matt stopped dead still and quickly compressed his six-foot frame into a doorway. He held his breath. He tensed his aching muscles, ready to run, then realized he had no place to go.

  The sounds stopped. Matt peeped out of his hiding place and caught the faint outlines of two men, the smaller silhouetted against the entrance to the alley, the larger moving slowly toward him, one careful step at a time. He heard the rasp of a lighter, saw a brief flicker, then the flame died. Despite repeated sounds of flint on metal, with an overlay of profanity, the darkness remained unbroken. Good. Darkness was Matt’s friend right now.

  Matt’s mind’s eye replayed the images from that momentary flash of light. Something had glinted in the big man’s hand—a gun. Probably the same one Matt had felt pressed against the base of his skull. Did the smaller man have one as well? No matter. A single bullet from one weapon would be enough to kill him.

  Matt groped around him for a weapon of some kind, any kind. Nothing. He had nowhere to go, nothing with which he could fight. His only hope was to hide. But where? How?

  When he was about to give up, his fingers touched rough wood. He squinted against the darkness and used both hands to explore further. Near the brick wall that blocked the end of the alley, a stack of wooden pallets had been shoved against the wall. Matt stretched as high as possible and was barely able to touch the top. Would the stack hold him? If it came tumbling down, the noise would certainly bring his captors. He held his breath and wedged his toe into an opening in the stack. With infinite care, he scaled the rickety pile, wincing over every sound, praying the big man was still too far away to hear it. At the top he pulled himself up and stretched prone. He wiggled around to peer back over the edge, his legs hanging off either side of the improvised platform.

  There was the sound of a step, a long pause, another step, another pause. Then, from the mouth of the alley, a metallic cacophony was followed by a spate of curse words erupting into the night. Apparently one of his pursuers had found the garbage cans Matt had so carefully avoided.

  “Lou, I need help.” The loud whisper’s high pitch told Matt this was pursuer number two. “I cut my leg on this—”

  “Shut up! A cut won’t kill you.” There was a guttural laugh. “But if I can find the doc, I’m going to kill him.”

  Matt willed himself to be perfectly still. As the shuffling moved toward him, Matt peeped over the edge and could faintly see the dark bulk of the larger kidnapper creeping closer. The man’s hand traversed left, right, left, right in concert with the motion of his head. If he looked up, Matt was dead.

  The kidnapper continued along the alley, trying doors along the way, moving on when he found them locked. He stopped at the wall that blocked the end of the passageway, turned, and retraced his steps along the opposite side of the alley. Matt hardly dared hope he would escape, but there was a chance . . .

  Finally the man reached the entrance to the alley. Matt could see him, silhouetted by the faint light of the street, as he shook his head and dropped the pistol into his coat pocket. He ducked his head and whispered to his partner, who was bent at the waist, holding his right shin. In a moment, they disappeared from Matt’s view, the injured man limping and hopping, struggling to keep up.

  After what seemed like an hour, Matt heard two car doors slam. There was quiet for a few seconds, then an engine revved and accelerated away. Matt couldn’t believe his good fortune. They’d missed him. They were gone. Or were they? Had one of them crept back to keep watch? He couldn’t take the chance.

  Matt’s back muscles were in spasm. He forced his nails into the palms of his hands to keep from crying out as he kept his body pressed against the rough wood.

  He decided to count to five hundred before he moved. By the time he reached a hundred and fifty, he thought he’d never be able to lie on his perch for another second. He swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and continued his count.

  At last Matt drew a deep breath and willed his muscles to relax. Like an old man getting out of a chair in which he’d sat too long, Matt hunched himself slowly into a crouch. He turned his back to the alley, intending to descend backward from his hiding place. Matt groped with his foot for purchase in the stack of pallets, but found only air. He teetered as he struggled to keep his balance, then threw his arms wide in a futile attempt to hold on to something, anything. Instead, gravity grabbed him and pulled him head-down into black oblivion.

  FOUR

  Dr. Hank Truong placed the last careful stitch in the face of the teenage boy. “I’ve closed the wound the knife made. There’ll be a scar,” Hank said, “but only a small one. Now try to stay out of trouble. I don’t want to see you back here again.”

  Odds were the teenager would be back—maybe even brought in DOA—but there was always hope. That was what made this duty in the Parkland Hospital Emergency Room tolerable for Hank: hope that what he did for some of his patients might help.

