Free City of Strangers (Luis Chavez Book 2) by Mark Wheaton Page B

breaths.”
    “But I  . . . can’t breathe,” Rabih replied. “I can’t—”
    “Yes you can,” Susan said. “If you can speak, you can breathe.”
    She took his hand. Less than a minute later it went limp. And no matter what Susan did to try and resuscitate him, Rabih Chamoun was gone. When the ambulance finally arrived, Susan explained what she could, holding back the information that Chamoun was a patient at her clinic. The paramedics half listened, then had to make a few calls of their own.
    Susan consoled Celia for a moment, then took her dirty lab coats back to her car, only to find that she was blocked in by the ambulance. When her cell phone rang, she saw that it was Clover Gao and picked up anyway.
    “I’m stuck at a trauma scene just down the street,” she explained, hoping to sound distressed. “It was one of the clinic’s patients, Rabih Chamoun. I should be there in a moment, though.”
    In the silence that followed, Susan wondered if Clover actually gave a damn. This was historic.
    “Well, there’s a coincidence,” Clover said. “I was just calling you about another patient of ours. You saw César Carreño yesterday, did you not?”
    “Um, yes. He came by to pick up his pills.”
    “But you also saw his daughter a few hours later?”
    “I did,” Susan agreed, though she barely remembered the encounter.
    “Carreño just about died in our reception area,” Clover said impassively. “His daughter brought him in saying he was in great distress, but he toppled over before we even got him into an exam room. We called an ambulance, and they rushed him to Kaiser.”
    What? Susan was flabbergasted.
    “He was perfectly fine yesterday!” Susan declared. “The nurse did the usual—blood pressure, temperature, et cetera. He didn’t complain of anything. Eyes and ears were fine.”
    “From the looks of it he had pneumonia. If he’d died here, that would’ve meant real trouble. There would’ve been an investigation. We would’ve been shut down. As it was, I had to get Esmeralda to let us move him into the parking lot for when the paramedics arrived.”
    You are an awful, awful human being, Susan thought but didn’t say. The worst.
    “Not that she’d sue us, given her immigration status, but that could’ve been really bad news,” Clover said in a chastising tone. “Now, I know you received a real shock yesterday, but I need you to put the patients first, or I can’t have you working here. Is that understood?”
    “Of course.”
    “Good. Now, see that you get here soon, and make sure you call the daughter just to check in. Could go a long way toward smoothing this over.”
    Susan was about to reply when Clover hung up.
    It was then that Susan remembered something Father Chang had told her once: “All of us are dying.” He’d tossed it off as a breezy literalism, referring, she thought, to the title of a book or even a poem. But it came back to her now with surprising force.
    All of us are dying.

VII
    Tuesday evening’s Mass was a sparsely attended affair, but that just made it more appealing to Luis. Though Whillans officiated over the Mass, Luis greeted the congregants at the door, passed out bulletins, and prepared the sacraments.
    On Sundays St. Augustine’s could appear cavernous, the sea of faces stretching from the altar to the back doors until they became a single mass. During the week it was more intimate, more like the Masses Luis had celebrated in New York when he’d been a seminarian. With a group this small it was easier to unify everyone in a way that allowed the Holy Spirit to be much more apparent in the room.
    A larger group could often make the priest feel as if he was preaching at rather than preaching to. And when that happened there was a disconnect—people began to fidget, and those who came were there out of a sense of duty or habit rather than a deeply felt desire to commune with God in the Lord’s house, attended by his servants on earth, the