Michael Connelly - Blood Work

He was taken down to the cardiology unit on the sixth floor. While being wheeled down the east hallway, he passed the rooms of the lucky and the waiting-patients who had received new hearts or were still waiting. They passed one room where McCaleb glanced through the open door and saw a young boy on the bed, his body tied by tubes to a heart-lung machine. A man in a suit sat in the chair on the other side of the bed, his eyes staring at the boy but seeing something else. McCaleb looked away. He knew the score. The kid was running out of time. The machine would only hold him up for so long. Then the man in the suit-the father, McCaleb assumed-would be staring at a casket with the same look.

They were at his room now. He was moved from the gurney onto the bed and left alone. He settled in for the wait. He knew from experience that it could be as long as six hours before Fox showed up, depending on how quickly the blood work was run through the lab and how soon she came by to pick up the report.

He had come prepared. The old leather bag in which he had once carried his computer and the countless case files he had worked on was now stuffed with back issues of magazines he saved for biopsy days.

Two and a half hours later, Bonnie Fox came through the door. McCaleb put down the copy of Boat Restoration he had been reading.

“Wow, that was fast.”

“It’s slow in the lab. How are you feeling?”

“My neck feels like it had somebody’s foot on it for a couple hours. You’ve already been to the lab?”

“Yup.”

“How’d everything come out?”

“It all looks good. No rejection, all the levels look good. I’m very pleased. We might lower your prednisone in another week.”

She spoke as she spread the lab report out on the bed’s food table and double-checked the good results. She was referring to the carefully orchestrated mix of drugs that McCaleb took every morning and night. Last he’d counted, he was swallowing eighteen pills in the morning and another sixteen at night. The medicine cabinet on the boat wasn’t big enough for all the containers. He had to use one of the storage compartments in the forward berth.

“Good,” he said. “I’m tired of shaving three times a day.”

Fox folded the report closed and picked the clipboard up off the bed table. Her eyes quickly scanned the checklist of questions he had to answer every time he came in.

“No fever at all?”

“No, I’m clean.”

“And no diarrhea.”

“Nope.”

He knew from her constant drilling and double-checking that fever and diarrhea were the twin harbingers of organ rejection. He took his temperature a minimum of twice a day, along with readings of blood pressure and pulse.

“The vitals look good. Why don’t you lean forward?”

She put the clipboard down. With a stethoscope she first warmed with her breath, she listened to his heart at three different spots on his back. Then he lay back and she listened through his chest. She took her own measure of his pulse with two fingers on his neck while she looked at her watch. She was very close to him as she did this. She wore a perfume of orange blossoms, which McCaleb had always associated with older women. And Bonnie Fox was not one of them. He looked up at her, studying her face while she studied her watch.

“Do you ever wonder if we should be doing this?” he asked.

“Don’t talk.”

Eventually, she moved her fingers to his wrist and measured the pulse there. After that she pulled the pressure collar off the wall, put it on his arm and took a blood pressure reading, maintaining her silence all the time. “Good,” she said when she was done.

“Good,” he said.

“Whether we should be doing what?”

It was like her to suddenly continue an interrupted or forgotten bit of conversation. She rarely forgot anything McCaleb said to her. Bonnie Fox was a small woman about McCaleb’s age with short hair gone prematurely gray. Her white lab coat hung almost to her ankles because it had been designed for a taller person. Embroidered on the breast pocket was an outline of the cardiopulmonary system, her specialty as a surgeon. She was all business when it came to their meetings. She had an air of confidence and caring, a combination McCaleb had always found rare in physicians-and in the last years there had been many. He returned the confidence and caring. He liked her and trusted her. In his most secret thoughts there had once been a hesitation when he considered he would one day put his life in the hands of this woman. But the hesitation quickly left and caused him only a feeling of guilt. When the time came for the transplant, it had been her smiling face that was the last he had seen as he was put to sleep in pre-op. There had been no hesitation in him by then. And it was her smiling face that welcomed him back to the world with a new heart and new life.

McCaleb took the fact that in the eight weeks since the transplant there had not been a hitch in his recovery as proof his belief in her was valid. In the three years since he had first walked into her office, a bond had developed between them that had gone far beyond the professional. They were good friends now, or so McCaleb believed. They had shared meals a half dozen times and countless spirited debates on everything from genetic cloning to the O. J. Simpson trials-McCaleb had won a hundred bucks from her on the first verdict, easily seeing that her unwavering belief in the justice system had blinded her to racial realities of the case. She wouldn’t bet him on the second.

Whatever the subject, half the time McCaleb found himself taking the opposing opinion just because he liked battling with her. Fox now followed her question with a look that said she was ready for another joust.

“Whether we should be doing this ,” he said, waving a hand around as if to encompass the whole hospital. “Taking out organs, putting in new ones. Sometimes I feel like the modern Frankenstein, other people’s parts in me.”

“One other person, one other part. Let’s not be so dramatic.”

“But it’s the big part, isn’t it? You know, when I was with the bureau, we had to qualify on the range every year. You know, shoot at targets. And the best way to qualify was to go for the heart. The circle around the heart on those targets scores more than the head. It’s called the ten ring. Highest score.”

“Look, if this is the aren’t – we – acting – like – God debate again, I thought we were well past that.”

She shook her head, smiled and looked him over for a few seconds. The smile eventually dropped away.

“What’s really wrong?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling guilty.”

“What, about living?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve been through this, too. I have no time for survivor’s guilt. Look at the choices here. It’s simple. You’ve got life on one side and then you’ve got death. Big decision. What is there to be guilty about?”

He raised his hands in surrender. She always put things in their clearest context.

“Typical,” she said, refusing to let him back off. “You hang around almost two years waiting for a heart, draw your string out and nearly don’t even make it, and now you wonder if we should have even given it to you. What’s really bothering you, Terry? I don’t have time to be bullshitting with you.”

He looked back at her. She had developed a skill at reading him. It was something all the best bureau agents and cops he had known had. He hesitated and then decided to say what was on his mind.

“I guess I want to know how come you didn’t tell me that the woman whose heart I got had been murdered.” She was clearly taken aback. The shock of his statement showed on her face.