“Okay, Brandon. Good to see you,” Mandy said, as we walked our separate ways. She then whispered, “I can’t believe we have to listen to that piece of shit implying anything negative about Ryan when we both know what a narcissistic dickhead he is. I just hope I’m there to see it when someone finally serves him a knuckle sandwich.”
I told you she was a cool chick! Like they say, great minds think alike!
“He thinks he is such a badass,” she continued, “but I’ll bet he is going to get his face caved in by someone soon. He doesn’t realize this is a grown-up world and there are grown up consequences for talking shit the way he does.”
“I just hope someone else reaches their final straw with him before I do,” I replied. “As satisfying as it would be to be the one who takes him down a few notches, I really don’t want my little girl pissed off at me for the rest of my life!”
Chapter 33
It had been a busy night. I’d been called in to assist on a cesarean section at midnight. It took a while to get the case going because the on call surgical tech got a flat tire during her drive in to the hospital. Afterward, I returned home and jumped back into bed. Just as my head was coming to rest on my pillow, my beeper went off. I hit the button on the side of the pager which lights up the screen so that the LCD image can be seen in the dark. The message read 2115- 911.
“Oh shit,” I said, as I jumped out of bed and ran into the walk-in closet off my master bathroom. 2115 was the number to the Labor and Delivery Unit at Rockwell Memorial Hospital, where I admitted all of my obstetric patients when it was time to deliver their babies. The 911 suffix on the message meant ‘call in immediately, there’s an emergency.’ Once in the closet I called the hospital and engaged the speaker function on the phone, so I could start dressing as I spoke to the nurses.
“Labor and Delivery, this is Pam,” came the voice through the phone speaker.
“It’s Doctor Bishop, what’s up?” I said, as I pulled my scrub bottoms up and tied the drawstring.
“We need you here right away,” she said. “Your patient Stephanie Morgan just arrived by ambulance with her pajama bottoms totally soaked with blood. She says she’s about thirty-two weeks with twins.”
“Yeah, I know who you’re talking about. I just saw her in clinic a couple of days ago. She’s been on bedrest at home due to a partial placenta previa,” I said, as I pulled my scrub top over my head and grabbed my clogs from the shoe rack. “Is she contracting?”
“She sure looks like she is. Amanda and Beverly are hooking her up right now,” she said, referring to the external fetal and uterine monitoring system.
“Just a second,” I said. After grabbing a pair of socks and hurriedly pulling them on, I slipped into my brown leather clogs, grabbed my phone, and ran out of the closet into my pitch- black bedroom where Mandy was still fast asleep. I negotiated the furniture in the dark as I had done so many times before as I headed into the hospital in the middle of the night. Slipping out the bedroom door, reclosing it without waking Mandy was a skill I had mastered long ago.
Once I was outside of the bedroom, I said, “Okay, let’s get a couple of IV lines in her and notify the house supervisor that we might be doing a stat c-section. Might as well give her Celestone and start Penicillin for Group B Strep prophylaxis.”
I heard someone in the background yelling out to Pam.
“Oh, shoot,” she said. “Beverly says there is a foot coming out and she is still bleeding heavily.”
I grabbed my keys, wallet and hospital badge and I was running out to my garage.
“Well,” I said, “that makes our decision easy. Call a stat section now and I’ll be there in six minutes.” It was usually a ten-minute drive, but I had made the trip to the hospital in my Jaguar F-Type in under seven minutes many times. The cops in the area knew my vehicle and even if I were to run across one of them on my way to the hospital, they’d likely understand that I was speeding in order to get to the hospital quickly due to the fact that someone urgently needed my services. Cops can, oftentimes, tend to be difficult, but you have to give them credit when they look the other way when it’s appropriate.
As I sped to the hospital, I got Pam back on the phone and told her to type and crossmatch my patient for a blood transfusion. I made sure IV fluids were running wide open in order to keep her from going into hemorrhagic shock, which is bad for pregnant ladies, but is much worse for fetuses. She told me our on-call anesthesiologist, Tom Cooper, was in- house and should be arriving on the unit at any moment. She also let me know the nurses were moving the patient to the O.R., so I should go directly there upon my arrival. I told her to let Dr. Cooper know we needed him to prepare for a general anesthetic as there would not be time to have him place a spinal block.
