Fallen

CHAPTER NINE

SARA WONDERED IF IT WAS A SOUTHERN PECULIARITY FOR little children to get sick in the half hour between Sunday school and church services. Most of her early patients that morning had fallen into that golden time period. Tummy aches, earaches, general malaise—nothing that could be pinned down by a blood test or an X-ray, but was easily cured by a set of coloring books or a cartoon on the television.

Around ten o’clock, the problems had turned more serious. The cases came in rapid succession, and were the kind Sara hated because they were largely preventable. One child had eaten rat poison he’d found under the kitchen cabinet. Another had gotten third-degree burns from touching a pan on the stove. There was a teenager she’d had to forcibly commit to the lockdown ward because his first hit of marijuana had pushed him into a psychotic break. Then a seventeen-year-old girl had come in with her skull split open. Apparently, she was still drunk when she drove home this morning. The girl had ended up wrapping her car around a parked Greyhound bus. She was still in surgery, but Sara guessed that even if they managed to control the swelling in her brain, she would never be the same person again.

By eleven, Sara wanted to go back to bed and start the day over.

Working at a hospital was a constant negotiation. The job could suck away as much of your life as you permitted. Sara had agreed to work at Grady knowing this truth, embracing it, because she didn’t want a life after her husband had died. Over the last year, she’d been cutting back on her time in the ER. Keeping regular hours was a struggle, but Sara fought the uphill battle every day.

It was really a form of self-preservation. Every doctor carried around a cemetery inside them. The patients she could help—the little girl whose stomach she’d pumped, the burned toddler whose fingers she’d saved—were momentary blips. It was the lost ones that Sara remembered most. The kid who’d slowly, painfully succumbed to leukemia. The nine-year-old who’d taken sixteen hours to die from antifreeze poisoning. The eleven-year-old who’d broken his neck diving headfirst into a shallow swimming pool. They were all inside of her, constant reminders that no matter how hard she worked, sometimes—oftentimes—it was never enough.

Sara sat down on the couch in the doctors’ lounge. She had charts to catch up on, but she needed a minute to herself. She’d gotten less than four hours of sleep last night. Will wasn’t the direct reason her brain would not turn off. She’d kept thinking about Evelyn Mitchell and her corrupt band of brothers. The question of the woman’s guilt weighed heavily on her mind. Will’s words kept coming back to Sara: either Evelyn Mitchell was a bad boss or a dirty cop. There was no in-between.

Which was probably why Sara hadn’t found the time this morning to call Faith Mitchell and check on her. Technically, Faith was Delia Wallace’s patient, but Sara felt an odd sort of responsibility for Will’s partner. It tugged at her the same way Will seemed to tug at her every waking thought these days.

All of the tedium. None of the pleasure.

Nan, one of the student nurses, plopped down on the couch beside Sara. She scrolled through her BlackBerry as she talked. “I want to hear all about your hot date.”

Sara forced a smile onto her face. That morning when she got to the hospital, there’d been a large bouquet of flowers waiting for her in the doctors’ lounge. It seemed Dale Dugan had bought out the entire city’s supply of baby’s breath and pink carnations. Everyone in the ER had made a comment to Sara before she’d even managed to change into her lab coat. They all seemed caught up in the romance of the widow being swept off her feet.

Sara told the girl, “He’s very nice.”

“He thinks you’re nice, too.” Nan gave a sly grin as she typed an email. “I ran into him at the lab. He’s super cool.”

Sara watched the girl’s thumbs move, feeling three hundred years old. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever been that young. Neither could she imagine Dale Dugan sitting down and having a nice gossip with this giddy young nurse.

Nan finally looked up from the device. “He said you’re fascinating, and that you had a great time, and that you shared a very nice kiss.”

“You’re emailing him?”

“No.” She rolled her eyes. “He said that in the lab.”

“Great,” Sara managed. She didn’t know how to deal with Dale, who was either deluded or a pathological liar. Eventually, she would have to talk with him. The flowers alone were a very bad sign. She would have to rip off the Band-Aid quickly. Still, she couldn’t help wondering why the man she wanted was unavailable and the available man was unwanted. Thus continued her quest to turn her life into a television soap opera.

Nan started typing again. “What do you want me to tell him that you said?”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“But you could.”

“Uh …” Sara stood up from the couch. This was much easier when you could just slip a note into somebody’s locker. “I should go get lunch while things are quiet.”