  A nurse stuck her head into the room. “Patient in trauma room 2,” the nurse said. “Unidentified white male, early to mid-thirties, brought in unconscious. EMTs say the call came from a guy who owns a pawnshop down on Riverfront Boulevard. He went into the alley to throw some boxes into the Dumpster and found the man lying there. No ID.”

  “Be right there,” Hank said.

  As he strode past patients on gurneys, many with family members hovering around them, Hank’s mind clicked along as though powered by a microchip as he sorted out the possibilities for the diagnosis and treatment of an unresponsive patient.

  Someone found in an alley in that neighborhood was a likely candidate for head trauma—probably a mugging. But Hank had to consider alcohol, drugs, diabetic coma, epilepsy, stroke, and many other possibilities. He wasn’t worried. He was confident he’d come up with the right diagnosis. He generally did.

  Hank tapped on the door of the trauma room and eased it open. The man on the treatment table was naked from the waist up, his skin as pale as the sheet over the lower half of his body. Dried blood covered his scalp and obscured his facial features like a Mardi Gras mask.

  A surgical scrub shirt and pants, the stenciled name on them partially obscured by black splotches of dried blood, were crumpled on the shelf beneath the gurney. Hank wondered what a psychiatrist would make of the fact that the blots reminded him of a Rorschach test showing a hand holding a gun. I’ve been in the ER too long, he thought.

  Was the scrub suit significant? If they washed out the blood, they could probably read the name of the hospital. But would that help? This could be a patient who’d grabbed the clothes to slip away without waiting for his discharge . . . or his bill. Or he might be a hospital worker—dietary, janitorial, laboratory, whatever. Lots of them wore scrub suits they “borrowed” from the hospital. But most likely this was just a bum who either found or stole the clothing. No, there wasn’t going to be any help there.

  “What have you got?” Hank asked.

  A nurse whose name Hank couldn’t remember stood at the patient’s side, scribbling on a clipboard. “Here’s what we have so far.” She passed the clipboard over, and when she did, Hank saw her name tag.

  “Thanks, Allison.” Hank scanned the ER intake record. White male, estimated to be in his thirties. Unconscious, bleeding from a scalp wound. No odor of alcohol. No Medic-Alert bracelet. Nothing that would help.

  “Vital signs?” Hank asked.

  Allison looked at the ballpoint scribbling on her palm. “Haven’t had time to chart them. One-ninety over sixty, fifty-four, ten.”

  The information clicked into Hank’s brain as though he’d hit Enter on his
well-worn laptop. Systolic blood pressure up, diastolic down, slow pulse. Cushing’s triad—evidence of increased pressure on the brain. “Could be developing a subdural hematoma, if he doesn’t already have one,” he said. “We need a stat CT of his head. I’ll go with him in case he goes south while he’s in radiology. And get a neurosurgeon down here.”

  “Do you want to clean up that scalp laceration?”

  Hank whirled and noticed the nursing student who stood in the corner. He swallowed the answer he had planned for the ER nurse—she’d know better, but this girl might not. “No, it’s barely oozing now. We don’t want to mess with it until we know there’s not a fracture. We’ll wrap some gauze around his head and get the CT first.”

  For the next forty minutes, Hank functioned on automatic pilot. His actions were dictated by lessons initially learned through countless hours of textbook study and hammered home by involvement in the care of case after case of head trauma. Stabilize the airway, get an IV going, give Mannitol to decrease the pressure in the brain, administer Dilantin to ward off convulsions, confirm the diagnosis through CAT scans, keep a careful eye on the patient’s neurological status.

  “What have you got?” The staff neurosurgeon, Ken Gordon, strode through the door and stopped next to Hank.

  “John Doe with a head injury,” Hank said. “Thought it was an acute subdural, but it’s actually an epidural hemorrhage.”

  Gordon had been a standout basketball player at SMU, a crackerjack medical student and resident at Southwestern Medical Center, where he was now associate professor of neurosurgery. Gordon was the typical tall, dark, and handsome man—six-two, wavy brown hair—and all the nurses tended to follow him with their eyes when he walked by. Hank didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that Gordon, the best neurosurgeon at the medical center, was on call today for Parkland Hospital.

  “Think he’s going to need burr holes?” Hank asked.

  Gordon held up one finger in a “just a minute” gesture. He finished scanning the chart that Hank handed him, then began a rapid but thorough neurological exam of the still-unconscious man. Finally he stepped to the viewbox on the wall and spent a moment studying the CT scan of the patient’s head. “Yep,” Gordon finally said. “Acute epidural hematoma.” He pointed. “There’s the fracture line. Non-displaced, though. That’s good.”