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mind urged.
Do it again. Just one more. Just one more
.
    He slipped a blood pressure cuff around her arm and then worked his stethoscope into place with one hand while he returned his other to the side of the woman’s neck.
    “I hear a pressure,” he announced softly. “It ain’t much, but for right now, it’s enough.”
    Annie’s breathing was still shallow, but much more regular. Softly, but steadily, she began to moan. Her lips were dusky, but the terrible mottling of her skin had lessened. At that moment, they heard the whoop of the ambulance, and seconds later, strobelike golden lights appeared in the living room window.
    Zack looked up at his older brother, who knelt across thewoman from him. For an instant, he flashed on two young boys kneeling opposite one another in a dusty, vacant lot, shooting marbles.
    For ten seconds, twenty, neither man moved or spoke. Then Frank reached over and took his hand.
    “Welcome to Sterling,” he said.

3
    The ambulance was one of several well-equipped vans owned by Ultramed-Davis and operated by the Sterling Fire Department. Zack sat beside Annie in the back, watching the monitor screen as the vehicle jounced down the narrow mountainside road toward the hospital. A young but impressively efficient paramedic knelt next to him, calling out a blood pressure reading every fifteen or twenty seconds.
    Sterling, New Hampshire, was small in many ways, but Zack could see Ultramed’s influence in the emergency teams response. This was big city medicine in the finest sense of the term. Annie was still unconscious, although her breathing seemed less labored and her blood pressure was inching upward.
    “Eighty over sixty,” the paramedic said. “It’s getting a little easier to hear.”
    Zack nodded and adjusted the IV which the young man had inserted flawlessly, and even more rapidly than he himself could have done.
    Frank had stayed behind to tend to the family and contact a cardiologist. They would meet later at the hospital.
    Zachary felt tense, but he was also charged and exhilarated. When it all came together, when it all worked right, there was no comparable feeling.
Come, Watson, Come! The game is afoot
. Zack loved the quote, and often wondered if Arthur Conan Doyle, a physician, had transferred the energy of his experience with medical emergencies to his detective hero.
    After a brief stretch on the highway, the ambulance slowed and turned into the long, circular driveway leading uphill to the hospital. A large, spotlighted sign at the base of the drive announced: ULTRAMED-DAVIS REGIONAL HOSPITAL—COMMUNITY AND CORPORATE AMERICA WORKING TOGETHER FOR THE BETTERMENT OF ALL .
    Zack smiled to himself and wondered if he was the only one amused by the hubris of the pronouncement.
    The Betterment of All
.
    Ultramed Hospitals Corporation and Davis Regional Hospital could certainly never be accused of setting their sights too low. Still, although he had a few lingering concerns about working for a component of what some had labeled the medical-industrial complex, his conversations with Frank and the Judge, and his investigations of the hospital and its parent company, had provided no cause to doubt the proclamation, however audacious.
    Ultramed-Davis, now a modern, two-hundred-bed facility, had a proud history dating back to the turn of the century, when the Quebec-based Sisters of Charity placed ten beds in a large donated house and named it, in French, Hôpital St. Georges. Over the decades that followed, brick wings were added, until, ultimately, the old house was completely replaced. The hospitals capacity grew to fifty patients, and eventually, to eighty. In 1927, the St. Georges School of Nursing was established, and before its closing in the early seventies, produced more than 350 nurses.
    In mid-1971, the ownership and administrative control of St. Georges was transferred from the Sisters of Charity to a community-based, nonprofit corporation headed by Clayton Iverson,