F Wilson - Implant

Gin allowed herself a tight, wry smile. She thought she was used to seeing blood. Other people's blood. Not quite the same as seeing her own.

She touched the wound edge and jerked her hand back. Exquisitely tender. Those severed nerve ends were screaming. This was when she really could have used some anesthetic.

Replacing the washcloth between her teeth, she clamped down on it and groaned as she separated the wound edges. The subcutaneous fat was blood-red instead of its natural yellow. Gingerly she probed the fat with her pinky. A strange, curious, slightly sickening sensation, this groping among her own fat cells. Painful, but it wasn't the pain that was making her queasy. She'd never touched human fat with her bare hands before. Like playing with greasy tapioca.

The pain increased as she pressed deeper, searching for an opening, a depression, a channel, any clue that would tell her what course the trocar had followed.

And then her fingertip slipped a little deeper into one area of the fat. She stiffened. Could that be it? She probed further, but gently, feeling the fat give way easily before her. Yes. Something had been this way before. And recently.

And then her fingertip came to rest against something soft but firmer and smoother than fat.

Gin didn't know whether to be relieved or terrified. At least she hadn't imagined all this. There was an implant in her leg and only one man could have put it there.

And it had to come out. Now. And she had to remove it without breaking it. If she ruptured it, or even caused a tiny leak, she'd have done Duncan's job for him.

Biting down harder on the washcloth, Gin dug her finger deeper into the fat. Propelled by pain, air hissed in and out of her nostrils as she worked to get around the implant. Had to get behind it. Gently .

. .

. . . gently . . .

Gerry slammed the phone down in the middle of Gin's instructions to leave a message after the beep. He'd already left two on her machine.

Where is she?

He glanced at his watch again. What for, he didn't know.

Only half a minute had passed since the last time he'd looked.

He stretched his neck to relieve the growing lump of tension between his shoulder blades. She should have been here by now. Visions of Gin wandering around the District, dazed and confused, replayed in his mind.

Or worse yet, huddled behind a Dumpster in some alley, hiding from imaginary enemies.

Damn it. He couldn't concentrate on anything. All he could think about was Gin. The way she'd sounded . . . like her world was coming to an end.

Only one thing to do. Go out and look for her.

He picked up his car keys and called the switchboard. He left instructions that if a Gin Panzella or a Dr. Panzella called, or anyone called about her, or if she showed up in person, to put her through to his car phone.

On the chance that she might be hiding in her apartment, afraid to pick up the phone, refusing to answer the door, he grabbed the Electropick on his way out. Just in case.

He got his car out of the Bureau's underground lot and drove up Pennsylvania toward the White House, trying to backtrack along the most logical route for her to follow from Adams Morgan. She'd have to come down Connecticut, but after that it was anybody's guess.

He worked his way up to K Street where he saw a couple of cops standing outside their unit at the top of Farragut Square watching a sanit man sweep up some broken glass. He flashed his ID and asked what had happened. The older of the pair, heavyset with a mustache, leaned in the window. His breath reeked of old coffee.

"A one-car M.V.A. Nobody hurt. Driver hopped out and took off. You can bet what that means." Gerry nodded. "Hot."

"You got it." Just so no stone was left unturned, Gerry said, "You remember what make it was?

" The cop shrugged. "Nh. It was already towed when we got here.

They're running the plates, though. Somebody you looking for? " "Not likely. Just thought I'd ask." As he drove away, he made a mental note of the location. If he couldn't find Gin, he'd check with the locals later on the registration of that car.

He turned back and headed up Connecticut. Maybe the best place to start was Gin's apartment.

Gin leaned, gasping, trembling, against the side wall of the tub alcove. When the pain receded from excruciating to merely brutal, she opened her hand and looked at the bloody little lump Lying in her palm.

G ha.

She was safe. Even if Duncan bathe the entire hotel with ultrasound, he couldn't harm her. But she wasn't out of the woods yet. She had a deep, wide gash in her leg that had to be closed.

But first, Save the evidence.

She reached over to the counter and grabbed the Coricidin bottle.

Carefully she scraped the sticky implant off her palm with the lip of the bottle. She'd already learned the hard way how much more fragile these things became once they'd been implanted. The implant slid down the inside of the bottle, slowly, like some sort of scarlet slug, and came to rest on the bottom. She capped the bottle and returned her attention to the incision in her leg.

Bleeding had slowed considerably. The blood oozing around the growing clot was thick, almost syrupy. She reached for the sewing kit and began threading a needle. The adrenaline tremor from the pain and stress caused her to miss S.

on the first few tries. She was beginning to fear that she'd never get it threaded, but finally the tip slipped through the eye.

She considered sterilizing the needle with the Cricket but discarded the idea. She couldn't sterilize the thread that way, and the wound was already grossly contaminated. She was covered for tetanus, but she had to get herself some antibiotic, a broad-spectrum cephalosporin preferably, to fend off the inevitable infection that would follow this egregiously unsterile little surgical procedure.

By way of compromise, she doused the needle and soaked the thread with hydrogen peroxide. She laid that aside and replaced the washcloth in her mouth. Then she expressed the clot from the wound and poured the peroxide directly into it. She groaned into the cloth as pink foam erupted from the opening. She writhe from the sharp, stinging agony of the nest of enraged hornets trapped inside her thigh.

When that passed, she wiped the sweat and tears from her eyes, pressed the wound edges together, and began suturing. She started at the distal end, figuring it would be easier to work her way up.

Gin winced as she forced the needle through her skin. Painful, but nothing compared to what she'd already put herself through. The needle was sharp enough, but it was designed for fabric, not the toughness of human skin. And it was straight, which made the job all the more difficult .

Forget the lidocaine, she thought. I'll settle for a hemostat and a curved needle now.

A few subcutaneous sutures and a vertical mattress repair would have been ideal, but out of the question without gut and a curved needle.

She had to settle for a simple, single loop.

She tied the first suture carefully, afraid to pull too hard and break the thread. She'd bought the heaviest she could find, but still this wasn't silk or nylon, this was plain old thread. If this repair was going to hold, she'd have to place the sutures close together, no more than an eighth of an inch apart.

She finished the first knot and cut the free ends with the little scissors from the kit. There. One done. Only fourteen or fifteen more to go.

Half an hour later, she was done. She foamed the blood off her skin with peroxide and examined her handiwork. Sixteen puckered sutures in a neat row. She blotted it dry, smeared some bacitracin ointment over it, then covered it with gauze. She held that in place with a few strips of adhesive tape, then wound the six-inch Ace bandage around her thigh to make a pressure dressing. Then she swung her legs out of the tub and stood up.