‘No, I have not heard of this.’
Caroline Difley looked angry. ‘Aleksandar is the best person I know at the hospital. He’s also one of the smartest. Don’t accuse him. Don’t even suggest—’
Kovacic gave Kelson a broad, confused look. ‘Do you accuse me?’
‘I’m just paying attention,’ Kelson said. ‘I’m not accusing anyone. I’m only starting to think there’s anything to accuse someone of.’
The orderly said, ‘Aleksandar could get in a lot of trouble for helping me – and you.’
Kelson acknowledged that with a nod.
‘We could both lose our jobs,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘It is nothing,’ Kovacic said.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a lot.’
After they paid their bills, they stepped outside together. An icy breeze blew down Lincoln Avenue. Kovacic wore a thick wool shirt but no sweater or coat.
‘You need a ride?’ Kelson said.
Kovacic shook his head. He didn’t look at all cold. ‘I live near here. By the Rosehill Cemetery. I like to walk in the cemetery before I go to work. I – what is your word? I commune with the people.’
‘Sounds cold,’ Kelson said. ‘Do you have a friend or family there?’
Kovacic gave him a funny look. ‘Why would I?’
‘You commune with dead strangers?’
‘The dead are never strangers,’ Kovacic said.
NINETEEN
Kelson drove back to Clement Memorial talking to himself about Aleksandar Kovacic, epinephrine, lamb borek, angel-of-death killings, and the big black chunks of smoked beef called suho meso hanging from strings behind Kiko’s meat counter. ‘You could dangle it from a tree to catch a grizzly,’ he said.
The hospital complex was mostly concrete and glass, built at a bend in the Chicago River. A circular helipad rose on spiderlike legs from the roof of the central building. Eight floors down, a circular drive led to a parking garage, the ER, and the main hospital entrance. In the middle of the drive, a fountain jetted water in the summer and sat empty the rest of the year.
Kelson cut from the drive into the parking garage, took a spot marked for families of patients, and walked the halls to the information desk.
‘No,’ the attendant said after calling the ICU, Dr Jacobson wasn’t available. ‘No,’ Dr Madani wasn’t either.
Kelson took the elevator to Jacobson’s office anyway.
When he knocked, no one answered.
So he tried the knob – and the door opened.
Jeremy Jacobson sat at his desk, reviewing a chart. He had earbuds in his fleshy ears, and for a moment seemed lost in whatever he was listening to. Then he looked up, alarmed, and tugged the earbuds off. Before he could say anything, Kelson stepped inside and said, ‘Epinephrine.’
‘I’m – what?’
‘Thirty-five vials missing since last summer.’
‘What—?’
‘Do the math.’ Kelson closed the door.
‘I’m sorry – I don’t understand. Missing from where? And what are you doing here?’
‘Medical supply. Missing from the hospital.’
‘You know this, how?’
‘Confidential sources – Caroline Difley and Aleksandar Kovacic.’ He caught his breath. ‘Dammit.’
Jacobson stared at Kelson. ‘I honestly don’t know what to make of you, Mr Kelson. We released you. We discharged you. We judged you well enough to send you home. And yet, you return day after day. There’s really nothing more we can do for you.’
‘Epinephrine.’
‘I heard you the first time. And, like the first time, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with that.’
‘Patricia Ruddig, Josh Templeton, and Daryl Vaughn all died in ways that could have been caused by overdoses of epinephrine.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ the doctor said. He looked at his earbuds as if they might have an answer to the problem Kelson presented. ‘Do you know what the most common cause of death from epinephrine is?’
‘Heart attack?’
‘Not even close. It’s something you may know a little about after your brain trauma. It’s cerebral hemorrhage.’
‘Huh,’ Kelson said.
