“Wow.”
The smile crumpled.
I sure didn’t seem to be winning any points here. I said, “They’re setting you up. You realize that. You and Alaine Chen and Harriet Tobel.”
“I know.”
“They’re trying to link you to Dr. Tobel—”
“I know.”
My face must have betrayed my confusion, and he went on to explain. “That is why I am here, Dr. McCormick. To clean house. Then I pay a visit to your friends. I will not become anyone’s scapegoat.”
Good for you, I thought. In any case, if he was going to pay my friends a visit, he must know where they are. In that, I thought I glimpsed an opportunity, though what good it could do me at that point, I didn’t know. Truly. My superior powers of deduction told me that I was, to put it crassly, fucked. “Where are they?”
He didn’t answer me, but said, “These doctors, they think they control everything. They don’t. Nobody does. You don’t control a virus, and you don’t control a man, Dr. McCormick.”
I thought that was a pretty philosophical statement from an assassin, but I guess this guy had a lot of opportunity to contemplate the bigger questions in life: power, influence, death.
He blinked again, squeezing out the tears. The scene was incongruous: the killer weeping, the gun pointed at my chest. I guessed he was having some trouble with the peepers. I began to raise my right hand slowly, elbow at my side, making sure to keep the cuffs from clinking.
“You don’t have to do this. Tell me where Alaine is and I’ll forget I ever saw you; I’ll forget I know your name.”
“You know my name?”
Oops.
My hand was now at about eight o’clock and rising.
“I thought you were different, Dr. McCormick. I thought you could see the angles.”
He was getting very Chandleresque with all this “cleaning house” and “angles” talk. I was about to tell him I’d keep everything on the “quiet tip” and that he should “keep his shirt on,” but his head jerked toward my hand before my big mouth got me in more trouble.
“Lower it,” he snapped.
I obeyed, but I had the information I needed. To wit, the man was partially blind. Like me, he couldn’t see all the angles anymore. He knew this, I guessed. He wanted to reduce the angles by one.
“I’m sorry,” he said. The words sounded very final. I could feel my limbs going weak.
“So am I.”
As the Surgeon raised the gun, I made my move: I grabbed the top file in the box and flung it at him, falling sideways as I did so. A jet of papers streamed toward him and fell across the desk a second later, but it was enough. Two dull thumps pulsed from the gun, and I heard the sound of breaking glass.
Then I scrambled for the door.
This move was a bit dicey, since the man stood between me and it. I rammed him with my shoulder as I passed, knocking him off balance. The gun spat again, and I felt a hand grab at my shirt.
In the lab. I dove for the light switch on the far wall, and though I never heard the shot, I felt something skip over my left arm. I yelped. At least he got the left, which was already useless. Like two flat tires on a car, the second one is just cosmetic. Well, cosmetic and painful.
My fingers slapped the wall and raked down. Except for the fluorescents from Dr. Tobel’s office and the thin light seeping from the window in the main door, the lab fell to darkness. I keyed in to the square of light in the door and ran.
Another thump and something from the wall—plaster or wood chips—stung my face. Screw the door. I bolted for the far end of the room and rolled behind a lab bench.
Killing the lights did the trick. In the gloom, I could make out the Surgeon as he moved along the wall, left hand feeling the way, gun pointed in my general direction. The oddity of the situation struck me. If I hadn’t been fearing for my life, it would have had comic potential: “One-Arm versus Blind Man.” I could already see the Hollywood possibilities.
Blood from my left shoulder wet my arm. As the Surgeon groped toward the light switch, I fingered the wound, winced, and determined it was just a graze.
There was an old centrifuge on the lab bench in front of me. I cranked it to thirteen thousand rpms and turned it on. The Surgeon fired a shot in my direction; it slammed into something inches behind me. I turned on a suction hose, hoping the noise would drown out the sound of my movements.
I pawed along the lab bench, desperate for anything I could use. The best I found was a hemostat forceps, an odd hybrid that crossed scissors with tweezers. Not my choice of weaponry, but any port in a storm. I grabbed it.
The Surgeon was at the door, his hand sweeping up and down along the wall.
