Raney & Levine Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Just came
     from there.”
    “Ah. That loon yelling into his
     megaphone? With today being Madison’s big announcement…the baby…”
    “We call him Jesse,” Jill said. Her
     heart was thudding.
    David reached for the snake and
     resumed studying it.
    “Weird,” he said. “It’s just a fake
     garter snake. They’re harmless. You can probably get fake snakes anywhere, toy
     and science stores…online. So why not something scarier like a rattler? Or a
     real garter snake?”
    Hutch raised his shoulders. “Afraid
     a real one would’ve climbed out?” He switched his gaze to Jill and smiled a
     little. “I had an uncle named Jesse. It’s a great name. Means ‘gift of God’ in
     Hebrew.”
    She smiled tightly; wiped her
     suddenly clammy hands on her scrub pants. “I just…liked it, then googled it and
     found out what it meant.”
    Her glance brushed the snake David
     held. “So…” She shuddered. “Is this someone’s disgusting joke? Or a horrible
     scary message?
We thought we were done with horrible scary.”
    Hutch picked up his remote and
     turned on cable TV. Floods in Malaysia. He watched for a second, tapped his
     finger, lowered the sound. Looked back to see David fingering the snake’s
     attached fake snake heads.
    “Someone went to a lot of trouble.”
     David brought the gruesome thing closer to Hutch. “Each of these is sliced off
     an inch behind the head and sewn on with black thread. It must have been hard
     sewing through this rubber.”
    Hutch nodded, taking the snake
     back, recoiling it on his desk. “Too much work for your ordinary cruel joke.
     This could be a message. That’s why I called you. I still hear of Baptists and
     fundamentalists who are violently against IVF, and
Jesse’s sure taken it
     further
.”
    David said, “There were some angry
     Catholics out there too.”
    A heavy sigh. “Two extremes of what
     should have been one faith,” Hutch said. “Can’t believe Jesus had any of this
     in mind. He just wanted to heal.”
    “Every religion has its
     extremists,” David said thoughtfully. Then frowned. “Who could have gained
     entrance to the lab?”
    On the TV, a bridge collapse in Ohio.
     Hutch glanced over at it, still keeping the sound down, then turned back,
     looking tired.
    “Lots of people,” he said. “Besides
     the med students, there’s now physician assistants, EMTs in training and our
     maintenance people. Residents come too to restudy at all hours.” Hutch gestured
     with a hand. “Put on a white coat and you blend. Who pays attention at two in
     the morning?”
    Cable news finally caught his
     attention. There, no surprise, was coverage of the conference with Madison
     Memorial Hospital officials. Willard Simpson, Acting Chief of the hospital’s
     Genetic Research Committee, was at the center of other white coats lining a
     table with microphones.
    Hutch turned up the sound.
    “He’s just a baby,” bespectacled
     Simpson was saying, his round, heavy features trying not to frown. “A normal
     baby with normal development, no sign whatsoever of anything different about
     him.”
Babble babble
from some reporters, and thin, scholarly Bill
     Rosenberg next to Simpson said, “No, we don’t know how this was done. We are
     studying the, ah, deceased Doctor Arnett’s notes, but they are…incomplete.”
    Reporters shouted more questions.
     Was this the wave of the future? Were women going to choose this method of
     having babies now that they had a choice?
    “Again,” droned Bill Rosenberg,
     sounding too professorial to be interesting. “We don’t entirely know how this
     was done. Further studies will have to be-”
    A male voiceover interrupted,
     taking us now to the taped-earlier crowd, panning signs and faces – “excited,
     emotional, some angry” - then stopping on “this frightening SPAWN OF THE DEVIL
     sign,” zooming in for an even more shocking close up. Megaphone Man railed and
     hollered. A shot then caught his