Instead of heading toward the cafeteria, Sara took a left toward the elevators. She almost got mowed down by a gurney flying down the corridor. Stab wound. The knife was still sticking out of the patient’s chest. EMTs screamed vitals. Doctors snapped orders. Sara pressed the elevator down button and waited for the doors to open.

The hospital had been founded in the 1890s, and was housed in four different locations before finding its final home on Jesse Hill Jr. Drive. Constant mismanagement, corruption, and plain incompetence meant that at any given time in its storied history, the hospital was about to go under. The U-shaped building had been added onto, remodeled, torn down, and renovated so many times that Sara was certain no one could keep count anymore. The land around the facility was sloped toward Georgia State University, which shared its parking decks with the hospital. The ambulance bays for the emergency department backed onto the interstate, at what was called the Grady Curve, and were a full story above the main front entrance on the street side. During Jim Crow, the hospital was called the Gradys, because the white wings were on one side, looking onto the city, and the African American wings were on the other, looking onto nothing.

Margaret Mitchell had been rushed here, and died five days later, after being hit by a drunk driver on Peachtree Street. Victims from the Centennial Olympic Park bombing had been treated here. Grady was still the only Level 1 trauma center in the area. Victims with the most serious, life-threatening injuries were all flown here for treatment, which meant the Fulton County medical examiner’s office had a satellite location to process intakes down in the morgue. At any given time, there were two or three bodies waiting for transport. When Sara had first taken the job as Grant County coroner, she had trained at the Pryor Street medical examiner’s office downtown. They were constantly shorthanded. She’d spent many a lunch hour making body runs to Grady.

The elevator doors opened. George, one of the security guards, got off. His girth filled the hall. He had been a football player until a dislocated ankle had convinced him to pursue an alternative career path.

“Dr. Linton.” He held the doors back for her.

“George.”

He winked at her and she smiled.

A young couple was already in the car. They huddled together as the elevator moved down one floor. That was the other thing about working at a hospital. Everywhere you turned, you ran into someone who was having one of the worst days of their life. Maybe this was the change Sara needed in her life—not to sell her apartment and move into a cozy bungalow, but to return to private practice, where the only emergency during the day was deciding which pharmaceutical rep was going to buy lunch.

The temperature was colder two stories down in the sub-basement. Sara pulled her lab coat closed as she walked past the records department. Unlike the old days when she’d interned at Grady, there was no need to stand in line for charts. Everything was automated, a patient’s information only as far away as the computerized tablets that worked on the hospital’s intranet. X-rays were on the larger computer monitors in the rooms, and all medications were coded to patient armbands. As the only publicly funded hospital left in Atlanta, Grady was constantly teetering on bankruptcy, but at least it was trying to go out in style.

Sara stopped in front of the thick double doors that separated the morgue from the rest of the hospital. She waved her badge in front of the reader. There was a sudden whoosh of changing air pressure as the insulated steel doors swung open.

The attendant seemed surprised to find Sara in his space. He was as close to goth as you could get while wearing blue hospital scrubs. Everything about him announced that he was too cool for his job. His dyed black hair was pulled into a ponytail. His glasses looked like they had belonged to John Lennon. His eyeliner was something out of a Cleopatra movie. To Sara, the paunch at his stomach and the Fu Manchu made him look more like Spike, Snoopy’s brother. “You lost?”

“Junior,” she read off his nametag. He was young, probably Nan’s age. “I was wondering if someone from the Fulton ME’s office was here.”

“Larry. He’s loading up in the back. Is there a problem?”

“No, I just want to pick his brain.”

“Good luck finding it.”

A skinny Hispanic man came out of the back room. His scrubs hung on him like a bathrobe. He was around Junior’s age, which was to say that he had probably been in diapers a few weeks ago. “Very funny, jefe.” He punched Junior in the arm. “Whatchu need, Doc?”

This wasn’t going as planned. “Nothing. Sorry to bother you guys.” She started to turn away, but Junior stopped her.

“You’re Dale’s new lady, right? He said you were a tall redhead.”

Sara bit her lip. What was Dale doing hanging around all these ten-year-olds?

Junior’s face broke out into a grin. “Dr. Linton, I presume.”

She would’ve lied but for her badge hanging off her jacket. And her name embroidered over the breast pocket. And the fact that she was the only doctor with red hair working in the hospital.

Larry offered, “I’d be pleased to help Dale’s new squeeze.”

“Hells yeah,” Junior chimed in.

