Michael Palmer - The Society

“Listen, we know all about you and Sergeant Moriarity making dirty together.”

Will nearly leapt at him.

“We’re grown-ups,” he managed.

“Fuckups would be a better way to put it. She’s in a coma, Grant, so rushing over there won’t make any difference.”

“Neither will talking to you,” Will snapped.

Before Court could react, Will sprang up and raced out the door.

“Get back here!” he heard the detective shout. “Dammit, Grant, this is a murder case!”

Half expecting to hear a gunshot from behind him, Will raced across the parking lot and scrambled into his Jeep.

“I knew it,” he said out loud to himself. “I knew something had happened to her.”

He screeched into a U-turn and sped out of the parking lot.

Moments later, a dark-blue Mercury sedan pulled out from between two parked cars and followed at a professional distance.

As usual, the main parking lot at Fredrickston General was full, as were the two rows reserved for physicians. Will finally found a place on the street a block away. He entered through the main lobby and, eyes down, melted into the crowd and carefully skirted the lone security guard on duty. Even though the clothing bag and OR shoes had been found, it was unlikely Sid Silverman would lift his ban at the hospital until he absolutely had to.

Like Brasco, Court, and so many others, Silverman had formed his opinion of Will’s guilt much quicker than he would ever let it go. Even if the insoles of the red Chuck Taylors were as loaded with fentanyl as Will and Micelli expected them to be, it was likely that many of his detractors would still believe he was somehow responsible. As he hurried up to the ICU, he wondered about those inmates who were awaiting execution on death row in so many states, all the while knowing that they were innocent.

As he entered the unit, Will could see a crowd gathered in cubicle 1. For an instant he thought there was a code blue in progress, but the lack of frantic movement suggested otherwise. Then, over at the bedside, he saw Peter Ng, the slope-shouldered neurosurgeon who for several years had been a member of the Hippocrates Society, albeit not a very active one.

“That Detective Moriarity in One?” he asked the nearest nurse.

“Yes, but, Dr. Grant, we have instructions that-”

“The ban’s been lifted. Besides, she’s a relative.”

Without waiting for her response, he walked confidently past and into the glass-enclosed room. Ng, watched by two nurses, a resident, and a couple of medical students, was peering through an ophthalmoscope, examining the arteries, veins, and optic nerves inside Patty’s eyes.

To the left of the bed, on the X-ray view box, were two films-one showing a panel of CT images, and the other a pre-op side view of Patty’s skull. Even from ten feet away, Will could see the fracture-a jagged, three-inch crack, dark against the white of bone. The CT scan, obviously taken before surgery, showed a rather large collection of blood beneath the area of the fracture.

Unwilling to push to the front of the group, Will peered over the shoulder of one of the med students. Hunched over Patty, Ng was blocking some of his view, but he could still discern that she was motionless and connected by a breathing tube to a ventilator, much as he had been at the beginning of this nightmare.

“I am looking for any blurring of the margins of the optic nerves,” Ng was saying, “and also a loss of the slight pulsations in the veins-not the arteries, but the veins. Either of these findings would be a warning of the buildup of pressure within her skull that would signify brain swelling. At the moment I see no signs of trouble, but I’m going to keep her on steroids just in case. If she remains stable for the next four hours, we’ll pull the breathing tube. How she does from here on out will depend on how long this coma lasts.”

Ng dictated a set of revised orders, which his resident dutifully wrote down. Then he stepped back from the bed and noticed Will. Gratefully, there was nothing in the neurosurgeon’s face to suggest that anything had changed in their always-cordial relationship.

“Got a minute, Peter?”

“Of course. Go ahead, everyone. I’ll meet you all in the hall.” He waited, then turned to Will. “Gosh, it’s good to see you. You all right?”

His concern was genuine. To his left, Will could see more fully the battering Patty had taken. The entire side of her face was contused and swollen. From this angle, she bore little resemblance to the woman who had made such sweet love with him.

“I’m all right,” he said flatly. “Someone set up that drug thing. I still don’t know who or why, but I’m going to find out. It’s been hell, but there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.”

“I’m glad to hear that. You know this woman?”

“She’s a good friend.”

“Well, she should do all right, but I confess I am a bit worried about why she hasn’t woken up.”

Ng reviewed the circumstances of her injury but couldn’t supply any details of why she had been at Camp Sunshine or who the fellow officer was whose life she had saved. Will wished he had paid more attention to Court’s account.

“You can see her fracture,” Ng was saying. “The result was a tear in the middle meningeal artery. As you can see on the CT scan over there, we were lucky to be dealing with epidural blood, not subdural.”

Lucky was an understatement, Will knew. The prognosis from bleeding between the skull and the dura-the protective membrane covering the brain-was not nearly as grim as if the collection of blood was sub dural-under the dura, between it and the brain itself.

“But you have no idea why she hasn’t woken up.”

“From what I can tell, she fell twelve feet from a balcony and landed headfirst on a rock with a man’s weight on top of her. I didn’t see any actual brain bruising, but given the concussion from such a blow, I’m not that surprised she hasn’t woken up yet.” He saw the concern in Will’s eyes. “Listen, this is an epidural, not a subdural, and with no major brain contusion. She’s going to wake up, Will, and she’s going to be okay.”

“I’m glad she has you for a doc, Peter,” Will said.

Ng took his hand and shook it.

“I’m glad she has you for a friend,” he replied.

For twenty minutes Will sat in the dimly lit cubicle, listening to the soft, dependable whoosh of the ventilator, the steady beep of the cardiac monitor, and the faint whir of the IV pump-once the sounds of his world, now a hymn to his helplessness. To his right lay the woman who had opened his heart in ways none other had for many years. If they ever got out of this mess-if she ever woke up, if he ever found his way back into medicine-he was going to do things differently. It would be the kids first, then Patty, then maybe some sort of exercise program to get back in shape.

The Society could still have a piece of him, but a smaller one. Managed care had to be stopped, but his role in the battle could and would be less. And as long as the twins wanted to share the Open Hearth experience with him, he would continue signing up there, but he was through working eighty hours a week in the hospital just to break even. He was through living in a chronic state of exhaustion just to keep Maxine from siccing her lawyer hounds on him. He was through saying yes simply because he hadn’t developed the gift of being able to say no .

Over the years since his marriage had begun coming unraveled, what he did had completely overwhelmed who he was. He wouldn’t wish the nightmare of a suspension on any doctor, but in one way, having to endure his suspension had been a blessing. The wonderful paradox was that he was ready now, truly ready, to go back to being a surgeon because he didn’t need to.