The lights blazed to full and I ran.
My left shoulder bit into his hips. I cried out as pain lanced through my fresh wound, but the impact knocked him against the wall and sent the gun sailing. Before I could drop the hemostat and grab for the door handle, I felt hands cup my head. A knee drove hard into my chin.
Contact, I realized too late, erased any advantage I’d had from his blindness. Not to mention that the last time I’d engaged in hand-to-hand combat was with an Xbox at a friend’s place in Atlanta, and I lost against the computer every time. You’d think I’d learn.
My head kicked back and I fell hard on my ass. Somehow the hemostat didn’t slip from my hand, but the mano a mano crap was truly working against me. The Surgeon gripped my left hand and twisted the gauze like he was cranking a motorcycle throttle. I screamed. The hemostat tumbled from my good hand.
He was on top of me now, hands moving incredibly fast, skating up my body, settling on my neck. He clamped down. I coughed, actually a squeak, because he was pressing so damned hard. In another few seconds, my trachea would be crushed and I’d be chatting it up with Dr. Tobel at the pearly gates.
Frantically, I began pawing the floor. My fingers brushed the stainless steel of the hemostat; I grabbed the handle and braced it on the meat of my palm. Then I drove it as hard as I could into the Surgeon’s back.
It sank.
I must have missed the ribs, because the pointed end buried a good three inches into flesh. The Surgeon grunted, then clawed at his back. Fingers found the hemostat and he tore it from his body. Quickly—he was so goddamned fast—the instrument was across the room and his hands were back at my throat. I’d barely managed to bring my right hand up and get it between his hands and my neck.
Still, he pressed. Fingers slipped and slapped; I grappled, coughed, and gagged. But his grip was becoming weaker.
Finally, he slackened enough that I was able to break his grip. I shoved and kicked, and pushed the man off me. The pistol lay a few yards away. I crawled over to it, fumbled to get it situated in my hand, turned, and sat. The Surgeon was on his side now. My wounds throbbed.
Unsteadily, I got to my feet, stumbled over to the vacuum hose and centrifuge, and turned them off. The silence was nearly complete, except for the Surgeon’s raspy breathing. I pulled down my jacket and looked at my left arm, where blood stained the shirt. Not too bad, actually. I tore open my shirt, popping a few buttons. Kimwipes, which I’d always used to clean slides and microscope lenses, would do a good job of stanching blood, I figured. I grabbed some and pressed them to the tear in my flesh.
Now that the adrenaline was gone, everything began to hurt—my hand, the old gunshot wound in my right deltoid, the new wound over my left acromion—it all really began to hurt.
Like the soundtrack to some B horror flick, the Surgeon’s breathing became more and more labored.
“You need to get to a hospital,” I said.
“You’re a doctor.”
I walked to a phone, slid the gun into my left armpit, and picked up the receiver.
“Don’t do that,” the Surgeon said.
“You need to be in a hospital.”
“Do not touch the phone.”
I held the phone for a moment, then placed it back in the cradle and edged clo
ser to the Surgeon. His breathing was difficult, desperate almost. He sat up and hunched over his crossed legs, as if he’d just blasted through a hundred yards at top speed.
“Take off your jacket,” I told him. He raised his head and glared at me. Many times, people have looked at me as though they wanted to kill me—patients whom I’m sticking for blood for the fourth time in a day, Brooke Michaels most of the time—but never as if they would actually follow through, never with such malevolence. Creepy.
Slowly, the Surgeon removed his sport coat and dropped it to the floor, revealing the crimson splotch on the back of his shirt below the shoulder blade. The bore of the hemostat was small, and the muscles between the ribs would have closed the tiny hole. Though this seems to be a good thing—this self-sealing of a chest wound—it was the worst of possibilities for the Surgeon.
He pushed himself to his knees, then pulled himself upright, heaving breath into his lungs.
“Stop.” I raised the gun, gripped it tight.
He moved toward the door, little shuffling steps.
“Stop.”
He kept moving. The bastard seemed to know I wouldn’t shoot him, so I did the next-best thing. I put down the gun and again picked up the phone.