Sara plastered a smile onto her face. “How do you two know Dale?”

“B-ball, baby.” Larry feigned a hoop shot. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

“No emergency—” she said, before realizing he was just being funny. “I had a question about the shooting yesterday.”

“Which one?”

This time he wasn’t joking. Asking about a shooting in Atlanta was like asking about the drunk at a football game. “Sherwood Forest. The officer-involved shooting.”

Larry nodded. “Damn, that was freaky. Guy had a belly full of H.”

“Heroin?” Sara asked.

“Packed into balloons. The gunshot split ’em open like …” He asked Junior, “Shit, man, what’re them things with sugar in ’em?”

“Dip Stick?”

“No.”

“Is it chocolate?”

“No, man, like in the paper straw.”

Sara suggested, “Pixie Stix?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Dude went out on an epic high.”

Sara waited through some fist bumping between the two. “This was the Asian man?”

“No, the Puerto Rican. Ricardo.” He put an exotic spin on the r’s.

“I thought he was Mexican.”

“Yo, ’cause we all look alike?”

Sara didn’t know how to answer him.

Larry laughed. “That’s cool. I’m just playin’ ya. Sure, he’s Puerto Rican, like my moms.”

“Did they get a last name on him?”

“No. But, he got the Neta tattooed on his hand.” He pointed to the webbing between his thumb and index finger. “It’s a heart with an N in the middle.”

“Neta?” Sara had never heard the name before.

“Puerto Rican gang. Crazy dudes want to break off from the U.S. My moms was all up in that shit when we left. All ‘we gotta get out from the rule of the colonial oppressors.’ Then she gets here and she’s all, ‘I gotta get me one’a them big-screen plasma TVs like your aunt Frieda.’ Word.” Another fist bump with Junior.

“You’re sure that’s a gang symbol—the N inside a heart?”

“One of ’em. Everybody who joins up has to bring in more people.”

“Like Wiccans,” Junior provided.

“Exactly. Lots of ’em drop out or move on. Ricardo there can’t be big-time. He don’t got the fingers.” Larry held up his hand again, this time with his index finger crossed in front of his middle finger. “Usually looks like this, with the Puerto Rican flag around the wrist. They’re all about independence. At least that’s what they say.”

Sara remembered what Will had told her. “I thought Ricardo had the Los Texicanos tattoo on his chest?”

“Yeah, like I said, a lot of ’em drop out or move on. Brother must’ve moved on and up. Neta ain’t got pull here like Texicanos.” He hissed air through his teeth. “Scary stuff, man. Them Texicanos don’t screw around.”

“Does the ME’s office know all of this?”

“They sent the pictures to the gang unit. Neta’s the top organization in PR. They’ll be in the Bible.”

The Gang Bible was the book used by police officers to track gang signs and movements. “Was there anything on the Asian men? The other victims?”

“One was a student. Some kind of math whiz. Won all kinds of prizes or some shit.”

Sara remembered Hironobu Kwon’s photo from the news. “I thought he was at Georgia State?” State wasn’t a bad school, but a math prodigy would end up at Georgia Tech.

“That’s all I know. They’re doing the other guy right now. That apartment fire got us backed up big-time. Six bodies.” He shook his head. “Two dogs. Man, I hate when it’s dogs.”

Junior said, “I feel ya, bro.”

“Thank you,” Sara said. “Thank you both.”

Junior pounded the side of his fist against his chest. “Be good to my man Dale.”

Sara left before more fists were bumped. She dug her hand into her pocket, trying to find her cell phone as she walked down the hallway. Most of the staff carried so many electronic devices that they were all likely going to die of radiation poisoning. She had a BlackBerry she received lab reports and hospital communiqués on as well as an iPhone for personal use. Her hospital cell phone was a flip-style that had previously belonged to someone with very sticky hands. Two pagers were clipped to her coat pocket, one for the emergency department and one for the pediatrics ward. Her personal phone was slim and usually the last thing she found, which was the case this time.

She scrolled through the numbers, pausing on Amanda Wagner’s name, then scrolling back up to Will Trent. His phone rang twice before he picked up.

“Trent.”

Sara was inexplicably tongue-tied by the sound of his voice. In the silence, she could hear wind blowing, the sound of children playing.

He said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Will—sorry.” She cleared her throat. “I was calling because I talked to someone at the ME’s office. Like you asked.” She felt her face turning red. “Like Amanda asked.”