Jacobson looped the cord on the earbuds and laid the coil on the chart. ‘It used to be when new medical students toured the hospital, we asked them to diagnose patients after giving them a little information. The smartest and the least intelligent among them were quickest to offer their opinions. They were almost always wrong, the smart ones as often as the unintelligent ones. They drew conclusions too fast from too little information and after too little training. The smart ones would eventually learn better. The others failed out or, if they hung on and earned a degree, became incompetent and dangerous doctors. I emphasize the word dangerous. Now – and this is how what I’m telling you applies to you – it’s not only the new doctors. It’s everyone with access to the Internet, which is to say, nearly everyone. Smart people and dumb people think they know better than trained physicians. The smart ones eventually learn better. The dumb ones behave irresponsibly, even dangerously. They leap to conclusions. These conclusions can harm themselves and others.’
‘Huh,’ Kelson said again.
‘Which are you, Mr Kelson – smart or dumb?’
‘So you’re saying heart attacks, asphyxiation, and kidney failure can’t happen with epinephrine?’
‘I’m afraid that was the wrong answer,’ Jacobson said. ‘I run a very busy part of this hospital. I don’t have time to educate the uneducable.’
‘Which is your way of saying all those things can happen.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Kelson. I’d prefer you leave on your own instead of making me call security.’
‘You mean, your son, Rick.’
‘Rick doesn’t tend to small problems. I’m sure he would send an assistant.’
‘No need to bother,’ Kelson said. ‘But I was hoping you’d be concerned about what I told you.’
The doctor sighed. ‘I don’t mean to be harsh. I appreciate your concern’ – he smiled, a little – ‘at a certain level. But you must understand. You barge into my office. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You insinuate that on my watch—’
‘I’m not insinuating.’
‘You are insinuating.’ He eyed Kelson as if he knew more about him than Kelson wanted him to know. He gave him more of the smile. ‘Sometimes when one’s life has …’ He hesitated. ‘What I’m saying is I sympathize. I understand what it means to fall into the deep end, better than you might guess. But you also need to understand, the way to get out isn’t by pulling others under with you.’
‘You have a great smile,’ Kelson said. ‘Sympathetic.’
Jacobson looked unsure what to do. ‘Goodbye, Mr Kelson.’
‘You managed to duck my questions.’
‘Perhaps there were no answers,’ the doctor said. ‘Perhaps next time, before you walk uninvited into a man’s office, you should think about what you want to know more thoroughly.’
Two hours later, as Kelson sat in his own office with his KelTec and Springfield on the desktop, his phone rang.
He answered, and Caroline Difley said, ‘What did you say to him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What did you do? Aleksandar and I just got fired.’
‘Dammit,’ Kelson said, ‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘You didn’t mean to? You just wrecked my life. And Aleksandar – do you know what he’s been through? Do you know what you did to him?’
‘I’m sorry – I couldn’t help it.’
‘No.’ She sounded as if only her anger kept her from crying. ‘That was unforgivable.’ She hung up.
‘Dammit, dammit, dammit,’ Kelson said. He hated nothing more than hurting people who loved him or did him good.
He drove home in the middle of the afternoon. He let himself into the apartment, went into the bathroom, and strippe
d off his clothes. He stared at the naked man in the mirror.
Then he peeled back the adhesive tape from the edges of the bandage on his arm.
His arm was bruised and bloody and stained with antiseptic. His guilt over Caroline Difley and Aleksandar Kovacic hurt more than the gunshot wound.
He bent and straightened his fingers. ‘The feeling is mostly back,’ he told his reflection. He bent and straightened his elbow. The motion tugged at his sutures. ‘Tingling. A little pain.’ Payday came into the bathroom, leaped on to the closed toilet seat, and watched him.
He wet a bath towel in the sink and washed the wounds on both sides of his arm. When the blood crust was gone from the surrounding skin, he dabbed the wounds until pink showed through the scabs. He stared at the mirror and let his arm dry. Then he bandaged himself with pads of cotton gauze and wrapped a strip of medical tape around them.
He pulled on his underwear and pants. Before putting on a T-shirt, he stared at his reflection. Blood showed on the cotton pads. ‘Good for you, you bastard,’ he said. ‘Two down – how many to go?’ He put on the T-shirt and a sweater.
Then he went down to the lobby and out into the cold. The sun hung bright in the winter sky. He went to his car, drove south through the city and, a half-hour later, pulled into the alley between the Ebenezer Baptist Church and DeMarcus Rodman’s building.
