by Gary Braver
IN MEMORY OF ROBERT B. PARKER.
I MISS YOU, OLD FRIEND.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several people have helped me with technical matters in the writing of this book, and I would like to thank them for their generous time and expertise: Dr. James Stellar, provost of Queens College; Dr. James F. English, Mount Auburn Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Karen Zoeller, R.N., Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks also to Cathie Gould for her insights on spirituality.
One book that was indispensable in writing this novel is The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, edited by Lee W. Bailey and Jenny Yates (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Also, a special thanks to Kathy, Nathan, and “Diamond Dave” Goshgarian, my ace in the hole.
As ever, thanks to my editor, Natalia Aponte, and my faithful agent, Susan Crawford.
Lord, I do believe; help me in my unbelief.
—MARK 9:24
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
One
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Two
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Three
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Epilogue
Other Novels by Gary Braver
Copyright
ONE
PROLOGUE
THREE YEARS AGO
PLYMOUTH, MA
Karen Wells was at the computer behind the ER desk at Jordan Hospital when a call arrived in from an ambulance unit. It was nearly three A.M., and EMTs were bringing in an unidentified male about fifty years of age with minimal vital signs, possible cardiac arrest. She alerted the other nurses, the on-duty physician, Dr. Brian Kennedy, and two residents. They readied an empty cubicle specially equipped for cardiac patients.
It had otherwise been a slow night—a couple of victims of minor accidents, a drug overdose, a sprained foot, an elderly woman being treated for acute diarrhea—atypical for a Saturday night in spring. Just two weeks ago the place was bedlam, with a packed waiting room and patients from infants to seniors in various states of distress. The ward was so quiet, it was almost spooky. So the possible cardiac would get fast and full attention.
Within seven minutes of the call, two paramedics burst into the ER with a man unconscious on a stretcher in full CPR mode. They rolled him into the bay, where the resuscitation team transferred him to a bed, intubated him in seconds, and wired his chest to an EKG machine.
“Come on, guy. Hang in there,” the EMT said, still performing CPR.
Karen hooked him up to a blood pressure cuff while another nurse inserted an IV to his arm. “Shit. Seventy over palp.”
“I can’t get a pulse,” said Barbara, another nurse.
The EKG showed agonal rhythm—slow, irregular complexes often seen as the heart dies.
“Come back to me, buddy!” the EMT shouted.
“Paddles!” Dr. Kennedy said.
Instantly, they slammed his chest with four thousand volts. The body lurched upward, but still no regular heartbeat, no pulse. Nothing.
They continued pumping and paddling the man until it was clear they could get no electromechanical activity at all. Dr. Kennedy then jammed a cardiac needle of epinephrine between the man’s third and fourth rib and directly into the heart. No response.
They continued the CPR, and the doctor called for another intercardiac injection. Karen pushed a second needle back into the right ventricle of the man’s heart and depressed the plunger, sending another bolt of epinephrine into him.
Again, nothing. No crisp spikes on the EKG. No pulse. No obtainable blood pressure. Respiration negligible. Body temperature was eighty-two. His skin had assumed the bluish, mottled look of a dead man.
“Was he this cold when you found him?”
“Yeah.”
“Was he breathing?”
“Hard to tell. His BP was seventy over palp, but he had a pulse. I swear.”
“Well, he hasn’t got one now,” Karen said.
“We worked on him all the way over.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Some kids spotted him on the side of a road near White Cliffs and called 911, and we got the dispatch.”
“Any booze containers or drugs with him?”
“Not that we found. But he looks like street.”
It was the face of dozens of others she had treated over the years—weathered maps of lives gone amok—fiftyish, unshaven, mottled skin, pupils dilated, eyes bloodshot. A face interchangeable with chronic druggies and alcoholics. He was dressed in black pants that looked relatively new. His top had been removed by the EMTs and sat in a belongings bag. His feet were bare and raw.
She could find no needle tracks in his arm. However, on the back of his right hand was a pinprick over a vein. “Looks like he injected himself.”
“That, or he’d been hooked up to an IV line.”
No, he looked like heroin to Karen. His skin resembled gray Naugahyde and was covered with scabs and nicks, as if insects had feasted on him while he was exposed to the elements.
“He’s gone,” Kennedy said. “Time of death … three twenty-five.”
