Hold Tight Read Online Free PDF Page A

like that-but Mike knew better. They pulled into the driveway. Mo looked at the neighbor on her knees.
    “Wow, nice ass.”
    “Her husband probably thinks so.”
    Susan Loriman rose. Mo watched.
    “Yeah, but her husband’s an asshole.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    He gestured with his chin. “Those cars.”
    In the driveway sat her husband’s muscle car, a souped-up red Corvette. His other car was a jet-black BMW 550i, while Susan drove a gray Dodge Caravan.
    “What about them?”
    “They his?”
    “Yes.”
    “I got this friend,” Mo said. “Hottest chick you’ve ever seen. Hispanic or Latina or some such thing. She used to be a professional wrestler with the moniker Pocahontas, you remember, when they had those sexy numbers on Channel Eleven in the morning?”
    “I remember.”
    “So anyway, this Pocahontas told me something she does. Whenever she sees a guy in a car like that, whenever he kinda pulls up to her in his muscle wheels and revs his engine and gives the eye, you know what she says to him?”
    Mike shook his head.
    “ ‘Sorry to hear about your penis.’ ”
    Mike had to smile.
    “‘Sorry to hear about your penis.’ That’s it. Ain’t that great?”
    “Yeah,” Mike admitted. “That’s pretty awesome.”
    “Tough to come back from that line.”
    “Indeed it is.”
    “So your neighbor here-her husband, right?-he’s got two of them. What do you think that means?”
    Susan Loriman looked over at them. Mike had always found her gut-wrenchingly attractive-the hot mom of the neighborhood, what he had heard the teens refer to as a MILF, though he didn’t like to think in such coarse acronyms. Not that Mike would ever do anything about it, but if you’re breathing, you still notice things like that. Susan had long so-black-it’s-blue hair and in the summer she always wore it in a ponytail down her spine with cut-off shorts and fashionable sunglasses and a mischievous smile on her knowing red lips.
    When their kids were younger, Mike would see her on the play-ground by Maple Park. It didn’t mean a thing but he liked to look at her. He knew one father who intentionally picked her son to be on his Little League team just so Susan Loriman would show up at their games.
    Today there were no sunglasses. Her smile was tight.
    “She looks sad as hell,” Mo said.
    “Yeah. Look, give me a moment, okay?”
    Mo was going to crack wise, but he saw something on the woman’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”
    Mike approached. Susan tried to hold the smile, but the fault lines were starting to give way.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hi, Mike.”
    He knew why she was outside pretending to garden. He didn’t make her wait.
    “We won’t have Lucas’s tissue typing results until the morning.”
    She swallowed, nodded too fast. “Okay.”
    Mike wanted to reach out and touch her. In an office setting he might have. Doctors do that. It just wouldn’t play here. Instead he went with a canned line: “Dr. Goldfarb and I will do everything we can.”
    “I know, Mike.”
    Her ten-year-old son, Lucas, had focal segmental glomerulosclero- sis-FSGS for short-and was in pretty desperate need of a kidney transplant. Mike was one of the leading kidney transplant surgeons in the country, but he had passed this case to his partner, Ilene Goldfarb. Ilene was the head of transplant surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian and the best surgeon he knew.
    He and Ilene dealt with people like Susan every day. He could give the usual spiel about separating but the deaths still ate at him. The dead stayed with him. They poked him at night. They pointed fin- gers. They pissed him off. Death was never welcome, never accepted. Death was his enemy-a constant outrage-and he’d be damned if he’d lose this kid to that son of a bitch.
    In the case of Lucas Loriman, it was, of course, extra personal. That was the main reason he took second chair to Ilene. Mike knew Lucas. Lucas was something of a nerdy kid, too sweet for his own