TWENTY
Rodman’s girlfriend Cindi gave Kelson a cup of tea. ‘You’re shivering, baby,’ she said.
‘I’m not cold.’ He sat on the couch under the portraits of Malcolm X, Cindi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
‘That’s worse,’ she said. When he knocked at the door fifteen minutes earlier, she told him, ‘DeMarcus is on a job with Marty LeCoeur – won’t be back until midnight.’ But she saw something in his eyes and invited him in. Now she said, ‘I go to work in an hour. You can stay as long as you want, you know that, but maybe you should be with someone when you feel this way.’
‘I’m all right,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen all right, and you aren’t it.’
Cindi worked in maternity at Rush University Hospital. Lately they had her in neonatal with the preemies. She taped snapshots of the tiniest of them on the fridge. The babies were hooked to sensors and monitors, as helpless as chicks in incubators.
‘I’m hoping you can do something for me,’ Kelson said. ‘I know a couple people who just got fired from hospital jobs. Could you put in a word for them at Rush?’
‘What kind of jobs?’
‘She was an ICU orderly. He was head custodian.’
‘Kind of out of my area. What did they do to get fired?’
‘Nothing,’ Kelson said. ‘I did it.’
She didn’t look surprised. ‘Are you sure they want you to do them any more favors?’
‘I hate when I do this.’
‘You can’t help yourself, though, right?’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’
‘Whose is it? It shakes me. I hurt people.’
‘Sure, but you do it while trying to do good.’
‘Does that make a difference?’
‘I guess it’s better than trying to hurt them.’
For the next forty minutes, he told her the whole thing, from Jose Feliciano’s belief that something terrible was happening at Clement Memorial, to the visits to Patricia Ruddig’s and Josh Templeton’s homes, to the conversation with Caroline Difley and Aleksandar Kovacic at Kiko’s. He said, ‘After I betrayed them, Jeremy Jacobson treated me like a sorry fool, which is what I deserved.’
Cindi never interrupted. Now she said, ‘Good doctors go to the most likely cause first. Usually they’re right, and to look in any other direction would be bad medicine. But sometimes, the most likely cause isn’t the real cause. Then they need to keep poking at a problem until they get it.’
‘You’re saying you think Jacobson screwed up?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m saying he did what he’s supposed to do – he went to the obvious answer. But that doesn’t mean the obvious one is the right one. Still, he’d be stupid to do anything else.’
‘And me?’
‘You’d be stupid to accept his answer if you think it’s wrong.’
‘He had a story about dumbasses like me jumping to conclusions.’
‘He’s wrong about that. You say a lot of stupid stuff – stuff you should keep to yourself – but when it comes down to it, you do the smart thing.’
Kelson thought about that. ‘Have you heard about how I got banned from Big Pie Pizza for dancing naked on a table?’
‘Most of the time, you do the smart thing.’ She stood up. ‘I’ve got to go. You want to hang out and wait for DeMarcus?’
Kelson stood too. ‘I’ll walk down with you.’
‘If this woman and the custodian want, you can have them call me. I’ll put them in touch with HR.’
‘Thanks, Cindi,’ he said. ‘I’ll spend an hour with you anytime.’
Kelson drove back through downtown. Cars, buses, and trucks – filthy with the spray of road salt and the greasy crud of winter – inched through the rush-hour streets. The sky was dark now, and the pavement glowed orange under the streetlights. ‘Could be better,’ Kelson said as he jammed the brakes to keep from rear-ending a van that stopped short of an intersection. Talking with Cindi had helped, but he still felt rotten.
He drove past his apartment building. ‘I should be with someone,’ he said. ‘As if that ever mattered.’
The front porch lights were on at Nancy’s house. ‘As if she …’ he said, and angled his car to the curb, walked up the front path, and rang the bell.
When Nancy opened the door, she seemed confused.
‘Thought I’d stop by,’ he said.
‘You know you need to call first.’ She gave him a second look. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Daad.’ Sue Ellen ran from the kitchen.
