Free Twice Dying by Neil McMahon Page B

out and carried by the bloodstream to the hypothalamus to produce a temporary euphoria, followed by mass cell destruction high and low, a fast-forwarded kaleidoscope of frames to the body’s dissolution. He considered the necessity of a kidney transplant, picturing donor organs like shy mollusks in the sea caves of the peritoneum, hiding from predatory human eyes and the rubber-gloved hands that probed to scoop them out, and wondered again if the malaria was coming on. He refilled his glass and went to check his supply of Plaquenil, a marginal remedy almost as bad as the disease.
    When he came back, he paused at a photograph on the living room shelf: himself, his ex-wife Gail, their daughter Stephanie and son Glenn. Gail had remarried, to a professor of environmental studies at UC Davis. Stephanie was the good child, in her last year of pre-med there, staunch member of the swimming team. Glenn had last been heard from in Seattle, where he seemed to be making a career of skateboarding, panhandling, and drugs: a world of predators, with Glenn on his way to becoming one of them, or perhaps a victim.
    They had been twelve and nine when the photo was taken: just about the same age spread as Robby Vandenard and his sister Katherine.
    They were the darlings of the city when those children were young.
    Sixteen years as husband and father, nine of them as chief of Emergency Services at the major trauma center of Bayview Hospital in Mann. The change seemed to have happened fast, but in fact it had been building for years: pressures that had grown subtly, pushing him into a series of decisions that were not major in themselves, but led him along until, like an electron forced from its orbit, he had made a quantum leap.
    An incompetent internist whose negligence had allowed a man to the of a heart attack. A deep-pockets malpractice suit that named the Bayview ER and Monks as codefendants, although their performance had been exemplary.The hospital administration’s agreement to settle—a settlement which would have tarnished Monks’s name, linking him with the negligence—which he refused to accept. A growing reputation as “not a team player,” to which he responded militantly against the good-old-boy system of uncredentialed procedures. A growing alienation from staff, colleagues, even felt by his wife and children in the community.
    Then one night a tense radio contact with a team of paramedics in the field, attending an elderly seizure victim. The senior of the medics assuming it was a coronary, and preparing to give a shot of adenosine—which Monks expressly ordered
against,
fearing it would eliminate the heart block that might be keeping the patient alive. Argument. The sudden loss of radio contact for eight minutes from the medics’ end.
    Then the panicked report that the patient had died.
    The medics claiming that Monks had ordered the shot.
    And some time within the next twenty-four hours, the radio tape—the only hard evidence of what had actually happened—disappearing.
    Monks stepped out on the deck and drank from the bottle, a long pull that burned his mouth and insides. With the rain slashing his face, he stood at that too-familiar point of wanting never to stop, to keep riding on the back of that fire-breathing mount of alcohol that he had realized long ago hewould never entirely break, but could only fight a lifelong battle to keep in check.
    The phone rang. Most nights, he would have let it go.
    “Tell me your news,” Alison said.
    Monks told her.
    She said, “There was nothing in Robby’s file to suggest he’d murdered his sister. I’d have spotted that, trust me.”
    He stepped close to the wood stove so that it warmed the backs of his thighs.
    “I see two possibilities,” he said. “Jephson genuinely didn’t know about that. Or he knew perfectly well that Robby was a dangerous son of a bitch, and he faked the diagnosis. Maybe that’s how the whole thing got started. It worked so well with Robby, he