Lethal Practice

by Peter Clement

She plopped the paddles on my chest. I tried to strain away. My fingers flexed, my arms budged a little, but I was still unable to move the rest of my body. The beeping steadily rose toward ready.

  “Grieving widow, unborn infant already fatherless.”

  Any reserve I had went into a gurgled roar.

  It surprised her, then tweaked her interest. I felt her lean on the paddles. She put her thumbs over the buttons and wiggled them.

  “So, a little response. I thought this was going to be boring. That you’d be classy to the end with this stiff-upper-lip bit.” She brought her mouth down and exhaled. “Want to beg?”

  I started moving my head, tried to spit in her face, but managed only to drool.

  “Oh, so fierce,” she mocked. “Good. Hate me! I’m taking away your miserable high-class fucking life.”

  My legs shuffled uselessly, but my hands were opening and closing, squeezing the slush between my fingers.

  “Ah, that’s good,” she crooned. “I like them writhing.” She was breathing hard enough now that I believed her.

  She pressed just one thumb down on the red button. I braced. She kept the left thumb up, twitched it. I tried not to close my eyes but kept staring at it. I was going to get only a fraction of a second to do this, and it would have to be the right fraction.

  “Yes, yes,” she teased, caressing the button now.

  “Fuck this shit!” hissed the figure behind me.

  The voice. I knew that voice.

  Jones reacted as if she’d been slapped. She glared up at him, forgetting me for the moment but still leaving the paddles in place. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that,” she said. “Do you hear me! Don’t ever interfere with what I do!”

  I saw the large shape turn and heard the latch behind me snap open. Cold air ran over my head while his footsteps crunched as he walked away over the snow. He didn’t bother to close the door.

  Jones squatted, hunched over her machine, her shoulders drooping. After a few seconds the piercing tone of the monitor seemed to revive her. She gave it a final look, then turned abruptly back to me. I got ready. I was going to die, but I had a chance to take her with me.

  She pressed the paddles hard down onto my chest. I gasped one final breath and grabbed for her hands.

  Her thumbs dropped. I exhaled a scream. The white explosion roared back through my brain. I felt the current lock my wet hands to hers and curl our fingers into spasms, clamping us to the paddles. Through the pain, I heard her shriek—an explosion of sound blown out of her lungs as the direct current convulsed her diaphragm. I’d gotten her! Then my hearing sealed off, and the searing grip of electricity snapped through my back, arms, and legs. It shot my muscles into a fixed seizure. My back jerked into an arch, my arms jammed into my chest, my grip on her increased. For that fraction of a second we were arched away from each other, yet fused in the extended agony of a violent convulsion. When the discharge ended, we both flopped back down—released, and dying.

  I could feel her twitching on top of me, fighting for air, the same as I had done. She must be aware, gasping in pain and terror, as I’d been, and as so many others had done under her cruel watch. I felt no forgiveness, no pity as we hurtled toward death together. I wanted her to fight it, to feel the horror of knowing she was already dead, to strain for air that would never come. To endure the long seconds at the end of her life knowing I’d sent her to hell.

  I went easier this time. Already weak, and with no one pounding my chest or shoving air into my lungs, I fell back to black.

  The rush into silence was unseemly. I tried not to struggle, to just let go. A vision of Janet came, then vanished. Even the rage and anger faded. My last thought was that I’d stopped Jones. I felt an acceleration, but it was more a dispersal in all directions than any real movement— spreading out—like a drop of water going back into the ocean. Death as a diluent.

  Suddenly there was a flash, followed by another. They were more whiteouts of the black than anything I could actually see. This wasn’t part of the ride. The hurtle slowed, reversed. The sound of surf began rushing in and out of my skull. I was going back. That bitch wasn’t dead! I thought, suddenly terrified again. She was bringing me back! The surf got louder. A tunnel burrowed into my throat. I was rising fast, welling back to life with the surge of vomit that flew out past the tube now snug in my airway. Seconds later I became very worldly and simply fainted.