By the time I arrived, which was exactly 9 minutes from the time of my 911 page, the patient was on the table in the O.R. and Dr. Cooper was pulling up his drugs. The surgical tech who had helped with the previous case had been called back in, but had not yet arrived, so I pulled the main instruments I needed to get the babies out. The patient was rapidly prepped and draped and, when given the go ahead by my anesthesiology colleague, I did my thing. Both fetuses were delivered in less than ninety seconds and they were both noted to be vigorous and pink. They would need specialty care in our Neonatal ICU, but they would both be just fine. After a blood transfusion of four units of packed red blood cells, Ms. was fine as well. Everyone worked well together, and we were able to pull off a win despite the set of bad circumstances which were unexpectedly thrust upon us in the middle of the freakin’ night.
Following the surgical case, I returned to the Labor and Delivery Unit in order to deliver the good news and thank the nurses for their excellent work expediting the C-section. Pam and Beverly were discussing the case when I arrived.
“So, he punched her in her pregnant belly?” Pam asked her colleague. “What an asshole! He’d better not show up here.”
“Who punched who?” I asked, as I approached their workspace.
“Ms. Morgan’s husband, or baby daddy or whatever. He hit her because she was asking him why he’d gotten home so late. Right after that is when she started bleeding and hurting. She was screaming about it when she got here and telling us that she wanted him arrested if he showed up. Apparently, this is not the first time he’s hit her. Of course, we didn’t have much time to go into details once we saw what we were dealing with.”
“You’re kidding!” I replied. ”I’ve seen him a bunch of times at her appointments and he seems like a really nice dude. I wouldn’t have thought he was the type to beat up his wife.”
I was taken aback, and thinking What the fuck is going on in this world? We had just found out about Brandon abusing Ryan and here I was finding out about this patient, who I thought I knew pretty well, who was putting up with abusive behavior from her husband. The fact that this patient of mine, had she not gotten to the hospital expeditiously, could have lost her twins and even have bled to death herself, reconfirmed to me how much jeopardy Ryan was in.
“Let me know if that piece of shit shows up. I’d like to confront him and tell him how he almost killed his babies.” I just hope he gets up in my face and I’m forced to physically restrain him. My adrenaline is still pumping from the stat section and I think I’d truly enjoy making him eat the carpet while I sit on him until the cops get here. I thought to myself.
“Don’t worry,” Beverly said, “we’d love to see that too, so we’ll definitely call you if he shows.”
I went to the doctors’ lounge, where I dictated the operative report for the case and entered my post-operative orders into the electronic medical record. When I was finished working, I was still wired up, so I scavenged the lounge for a snack and got a cup of coffee. At this point, it was about a half hour until dawn, so I knew I would not be climbing into bed when I got home. Rather, I’d be jumping into the shower and preparing to head to the office, so there was no reason to hurry home, as there would b
e no additional rest to be gained by hurrying. Besides that, I wanted to hang around a little longer to see if Ms. Morgan’s husband showed up. I wasn’t sure what type of interaction I’d have with him if and when he arrived, but I wanted to make sure the L&D nurses had some backup if he did. I suspected he wouldn’t show, however, based on the fact that Ms. Morgan seemed ready to file charges against him. I just knew he’d be lying low trying to figure out a story that might cast doubt on his wife’s version of what happened in order to keep his ass out of jail.
As I sat on the couch and tried to focus on the Fox 4 Morning News that was playing on the flat screen television mounted on the wall, my mind kept picturing a scenario where a pregnant female was arguing with her significant other. As the movie played out in my mind the guy, who was much bigger and stronger than the pregnant woman, scowled as he looked down into the face of the mother of his unborn child. They were having an argument and the dialogue was increasingly heated.
