Doing Harm (46 page)

She leers, and I glimpse a flash of steel in her right hand, just as it begins to curve downward toward
my
throat. But in that instant, I’m able to twist my right hand away from her left and grab her right wrist, slowing but not completely halting the forward momentum of the large, razor-sharp scalpel she’s holding in her right hand.

It’s not enough. The tip of the scalpel pierces the exposed skin below my left jaw and begins to dig into the soft flesh. I feel a trickle of warm, wet blood—my blood, for a change, instead of someone else’s—dribble down my neck. I dimly wonder if it will leave a stain on my collar. Meanwhile, she joins her left hand to her right, using both to push down with the combined strength of her two against my one. Time slows as the focus of my entire universe becomes the scalpel.

So this is how it ends for me. How ironic.

Death by scalpel.

Oddly, as I struggle to keep GG from tearing my neck open, I remain calm. There’s no pain, probably because I’m pumped full of adrenaline. So, really, what’s the point in freaking out? Or even putting up much of a fight? Maybe I should just let her carve me up a like a Thanksgiving turkey.

After all, my career is over. My marriage is likely over. And I’m now on the floor of one of the oldest, most prestigious teaching hospitals in the world, being attacked by a crazed, murderous medical student. I mean, if you’re going to go out in style, then this is the way to do it. Right?

I only hope that, if she manages to butcher my neck, she finishes it now, here, on the cold hard floor of the auditorium. A half-ass job, with a catastrophic but only temporary interruption in the flow of blood to my brain, will simply make me stroke out, leaving me mentally incapacitated, a thirty-two-year-old vegetable gorked out in some nursing home somewhere. That would seriously suck. Not so much for me. Because, after all, if I was a drooling, brain-dead zombie fed through a plastic tube shoved into my stomach, what would I care? But for Sally. And the girls.

Sally.

Katie.

Annabelle.

No.

It can’t end now. Not like this. She said she was going to
kill
them once she was done with me. I can’t let that happen.

So I strain against her wrist as hard as I can, fighting to alter the destructive path of the scalpel.

But it’s no use. Despite the ketamine, she’s too strong, and with her two hands against my one, she has a decisive mechanical advantage. The scalpel continues its relentless journey toward the major blood vessels of my neck. I’m going to die.

Mr. Bernard, Mrs. Samuelson, Jerry Garcia—here I come
.

I close my eyes and await the inevitable.

“Get off of him, you
bitch
!”

I open my eyes and can’t believe what I see. Amazingly, miraculously, Sally has appeared to my right holding the midazolam syringe. She buries the needle to the hilt in the side of GG’s left neck, right in the spot I had been aiming for, and depresses the plunger. I don’t know what unseen force guided her hand, luck or God or whatever, but it’s a perfect shot.

GG bares her teeth, lets loose a guttural growl, and deals Sally,
pregnant
Sally—shorter by at least eight inches and lighter by fifty pounds—a vicious backhand blow with her left hand before yanking the syringe out of her neck and tossing it away. Sally falls to the ground next to us, clutching her face and groaning.

And now fury blinds me to all else.

With renewed strength, I take advantage of this momentary distraction by yanking my left arm free of GG’s leg. I push against her scalpel-wielding right hand with both of my hands, and in doing so am able to shove it incrementally back toward her, out of the superficial tissues of my neck. She, in turn, brings her left hand, free again after hitting Sally and disposing of the syringe, to her right.

Now, caught between two inexorable forces, the scalpel starts to shake violently in our hands, centimeters from the main blood supply to my brain. Facing each other there on the floor, limbs interlocked, scalpel at my throat, it’s as if we’re joined in some bizarre dance. We remain like that for what seems like hours but can’t be more than five seconds, until the muscles in my arm start to cramp, then seize up.

The scalpel creeps back toward my neck.

And then,
finally,
all of those drugs pumped into her really kick in, and the tide begins to turn.

GG’s arms, which had been as rigid as steel when she first jumped me, start to give way; grunting with effort, I’m able to gradually, incrementally, push the tip of the scalpel back toward her.

