Black Heart

Page 23

“You got a bathroom?” the doctor says, glancing around.
“Through those doors and down the hall,” says Dean Wharton, frowning at the doctor’s cigarette disapprovingly, still apparently trying to stay in control of the situation. “This is a no smoking building.”
The doctor gives him an incredulous look. “I’ve got to scrub in. Clear off the desk while I’m gone. We’re going to have to get the patient up there. And get some more lights. I need to see what I’m doing.”
“Do you trust that man?” Dean Wharton asks me as he lifts stacks of papers and shoves them into his filing cabinet haphazardly.
“No,” I say.
Sam makes a choked sound.
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say. “You’re going to be fine. I’m just pissed off. Mostly at myself—no, scratch that, mostly at Wharton.”
The dean drags a floor lamp to his now clear desk and flips it on. He manages to position a couple of other lights on the bookshelves, tilting their flexible necks to point bulbs at the table, like faces all turned toward a performance.
“Help me get him up,” I say.
“Don’t lift me,” Sam says, slurring the words slightly. “I can hop.”
This seems like a terrible idea, but I am not arguing with a wounded man. Putting his arm around my neck, I haul him up. He makes a low sound in the back of his throat, like he’s biting back a scream. His gloved fingers dig into my bare arm. His face contorts with pain and concentration, his eyes closing tightly.
“Don’t put any weight on it,” I remind him.
“Screw you,” he says through gritted teeth, which I take to mean that he’s doing okay.
We move across the room, his body half-slumped on mine. My T-shirt slides off his leg, and blood seeps sluggishly from the hole as he climbs up onto the desk.
“Lie down,” I say, reaching for the shirt. I have no idea how clean anything is, but I try to mop up the worst of the blood and reapply pressure.
Wharton stands back, watching us with what looks like a mixture of distaste and terror. Possibly he’s mourning the ruination of his desk.
The doctor comes back into the room, his cigarette gone. He’s got on what looks like a plastic poncho and gloves. His hair has been pulled back with a bandana.
Sam moans. “What—what is he going to do?”
“I am going to need an assistant for this,” the doctor says, looking at me. “You okay with blood?”
I nod.
“You’re lucky. My last job wasn’t too far from here. Sometimes I can get pretty backed up.”
“I bet,” I say. I wish he would stop talking.
He nods. “So . . . I need the money. It’s going to be five hundred up front, like my answering service said. Maybe more, depending on how things go, but I’ll need to have that now.”
I look over at Wharton, and he fusses around with one of the drawers in his desk. He must be used to paying other people in cash, because he unlocks some section inside a lower part and counts out a wad of bills.
“Here’s a grand,” the dean says, his hand shaking as he holds out the cash. “Let’s make sure things go well. No complications, do you understand?”
“Money soaks up germs. It’s dirty stuff. You take it, kid,” Dr. Doctor says. “Put it in my bag. And take out the bottle of iodine. Then, before you do anything else, I want you to go wash your hands.”
“My gloves?” I ask.
“Your hands,” he tells me. “You’re going to wear a pair of plastic gloves. Those are ruined.”
In the bathroom I scrub furiously. My hands. My arms. He’s right about my leather gloves. They are so sodden with blood that my hands were stained red underneath. I splash water onto my face for good measure. Bare to the waist, I feel like I should try to cover up somehow, but there’s nothing to cover up with. My T-shirt is a disgusting mess. My coat is still on the floor of the other room.
I return to the dean’s office to find the doctor has his bag open. It’s a mess of bottles, cloths, and clamps. He’s taking out sharp, scary metal instruments and laying them out on a side table he’s dragged over. I put on a pair of thin plastic gloves and get out the iodine.
“Cassel,” Sam says faintly. “I’m going to be okay, right?”
I nod. “I swear.”
“Tell Daneca I’m sorry.” Tears are welling up in the corners of his eyes. “Tell my mom—”
“Shut up, Sam,” I say fiercely. “I said you were going to be fine.”
The doctor grunts. “Get me one of the swabs, soak it in the iodine, and wipe off the bullet hole.”
“But—,” I say, not sure how to proceed.
“Cut off his pants.” He sounds exasperated, and I can see that he’s taking out a brown vial and a large needle.
I try to keep my hand steady as I take out the scissors from the kit and slice open Sam’s cargo pants. The material rips wide, to his thigh, and I see the actual wound, just above his knee, small and welling with blood.
When my fingers touch his skin, brushing it with brown medicine, he twitches.
“It’s fine, Sam,” I say.
Across the room Wharton sits down heavily in a chair and puts his head in his hands.
The doctor walks over to Sam, holding up a syringe. He taps it, like he’s trying to get the air out. “This is morphine. It should help with the pain.”
Sam’s eyes go wide.
“You’re going to need to be sedated for this,” the doctor says.
Sam swallows and, visibly steeling himself, nods.
The doctor sticks the needle into a vein in Sam’s arm. He makes a sound that’s half moan and half swallow.
“Do you think she really likes him?” Sam asks. I know who he means. Barron. And I don’t know the answer, not really.
The doctor looks at me, then back at Sam.
“No,” I say. “But maybe you shouldn’t worry about that now.”
“Distracting—” Sam’s eyes roll back in his head, his body going limp. I wonder if he’s dreaming.
“Now you’ve got to hold him down,” the doctor says. “While I dig out the bullet.”
“What?” I say. “Hold him how?”
“Just keep him from moving too much. I need his leg to stay steady.” He looks across the room at Dean Wharton. “You. Come over here. I need someone to hand me forceps and a scalpel when I ask for them. Put on these gloves.”
The dean stands and crosses the room dazedly.