He heard me and, finally, stopped.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“You help me,” he said weakly.
“Tell me where they are.”
He said nothing, but braced himself on the lab bench. His breathing was becoming both shallower and more forced. It didn’t take three years of residency to know the man had what’s called a pneumothorax, literally, “air in the chest.” I guessed the hemostat had pierced his lung. With each breath in, he filled the lung; with each breath out, the Surgeon was forcing air through that little tear, into the space between the lung and the chest wall. Since the hole in his back had closed, the air could not escape. One lung was collapsed from the puncture, and, with each breath, he was compressing the other. The air pressure would squeeze his heart, too, not allowing blood to fill it during relaxation. Too much air in the wrong places.
“You’ll suffocate,” I said. It wasn’t a good way to die. The man standing before me had at most a few minutes. “Tell me where they are.”
The Surgeon didn’t respond. He placed both hands on the bench, blinking madly, the tears flowing out of his eyes. His face was a mask of wet, yellow, blistered skin. “You help me.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You . . . first.”
I thought about that for a second, thought about the bargain we were negotiating with monosyllables. Being the good doctor I am, I chose the only viable option for me.
“Okay.”
What I needed was a stiff tube: a ballpoint pen, maybe, a small-gauge pipe. Moving around the lab, opening drawers, tossing aside boxes, I found nothing useful. The plastic pipettes were too flimsy, Pasteur pipettes too thin. Not a goddamned ballpoint pen to be found. His breathing was becoming shallower and faster.
There was a small cell culture room across the lab. I glanced at the Surgeon, now sagging over on the lab bench and growing weaker by the moment. I walked the several yards to the space where Dr. Tobel’s lab trolls grew their cells. Inside, I found what I was looking for: a box filled with thick glass cell culture pipettes. Ten-inch tubes that, unlike the thin Pasteurs, wouldn’t shatter. Perfect. Wedging the gun under my left arm to free up my right, I took one and crossed back to the Surgeon.
“Don’t move,” I said, but he was too weak to respond.
I pulled his bloodied dress shirt over his head and, well, the surprises never end. On his left flank, running just below the twelfth rib, was a ten-inch horizontal scar. The only thing I could think of that would yield a scar like that was an open nephrectomy. It looked like the Surgeon, Mr. Richard Craw, killer of dogs and people, tormentor of the good guys, had donated a kidney.
To get a good point on the pipette, I smashed the end against the lab bench. The Surgeon jerked.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to let the air out of your chest.”
He began to push himself up. “No.”
“You’ll suffocate.”
He seemed not to care, and I spent the next ninety seconds watching a man die.
It was grueling to see. The whole scene had that sick rhythm I see in nature shows, where the wildebeest or elephant or whatever bleeds and struggles and dies over the course of what seems like hours. I am not good at this stuff, at just standing by. But I forced myself to wait; I stepped back and put the gun on the lab bench and watched the terrible show.
The Surgeon steadied himself on the lab bench and managed one step before having to rest. I suppose he was trying to get to the door, but he had to know he’d never make it. He took another step and another, but that seemed to be all he could do. Pressure was rising in his chest, squeezing air from his one good lung, squeezing blood from his heart. He placed both hands on the bench. For a moment, he held that position—a last stand—then collapsed to the floor.
Broken pipette in hand, I ran. His breathing was too shallow, too fast. He was hypoxic now and might have already lost consciousness; I couldn’t tell. I yanked up the shirt. The hole from the hemostat was below and lateral to the scapula, where the muscle mass was lowest and where it would be easiest to gain access to the chest cavity. I’d been lucky on that first strike. And what worked once . . .
I raised the jagged glass tube, targeted the bloody dot, and stabbed.
Glass ripped through flesh, the Surgeon convulsed, and I heard the sweet sound of rushing air.
Strong work, Doctor.
Air continued to blow through the large-bore tube for a few seconds, reducing the pressure in the Surgeon’s chest. A pause, then he heaved a great gulp of air into his good lung. Almost immediately, he began to squirm. Leaving the pipette in place, I scrambled off him and back to the gun.