Then, suddenly, as if a power switch had been thrown, GG’s arms go completely limp.

The scalpel clatters harmlessly to the marble floor.

And she collapses on top of me, heavy and inert.

Thank God.

I push her off and roll away, panting and groaning, the sweat streaming down my face in sheets. I crawl over to Sally, who’s still lying on the ground, clutching her face. I gently pull her hands away and examine her. An ugly purple welt is blossoming across her right cheek but, otherwise, she seems okay. Her facial bones appear completely intact, and her nose is untouched. She’s shaking all over and breathing hard. She grabs hold of me, seizing me like I’m a life preserver in the middle of a tsunami, and for several minutes, we just sit there on the floor, holding on to each other, until her shaking stops.

“What are you doing here?” I murmur into her hair, rocking her back and forth. “You’re supposed to be at your parents’ house.”

“I had my dinner with Andrea. About work. Remember? We got done early. I was nearby. I knew you had conference, and I wanted to … I don’t know. Talk. About things. You weren’t answering your cell.” She points to GG’s inert form. “What’s all this about, Steve? I mean, I know this is …
her.
But I saw her attack you, and heard her talking about
killing
you. And me. And the
girls
.
Murdering our whole family.
And my mind, I don’t know … I snapped. All I could think about was protecting the girls. Nothing else. So I grabbed the needle and…” She shudders. “But why was she talking about psychiatrists? And the police? Why was she trying to
kill
you?”

“It’s a long story, sweetie. I am so sorry. I am so very sorry for all of this.”

She takes a deep breath. “Well, we’d better call the police. Before she wakes up.”

GG is sprawled on the floor next to us, eyes glassy, mouth parted slightly. A small trickle of blood is running down her neck from the needle puncture in her skin. I’m surprised it’s not bigger; central veins like the internal jugular usually bleed more. Although she’s gazing right at us, she clearly doesn’t see us. It’s a bit unsettling; like any minute she’s going to jump up and grab me in a headlock. Without taking my eyes off her, I reach up to my neck. The tips of my fingers come away wet and sticky and red, but only just barely, like the kind of minor bleeding you get from a shaving nick. A quick inspection reveals that none of my blood spilled out on the floor or on GG.

Lucky.

“No.”

“
No?
Don’t call the police?”

“No.”

“Are you
crazy,
Steve?”

“I mean, not yet. We need to get out of here first. Before we call the cops.”

“
What the hell are you talking about?
”

“Sally. You have to trust me on this. Don’t worry. We can get her locked away for good without anyone’s ever knowing we were involved.” She’s staring at me like I’ve gone off the deep end. I can’t really blame her. Maybe I have. “Please, Sally. I don’t have time to explain everything right now. But think of what will happen to all of us after this story gets out. Can you imagine? Once this thing goes viral? The effects on our careers? On the girls? Our lives will never be the same.
I
might even end up in jail. Think of Katie and Annabelle.”

There.
I’ve got her. That last bit about Katie and Annabelle. I can tell by the look on her face. “So … what do we do?” She sounds skeptical but interested.

“I’ve taken care of everything. I’ve got it all planned out. But we don’t have a lot of time.”

I pull myself up, wincing, my ribs and all four limbs screaming in protest. “Lock the doors to the room. And stick that chair next to the door underneath the door handle.”

As Sally limps to the doors, I grab a pair of latex gloves, a rubber tourniquet, an alcohol pad, and a large syringe with hypodermic needle from my computer bag. I put on the gloves, tie the tourniquet around GG’s left arm, and locate the basilic vein in the antecubital fossa, in front of the elbow between the biceps and flexor muscles of the forearm. It’s a big fat juicy one, like a blue worm lazing under the surface of the skin, and I slap it gently with my fingers a few times to make it stick out more.

“What are you doing?” Sally has finished locking the doors and is watching me over my shoulder.

I wipe the skin over the vein with an alcohol pad and impale it with the syringe. “Injecting her with some more meds. Mostly narcotics. I need the world to think she was trying to kill herself in a fit of guilt.” I press the syringe into her right hand, undo the tourniquet, and rise to my feet. Thin trickles of blood slowly dribble from her neck and left arm and onto the floor. I find the other syringe, the one Sally jabbed into her neck, lying a short distance away and drop it next to GG’s hand.