I move to the other side of the desk and put one hand on Sam’s stomach and the other on his thigh, leaning my weight against them. He turns his head and groans, although he remains out of it. I let go immediately, stepping back.
“Hold him. He won’t remember this,” the doctor says, which doesn’t comfort me even a little. There’s lots of stuff I don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I put my hands back in place.
Dr. Doctor leans in and presses around the wound. Sam moans again and tries to shift position. I don’t let him. “He’s going to stay semiconscious. It’s safer that way, but it means you’ve really got to stop him from moving. I think the bullet’s still in there.”
“What does that mean?” Dean Wharton asks.
“It means we’ve got to get it out,” says the doctor. “Give me the scalpel.”
I turn my head at the moment the point of the knife sinks into Sam’s skin. He writhes under my hands, squirming blindly, forcing me to put my full weight against him. When I look again, the doctor has cut a deep slice. Blood is welling up out of it.
“Retractor,” the doctor says, and Wharton hands it over.
“Hemostat,” the doctor says.
“What’s that?” Wharton asks.
“The silver thing with the curved tip. Take your time. It’s not my emergency.”
I shoot the doctor my filthiest glare, but he isn’t looking. He’s pushing an instrument into Sam’s leg. Sam moans, low, and jerks slightly.
“Shhh,” I say. “It’s almost over. It’s almost over.”
Blood sprays out of the leg suddenly, hitting my chest and face. I stagger back, shocked, and Sam nearly jerks off the table.
“Hold him, you idiot!” the doctor shouts.
I grab Sam’s leg, slamming myself down onto it. The blood pulses along with his heart, rising and falling. There is so much blood. It’s in my eyelashes, smeared over my stomach. It’s all I can smell and all I can taste.
“When I say hold him, I’m not joking! Do you want your friend to die? Hold him. I have to find the vessel I nicked. Where is that hemostat?”
Sam’s skin looks clammy. His mouth looks bluish. I turn my head away from the surgery, my fingers digging into his muscles, holding him down as firmly as I can. I grit my teeth and try not to watch the doctor tie off the artery or watch him root out the bullet or start stitching up the wound with black string. I hang on and watch the rise and fall of Sam’s chest, reminding myself that so long as he’s breathing and moaning and shifting, so long as he’s in pain, he’s alive.
After, I slump on the floor and listen to the doctor give Dean Wharton instructions. My whole body hurts, my muscles sore from fighting Sam’s.
“He’s going to have to take antibiotics for two weeks. Otherwise he’s at serious risk for infection,” the doctor says, taping the gauze in place and wadding up his bloody poncho. “I can’t write him a prescription, but this is enough for the first week. My answering service will contact whichever one of you called about getting more antibiotics.”
“I understand,” the dean is saying.
I understand too. Dr. Doctor can’t write a prescription because he’s had his license revoked. That’s why he’s acting as a concierge doctor for Zacharov and for us.
“And if you need a cleanup service for in here, I know some very discreet people.”
“That would be very much appreciated.”
They sound like two civilized men, discussing civilized things. They are two men of the world, a man of medicine and a man of letters. They probably don’t think of themselves as criminals, no matter what they’ve done.
As the doctor walks out the door, I take my phone out of my pocket.
“What are you doing?” Dean Wharton demands.
“I’m calling his girlfriend,” I say. “Someone’s going to have to stay with him tonight. It can’t be me, and he wouldn’t want it to be you.”
“You have somewhere more important to be?”
I look up at Wharton. I’m exhausted. And I hate that I can’t stay, when this is all my fault in the first place. My gun. My dumb joke with Mina, the finger in my pocket that made it seem like bringing a gun was the right move. “It can’t be me.”
“I absolutely forbid you to call another student, Mr. Sharpe. This situation is chaotic enough as it is.”
“Bite me,” I say, my gloved fingers leaving sticky brown marks behind when I tap the keys.
“Did you find him?” Daneca says, instead of “hello.” “Is he all right?”
The connection isn’t very good. She seems scratchy and far away.
“Can you come to Dean Wharton’s office?” I ask. “Because if you can, I think you should come now. Sam could really use you. It would really help if you came right now. But don’t panic. Please just don’t panic and please come now.”
She says she will in a bewildered tone that makes me think I must sound very strange. Everything feels empty.
“You should go,” I tell Dean Wharton.
By the time Daneca arrives, he’s already gone.
She looks around the room, at the blood-soaked carpet, and the lamps on the bookshelves, at Sam lying on Wharton’s massive desk, unconscious. She looks at his leg and at me, sitting on the floor without a shirt on.
“What happened?” she asks, walking over to Sam and touching his cheek lightly with her glove.
“Sam got—he got shot.” She looks scared. “A doctor came and fixed him. When he wakes up, I know he’ll want you there.”
“Are you okay?” she asks. I have no idea what she means. Of course I’m all right. I’m not the one lying on a desk.
I stagger to my feet and pick up my coat.
I nod. “But I have to go, okay? Dean Wharton knows about this.” I gesture vaguely, mostly toward his carpet. “I don’t think we can move Sam until he wakes up. It’s what—about noon now?”
“It’s two in the afternoon.”
“Right,” I say, glancing toward the windows. Dean Wharton drew the blinds, I remember. Not that I would be able to tell the time by the amount of sunlight. “I can’t—”
“Cassel, what’s going on? What happened? Does where you’re going have to do with Sam?”
I start to laugh, and Daneca looks even more worried. “Actually,” I say, “it’s totally unrelated.”
“Cassel—,” she says.
I look at Sam, lying on the desk, and think of my mother in Zacharov’s house, nursing her own gunshot wound. I close my eyes.
At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left.
I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell.