Free 24 Hours by Greg Iles

doctor and two nurses with a broken coffee carafe, causing serious injuries.”
    The image on the Hitachi smash-cut to a jiggling, handheld shot that looked like something out of a Quentin Tarantino film. A wild-eyed man was jabbing a broken coffee carafe at whoever was behind the camera and screaming at the top of his lungs. “ Satan’s hiding inside you, motherfucker! ”
    The audience gasped.
    The man in the video swung the jagged carafe in a roundhouse arc, and the camera jerked wildly toward the ceiling as its operator leaped back to avoid being slashed. Only Will knew that the cameraman had been himself.
    “ It’s the end times! ” the man shrieked. “ Jesus is coming! ” In the background, a nurse cried, “Where the hell is security?” The man with the carafe charged her and began weeping and howling at once. “ Where’s my Rhelda Jean? Somebody call Rhelda, goddamn it! ”
    Suddenly the video cut back to the man lying prostrate and prepped in the OR.
    “If I were to tell you that this man was subdued in the ER not by police, but by me—using a drug—you might guess this was accomplished with a benzodiazepene , a barbiturate, or a narcotic. You would be wrong. No doctor can hit the vein, or even the muscle, of a PCP-crazed man who is trying to kill him with a coffee carafe, not without grave risk to himself and other staff. The ER docs among you might make a more experienced guess and assume that it was done with a paralyzing relaxant like pancuronium bromide, curate, or succinylcholine. And you’d be right. Nowadays, emergency physicians routinely resort to the use of these drugs, because they sometimes offer the only means of compelling violent patients to accept lifesaving treatment. And though they don’t talk about it much, they sometimes use paralyzing relaxants without first administering sedatives, as a sort of punishment to ‘repeat offenders’—violent addicts and gangbangers who show up in the ER again and again, causing chaos and injury to staff.
    “All of you know how dangerous the paralyzing relaxants are, both medically and legally, because they leave patients unable to move or even breathe until they’re intubated and bagged, and their breathing done for them.”
    The Hitachi showed a nurse standing over the patient in the ER, working a breathing bag. Will glanced into the crowd. At the first table, a stunning young woman was staring at him with laserlike concentration. She was twenty years younger than most of the women in the audience, except the trophy wives escorted by those doctors who had ditched the loyal ladies who put them through medical school, in favor of newer models. This woman wore a tight black dress accented by a diamond drop necklace, and she seemed to be alone. Older couples sat on either side of her, framing her like bookends. Since she was sitting in front of the first table, Will had an unobstructed view, from her tapered legs and well-turned ankles to her impressive décolletage. The dress was shockingly short for a medical meeting, but it produced the desired effect. She was distracting enough that he had to remind himself to start talking again.
    “Tonight,” he said, “I’m going to tell you about a revolutionary new class of drug developed by myself and the Klein-Adams pharmaceutical company, and tested in my own clinical trials at University Hospital in Jackson. This drug, the chemical name of which I must keep under wraps for one more month, can completely counteract the effects of succinylcholine, restoring full nerve conductivity in less than thirty seconds.”
    Will heard murmurs of disbelief.
    “Beyond this, we have developed special new compressed-gas syringes that allow the safe injection of a therapeutic dose of Anectine—that’s a popular trade name for succinylcholine—into the external jugular vein, with one half second of skin contact.”
    The Hitachi showed the screaming man with the broken carafe again. This time, as he charged a