“There. That should do it.”

“Won’t the police be suspicious she injected herself in the neck?”

“No. IV drug users do that all the time to themselves.”

“Won’t they—I don’t know—get suspicious about fingerprints? Or DNA? Or something?”

“You’ve been watching too many cop shows. There’s nothing that will ever definitively link any of this to us. We just need to keep our mouths shut and pretend we were never here. They’ll never come looking. Besides, all the evidence points to her acting alone.”

GG is staring through me, looking but not seeing.

“Why … not … just kill me?” she breathes. Her eyes flutter and close. Her breathing slows but doesn’t halt. I palpate her carotid pulse, which is weak but steady.

I think, sadly, of Luis, that night on the McIntoshs’ porch. It seems so long ago now. “Because it wouldn’t be the honorable thing to do,” I whisper.

I pick up her smartphone, turn off the power, and—just for good measure—remove the battery.

“
Now
what are you doing?” Sally asks.

“I don’t want the GPS in her cell phone to track its location when I get rid of it.” I stick the phone and battery in my pocket.

“Won’t GG and the police wonder where it went?”

“Sure. But the last known location will be here at University. And University is a big place to lose one small phone. They’ll figure that, in her state of mind, anything could have happened to it.”

I gingerly place the scalpel, the syringe labeled
00134,
and my laptop into the computer bag, right the lectern, and take Sally by the hand. We slip out through an old maintenance door in the projector room in the back of the auditorium and wend our way through a maze of side hallways before emerging in the main corridor near the entrance to the Dome. I guide Sally to a hidden vantage point I had staked out earlier.

“The automated confession went out from her e-mail account about five minutes ago,” I whisper, checking my watch. “So University Security should … yep. There they are now.”

We watch as several University Hospital Security officers break down the front doors of the Dome and storm into the room.

She takes a deep breath and turns to me. “You know that this doesn’t get you off the hook. Right? Just because she tried to kill us doesn’t mean that I’m not still
really
pissed off at you.”

I suppress a smile. “I understand.”

CHAPTER 25

Friday, August 28

As news of the woman quickly dubbed the “Med Student Murderer” sweeps across the country, I drive to a landfill a few hours from our house and park next to two college kids wrestling a beat-up couch from the flatbed of a pickup truck. The air is filled with the sounds of heavy machinery and the cries of seagulls.

I walk to the edge of the parking lot, where a safety rail separates it from the periphery of the massive garbage pit, and toss both disposable cell phones, GG’s smartphone, and the scalpel into the nearest pile of refuse below. I dropped the smartphone’s battery off at a recycling center earlier today. There’s no reason not to be ecologically responsible, after all.

I watch as a bulldozer pushes the pile with the cell phones and scalpel away from me, toward the center of the pit. The mountains of trash swallow the tiny mound, and it’s gone, like a handful of sand sprinkled onto the grainy expanse of a desert sand dune.

EPILOGUE

It’s 6:45
A.M.
, and I’m sitting in University Hospital’s cafeteria, cradling a strong cup of coffee. The early-morning rush has begun. Nurses and lab technicians and doctors stream in and out of the food line.

I glance at my watch impatiently. The junior resident is running late this morning, and we still need to talk about the patients before I head up to the operating rooms for a full day of surgery with Dr. Collier, who asked for me personally today. It seems he wants to use our time in the operating room together as an opportunity to impart advice about my beginning my faculty job at University Hospital next year. My career trajectory, I note with more relief than satisfaction, gently blowing on the steaming surface of my coffee before taking a small sip, seems to have righted itself—thanks both to my performance at M and M conference that night, and GG’s role in Mr. Bernard’s and Mrs. Samuelson’s deaths.

My smartphone chimes with an incoming text message from Sally.

Can u pick up baby wipes on way home 2nite? Also—marriage counseling Sat. morning. Mom 2 watch girls.