  * * * *

  The sounds of surf were back; steady, running in, running out. It was the sound of my own breathing, noisily pushing up and down the tube in my windpipe that felt like a garden hose. I seemed buried alive, so heavy was each limb, every finger immobile. What flicker of brain activity I had left was enough to fear more games. It became essential to open my eyes. What was she going to do? Why was I still alive? Why was she? The rushing sound of my own breathing blended with a tinny rumble. A voice? Was someone speaking to me?

  I felt hands on me. I got ready. I still couldn’t lift my lids. Had the bitch stitched them closed? I could barely manage a good flinch.

  But the hands were gentle. The breathing got less loud, and the rumble organized itself into a man’s voice.

  He kept saying two words, but they were garbled. He repeated them, and finally I could hear what he was saying.

  “I’m sorry.”

  All at once the hands, and the voice, were gone.

  * * * *

  Everything hurt, even my eyelids. I finally opened them, but it didn’t matter. The hallway was dark, and I wasn’t past seeing just blurred shadows anyway.

  My breathing kept me company. Any gagging I felt didn’t amount to much. I was too feeble to vomit.

  I heard a sound, rising and falling like my breathing. Except it was higher, annoying, getting louder. A siren. It seemed to be right in my ear before someone mercifully shut it off. I heard doors slamming, boots crunching on snow. Then I felt a shot of cold air over my head as the door flew open and my new visitors arrived.

  I sensed more than saw one of them kneel by my side. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

  Sure, I’m lying there in my own pee and crap, had been dead twice, and now I didn’t have the strength of a polio victim, but sure, I’d reassure my rescuer. My brain said “nod.” What my head did, I don’t know, but it must have budged.

  The man, who was still blurry and unrecognizable to me, leaned back as if relaxing. “Wait till you get my bill.”

  * * * *

  I couldn’t see yet. My vision remained a blur of speckled lights. Any effort to speak left me gagging on the tube in my throat. I could hear their voices, but they sounded pretty far off and faded in and out like a poorly tuned radio. In the background I recognized the steady hum of a vehicle moving fast.

  I was still barely able to move, but I had to get that cursed tube out of my throat. It was making me cough and retch continually now. I tried to move my arm and feebly brought my hand up to the part of the tube sticking out of my mouth. I got my fingers around it and pulled. Whoever had intubated me hadn’t inflated the cuff to keep the tube secure. It slid out easily, and while the extraction had left me coughing and spitting, I immediately felt better.

  Someone supported me when I tried to turn on my side and clear my mouth. I heard Doug’s voice say, “Easy, Earl.”

  “What happened to Jones?” I managed to croak after I caught my breath.

  Doug didn’t answer at first. “Was that the woman we found beside you?” he asked after a few seconds.

  “Yeah,” I answered. I’d forgotten he didn’t know her name.

  He waited, then told me, “She’s dead. Earl.”

  At first I didn’t feel anything in particular. Not relief, not triumph, not even a sense it was over. It worked, I thought almost neutrally. My grab at her hands had worked. I seemed to accept this outcome the same way, as a physician, I’d have accepted the successful outcome of an attempted therapeutic act. Then a horrible feeling of emptiness came through me—a hollow, sick f
eeling— absolute, final, irrevocable. I felt dead inside.

  Chapter 17

  I could finally see. Arnie was driving the commandeered ambulance with full lights and siren. I was trying to stay in the bouncing stretcher. I found my voice enough to ask Doug a few more questions on the ride into Buffalo.

  “What brought you in?”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “You sound like a mother,” I quipped, trying to hide how shaky I was, inside and out.

  Amie whooped with glee as yet another column of traffic pulled over to let him pass.

  When I hadn’t phoned in, Doug told me, he radioed the cops. Then he and his boys drove down to the highway and with their trucks cut off Jones’s two thugs waiting in the ambulance and car before they even could start their engines. The sight of him and his men jumping from their vehicles, armed with crowbars, ball-peen hammers, and a few hunting rifles did the trick. The two came out, hands up. Doug trussed them in bandages, threw them in the back of the ambulance, and roared in to find me.

