Colin Harrison - Afterburn

"Left or right? We'll accommodate."

He didn't believe them, did he?

"Which?" asked Morris.

"Need the right!"

"It'll be the left, then." He pointed to Rick's handcuffs. "Take it off the left, and cuff his right to the table."

Morris opened one of the carpenter's boxes while the men held Rick and moved the handcuffs. "I have an arterial hemostat I'm going to put on your upper arm," he said softly. A sweetness, even a calm appeared to pass into him. "Nobody is going to bleed to death. And no problem on the limb recovery. Cooled, you've got four hours maybe. So there's no problem."

"I fucking told ev-thing!" Rick cried.

Morris came over and sat down. "See, this is what we're going to do, Rick. We had a good discussion, but now we have to talk about the big topic. If you tell us where the money is, we stop right now."

Rick searched Morris's face for an explanation. He didn't understand anything anymore.

"But if you don't, then my procedure keeps going. Once it goes far enough, though, we have to keep going. I'm not leaving a messy job. So that's where we are. Okay, also, listen to me, because the more anxiety you allow yourself, the more unfortunate everything gets." Morris's eyes moved closer to Rick. No redness, no fatigue in them. "First I'm going to start a saline IV on your other arm. This allows me to compensate for the blood loss, which really should not be excessive if I get the artery clamped quickly enough-"

"No, no!"

"I'm figuring that I really must have that artery closed off in sixty seconds, forty-five being optimal," Morris explained. "On the IV, I'll use a fourteen-gauge, which is big enough to give you a liter a minute if I have to. It also lets me administer morphine as necessary. We'll be starting you off at fifteen milligrams, but watching to see if your respiration drops. I usually give the patient five milligrams, but with this, I think fifteen is warranted." Morris nodded to himself, satisfied by his own analysis. "I'll be cutting through the upper arm, through the biceps muscle and the humerus-just one bone-and then through the triceps. It's easy. Muscle and bone. I don't feel like going through the elbow joint, see. The joint is very complicated-lot of nerves and blood vessels running through there. I do have enough morphine for the pain that would cause-that's not the problem, it's that if it got messy I might have a little difficulty finding the artery." He was a man in his element. "If it takes me ninety seconds to get you clamped, then we might have a bleed-out. Upper arm, the artery is no problem. Also, if we cut through the elbow, your arm is damaged forever. But the upper arm-should be fine. The boys at the replantation center at Bellevue are magicians if they've got a clean cut. So the key to this whole deal is the aforementioned hemostat." He held up a stainless-steel needle-nosed clamp with locking finger grips. "More effective than a tourniquet. Once we get the arm off and the clamp on, you're in good shape, Rick. You're not going to die. You might feel that way, you might go into shock, but you are absolutely not going to die. The body's ability to recover is astounding. The body protects itself. We'll make sure the wound is washed with betadine and bandaged so that the boys are working on a wound that is clean. Tommy will take pictures of each step. As for the arm itself, I'll be putting a piece of Saran Wrap on the cut surface and then will wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil and put it on the ice. It won't be in direct contact with the ice. I don't want you worrying about that, either. We want that arm cool but not frozen. That arm, once chilled down rapidly in a sanitary environment, is going to be good for three, four hours. You'll be in Bellevue by then and they'll be sewing it back on. I'm making it easy for those guys."

Morris appeared to wait for Rick to protest, but he felt despondent, exhausted, the pain sawing across his bleeding tooth stump, his eyesight purpled and darkening.

"I'm going to take good care of you, okay? But if you try to resist me now, start calling me names or fighting, then I'm going to give you Narcan. What is that, you might ask? I call it God in a syringe. It blocks the reception of morphine. The antidote. You can make guys who look dead from an OD get up and sing. I've done that, a real crowd-pleaser, let me tell you. You start giving me shit, Rick, then I'm going to give you two milligrams of Narcan and that is going to block the fifteen milligrams of morphine that I gave you before. It takes twenty seconds to work. All right? Which is to say that your arm is going to go from feeling not bad at all to feeling like someone just cut it off, which"-Morris calmed himself-"of course, someone did." He looked at Tommy. "Get my circular saw. Also, I folded some plastic overalls in there. Okay, we'll put that music on."

"You got tapes?" Tommy's voice echoed in the cavernous room.

I love my hand, my fingers, Rick thought with strange detachment. "Wait, wait," he said weakly. "Wait-"

"I've got the Rolling Stones, I've got Salt-N-Pepa, the Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson-you know, 'Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain'-all kinds of good music." Morris turned back to Rick. "You got a request?"

Rick made a fist with his left hand, just to remember. Oh, Paul, he thought, please do something.

"Make your pick," ordered Morris.

He spittled a piece of tooth onto his lower lip. The pain came back to his rib. "Give me the Bruce."

"Great choice." Morris nodded his approval. "Fine. Make it loud, Tommy. Good. Yes. I'll take the saw." He looked at Rick, his mouth a tight slit of concentration. "This goes quick, man, just listen to the music."

Somebody buys his suits for him, she realized, seeing Charlie leaning darkly against the hotel bar reading a sheet of paper and sipping his drink. He didn't notice her come toward him, which worried her, since she'd spent what time and money she had to make him think she was someone she was not, buying new lipstick, perfume, and a pair of fake gold earrings. How ridiculous the trouble she'd gone to, considering that he'd probably gone to no trouble at all! Wriggling into her one little black dress again-what choice did she have? Well, you gotta do who you gotta do, they used to say at the prison. She'd worked the lunch shift at Jim-Jack's, finally leaving at four, then hurried home through the windy rain to shower and put herself together, wondering what men in their late fifties liked in a younger woman. Youth, for starters. But nothing flashy or cheap-looking. If a man like Charlie wasn't comfortable, he wasn't going to get involved. He would smile politely and move on. Now she slipped past the few other men at the bar and let her hand touch Charlie's sleeve.

"Hey, mister," she whispered close as he turned. "Remember me? I'm that girl who flirted with you last night." She kissed him quickly on the cheek, leaving a smudge. She felt nervous, a little insecure, but a drink would fix that. "Been here long?"

"No." He shook his head and folded the paper and slipped it into his breast pocket. They stood silently, and as before he seemed to be studying her. But his attention was not cold and hard; rather, it seemed to come from some other part of him. His blue eyes were sorrowful. She remembered what he'd said about his son.

She ordered a drink. "You seem glum. Or preoccupied. Or noncommittal."

"Nah," he said, "just business." He shifted his weight uncomfortably.

"Just glum old preoccupying business?"

"That's it," he said. "Everybody wears a nice suit and you try to kill the other guy first."

She touched the scar on his hand, rubbed it. "Why did you become a businessman?"

"I wanted to make money."