Kennedy left, and they unhooked the man from the monitors. As Karen put away the equipment, she barely registered how jaded she had become to dead people. In her seventeen years in ER, she had seen every manner of death that could claim human beings—cardiac arrest, drowning, domestic abuse, gang shootings, drug o
verdoses, stabbings, fire, mangling car crashes—people alive but so disfigured that you had to check for limbs to be certain the carnage was human. When she was in her twenties, it had been much harder to detach herself from the blunt reality of death—to view the dead not as human beings but as bodies, husks of whom they had been. She would look at victims and think that not too long ago they were living, breathing, thinking entities, animated, ensouled with whatever it was that defined life. And now they were tissue, organs, and bone in the process of decaying.
As consolation, she told herself that the real person had departed, gone to a better place where the suffering had ended. But even after seventeen years of ER nursing, it saddened her when the victim was young—even this guy, who died far short of his three score and ten. Sadder still that he had no identity, no name she could put on the toe tag.
She and Barbara cleaned him up. They put his shoes and shirt into a belongings bag and laid the bag on his thighs. They disconnected his monitors and left in the IV, the arterial lines, and the intubation tube for postmortem confirmation that nothing they did in the ER had caused his death.
Because only a physician could legally pronounce a patient’s death, Karen left to check her other patients. When she returned, Dr. Kennedy had completed the death certificate. The official time was listed as “3:25 A.M.” Karen entered the data into the computer. Later, the body would be delivered to the medical examiner’s office, where it would be held until identified and autopsied.
Karen prepared the toe tag and headed into cubicle four, where their John Doe had been left on the gurney. The gurney was still there and the lines were still connected to the IV and monitors, but the body was gone.
Karen shot out to the desk. “Where’s the dead guy in four?”
Barbara looked up from her paperwork. “Huh?”
“The John Doe. He’s gone. Did someone move him?”
“No. What are you talking about?”
Barbara shot down the hall with Karen to find the other nurses. Nobody had moved the man. And Dr. Kennedy said he hadn’t touched the body. The same with the orderlies. “Who would have taken him?”
“You think somebody took him?” Barbara asked.
“Well, he didn’t walk out on his own. Somebody stole him.”
Karen ran to the reception desk in the emergency room lobby. The waiting area was empty, and the desk attendant had just returned from the restroom and had seen no one wheel out a body.
Karen buzzed security, and in seconds a guard showed up. “We’ve got a missing body,” she said, and explained what had happened.
“Who the hell would steal a corpse?” the guard said.
“That’s my question.” Then Karen went into the nurses’ office, where the video security system was stored. She typed in “3:20 A.M.” and hit the playback button.
The image was a long shot of the row of cardiac bays. At 3:27, Dr. Kennedy left cubicle four. Two minutes later, Barbara and Karen left as they checked patients in adjacent cubicles. Then Karen headed down the corridor to the nurses’ station to enter the dead man’s data into the computer. There was no other activity until the digital clock said 3:43 A.M., when a man emerged from cubicle four.
It was the dead man—Karen’s John Doe, his toe tag in her pocket—still naked from the waist up, still barefoot, EKG electrodes still visible on his chest—shuffling down the empty corridor toward the exit with no pulse, no heartbeat, no blood pressure, no body functions, flatlined and moving on his own power.
Karen watched and bit down on a scream.
1
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, THE PRESENT
“Thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
“You did. Two jacks staring at you from Anthony’s hand, and you draw another. Don’t you believe in counting?” Damian said. “Bro, you take some wild-ass risks.”
“But I won,” Zack said.
“Yeah, on pure luck. ’Least you don’t have to play beer money for a while.”
“More like blood money. Found a clinic that pays thirty bucks a pint.”
“You mean you’re selling your blood?”
“I’m down thirty-six hundred on my Discover card, and they’re threatening court action.”
“Maybe you should stop gambling.”
It was a little after one in the morning, and a mantle of clouds made a hefty underbelly in the Boston sky. Although it was midwinter, the temperature was above freezing, and the streets were free of snow. Zack Kashian was heading to his bike, chained at a light pole near where Damian Santoro had parked his car. They had just left a friend’s apartment where a Texas hold ’em game was still going on. After four hours, Zack had drawn a high-win hand—a full house, queens over jacks—and walked away with a $300-plus pot that put him in the black for the night.
“What about your mother?” Damian said.
“She thinks I’ve got a gambling problem.”
“And she refuses to support it.”