He mumbled something, probably to Amanda. “What’d you find out?”

“The Texicanos victim, Ricardo. No last name as of yet, but he was probably Puerto Rican.” She waited while he relayed this information to Amanda. She asked the same question Sara had. Sara answered, “He had a tattoo on his hand for a gang, the Neta, which is in Puerto Rico. The man I talked with said Ricardo probably switched affiliations when he came to Atlanta.” Again, she waited for him to tell Amanda. “He also had a belly full of heroin.”

“Heroin?” His voice went up in surprise. “How much?”

“I’m not sure. The man I spoke with said the powder was packed in balloons. When Faith shot him, the heroin was released. That alone would’ve killed him.”

Will told Amanda as much, then came back on the line. “Amanda says thank you for checking into this.”

“I’m sorry there’s not more.”

“That’s great what you came up with.” He clarified, “I mean, thank you, Dr. Linton. This is all very useful information to have.”

She knew he couldn’t talk in front of Amanda, but she didn’t want to let him go. “How’s it going on your end?”

“The prison was a bust. We’re standing outside Hironobu Kwon’s house right now. He lived with his mother in Grant Park.” He was less than fifteen minutes away from Grady. “The neighbor says his mother should be home soon. I guess she’s probably making arrangements. She lives across the street from the zoo. We had to park about a mile away. Or, I did. Amanda made me drop her off.” He finally paused for breath. “How are you doing?”

Sara smiled. He seemed to want to stay on the phone as much as she did. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Not much. How about you?”

She tried to think of something flirty to say, but settled on, “Not much.”

Amanda’s voice was too muffled to understand, but Sara got the tone. Will said, “So, I’ll talk to you later. Thank you again, Dr. Linton.”

Sara felt foolish as she ended the call. Maybe she should go back up to the lounge and gossip with Nan.

Or maybe she should talk to Dale Dugan and nip this in the bud before they both got any more embarrassed. Sara took out her hospital BlackBerry and looked up Dale’s email address, then started to enter it into her iPhone. She would ask him to meet her in the cafeteria so they could talk this through. Or maybe she should suggest the parking lot. She didn’t want to cause more gossip than was already circulating.

Up ahead, the elevator bell dinged and she caught sight of Dale. He was laughing with one of the nurses. Junior must’ve told him she was down here. Sara chickened out. She opened the first door she came to, which happened to be the records department. Two older women with matching, tightly groomed perms sat behind desks piled with charts. They were typing furiously on their computer keyboards and barely looked up at Sara.

One of them asked, “Help you?” turning the page on the chart opened beside her.

Sara stood there, momentarily unsure of herself. She realized that somewhere in the back of her mind, she had been thinking about the records office since she got on the elevator. She dropped her iPhone back into her coat pocket.

“What is it, darlin’?” the woman asked. They were both staring at Sara now.

She held up her hospital ID. “I need an old chart from nineteen …” She did the math quickly in her head. “Seventy-six, maybe?”

The woman handed her a pad and paper. “Give me the name. That’ll make it easier.”

Sara knew even as she wrote down Will’s name that what she was doing was wrong, and not just because she was breaking federal privacy laws and risking immediate termination. Will had been at the Atlanta Children’s Home from infancy. There wouldn’t have been a family physician managing his care. All of his medical needs would have been handled through Grady. His entire childhood was stored here, and Sara was using her hospital ID to gain access to it.

“No middle name?” the woman asked.

Sara shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“Gimme a minute. These won’t be in the computer yet or you’d be able to pull them up on your tablet. We’ve barely dipped our toe into 1970.” She was out of her chair and through the door marked “File Room” before Sara could tell her to stop.

The other woman went back to her typing, her long red fingernails making a sound like a cat running across a tile floor. Sara looked down at her shoes, which were stained with God knows what from this morning’s cases. In her mind, she went over the possible culprits, but as hard as she tried, she could not shake the feeling that what she was doing was absolutely and without a doubt the most unethical thing she had ever done in her life. What’s more, it was a complete betrayal of Will’s trust.

And she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.

This wasn’t the way Sara operated. She was normally a forthright person. If she wanted to know about Will’s suicide attempt, or any details about his childhood, then she should ask him, not sneak around his back and look at his medical chart.

The woman was back. “No William, but I found a Wilbur.” She had a file tucked under her arm. “Nineteen seventy-five.”