I could see the guy getting increasingly agitated as she yelled at him. The female character in my fantasy, was much smaller than her ape of a husband, but her belly was distended the size of a soccer ball. Her criticisms of him became increasingly venomous and as he tried to turn away from her to show his disinterest in her point of view, she stepped into his path and prevented him from ignoring her. His ego was threatened, and he began to think, I can’t let this bitch talk to me like this. As the tension mounted, he realized his own insults and accusations were not having the intended effect on her. She didn’t even seem to absorb what he was saying, but her words were like pricks from a needle and cumulatively, they were increasingly injurious. He wanted the fight to be over, but he couldn’t let himself be seen as weaker than his mate, so he pushed her and told her to shut her goddamn mouth, thinking a threat of physical violence would convince her she needed to walk away. Maybe she came back at him and hurled more caustic language at him, or maybe she just looked at him with disgust. Either way, his temper reached its breaking point and he could no longer suppress his urge to hurt her physically. He wanted to punch or slap her in the face, but he knew such a blow will leave a bloody nose, a black eye, a split lip, or some other damage that would scream out to the world he had hit her.
At that moment, within his mind, a transformation occurred. He no longer saw his wife in front of him. Instead, he saw an enemy—an enemy who was trying to hurt him and take away his manhood. He needed to put this disobedient, back-talking threat to his self-esteem right back in her place. He’d restrained himself from striking her in the face, so he had to find another target. Without thinking of the possible consequences to his own child, he focused on her large, protuberant belly. He knew that, hardwired into her just like with every female animal on the planet, the one thing she valued more than her own safety was the safety of her offspring. The best way to really hurt her was by striking her in the abdomen, so she would not only feel physical pain, but she’d experience the terror of an attack on her baby. He stepped forward and punched her in the belly.
The image in my mind was sickening. As I allowed this story to play itself out in my mind several times, the faces of the characters changed. Initially, the female was my patient, Ms. Morgan, and her assailant was her husband. However, the faces changed as I reimagined several different scenarios, each with somewhat altered settings and circumstances.
By the time the dietary workers entered the lounge to stock the drawers and refrigerator with snacks and sodas—which startled me and brought me out of my trance—the players in my fantasy of domestic violence had morphed again. The characters in my story had become my own sweet daughter Ryan and her own abusive husband. When I saw him in my mind take a step aggressively toward her as she defiantly held her ground, I wanted to insert myself into the scene, where I would jump between them with a baseball bat in my hand. I knew, though, if such a scene were ever to play out between them, neither I or any other protector would be present, and she would have no defense against his aggression. She, like Ms. Morgan, would be powerless to protect herself and her unborn child. It struck me at that moment like a slap in the face. This was not just a fucked up fictional story I was imaging in my head, and it was not a projection of Ms. Morgan’s terrifying experience onto a child of mine. This was a premonition—vivid and clear. Even if the details were not the same as the ones in my imagined scenario, I knew in my heart Ryan would find herself in a similar situation one day. What I realized for the first time was when—not if—but when Brandon gave in to his rage and lashed out at his pregnant wife, he would be putting not only her life, but the life of my future grandchild, at risk.
I realized once again that the only way to keep Ryan from becoming the female lead in the fictional drama I had composed in my head was to eliminate the antagonist character from her life’s story once and for all. I decided when I got home from the hospital that morning, instead of preparing for a day in the office, I would cancel my scheduled patients for the day and figure out my plan for ridding Ryan—and the world—of Brandon.
As I exited the hospital, I cursed myself for not having my scheme hammered out in my head. It had been over a week since Hank and I had met at the Black Boar and committed to each other that we would move forward, and we would absolutely plan our crime down to the smallest detail in order to avoid failure or discovery. It had been a particularly busy week, but I still felt crappy about not having come up with the basic outline of our game plan.
Back in the parking garage, I approached my car. I was distracted by the thought that it would be interesting, sometime, to compare my average speed on my way to the hospital to my average speed leaving. How many times had I come racing into this parking garage in order to be present for a delivery which was coming sooner than expected? In fact, I was lucky I hadn’t had any close calls with pedestrians as I raced around the semi-blind corners of the parking garage in order to park as close as possible to the entrance. I remember thinking that day that I really needed to slow down before I committed vehicular homicide in the parking garage, as I didn’t think the hospital administration and staff would look favorably on this.