“Don’t move—you’ll break the glass.”
He didn’t listen, and slowly got himself to a sitting position. His shirt caught on the glass and he winced; he reached around to his back. “Leave it there,” I said.
He retracted his arm like some primordial sea beast slithering its tentacle. Then we sat in silence: I with the gun, the Surgeon with his ersatz chest tube.
Finally, I said, “You gave a kidney.”
He nodded.
“Otto Falk did the work?”
“No,” he breathed. “But it is why I took the job. That and the money.”
“Who was the recipient?”
The Surgeon shook his head. “Why do you care, Dr. McCormick?”
I didn’t know. Curiosity, maybe. Curiosity at the paradox of the man in front of me.
“My brother,” he said haltingly. “He died anyway. Dead brother, and I have one kidney.” The Surgeon paused, grabbing more air. “Too late for us, but it’d be nice if the pig thing worked out.”
I asked, “Where are they?”
“I tell you, and we go our separate ways.”
“Yes.”
He took a few noisy breaths. Then he said, “The offices.”
“The company? Chimeragen? Alaine is there?”
“That’s what they told me. They wanted me to go there tonight.”
To kill her, I thought.
So, now I had what I was looking for. Our pact was made. This was my cue to edge out of the room, let the guy get himself to a hospital or some ancient Nazi doctor refugee, wherever killers go to get fixed up. But I didn’t move; I didn’t know what to do.
“You need to go,” the Surgeon said. “Your friends will wait for only so long before they do it themselves. They’re scared. They’re making bad decisions.”
Well, I didn’t want to place myself in their company, so I made a good decision. Bad for the Surgeon, sure. But screw him. I picked up the phone.
“What are you doing?” the Surgeon asked.
I dialed 911, gave the dispatcher the lowdown—that I had disabled the man who’d k
illed two police officers in Gilroy—along with location and my name.
“No—” the Surgeon said. He’d risen to his feet.
“Sit,” I yelled.
The dispatcher asked what was going on. The Surgeon hobbled toward me. “You liar—”
I dropped the phone, grabbed the gun. And I did what I hoped I never would have to do, what I never envisioned myself doing.
I fired two shots.
One caught the Surgeon in the knee. He yelled as the bullet kicked his leg from under him and he went to the floor. Groaning, he began pulling himself toward me.
“Stop!”
He kept coming, and my hand, with gun and handcuffs, quivered like a fishtail. The grip was slippery with sweat. “Stop!” I fired a bullet into the floor in front of him.
He stopped.
The dispatcher on the other end of the line was squawking away—“Sir? Sir?” coming out of the receiver over and over again. I yelled for her to get someone over here immediately.
The Surgeon was splayed on the floor between the two benches, gasping, blood pouring from his shattered knee, tears pouring from his eyes. Quickly, I stepped past him. I found a roll of gauze and threw it to him.
“Put this on.”
He just lay there, bleeding and weeping.
“Put it on!”
“We had a deal,” he said.
“You should have checked my CV. I’m a cheat and a liar. They never told you that?”
Guess not.
As the Surgeon reached for gauze and began to bind his leg, I heard sirens. Nothing like gunfire and high-decibel dialogue to generate some get-up-and-go in the 911 system. I took another roll of gauze to wrap my arm.
“I’m going to kill you, Dr. McCormick.”
Tires screeched.
“Looking forward to it.” Another little lie, but I’d been lying all my life, right? It was easy at this point.
Having more pressing things to do than answer questions for the police and campus security, I left, the Surgeon’s threats—“I’m going to kill you, Dr. McCormick, I’m going to kill you”—following me like a stench down the hallway.
CHAPTER 100
Avoiding the police on my way out the back door of the building, I’d like to say I was thinking about nothing but Alaine. Rescuing the damsel in distress, all that fairy-tale stuff. Truth is, I was pretty taken with slaying my own dragons. I’d nearly been killed, I’d just shot somebody, I was scared about what I’d find at Chimeragen. And I’d fucking lied—big, bald-faced, unabashed. We’d had a deal, the Surgeon and I. And I’d betrayed him.
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