Free The Missile Game (The Dr. Scott James Thriller Series Book 1) by Glenn Shepard Page A

seemed sincere, and God knows I could use an ally.
    After breakfast, Keyes gave me a lift to Jackson City Hospital. I still had a license to practice medicine and hospital privileges. I just needed a space to operate and to have access to special equipment for wound care for my post-op patients. I dreaded having to go there because to do so I had to get Herb Waters’ approval. It would have been tough enough even before I was accused of murder, but now it would be next to impossible. With everything at stake, I had to give it a try.
    Herb Waters ruled the hospital with an iron fist. I went directly to his sixth floor Penthouse office.
    In what little spare time I had, over the previous few months, I’d done research on Waters and the Jackson City Hospital. My research concluded with a half-page op-ed piece that was published in the Daily Chronicle , the city paper. In my article, I accused Waters of negotiating to sell our community not-for-profit hospital to the large for-profit conglomerate, American Hospital Systems (AHS). AHS bought and managed hundreds of hospitals all over the United States.
    I’d written the piece because the concept of charitable medical care was near and dear to my heart. The purpose of a nonprofit hospital was to provide medical care to all who needed it, not only to those with good insurance or loads of cash in the bank, as was the standard practice at for-profit hospitals. Most physicians had, as I did, a few indigent patients they treated for free, and they relied on the community hospital to accept those patients who needed in-hospital services.
    Waters had written a three-column rebuttal to my article. In his piece, which appeared on the front page of the newspaper a few days after my letter was published, Waters repeatedly stated that, “this hospital is not for sale to anyone.” Further, he claimed, “Dr. James’ letter was written with no knowledge of fact.”
    I knew that to be a lie because I had personally talked with an AHS executive in Houston four times during the previous month. Waters had never accepted criticism well, and he was beyond livid about my op-ed piece in the newspaper.
    Until our recent falling out, Waters and I had been close friends, going back to our freshman year in high school. These days, our relationship was rocky, at best. But I had no choice but to ask for his help.
    Herb Waters’ office, occupying one-fourth of the roof space of the sixth floor, looked as if it had been dropped from the sky on top of an otherwise functionally well-designed hospital. It was planned by his advisers, who felt he should be physically present at the hospital and not several miles away in the Hanover building, where his office was formerly situated. Hospital employees gave the office the name, “Penthouse,” which by common usage became the official title of the structure.
    The Penthouse’s appearance was questioned by professional builders and designers, even though it was drawn by the best architects in the southeast. Passersby thought that the odd structure was the top of the elevator shafts or the ventilation system. With the Penthouse addition, Waters moved, permanently, from the Hanover building to the hospital, and his title was changed to President of Jackson City Healthcare Systems Inc.
    The hospital elevator only went as high as the fifth floor. This was because Waters didn’t want to see any of the doctors, and made it difficult for us to reach his office by distancing himself from the hospital complex with a flight of stairs. I took the elevator to the fifth floor and ran up the stairs, bounding into the Penthouse.
    I walked into Waters’ office reception area. No one other than his private secretary was allowed in Waters’ Penthouse.
    I surprised the secretary, Shirley Moss. “I need to see your boss.”
    “Dr. James, please … I’m not sure if ... ” was her tentative response. She looked at me and continued, her voice, now firm, “He’s busy.