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“You think it’s our Branch?”
    “Balloons in a patient’s heart? Has to be.” The passenger shook his head. “Branch could pull off something like that.”
    “Yeah, like the fire he started in the OR a couple of months ago. Used the flames as a weapon to take down his adversary and then extinguished it like a grease fire in the kitchen.”
    The men had hoped to connect with Eli during middle-of-the-night dead time at the small ER. “Now, we’ll have to intercept him at the medical center,” the driver said as he pulled into the right lane. He took the nearest exit and started to double back toward downtown.
    “What’re they talking about, balloons in the heart?”
    “Hell if I know. But that’s why we need him on this investigation. He can pull off that kind of shit.”
    “Trouble seems to follow that guy, you think?”
    The driver gained speed on a straight stretch of highway that ended with the first glimpse of lights from downtown Memphis. “Yeah, but he has no idea the trouble we’re bringing.”
    Outside the trauma rooms of Mid-South Medical Center, chief surgical resident Susan Morris disconnected from the ambulance call and punched in the pager number of the on-call cardiac surgeon. She turned to her third-year trauma resident, who was eating donut holes like popcorn.
    “Remember Dr. Branch?”
    Donut Hole looked up from his bag of breakfast left over from the day before.
    “The guy who got stabbed in the neck? Had his arm slit open in a fight with that biotech company?”
    He said this while spewing plumes of powdered sugar with each hard consonant. “He was all over the news. Who doesn’t remember him?”
    “You won’t believe what he’s bringing in,” said Dr. Morris.
    “Oh shit, what?”
    “He’s doing an ER shift somewhere in the boondocks. Gets a drop-off GSW to the chest. Cracks him open. Sticks two Foley catheters in the heart.”
    “No way the guy’s alive,” he said, popping his last donut hole.
    “Branch shocked his heart with external defibrillator pads.”
    “Damn, I didn’t know that was possible.”
    “It’s not supposed to be. But he says the guy has a pulse.”
    “How far out?”
    “Whitehaven, below the 240 loop. Ten minutes.”
    Donut Hole stood, brushed the white dusting off his green scrubs. “I’m calling the interns and medical students. They’ve got to see this.”
    The black sedan caught up to the ambulance on Interstate 240. The agents had learned from the police scanner of the ambulance’s route and followed it to the medical center. Knowing it would be a while before they could approach Dr. Branch, they parked, leaned against the sedan, and watched the ambulance back into the trauma bay. When the ambulance doors swung open and the stretcher rolled out, Eli Branch was sitting on top of it, straddling the patient, his arms and scrubs covered in blood. A rush of people pushed the stretcher and it disappeared inside Gates Memorial. The feds waited.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “His pressure’s starting to drop,” Eli said as the back doors of the ambulance opened.
    When he looked up, he saw a mass of medical personnel standing in the receiving area of Gates Memorial’s Emergency Department, as though awaiting his arrival. He was glad to see the familiar face of Susan Morris among them.
    “Hope you got an OR ready.” Eli held up both catheters, the patient’s lifelines. “I’m not sure how much longer this will hold him.”
    “Go straight up,” Dr. Morris said. They pushed the stretcher inside the emergency room and Morris pointed to an open elevator at the far end of the room.
    Eli noticed camera phones pointed his way. A young woman with a more professional appearing camera was clicking off flash shots.
    As Eli rode past on the stretcher, a surgical resident sporting a thin mustache of powdered sugar explained to a group of interns and medical students how Dr. Branch had devised a way to keep the patient alive—despite a lethal cardiac injury. One of