“Except I don’t have a gambling problem. I’ve got a losing problem.”
They crossed Tremont Street to his bike. Zack’s apartment was on Hemenway on the other side of Northeastern University’s campus. Because it was so close, he didn’t bother with his helmet, just a knitted cap. He unchained his bike and rolled it to Damian’s car.
“Whatever, get some sleep,” Damian said.
Zack patted his breast pocket. “And on Anthony. He sold me half his Lunesta.”
“Maybe you do have a gambling problem.”
“I’m not sleeping because I’ve got debts up the grunt, not because I’m gambling.”
“That’s nuts. You’re borrowing to pay down your debt. And now you’re selling your blood. I’m telling you, man, you might want to get off those online games. That stuff’s dangerous.”
Zack put out his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Phil. Or is it Father Damian?”
Damian took it. “You know what you need?”
“No, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“You need to consider finding God again.”
“I never found Him to begin with.”
“Then the first time. It doesn’t have to be a church. Just go where you can find enlightenment, some kind of spiritual enrichment.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You won’t, but I wish you would. I’m visiting a Buddhist temple on Sunday. You’re welcome to come.”
Damian was a devout Christian who went to different churches in Greater Boston each week. Sometimes even non-Christian places of worship. “I’ve got another commitment.”
“Yeah, the God grumblers.”
He meant the Secular Humanist Society Zack belonged to. “We’re not God grumblers, man. We don’t sit around making fun of religions. We’re planning an outing to the Museum of Science for inner-city kids. If there’s a God, He’d approve.” They had met as roommates in their freshman year at Northeastern. Despite the fact that Zack was an unapologetic atheist, they were still fast friends, held together in part by sniping each other’s dogmatism.
“Whatever, you’re too much the rationalist. You need enlightenment.”
“Would Foxwoods qualify?”
“A casino’s the last thing you need.” Damian gave him a hug and drove off as Zack began pedaling home.
Zack had never been to a casino. He preferred home games and the poker Web sites. Perhaps a little too much. Some weeks he’d rack up thirty hours, missing classes and staying up all night, running three and four hands at once. Yes, he made money because he played low-ante games—$25 buy-ins. He’d often win, but it took hours to amass a decent haul. With his face buried in a flash poker site, an easy seduction was an occasional $250 buy-in or a $500 game. And each time he felt the rush that came with laying money on the next card, telling himself that his time was now. But that was the problem: getting into a twilight zone of your own adrenaline, convinced of beating the odds. Unlike at table games, online you can’t read faces. Instead, you’re locked in a cubby with a
dark goddess and no good sense. And his debt to friends, bank, and credit card was what he had to show for it. Maybe Damian was right.
You’re a congenital screwup, pal. Twenty-four years old and going on fourteen.
Zack glanced up at the sky, wishing he had a father he could call for advice. He dismissed the thought and turned up Ruggles Street, thinking that tomorrow he’d head to Mass General Hospital’s blood bank, hoping they didn’t screen for poker.
His apartment was only a few blocks away off Huntington Avenue. But a cold drizzle began falling and chilling his face. Another few degrees and the road would be a skim of ice. As he pumped his way onto the avenue, he felt the wad of bills slide up his pocket. With his right hand he pushed down the lump to keep it from working its way out. But doing so left only his other hand to steady the handlebars against an uneven, slick surface.
In a protracted moment, Zack saw the fatal error. His front tire slammed into the jagged edge of a pothole. In the next instant—played out in weird slow motion—the front wheel snapped to the left, sending him flying over the handlebars and coming down dead smack on the top of his head into the base of the crosswalk lights.
In a fraction of a second, Zack was suddenly looking down from someplace above, seeing himself lying crumpled across the curb with his head at the base of the pole and his bike on its side, the front wheel at a crazy angle. In that sliver of awareness, he knew he was viewing things from an impossible perspective. And just as he tried to make sense of it, the moment blinked to total black.
2
Maggie Kashian was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang.
She jerked awake. The digital clock glowed 3:28 A.M. Panic filled her chest. No call after midnight was a good call. Not since that night thirteen years ago when she was told that her firstborn son, Jake, had been murdered by two homophobic thugs.
Please, make this a wrong number, she begged the dark as she reached for the phone.
“Mrs. Kashian?”
“Yes?”
“Are you the mother of Zachary Kashian?”
She felt an ice pick pierce her heart. “Yes.”