Under the Knife(26)

Over the phone, a door squeaked on its hinges, followed by a knock of plastic striking ceramic.

A toilet seat going up, Spencer recognized. Raj continued to talk over the sound that started, predictably, a moment later.

“Yeah. I’m thinking if I tweak the algorithms a little more, we’ll be able to see early recurrent glioma. And possibly structural changes consistent with a pre-Alzheimer’s state, or early Parkinson’s. What do you think?”

“Uh, sure. Okay.” Spencer tried to block, without success, an image of Raj at the other end of the line, holding the cell phone with one hand while obliging his biological needs with the other. “Raj, do you really have to take a piss while we’re talking on the phone?”

“Yes,” Raj said, yawning. “Anyway. It’s going to put us years ahead. A goddamn work of art, if I do say so. Those envious pricks at Hopkins (like Coleman, remember that asshole?) are going to shit when they see this.” Flush. “When we submit to a journal … Oh, shit. Shit.”

“What?”

“The storm!” Raj was practically shouting into the phone. “Dude, I totally forgot about that storm.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That offshore storm! It’s all over Twitter.”

He didn’t know how Raj had pulled off that feat of multitasking: checking his Twitter feed while talking on the phone and taking a piss. He didn’t want to know. Raj had always been incapable of doing just one thing at a time. His mind always seemed to be racing in at least five different directions, even, Spencer suspected, during the few hours he slept.

“Oh. Right. What about it?”

“Consistent swells with ten-foot faces. Ten feet! And breaking totally clean. I’ve got to get down to Black’s, dude.”

Black’s Beach was a popular surf spot at the base of steep cliffs. Turner Hospital and the university campus sat at the top of the cliffs overlooking Black’s. Spencer’s understanding was that, back in the seventies, Black’s had been some kind of hippie nude beach. These days, though, it drew properly attired surfers, sunbathers, families, and the occasional paunchy old man wearing nothing but a G-string and leering grin. It went without saying that you never made eye contact with those guys, who wandered the shoreline like enormous, bronzed crabs. Ever.

Raj was a surfer, and, despite his ungainly physique, a damn good one. Raj preferred the most direct route to Black’s from his campus lab: clambering down steep, switchbacking trails carved into the precarious sandstone of the four-hundred-foot-high cliffs, surfboard tucked underneath his arm. Spencer thought he was nuts, risking his life for a couple of seconds perched atop a damn six-foot piece of fiberglass.

“Thought you would have heard about that by now. I saw a bunch of guys down at Calumet this morning on my run. It was packed.”

“I’m not surprised. I’ll get in a quick surf, then head over to the lab.” Raj’s enthusiasm and energy spilled through the receiver; it sounded as if his four hours of sleep would suffice. “Probably only a few good hours of waves left.”

“You want to meet for lunch?”

“Sure. Sushi? At that place near Higdon Park?” The view from there, a sweeping one of the Pacific, was phenomenal.

“Okay. How about one o’clock?”

“Great.”

Spencer was approaching the mouth of a steep canyon. “Raj. I’m about to drive through the canyon, so I’m probably going to lose you. I’ll look over those data, and we’ll talk more at lunch. Sound good?”

“Yeah, sounds—” But then, as Spencer had anticipated, the connection was gone.

Spencer grinned. This was great news, and it shoved the memory of the tumbledown Ford Fiesta parked in front of Rita’s house out of his mind. He couldn’t wait to see Raj at lunch.

As he wound his way along the four-lane road through the canyon, two lanes in either direction divided by a concrete median, the grey-haired woman in the red Tesla, having switched lanes several more times, got caught in a knot of traffic, and ended up behind him and one lane over.

This presented him, he realized wickedly, with a golden opportunity to cut her off, and trap her behind the knot of cars. Teach her a lesson. Show her how it felt.

He gripped the wheel harder as he began to change lanes and nudge his car into the small gap of road in front of the Tesla.

But, no.

He shifted the Prius back into his lane.

He was a better man than that. He would not cut her off. He didn’t do road rage. Or any kind of rage.

Instead, he maintained his lane, turned the radio—which still wasn’t working properly—off, and focused on running through the steps of his first (and only) operation that morning.





SEBASTIAN


Sebastian wondered what kind of conversation Finney and Wu were having right now, compliments of the device.

The device.

The device, truly, was a piece of work. A goddamn technological marvel.

Sebastian had never encountered anything like it; and as someone who’d had access to a lot of secrets over the years, he’d seen some weird sci-fi-type shit in his time. When this thing got out (and it would eventually get out), every government, crime syndicate, and multinational corporation in the world was going to want one.

There were all kinds of applications. Mostly military, of course: surveillance, field communications, interrogation.