Nancy spoke under her breath. ‘Always call first.’ She opened the door and let him in.
Sue Ellen saw he had both arms through his coat sleeves – and so she leaped.
He caught her with his good arm. ‘I needed that,’ he said.
‘You,’ Nancy said to her, ‘are way too big to do that.’
Sue Ellen grinned at Kelson. ‘I’m exponentially big.’
‘Good math,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ Nancy said. ‘That’s a complete misuse of the term.’
‘I’m rationally irrationally too big,’ Sue Ellen said.
‘Works for me,’ Kelson said.
‘What do you need, Sam?’ Nancy asked.
He lowered Sue Ellen to the floor. ‘I was hoping we all might have dinner together.’
‘Yes,’ Sue Ellen said.
‘You came, hoping I would feed you?’ Nancy said.
‘No – well, I guess, kind of. I thought it would be nice.’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Not nice. Not nice to come without calling. Not nice to create false expectations.’
‘She means me,’ Sue Ellen said.
‘Of course I mean you,’ Nancy said.
‘What false expectations?’ Kelson said. ‘I came because I had a hard day, and I thought—’
‘You need to take your hard days elsewhere,’ she said. ‘That’s the nature of – this.’
‘She means being divorced,’ Sue Ellen said.
Nancy shot her a warning look, then said to Kelson, ‘Don’t you get that?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I get it.’
‘Mom?’ Sue Ellen gave Nancy a look of her own.
‘I’ll go,’ Kelson said.
‘Mom?’ Sue Ellen said. Nancy would suffer repercussions.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Nancy said. ‘Stay.’
‘No,’ Kelson said, ‘I’ll—’
‘Goddammit, you’ll stay for dinner,’ she said. ‘If you think you can set me up this way and then leave, you’re wrong.’
Kelson stayed for dinner. He sat at one end of the table, Nancy at the other. Sue El
len sat between them and acted as if they did this all the time.
Nancy knew better than to ask Kelson about his troubles. He told her about them anyway.
Then Sue Ellen said, ‘What do you get if you teach a Vietnamese potbelly pig to lift weights?’
‘Extra-strength bacon?’ Kelson said.
She shook her head. ‘Arnold Schwarzepigger.’
‘You made that up,’ Kelson said.
‘What do you get if you cross a potbelly with an eighteen wheeler?’ she said.
‘Stop,’ Nancy said.
‘An oinker trailer,’ Sue Ellen said.
Kelson and Nancy looked at her, blank faced.
Sue Ellen rolled her eyes. ‘Like a tanker trailer?’
‘I’ll bet it’s a road hog,’ Kelson said.
‘No dessert for anyone who says another word,’ Nancy said.
Sue Ellen and Kelson both missed dessert.
When Sue Ellen went upstairs to do her homework, Kelson put on his coat and hat. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That meant a lot to me.’
‘Let’s not make a habit of it,’ Nancy said. But she added, ‘It was nice. Sue Ellen liked it.’
‘Yeah,’ Kelson said. ‘Me too. I loved it.’
‘We won’t start that talk again,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t – I just meant I liked it. No, I loved it. It. I know we can’t have it.’
Nancy looked exhausted. ‘Maybe now and then, we could. Not often. Dinner.’
‘Yeah,’ Kelson said. ‘Dinner. Why not?’
‘Now and then. For Sue Ellen.’
Kelson wanted to kiss her. ‘It would be a terrible idea,’ he said.
Nancy looked confused. ‘Dinner would?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘dinner would be great. Whenever. Wherever.’ He rushed out into the cold night.
As he drove back to his apartment, he glanced in the mirror. His face smiled back. ‘You son of a bitch,’ he told it. But by the time he pulled into the parking lot behind his building, the letdown started. ‘Never could,’ he said. ‘Not even now and then – because it’s the time between that matters.’
He drove slowly over the icy pavement, turned at the end of a row, and slid his car into his space. For a minute, he left the engine running. He stared up through the dark windshield. He saw no moon. He saw no stars. ‘For better or worse,’ he said.
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