Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

Meanwhile, at the end of the block ahead of me, two limousines pull up, and six men get out without speaking to each other.

All six have coats that go past their waists, to cover their weapons. There’s a dark-haired guy and a Hispanic-looking one, but the other four look midwestern. Jeans and sneakers. Faces lined by too much time in the sun on their ranches in Wyoming and Idaho that they think no one knows about.

I’ve visited some of those ranches. On business, if you know what I mean.

The hitters split both ways at the corner, to block off all exits. I look behind me. Another two cars.

I’ve got about half a second to decide whether to cross the street and be gone or head back into the hospital.

I’m an idiot. I choose the hospital.

I race back up the escalators to the operating floors. If the guys outside are the first ones here, this will buy me some time, since they’ll probably sweep from the ground up.

If.

I cut through the recovery room, where the ICU guys are still looking around the cubicle where Squillante died, trying to figure out where the printout from his EKG went. Eventually they’ll get IT to print a new one. Like in a month.

In the Surgery locker room there’s a flat-screen TV on the wall that shows the operating schedule. It says Osteosarcoma Girl had her leg removed three hours ago. Which is impossible, because I just saw her. At least there’s a room number, one floor up.

When I get there, though, some schmuck in scrubs and a face mask is mopping the floor, and there’s no one else there. Which probably means the schedule has the wrong room on it, but isn’t a guarantee.

“When’s the next procedure?” I ask the guy with the mop.

He just shrugs. Then, when I turn to leave, he drops the mop and loops a wire over my head.

Cute. The guy’s probably been waiting here since he overheard me talking to Osteosarcoma Girl outside her room. Playing the long odds to keep Locano’s reward money for himself. And he’s a wire psycho.

A wire is simple to make, simple to get rid of, and simple to hide, even in scrubs. But only a psycho uses a wire. Who else wants to get that close to someone? I barely have time to get my hand up in front of my throat before he yanks it tight.

I realize then that it isn’t going to kill me. At least not fast. With my hand palm-out in front of my voice box, and the tube of my stethoscope caught beneath the wire on both sides, the psycho can’t generate enough force to cut off the arteries, even with the wire crossed behind my neck. He can cut off the veins, which are closer to the surface than the arteries, but that will just stop blood from leaving my head. I can already feel the heat and pressure building up. But I won’t be unconscious for a while.

Then the guy does a back-and-forth sawing motion, quick enough that I can’t take advantage of it, and the wire cuts deeply into my palm and the sides of my neck. The psycho’s braided something into it—glass, or metal or something. The head of my stethoscope clanks as it bounces off the floor.

Apparently this is going to kill me fast.

I stomp on his foot. He’s wearing steel-toed shoes. Of course he is—he’s a wire psycho. He’s expecting this. The toe cap caves a little, causing him to grunt as his toes get pinched, but it doesn’t change his plans much. You can run a car over steel-toed shoes.

So I shove us both backwards, hard. He’s expecting this too, and easily braces us against the operating table with his legs.

But this is my house. I drive my heel into the pedal that unlocks the table’s brakes, and this time when we go flying it takes him by surprise.

I land on top of him on the floor. There’s a satisfying grunt as his air goes. But his grip on the wire holds.

So with my free hand I reach back and grab a bunch of hair—which, stupidly, he has—on the left side of his head. Then I sit up, yanking him up and over my shoulder, and twisting him at the same time.

This only works if the wire psycho’s right handed, or at least has his right wrist crossed over his left one. But I’m running out of options.

It works: the wire’s no longer around my neck as he goes over.

The psycho hits the floor pretty hard and missing some hair, face up with his head toward me. Where it’s not too much trouble for me to rapid-strike his face with alternating elbows and knife-hands—back and forth, back and forth—until he’s unconscious and bleeding out the back of his head.

I get dizzily to my feet.

Wrong day to mop, fucko.

In the supply corridor between surgery rooms, I use a staple gun to close up my palm. The pain is maddening, but it’ll keep my hand functional. My neck I wrap in a bandage. There’s not much more I can do about it without being able to see it, and the most mirrorlike object I can find is an instruments tray.

While I’m changing into a new pair of scrubs, I notice the kit shelf, which has steel shoeboxes with the instruments for various surgeries. They’re labeled things like “CHEST, OPEN” and “KIDNEY TRANSPLANT.”

I pull out the one that says “LARGE BONE TRANSECTION.” Select a knife that looks like a machete with a grip cut out of it and use it to slice open the side of my new pants. Then I attach it to my outer thigh with surgical tape.

When I go out to the sink to try to wash the blood off, there’s a nurse there scratching his armpit with the needlelike camera of a laparoscope that will later be inserted into someone’s abdomen by doctors wearing moon suits to prevent contamination.

He takes one look at me and scuttles off.

I go from room to room on the Surgery floors until I find Osteosarcoma Girl. It’s the fastest way to do it. When I get there, she’s unconscious, with the anesthesiologist holding the mask on her.

She’s laid out naked on the table. The residents are squabbling over who gets to shave her pussy, which isn’t necessary in the first place.

The scrub nurse’s eyes go wide when he sees me. “You’re not wearing a mask! Or a hat!” he shouts.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Where’s the doctor?”

“Get out of my operating room!”

“Tell me who’s doing the surgery.”

“Don’t make me call security!”

I pat the front of his paper gown, contaminating it, and he shrieks. If the operation does happen, I’ve just extended it by half an hour. “Tell me where the fucking doctor is,” I say.

“I’m right here,” the doctor says, behind me. I turn. Above the mask he’s patrician. “What the hell are you doing in my operating room?”

“This woman doesn’t have osteosarcoma,” I tell him.

His voice stays calm. “No? What does she have?”

“Endometriosis. It only bleeds when she’s menstruating.”

“The tumor is on her femur. Her distal femur.” He looks at my neck bandage, which I imagine must be seeping again. It hurts like fuck. “Are you a physician?”

“Yes. It’s migrated uterine tissue. It can happen. There have been cases.”

“Name one.”

“I can’t. I heard about it from a professor.”

In fact I heard about it from Prof. Marmoset, once when we were on a plane together. He was talking about the stupid shit you have to learn in medical school that you never see again in your life.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I can pull a case up on Medline,” I say. “She has uterine tissue in the anterior compartment of her quadriceps, attached to the periosteum. You can take it out. If you take her leg off instead, Pathology will realize that I’m right and fuck you. They’ll fuck everybody in this room. I will make sure of that.”

I stare around at each set of eyes I can find.