Scarcity (Jack Randall #3) (34 page)

“Dr. Dayo?”

“Yes?”

“You stopped?”

“Oh . . . sorry, uh, metz please.”

Raina slapped the scissors into his hand before trading a confused look with Jennifer. She received a shrug for a reply.

The ventilator hissed as they silently went back to work.

Organ donors may be denied health insurance
April 18, 2011—The Washington Post
 
 

—TWENTY-SIX—

M
anuel tapped the barrel of the gun repeatedly against his forehead in an attempt to wake himself up. He had already tried several other tricks to stay awake, many of them taught to him by the man he was waiting for. He stopped the tapping and lightly tickled the roof of his mouth with his tongue until it sent an involuntary shiver through his muscles. But that only worked for a few minutes, and he was soon fighting off the sandman again. A drop of sweat crawled down his back and into the already soaked waistline of his pants. If sweating alone kept one awake, it would have been all that he needed, but the sauna-like interior and the gentle rocking of the sailboat made it hard for him to do so.

At least the sun was going down soon, and with it, he hoped, the temperature. He had already exhausted his drink supply, having underestimated his needs by a long shot. Fortunately, a quiet search of the boat had turned up a case of bottled water. It was as warm as the cabin temperature, and far from refreshing, but it served its purpose by replacing the fluids he was sweating out. He was on his second towel, and had given up on staying dry some time ago. He used it on his face and eyes only at this point, as his shirt had long since been saturated. Even his socks were soaked, but he never considered taking his shoes off, he may soon have to move quickly, and there wouldn’t be time to put them on.

A voice outside brought him up out of his reclined position and he listened intently, letting his mouth hang open so his ears could perform better, just as Jimmy had taught him. The voice was soon joined by a few others, both male and female, and after a moment he classified them as returning boaters who had obviously had a few drinks. Their laughter penetrated the fiberglass with ease as they walked past, and he found himself wishing he were with them, or at least on his own boat. Anywhere but here.

As he sank back down into the chair his thoughts turned back to the task at hand. He cursed the lack of preparation time. If he’d only had time to go to his storage garage and fetch a rifle. He could have done this from a distance. But there had been no time and now he had no choice but to confront Jimmy face to face. Despite the time alone to think about it, both on the plane and here in the boat, he was unsure of what he was going to do when his teacher showed up.

He shifted on the cabin bench and cursed Rico for putting him in this position. Something he had been doing ever since he had answered the phone in DC. He also cursed Jimmy for quitting on him the way he had. Why did he tell him he was doing it at all? Was it the girl and her heart going to Oscar? They had seen and done some evil things in the years they’d worked together, and while it was true that this was close to the top, it wasn’t like they had been tasked with doing it themselves. Was it Jimmy’s dislike of Rico? They were all in that club, including him, but like it or not, Rico was in charge now. Manuel knew what happened to those who crossed Rico. They got visits from men like himself. As much as he respected Jimmy, he wasn’t about to cross Rico and end up in that position.

Perhaps it was the woman? He knew Jimmy had a woman in his life. He had never mentioned her and Manuel had never asked, but he knew. Any answer he might have received to such a question would have been at best a half-truth. Looking back now, it dawned on him that Jimmy had never spoken of
any
woman in his life. While Manuel would often boast of his many female conquests, Jimmy would simply play along until he had exhausted the subject and then move on to other things.

Manuel smiled in the dark room at the revelation. “That is why he was the teacher and you were the student,” he told himself.

He raised the water bottle to his lips and drained it. Soon he would have to piss in the sink again, but he didn’t wish to get up and move around until he had to. Moving around meant noise. Noise that might be heard by someone on the dock or a neighboring boat. If there was one thing Jimmy had taught him, it was patience. Besides, he admitted, he was not eager to meet his old partner. Despite the current working conditions he was in.

He opened another bottle of water and listened to the sounds around him while he drank. A car in the parking lot, a young woman’s laughter on a distant dock, a passing boat. The sounds were classified and dismissed with little thought. The majority of his brain was still occupied with the one question, and he pondered the thought as the shadows lengthened across the cabin floor.

What would he do when Jimmy got here?

•      •      •

Unaware of the dilemma playing out in his surgeon’s head, Brian sat in front of his malfunctioning bypass machine, watching and listening for further trouble. He was shoulder to shoulder with a man they had all just met and knew only as Joe. Joe was one of the hospital’s maintenance men, and he was far outside his comfort zone. He was unlucky enough to have been in his boss’s office when the call had come in, and as a result, he’d been quickly dispatched to the OR with some frantically located tools. After being quickly gowned, gloved, bootied, and goggled by the nurses in the hallway, they had pushed him over the thick red line painted on the floor and down the hall. Before he was through the doors, his nose told him the problem. Electrical fire. It had the distinct smell of burning wire insulation. But when he looked around the room he failed to see the source. He froze when his gaze naturally found its way to the operating room table and the people busy over it. Only Brian’s call and Paula’s prodding had moved him to where he was now.

He now sat on a small stool, holding a timing light in his hands. The cold temperature of the OR failed to overcome his nervousness, and he unconsciously attempted to wipe the sweat from his palms on his pants, only to give up as he remembered the gloves. He instead sat straighter in an effort to see what was happening on the table. It was not his first time in an operating room. He had been here before to service the air handlers and the table hydraulics once. But today was his first time in the room while it was actually in use, and he was a little overwhelmed.