Sara had used paper charts the majority of her career. Most healthy kids had a chart with twenty or so pages by the time they reached eighteen years of age. An unhealthy kid’s file could run around fifty. Will’s chart was over an inch thick. A decaying rubber band held together faded sheets of yellow and white paper.

“No middle name,” the woman said. “I’m sure he had one at some point, but a lot of these kids fell through the cracks back then.”

Her partner supplied, “Ellis Island and Tuskegee rolled up into one.”

Sara reached for the file, then stopped herself. Her hand hovered in the air.

“You all right, darlin’?” The woman glanced back at her office mate, then to Sara. “You need to sit down?”

Sara dropped her hand. “I don’t think I need that after all. I’m sorry to waste your time.”

“Are you sure?”

Sara nodded. She could not remember the last time she had felt this awful. Even her run-in with Angie Trent hadn’t produced this amount of guilt. “I’m so sorry.”

“No need to apologize. Felt good to get up.” She started to tuck the file under her arm but the rubber band broke, sending papers flying onto the floor.

Automatically, Sara bent down to help. She gathered the pages together, willing herself not to read the words. There were lab reports printed in dot matrix, reams of chart notations, and what looked like an ancient Atlanta police report. She blurred her vision, praying she wouldn’t pick up a word or a sentence.

“Look at this.”

Sara looked up. It was a natural thing to do. The woman held a faded Polaroid picture in her hand. The shot was a close-up of a child’s mouth. A small silver ruler was beside a laceration running the width of the philtrum, the midline groove between the top of the lip and nose. The injury wasn’t from a tumble or bump. The impact had been significant enough to rend the flesh in two, revealing the teeth. Thick black sutures pulled together the wound. The skin was puffy and irritated. Sara was more accustomed to seeing this kind of baseball stitching in a morgue, not on a child’s face.

“I bet he was in that poly-what’s-it study,” the woman said. She showed the photo to her friend.

“Polyglycolic acid.” She explained to Sara, “Grady piloted a study on different types of absorbable sutures they were working on at Tech. Looks like he’s one of the kids that had an allergic reaction. Poor little thing.” She went back to her typing. “I guess it was better than sticking a bunch of leeches on him.”

The other woman asked Sara, “You all right, hon?”

Sara felt as if she was going to be sick. She straightened up and left the room. She didn’t stop walking until she had bolted up two flights of stairs and was outside, breathing fresh air.

She paced in front of the closed door. Her emotions pinballed back and forth between anger and shame. He was just a child. He’d been admitted for treatment and they had experimented on him like an animal. To this day, he probably had no idea what they had done. Sara wished to God she didn’t know herself, though it served her right for prying. She should’ve never asked for his chart. But she had, and now Sara couldn’t get that picture out of her head—his beautiful mouth crudely pulled together with a suture that couldn’t meet the basic standards for government approval.

The faded Polaroid would be burned into her memory until she died. She had gotten exactly what she deserved.

“Hey, you.”

She spun around. A young woman was standing behind her. She was painfully thin. Her greasy blonde hair hung to her waist. She scratched at the fresh needle tracks on her arms. “Are you a doctor?”

Sara felt her guard go up. Junkies lurked around the hospital. Some of them could be violent. “You should go inside if you need treatment.”

“It’s not me. There’s a guy over there.” She pointed to the Dumpster in a corner behind the hospital. Even in full daylight, the area was shadowed by the looming façade of the building. “He’s been there all night. I think he’s dead.”

Sara moderated her tone. “Let’s go inside and talk about this.”

Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes. “Lookit, I’m just trying to do the right thing. You don’t gotta go all high and mighty on me.”

“I’m not—”

“I hope he gives you AIDS, bitch.” She limped off, mumbling more insults.

“Christ,” Sara breathed, wondering how her day could get any worse. How she missed the manners of good country people, when even the junkies called her “ma’am.” She started back toward the hospital, then stopped. The girl could’ve been telling the truth.

Sara walked back toward the Dumpster, not getting too close in case the girl’s accomplice was hiding inside. The trash wasn’t collected over the weekend. Boxes and plastic bags spilled out of the metal container and littered the ground. Sara took a step closer. There was someone lying underneath a blue plastic bag. She saw a hand. A deep gash splayed open the palm. Sara took another step closer, then stopped. Working at Grady had made her hyper-cautious. This could still be a trap. Instead of going to the body, she turned around and jogged toward the ambulance bay so that she could get help.

