Under the Knife(24)

Oh, God.

“It’s all she talked about when we were alone.” He sounded distant. Distracted. “Getting a room ready. Buying baby clothes. Toys. Strollers. Names, of course.”

She waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she said, from behind her hands, “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

Oh God dear God this can’t be happening to me.

A beat. An ominous one.

“Not nearly as sorry as I was.”

Another, longer, even more ominous beat.

“As sorry as I am, Dr. Wu.” The slight emphasis he placed on the word am felt like a punch to her stomach.

She dropped her hands from her face and stared up at the ceiling. “But my ear. If someone were to look inside there, or scan my head, with a CT, or an MRI—”

“My technology is for all intents and purposes undetectable. A medical examination will reveal some inflammation, perhaps a little bleeding around your tympanic membrane. The same goes for a head CT or MRI. Minor findings easily explained, if necessary, as the self-injurious behavior of a paranoid schizophrenic.”

She felt exhausted. Weak. Defeated.

Afraid.

No way out. There’s no way out.

But the question was: no way out of what?

This grieving, unbalanced (crazy?) husband of a former patient had trapped her, in an elaborate and perfectly executed—what? Setup, she supposed. But why? Setup for what? What did Finney want from her?

“What do you want?” Rita asked.

No answer.

Her cell phone trembled on the bench, announcing the arrival of another text message.

“What do you want from me?”

Another minute of silence, her cell rumbling every fifteen seconds or so, as if expressing indignation over being ignored.

Having received no response from Finney, Rita picked up her phone and read the message. It was the nurse in the pre-op area, insisting for the third time that she come and see Mrs. Sanchez.

“I want you,” he finally said, “to operate on Mrs. Sanchez.”





SPENCER


Spencer was halfway to work and still thinking about that damn Ford Fiesta in front of Rita’s.

It was just a car parked on a street, he told himself. He was being paranoid. He had to get his mind off it.

Raj. I’ll call Raj.

The clock on his dashboard read just after 7:00 A.M. He’d long ago settled on 7:00 A.M. as an arbitrary cutoff time, on weekdays, for calling people who weren’t surgeons. On weekends he stretched it out to eight.

“Call Raj,” he said.

“Calling Raj,” his hands-free phone replied.

After several rings, he heard a drowsy, interrogatory grunt that Spencer accepted as a greeting: “Huh?”

“Hey, man,” Spencer said. “Good morning.”

“Spencer?” Raj groaned. “Shit. Dude, it’s barely even light outside.”

Spencer grinned. “Day’s a wasting, man.” Like many men of a certain age, Spencer and Raj downshifted a gear in the maturity department when around one another, which in their case meant peppering their conversations with obscenities, dude’s, and man’s. Raj, who, like Spencer, was single, was more enthusiastic in this pursuit than Spencer, probably because he was closer to thirty than to forty and less inclined to embrace adulthood.

“Speak for yourself.” Raj yawned. “Brain surgeons, dude. What the hell do you want?”

“The MRI data. Wondering if you had the results yet from yesterday’s supercomputer analyses—the ones you ran during our designated time.”

“Of course,” Raj said, exasperated. “Didn’t you check your e-mail? I sent it around 3:00 A.M.” Raj was one of those enviable people who required little sleep.

“No.”

“You woke me up at the crack of dawn for this? Come on, Spencer. What are you, like, ninety years old? Even my grandmother knows people don’t talk on the phone anymore.”

An elegant, silver-haired woman driving a red Tesla abruptly cut Spencer off, inches separating her rear bumper from his front. Spencer leaned on his horn. He caught a glimpse of mirrored designer sunglasses sizing him up in the Tesla’s rearview. Then, with languid grace, the woman stretched a fine-boned hand out the driver’s side window and extended her middle finger. Spencer suppressed an unchivalrous urge to respond in kind, and growled, “I didn’t have time this morning to check e-mail before I left for work.”

“Not my problem.”

“Come on, Raj. Just tell me.”

A pause. “Are you wearing it?”

Oops. Spencer’s eyes darted to the leather satchel (a gift from his parents last Christmas) in the front passenger seat. Shit.

“You’re not wearing it, are you?” Raj said.

“No.”

“Why?”

Because I was thinking about the Fiesta. Which he’d never admit to Raj because he’d then have to explain what he’d been doing outside his ex-girlfriend’s house at six in the morning. Besides which, Raj wasn’t brimming over with warm and fuzzy feelings toward Rita.

“I, uh, forgot.”

“Come on, man. We need those data. Your name’s on the patent, too. You should care about this as much as I do. Put it on now, and I might tell you about the results.”