“Wait a second,” I said out loud to no one in particular. It immediately occurred to me that talking out loud to oneself in the doctors’ parking lot at 6am was not particularly cool, so I kept the rest of my thoughts unspoken.
A totally amazing idea was starting to take shape in my mind, so I stopped in my tracks and let the idea develop. Parking garage... Brandon... early morning workouts... underground and isolated from witnesses. Yeah, I thought, that’s where it’s going to take place. There’s a good chance that he’ll be alone in the garage. There are plenty of places to conceal ourselves as we case the place and as we lay in wait for him. I doubted that there would be surveillance cameras, but we’d be wearing disguises anyway. It was on a busy street with a lot of businesses around, so it would be relatively easy to become inconspicuous following the hit. I’m sure that anyone paying attention to him had noticed his flashy watch, so robbery would be a realistic motive. This would probably keep the police from digging too hard into Brandon’s personal life looking for a different reason for the assault. There were many details yet to be discovered and plotted out, but the parking garage where we’d run into Brandon seemed to be a perfect setting for what had to be done. I jumped in my car and headed home to prepare for a day of reconnaissance and strategizing.
Chapter 34
The first thing I needed was a disguise. Even during the time I would spend casing the areas in and around the parking garage, I would need to alter my appearance. I didn’t want to bump into or even be noticed by anyone I knew as I looked around. I certainly wouldn’t say that I knew a lot of people in the area, but you never know who is going to be eating at one of the local restaurants or patronizing one of the other businesses up and down Lemmon Avenue. Hell, even some of Lizzie’s co-workers had kind of gotten to know me and Mandy and would probably recognize me if they saw me loitering around the area.
Lemmon was also one of the main thoroughfares leading to Dallas Love Field, so it was conceivable that people I knew may be driving by or stopping to get gas on their way to the airport. The danger would be if someone I knew just happened to see me walking around the area, they might think “I wonder what he is up to. He is obviously not at a restaurant eating, working out at the boxing club, or filling up his car.” It would therefore be possible when such a person found out shortly thereafter my son-in-law was murdered, they might mention this coincidence to the cops. I needed to be completely off the list of possible suspects if I was to eliminate any risk of detection, which may or may not lead to prosecution. Even if I was only suspected in Brandon’s murder, my life could be just as fucked as my ass would be on the day that I would make my debut in the prison community. I liked my life, and I certainly had enjoyed the fact that my aforementioned ass had never been desecrated by an act of prison rape. I loved my daughter dearly and truly feared for her safety, but I was equally afraid if she even suspected my involvement in the murder of her husband, she would never forgive me, and I would lose her forever. With these likes, loves, and fears in mind, I knew I would be a fool to proceed with any plan to bring about Brandon’s untimely demise before Hank and I were able to generate a meticulous blueprint of the crime, taking every detail into account. We were going to come up with a scheme so detailed and circumspect, and we would execute it so flawlessly it would make Danny Ocean’s head spin. When the mission was complete, we would be able to breathe easily, knowing that nobody, including Ryan, could or would ever connect us with the terrible deed we had carried out.
*****
Mandy and I had thrown some major Halloween parties over the years and we had, in the back of our closet, a treasure trove of costumes and wigs. I had a Kurt Cobain wig that would be perfect for a ‘street thug’ costume I intended to wear as I wandered the areas in and around the parking garage looking for security cameras, ATM’s (each with their own camera), traffic cameras, etc., and mapping out the scene of the crime to be. To complete the outfit, I would wear one of several pairs of my jeans that I kept around to use while I did ‘dirty jobs’ around the house, an oversized pullover sweat top, and some old Chuck Taylor’s I hadn’t worn in forever. My arms would have to stay completely covered at all times in order to prevent anyone from seeing one of my tattoos.
Fatal Flaws Page 20