Richard Mabry - Lethal Remedy

She'd thought dinner would be a nice change, but dinner had turned into a time of sharing for which Sara wasn't ready. Better slow it down. "Not today, Mark. Why don't I call you?" The disappointment in Mark's voice was obvious. "Sure. And if you don't call-" "I'll call.

Now I have to go." Sara noticed that the phone receiver was damp when she cradled it. Wasn't a phone conversation with a good-looking man who was interested in you supposed to be an enjoyable experience? She should be thrilled that Mark was obviously interested in her. Instead, she was a little afraid. "What's going on?" Rip Pearson stood in the doorway, a quizzical expression on his face. "Whatever the problem is, you can tell me. I'm a pretty good listener, and you look like you could use a friend." "That's my problem," she said. "Maybe I don't really have any friends-at least, any I can trust." "Whoa!" Rip held up his hand. "You and I've known each other for…" He counted silently. "For eight years. We've been friends all that time, although admittedly after you married Jack you didn't seem to have time for anyone else. But I've never stopped being your friend." He eased into the chair beside her. "Want to tell me about it?" Gloria appeared in the doorway, but Sara motioned her away. "Give me five minutes, please. And close the door. Thank you." She took a deep breath, then launched into her tale of finding the digital recorder in her attic.

Rip, to his credit, listened without interruption, although the expression on his face when she mentioned her evening with Mark reminded Sara of someone who'd bitten into a lemon. When she finished, Rip said, "So who do you think left it there? And why?" "I've thought about this. Matter of fact, I was up all night thinking about it. I thought about the when, and the who, and the why." "So what did you come up with?" "It started a few months after the baby died-about the time Jack moved out and announced he wanted a divorce. At first I thought it was just another manifestation of my guilt. My baby was dead. Therefore I had to be a bad mother." "But now that you know about the recorder, you think-" "I think Jack left it in the attic."

"Why would he do that?" "I have no doubt he did it to torture me. It was simply a gesture of pure evil." "What can you do about it?" Rip asked. "That's the problem. I have no proof. He'd deny it and accuse me of being paranoid." There was a tap on the door. Without opening it, Sara called, "Okay, Gloria. I'll be right there." "So what do you intend to do?" Rip asked. "Nothing-except be very careful around Jack Ingersoll." She paused with her hand on the doorknob. "And I'd advise you to do the same."

"John, how's that hand doing? " Rip Pearson motioned John Ramsey to a seat on the edge of the exam table. "That's what I wanted to ask you. It's getting pretty sore," John said. "Do you think I should be on an antibiotic?" "Let's take a look." Rip swung a lamp away from the wall on its hinged arm and focused the light on John's hand. "If that's your primary question today, at least you don't seem to be worrying about HIV with every breath." If you only knew. "Oh, I'm worried about that, too. I'm just trying to live with it." John winced as Rip pressed on the soft tissue at the base of his right thumb. "Well, this looks like it's getting a bit red. Feels warm. It's swollen, and I think there's a little fluctuance here." John knew what that meant. For years he'd taught medical students the four cardinal signs of inflammation. Calor, dolor, rubor, and tumor. Heat, pain, redness, and swelling. "So where do we go from here?" Rip was already reaching for a pair of latex gloves. "I think I'd better stick a needle into that area and see if I can aspirate some pus for a culture." He opened a cabinet and extracted a large syringe, a needle, and several sealed foil packets containing antiseptic swabs. Rip's hand stopped and hovered over a rubber-stoppered vial. "Want a local anesthetic?" "No, I'll be fine. Besides, the fewer times you stick a needle into that area, the less chance of spreading the infection."

"Right, of course. You haven't lost a step, have you?" Rip said.

"Maybe one or two, but I think I can still remember a few things."

John tried to relax as he felt the cool antiseptic on his skin.

"Little stick." John thought about what a total misrepresentation those two words were. They could mean anything from the mosquito bite of an immunization to the searing pain he was currently feeling in his hand. He hazarded a look and saw that Rip was moving the needle around, looking for a pocket of pus. John winced as he felt the grinding of needle tip against bone. "We may not have any-Oh, there you are. Come to Daddy." Rip pulled back on the plunger of the syringe and a tiny amount of reddish-yellow pus oozed into the tip of the barrel. "Not much, but it should be enough to culture." He pulled the needle out and applied a sterile gauze pad to the puncture wound.

"Hold pressure on that for a minute, will you?" "I don't like the looks of what you got," John said. "No, but let's wait until we see what the culture shows." He put a few drops of pus on two swabs and plunged them into tubes containing culture medium. "I'll get an aerobic and anaerobic culture, and… " Rip forced the last drop from the tip of the syringe onto a clean slide, then used the edge of another slide to create a thin film of pus on the glass. "Let's get someone to stain this so we can have a look." Soon the two men watched a lab tech put the stained slide on the stage of a binocular microscope, apply a drop of oil to one of the lenses, and rack the assembly down until the lens barely touched the slide. John remembered how many slides he'd cracked before he mastered the technique of using the oil immersion lens. For the tech it appeared to be old hat, though. He brought everything into focus, stepped back, and gestured for Rip and John to have a look. Rip bent over the 'scope, and after a few seconds of moving the slide back and forth, his face tightened. He stood up and gestured for John to take his place. John removed his glasses and applied his eyes to the scope. He fiddled with the knobs to bring the field into focus, and when he did, he knew why Rip's expression had changed. Amidst the debris of dead white blood cells he saw round blue organisms. Most were single or in pairs, but many formed chains and grapelike clusters. A second-year medical student could have made the diagnosis: Staphylococcus. John straightened.

"It's Staph, all right. Think it's Staph luciferus?" "Too soon to tell. Could simply be a coagulase-negative Staph, a non-pathogen.

We'll have to wait for the culture results." "So what do we do?" "I don't think we need to get out the big guns until we have confirmation. Why don't I just put you on a broad-spectrum antibiotic now? We can change it later if we need to." John tried to keep his expression neutral, but his insides were churning. What else, Lord?

And why me?

The man's nametag said he was Wes, the owner of this gun store. He looked pointedly at his watch. Five o'clock, time to close. But he couldn't ignore a potential sale. "This one?" Wes reached into the glass-topped case. His hand hovered in midair over the rows of handguns displayed there and settled on a small revolver. "Yes, that one," Sara said. "You know, you don't want to just pick one that's pretty," Wes said. "I mean, this one's nice-blued steel, rubber grips and all. But-" "May I see it, please?" Sara held out a hand that was rocksteady. Wes handed her the revolver butt-first. She balanced it in her hand, snapped the cylinder out and checked that the gun was unloaded, snapped it back into place and dry-fired the weapon four times rapidly. "Trigger pull's not too bad. Good balance. I like the weight-about a pound, isn't it?" Sara enjoyed seeing the startled look on Wes's face. She was a woman. Women weren't supposed to know about guns. Well, she did. She knew that the Taurus Ultra-Lite weighed seventeen ounces, had a two-inch barrel, held five. 38 caliber bullets, and was a favorite among off-duty policemen. After a couple of phone calls to the policewoman she'd met after the shooting incident, followed by a little research on the computer, Sara knew just what she wanted. "How much?" she asked. Wes scratched his head.