A gentle nudge from Brian’s elbow brought him back to the task at hand. Brian didn’t say anything, he just pointed to the number one pumphead with his clipboard. Joe obediently aimed the timing light and pulled the trigger to get a reading. The light strobed across the spinning pump until a digital readout appeared on the screen. He silently held it out for Brian to see and watched as he wrote it down on what was obviously a quickly sketched chart.

Joe moved on to the next pump without waiting to be asked. Since he had arrived they had been repeating the process every few minutes. Brian had calmed down once Joe had managed to slap pieces of reflective tape on each pump, while they were still spinning, and get a few readings. Still, he noticed that Brian kept a manual pump handle in his lap in case any of them failed and he had to rotate it by hand. Another reason for his nervousness was that they had switched pump 4 for pump 5 as it had been running too hot for his comfort level. Five was running fine, but using it meant that they no longer had a backup pump. They had to make do with what they had, or switch to another machine. Joe had been told that really wasn’t an option at this point.

After getting a reading on each of the four running pumps he exchanged his timing light for his laser temperature gauge and shone it on the cooling unit.

“How’s it look?” Brian asked.

“It still matches your gauge.”

“Okay.”

Brian leaned back in his chair to document the reading and this gave Joe a view of the heart beating in the tray of fluid on top of the POPS machine next to him. He couldn’t help but stare at it.

“You okay?” Brian asked.

“Yeah . . . why?”

“You’re not going to get sick or anything, are you?”

“No, blood doesn’t bother me. Lord knows I’ve had to clean up enough of it since I took this job. How people manage to bleed into stuff around here amazes me.”

“Really? How’s that?”

“Well, remember last month when the air conditioning went out in the ER? We had to set up all these portable units. Well some drunk managed to fall into one of them and jam his hand into the fan. Took two of his fingers off and filled the thing with blood. Took us a week to get it clean enough to put it back in service.”

“Sounds fun. They save his fingers?”

“Yeah, sewed them back on. He’s probably holding a drink with them right now.”

“Could’ve been worse. At least he didn’t puke into it.”

“That’s thinking positive, I guess.”

“It’s been that kind of day.”

“Yeah . . . so is that heart really beating, or is the machine just making it look that way?”

Brian turned to the POPS machine and watched the heart pulsating in the tray for a moment before replying. He was too frazzled to give an in-depth explanation.

“A little of both actually. The heart just needs blood and oxygen and some other stuff to do its thing. As long as those things are provided, it
wants
to beat. The machine just gives it what it wants and keeps it happy.”

“Amazing.”

“That it is.”

“So when do they . . . you know . . . put it in?”

“Whenever the man says he’s ready.” Brian nodded toward the table where Dr. Dayo and the team were busy before glancing at the clock. “Should be soon.”

“Then how long till we’re done?”

“Couple of hours. Are you bored already, or do you need to be somewhere?”

“No, not bored.” Joe smiled. “The wife’s just gonna start to wonder in an hour or so.”

“Just grab Paula’s attention when she’s not busy and she’ll make a call for you. If you can’t stay, just show me how to work the light before you go.”

“No, I’ll stay if you need me. Most interesting thing I’ve done since I got here. Besides, you can’t crank on all these pumps by yourself.”

“Okay.”

They both sat back and silently divided their attention between the action on the table, the heart beating in the machine next to them, and the spinning pumps in front of them. After another few minutes, Brian picked up the clipboard. The newest member of the team raised the timing light and aimed it at the spinning pump.

•      •      •

Rico lay on a chaise lounge outside his brother’s mountaintop home. He had essentially moved in since Oscar’s capture and was taking full advantage of the luxurious space. Oscar’s mistress had relocated to the beach house after Rico had moved a few of his girlfriends in with them. He didn’t care, he was already thinking of the house as his anyway.

He grunted into the phone and only half-listened to a report from one of his informants in the Mexican AFI. His man Luis had been arrested. It was a small setback, he had many such people like him on the cartel payroll, but combined with the multiple arrests made as a result of Angel’s capture, it was starting to sting. The crackdown by the President of Mexico on the cartels had not really made much of a dent in the production or flow of their product. It had mostly served to turn the Mexican gangs they employed against one another as they fought for vacated territory. He didn’t really care how much they killed one another as long as lost shipments did not rise above what was considered acceptable losses. His brother had jokingly referred to it as taxes. Import/export taxes, the cost of doing business. Occasionally a gang leader was caught and paraded before the TV cameras like a hunting trophy, but Oscar was usually dealing with his replacement long before the cameras rolled.

It was a lesson that Rico had never really managed to learn.

Rico ended the conversation with another grunt and managed to hang up without taking his eyes off of the very tan and tight buttocks of the girl fixing him another drink. He watched closely as her thong did a rhythmic dance as she stirred it. It produced a leering grin on his face as the drink was delivered and he accepted it while also running his hand up her leg and roughly cupping her bare flesh. She endured the groping with the required smile on her face. Rico falsely read it as an invitation and was about to pull her down onto his lap when they were interrupted by his security man approaching. The girl quickly spun and walked away, this time with a genuine smile.

“What is it?” Rico snapped.

“They’ve arrived.”

Rico made a face. More business. This time a meeting with his top lieutenants. It seemed to never end. He knocked back the drink before pushing himself to his feet. The sudden move, combined with his early start on the bottle that morning, resulted in a wave of dizziness. The mountaintop view blurred and he swayed for a moment before managing to stay on his feet and out of the pool. He turned to find Carlos standing close, his large frame and outstretched hand blocking out the sun.