Free Lethal Practice by Peter Clement Page B

surgeons’ lounge. It was two P . M ., and I’d arranged to meet him there when he was between cases again. He looked relaxed and at home stretched out on a couch, still in his greens with a surgical mask hanging loosely on his chest. He’d been operating since he left my meeting.
    “I think so,” he replied. “A few will be worried about the damage to their incomes, but I haven’t heard any other bright ideas to save us from Hurst and his cuts, and in the long run, that will cost them a lot more.”
    Half of the major surgery done in the hospital came from emergency. Obviously, our closure would affect the incomes of his departmental members. Even in this room, a few of the other surgeons who’d been reading newspapers had put them down and were leaning forward to try to hear our conversation.
    “In any case,” Sean added, “I’ll support you, and I’ll talk to the others.” He stretched, sat up, and leaned closer to my chair. In a near whisper, he asked, “What’s this I hear about Kingsly being murdered?”
    “How’d you find out?”
    “It’s all over the hospital—rumors, cops beginning to poke around. How come you didn’t tell me?”
    “Those same cops told me to keep my mouth shut.”
    “Well, now that it’s no longer a secret, you can open your mouth.”
    We had another cup of coffee while I told him what I knew. Again, I omitted that Bufort had singled me out for special attention. Not knowing why he’d done so was making me increasingly uneasy, and I wasn’t going to fuel any rumors about myself. I had just finished the story when a nurse stuck her head into the room and called over to a gray-haired woman in greens, “Your case is ready. Doctor.”
    “Sean, is that Phoebe Saunderson, the gynecologist?” I asked as the middle-aged woman left the lounge.
    “Yep.”
    “I thought she’d retired from practice years ago.”
    He shook his head. “Became the VP medical of a hospital in the east end of Buffalo. After five years she asked to come back to St. Paul’s.”
    “And she can still operate?”
    “Sure.”
    “After being away from it for five years?”
    “Absolutely. She had to work like crazy to catch up on all the new drugs and the latest in reproductive endocrinology, but apart from a few new techniques and instruments, cutting is cutting. Once you’re a surgeon and know how to operate, it’s like riding a bicycle—you never really lose the technique.”
    The same nurse who had summoned Dr. Saunderson now poked her head through the door and called Sean.
    “You know,” he said as he got up, “I bet even old Hurst could still wield a pretty mean scalpel.”
    My meeting at five that evening with my own staff was brief. By five-fifteen we decided, nearly unanimously, to withdraw our services and shut down emergency in twenty-four hours if the closed beds weren’t immediately reopened. I suggested we should consider issuing a press release warning of our hazardous overcrowding in the ER. It would condemn the administration for its irresponsible action and request that patients use other emergency facilities until we could make our own department safe. I said I was going to sleep on the wording of the press release and we’d take it up tomorrow. Then I explained that I would warn our sister hospitals, since our closing would increase their loads. In spite of the added burden to the other ERs, I expected we’d get support from their staffs. Finally somebody would be doing something. I’d inform MAS what we were up to. They would have no choice but to continue diverting ambulances to other institutions.
    Initially, the younger physicians were reluctant to go along with the plan. Not having the established reputations or financial security of the older doctors, they balked at putting their jobs at risk.
    “You guys can walk out of here and probably find a new position by tomorrow night,” one of them said pointedly. “We don’t have your options.”
    But then I explained