  “When we arrived, no one else was there except you and that woman. Scared me shitless, seeing the two of you stretched out like that,” Doug continued. He paused, having trouble finding the words to recall the scene. “With that monitor thing wired to you and a tube down your throat, I thought we were too late.”

  I was still confused, but I started to get it. “You mean you didn’t shock me back?”

  “Me? No way. You were already beeping away with a pattern on the screen—the pointy pattern, like you see on the TV shows when it’ll be okay. Still, we didn’t want to take any chances with you by waiting for the cops to arrive. That’s why Arnie and I have you in this ambulance. We left Norm and my other men back there guarding the bad guys.”

  The man with the familiar voice must have somehow slipped back and resuscitated me. I was still wondering why when I went unconscious again.

  The next time I woke up Janet was holding me.

  “You turkey!” she yelled as she burst into tears. She was still giving me a hug when I slipped away again.

  The next few days were a series of comas. In between I slept a lot. They hooked me up to every piece of equipment they had in the ICU. Then they went out and rented some they didn’t have just to make sure. When they finished, I looked like a pinball arcade paying off in free games. But they needn’t have bothered. My best monitor was Janet. She was there each time I woke up, watching every blip, every digital printout.

  “Hold my hand?”

  “Sure.”

  “Rub my head?”

  “Don’t press your luck, turkey!”

  * * * *

  There were no windows in the ICU. The mornings were marked by how many times the powdered egg stuff came by. I could tell it was night when all the needling and testing stopped.

  I could tell I was doing better when I awoke and the chair where Janet kept her vigil was empty.

  By crossing my eyes I could see the tube running out my nose. The needled catheters inserted under my right collarbone and into both arms were easier to spot. Another permanent arterial line was stuck in my wrist with a spigot on the end for immediate access to my blood. I felt like a keg of draft on tap.

  But the ultimate humiliation was the tube running off the end of a condom I now peed through. For some strange reason, they called this contraption a Texas catheter.

  Stewart Deloram, the chief of intensive care, seemed to enjoy having me under his total control. He strutted to the end of my bed and boomed, “How are you today, Chief?”

  It wasn’t a question. It was a gloat. A look-at-you-there-and-me-here kind of gloat.

  “Deloram, you’re a sick, sadistic son of a bitch in a control frenzy!”

  “Ooh, nurse, has Dr. Garnet shown signs of delusional paranoia, an ICU psychosis?”

  “You’re the only psychotic on these premises. Hell, I don’t need half this crap.”

  “Is that a professional opinion, Chief, or does all this crankiness mean you’re really getting better?”

  “Apart from being pretty sleepy, I can’t tell there’s anything wrong with me.”

  “Frankly, neither can we.”

  “Why not back off all this mother-hen stuff?” I waved my arms and the attendant tubes at him. The attached bottles of varied green and yellow secretions rattled noisily. The bells and whistles on all the machines lit up. Five nurses ran over to our cubicle.

  Deloram waved them off. “He’s just being expressive again. It’s all right. Everyone back to work.” He turned to me. “You keep crying wolf like that. Doc, no one will believe it if you really need us.”

  “How do you know I need you at all?”

  He pouted, then did something really scary. He got serious. “We don’t know. Nobody’s done studies on stopping and jump-starting a normal heart before.”

  “You find any damage?”

  “None we can measure.”

  “Do you think it’ll affect my life expectancy?”

  “Like I said, no studies. There’ve been a couple of series on dogs who had tickers tocked and restarted with a shot of juice. They did okay, but by that I mean you can expect to be burying bones in the backyard to a ripe old age of twelve in doggie years.”

  This time his humor felt a little thin. The look on my face must have betrayed a wee touch of the cold, crawly feeling I was getting inside. He put a hand on my shoulder and became very gentle.

  “Look, Earl, what you were put through is as weird as I’ve ever seen, and probably ever will. Those creeps seem to have kept you pretty well aerated while they had their sick jollies. In that regard, they were at least technically competent, but monsters with expertise are somehow even scarier.”

