Gregg Hurwitz - Do No Harm

"Good," David said. "Now let's check for a pericardial tamponade." If the heart had sustained a trauma, which David guessed it had from the angle of the rebar, it was probably bleeding into the pericardium. And if the sac around the heart filled with blood, it would interfere with the heart's mechanism, preventing it from pumping effectively.

Someone banged into a rapid infuser and it nearly capsized.

"Where the hell is surgery?" Diane said. She readjusted her hand, and a soft sucking noise emerged from the wound.

"It's all right," David said. "Focus on the task."

Diane twisted her body so she could better maneuver her hand. "Got it! The pericardial sac is full and tense. The heart must've bled into it."

She removed her right hand to grab a tiny pair of scissors, picked up a pair of tongs with her left, and went back in with both.

"Okay," David said. "Grab the edge of the sac with the tongs and make a small vertical incision." He strained to look around her and saw blood spill into the chest. "Good. Now deliver the heart."

Her arm moving with exquisite care, she gripped the heart and pulled it out through the small incision, holding it in her hand. "It's beating," she said, ducking her head to see through the mess. "It's got a small hole."

"It's trying to push blood but can't. Put your thumb over the hole."

She adjusted her thumb, then turned and looked to David again. He held her gaze as they waited. Now that she'd plugged the heart's hole, blood should begin pumping more effectively. A nurse near the man's head looked up triumphantly. "I got a pulse!" A carotid pulse meant the blood pressure had just hit sixty.

"Me too!" another nurse exclaimed. "Femoral pulse!" The blood pressure had risen to seventy.

A wisp of hair fell across Diane's eyes, and she flicked it aside with a quick jerk of her head. Her lips were trembling ever so slightly-David was sure he was the only one who noticed. Her face had taken on the fervent, confounded cast of one in extreme grief or ecstasy. She held a man's beating heart in her hand, and her thumb plugging its hole was the only thing keeping him alive.

The junior surgeon jogged into the room. "Call OR," Diane said. "Tell 'em we're on our way."

The gurney took off with a lurch as Jill shoved it toward the door, several others grabbing for the connecting gear and making sure it moved with the body.

Keeping her thumb firmly pressed over the hole in the heart, Diane threw one leg over the man's body as she hopped on the gurney. David stepped back as the gurney and its attendant mob swung out into the hall and rattled along at an impromptu sprint, the junior surgeon barking orders, nurses dragging rapid infusers on IV poles, and Diane straddling the patient's unconscious body, her arm inside him, seeming to ride the entire mob like a cowboy.

Looking up across the bobbing heads and waving poles, she caught David's eye. She winked just as the gurney turned the corner, and he realized he was in love with her.

After checking that Clyde's composite was indeed being circulated through internal mail, David rode up to the fifth floor and entered the ICU ward. It was busier than the last time he'd visited Nancy, two days ago. A frail woman called out to him from a bed, wanting more morphine, and he smiled at her as he passed. "I'm sorry, ma'am, I don't work in this department, but I'll get the nurse for you."

The curtains were drawn in a tight oval around Nancy's bed, like a coffin pall. The rattle of the rings woke her. She turned her face, and he did his best not to let his horror show despite the fact that she couldn't see him. If shock found its way into his face, it would find its way into his voice.

If anything, she looked worse, her burns resolving into wounds even more horrifying for their permanence. In the six days since the attack, her hair had fallen out along the front of her crown, leaving her with a coarse fringe of ringlets around the sides and back of her head. The large bolster on her right cheek had dried and turned gray, and the skin around the edges had yellowed. David didn't have a plastic surgeon's eye, but he doubted that the graft would take. Between her other bolsters, her patchwork flesh shone red, slick with residual Silvadene. In the midst of it all, her two eyeballs perched inside their sockets, shrunken and sightless.

"Who is it?" she said weakly, her voice a tiny rasp. "Who's there?"

"It's David Spier."

"Oh. I don't want to see you. I heard what you did… that you helped him… and now he got away." Her head drifted slightly on the pillow, a dying motion. "How could you?"

"I didn't help him," David said. "I treated him."

She drew breath raggedly. "I don't want to see you."

"Okay," David said.

"Ever again."

"Okay."

David backed up quietly and pulled the curtain shut.

Diane was back from surgery by the time David got downstairs. She'd already changed into fresh scrubs when David entered the doctors' lounge.

"This morning's incident with Jenkins gave me an idea," he said.

She gathered her bloody scrubs from the floor. "If it's the handcuffs you're interested in, you'll have to buy me dinner first."

"Sadly, nothing so titillating. That patient we helped out who the cops wanted-?"

"Hell's Angel guy?"

"No. The guy Jenkins was yelling about. The bullet in the ass. What was ostensibly his name again?"

"Ed Pinkerton."

"Right." David went to his locker and withdrew the odd bookmark that Ed had left behind in the ER. It read: AMOK BOOKSTORE. THE EXTREMES OF INFORMATION.

David stopped at a bad taqueria and wolfed down a burrito he was certain would give him acute GI distress. Driving toward the Amok Bookstore, he glanced down at the bookmark, double-checking the address. Located in a downscale-trendy area of Los Feliz, the storefront was small and unassuming, and David drove right past it and had to backtrack when he hit Hollywood Boulevard.

The book Ed had been reading, Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance, implied that he'd be an asset in an effort to find someone. Plus, as an ex-con, he probably knew how to get done any number of things David could scarcely even name. He'd done Ed a favor, after all, and the man with the awkward flesh wound might be willing to point him in the right direction.

Even if Ed hadn't stolen his file, David would have had no way to get ahold of him without going out and tracking him down. David had not been surprised to find that he was unlisted-the only Ed Pinkerton in the area had turned out to be a ninety-year-old veteran of the Second World War-so he only had the bookmark to go on.

David parked at a broken meter in front of a shop that advertised inflatable sheep. He walked toward Amok, enjoying a small flare of pride at operating like a noir detective. Any notion of pride quickly vanished, however, when he entered and realized just how out of his league he was.

A twanging East Asian tune played over the speakers, interspersed with pleading in a foreign tongue and screams that David, who had heard a fair variety of screams at work each day, could not dismiss as staged. Wraiths of incense smoke curled in the air, dispersing, disappearing. The narrow store was lined with bookcases that displayed books cover-out, and a sinewy man in a leather vest leered across an old cash register at the front, tufts of grayish hair escaping from the V above the vest's buttons. Massive spiderweb tattoos worked their way up both his arms and clutched the balls of his shoulders. A bar pierced his septum, protruding a few centimeters beyond each nostril.

Several customers perused the shelves, indifferent to the ambient wailing. David pretended to do the same, though he could not shake the cashier's stare or the feeling that he'd been immediately recognized as an impostor. A book called Jugular Wine, positioned between Red Stains and the more respectable-looking Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, caught his attention. He flipped through a few pages with a sort of horrified interest, then lowered the book and risked a look around.