Three EMTs were standing around talking. She directed them toward the back and they followed her with a gurney. Sara pulled away the trash. The man was breathing but unconscious. His eyes were closed. His brown skin had a yellow, waxy look. His T-shirt was soaked in blood, obviously from a penetrating wound in his lower abdomen. Sara pressed her fingers to his carotid and saw a familiar tattoo on his neck: a Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.

Will’s missing Type B-negative.

“Let’s move it,” one of the EMTs said.

Sara ran beside the gurney as they rolled the man into the hospital. She listened to the medics run down vitals as she pulled back the gauze over his belly. The entrance to the wound was thin, probably from a kitchen knife. The edge was rough from the serration. There was very little fresh blood, indicating a closed bleed. The gut was distended, and the telltale odor of rotting flesh told her that there was not much that she would be able to do for him in the ER.

A tall man in a dark suit jogged alongside her. He asked, “Is he going to make it?”

Sara looked for George. The security guard was nowhere to be found. “You need to stay out of the way.”

“Doctor—” He held up his wallet. She saw the flash of gold shield. “I’m a cop. Is he going to make it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pressing the gauze back in place. Then, because the patient might hear, she said, “Maybe.”

The cop dropped back. She glanced up the hall, but he was gone.

The trauma team set up immediately, cutting off the man’s clothes, drawing blood, connecting lines to hook him up to various machines. A cut-down tray was laid out. Surgical packs were opened. The crash cart appeared.

Sara called for two large-bore IVs to force fluids. She checked the ABCs: airway clear, breathing okay, circulation as good as could be expected. She noticed the pace slow considerably as people began to realize what they were dealing with. The team thinned. Eventually, she was down to just one nurse.

“No wallet,” the nurse said. “Nothing in his pockets but lint.”

“Sir?” Sara tried, opening the man’s eyes. His pupils were fixed and dilated. She checked for a head injury, gently pressing her fingers in a clockwise pattern around his skull. At the occipital bone, she felt a fracture that splintered into the brainpan. She looked at her gloved hand. There was no fresh blood from the wound.

The nurse pulled the curtain closed to give the man some privacy. “X-ray? CT the belly?”

Sara was technically doing the regular attending’s job. She asked, “Can you get Krakauer?”

The nurse left, and Sara did a more thorough exam, though she was sure Krakauer would take one look at the man’s vitals and agree with her. There was no emergency here. The patient could not survive general anesthesia and he likely would not survive his injuries. They could only load him up with antibiotics and wait for time to decide the patient’s fate.

The privacy curtain pulled back. A young man peered in. He was clean-shaven, wearing a black warm-up jacket and a black baseball hat pulled down low on his head.

“You can’t be back here,” she told him. “If you’re looking for—”

He punched Sara in the chest so hard that she fell back onto the floor. Her shoulder slammed against one of the trays. Metal instruments clattered around her—scalpels, hemostats, scissors. The young man pointed a gun at the patient’s head and shot him twice at pointblank range.

Sara heard screaming. It was her. The sound was coming out of her own mouth. The man pointed the gun at her head and she stopped. He moved toward her. She groped blindly for something to protect herself. Her hand wrapped around one of the scalpels.

He was closer, almost on top of her. Was he going to shoot her or was he going to leave? Sara didn’t give him time to decide. She slashed out, cutting the inside of his thigh. The man groaned, dropping the gun. The wound was deep. Blood sprayed from the femoral artery. He fell to one knee. They both saw the gun at the same time. She kicked it away. He reached for Sara instead, grabbing the hand that held the scalpel. She tried to pull back but his grip tightened around her wrists. Panic took hold as she realized what he was doing. The blade was moving toward her neck. She used both her hands, trying to push him away as he inched the blade closer and closer.

“Please … no …”

He was on top of her, pressing her into the ground with the weight of his body. She stared into his green eyes. The whites were crisscrossed with a road map of red. His mouth was a straight line. His body shook so hard that she felt it in her spine.

“Drop it!” George, the security guard, stood with his gun locked out in front of him. “Now, asshole!”

Sara felt the man’s grip tighten. Both their hands were shaking from pushing in opposite directions.

“Drop it now!”

“Please,” Sara begged. Her muscles couldn’t take much more. Her hands were starting to weaken.

Without warning, the pressure stopped. Sara watched the scalpel swing up, the blade slice into the man’s flesh. He kept his hand wrapped tightly around hers as over and over again he plunged the scalpel into his own throat.