  For a moment I didn’t see Deloram. I saw a pair of older eyes, eyes of a man who kept saying he was sorry.

  “Any word on the fourth guy yet?”

  “Apparently the cops got him. They picked him up coming out of the woods about two miles south of you. So you don’t have to worry about any of them. It’s over.”

  I still had a dead feeling inside. In some ways I knew it would never be over.

  “By the way,” Deloram continued, “some big detective’s taken a special interest in you. He’s been here regularly for the last two days to see if you were ready to talk to him yet, but I told him you weren’t going anywhere and needed the rest. I suggested he run your name for unpaid parking tickets while waiting.”

  Riley. “Let me speak to him next time.”

  “Sure.”

  “Where’s Janet?”

  “Asleep.”

  I must have looked lonesome because he said, “Hey, give your guardian angel and us a break. She’s been like a one-woman accreditation visit since you got here. It took her twenty-four hours just to trust us enough with your precious skin before she agreed to a little nap herself. She’s in the residents’ room, wondered if we’d changed the sheets since she rotated through here ten years ago. Let her rest.”

  “So this is day two?”

  “More or less.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Now, that, my son, is a closely guarded medical secret.”

  “Dammit, Stewart, quit kidding around. When do I get out of here?”

  He slid off the side of the bed where he’d been sitting, strode to the cubicle curtains, struck an operatic pose, and answered, “Soon, my son, soon, or never.” Then, with a maniacal grin, he left.

  Outside from the nurses’ station I heard his deliberately overloud instructions. “Oh, Nurse Mandy, I think it’s time to change Dr. Garnet’s Texas catheter, please.”

  There were giggles, and Nurse Mandy, who regularly modeled swimsuits in the ad section of the Buffalo Gazette, jiggled into the curtained area to do her duty. Then he must have hit the alarm-set switch at his desk because every bell and buzzer at my bedside went off again.

  “You’re a sick person, Deloram! Sick!” I yelled against a rising wall of laughter from beyond my curtains. Nurse Mandy
never missed a beat, so to speak.

  * * * *

  I figured the stay at Deloram’s little kingdom would end when he got bored with me or I could stay awake for more than an hour. The first occurred pretty quickly. I didn’t see him much after our chat. The second feat proved more difficult.

  A few awakenings later I found Janet back in her chair. She looked tired, but she smiled my way and softly said, “Hello.”

  “Hi, yourself.”

  I enjoyed just watching her for a few quiet minutes. She looked pleased that I was awake and reached for my hand. It felt wonderful.

  “I was afraid you’d still want to brain me,” I whispered.

  “That would presume some brains in the first place.” Her voice was a little less soft.

  “You do still want to brain me.”

  “I’m letting them fatten you up here first.”

  “How’s Muffy?”

  “Better than you. She’s out of intensive care.”

  I was left to stew in an uneasy silence for a while. Then Janet added, “She’s going to be all right. Probably will be home next week.”

  “And how is home coming along?” It wasn’t exactly a roaring conversation, but I figured sputtering talk was better than icy silence.

  What I got back, however, was ice and talk. “Let’s just say,” she began rather coolly, “that Doug’s wife was as thrilled as I was with the great bozo escapade. Now that she’s let him back out of her sight, the work is going quite nicely.” A pause. Then a hint of melting, “Especially the baby’s room.” More thought. “It’s really quite lovely.”

  “You look like you could use some of the sleep I’m getting.”

  “It’s the two men I run around with. One keeps me up all night with worry, the other kicks me awake when I sleep.”

  “I’m sorry, Janet. It was a pretty boneheaded idea.”

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, great! You decide on your own to play Hardy Boys with our contractor, without so much as a word to me, and then bring the Wicked Witch of the Night down on us, and you think a big doleful ‘I’m sorry’ is going to cut it!”

  As Janet’s voice rose, the rest of the ICU suddenly got very, very quiet.