Willnot Read Online Free PDF

with a mock-horror face, “My God, what have you done?”
    I swung out and stood.
    “Nice,” Richard said, “but you might want to put a robe on. You know, go formal.”
    I grabbed his off the back of the door and went out.
    “Sorry, Doc. You’re needed. I could have called but figured it’s faster this way. There’s been an accident at the site.”
    Raising his voice, he continued as I went back into the bedroom to find clothes.
    “Looks like a generator blew. Things were stacked up tight, so it took some containers and shelving with it. Only two workers on the scene that early. One of them’s got what looks like a piece of rebar in his chest, the other’s leg got hacked up pretty bad, lost a lot of blood. Wellman came in early and found them.”
    I shouted through the door. “They’re at the hospital?”
    “Andrew and his new driver transported, guy supposed to have been a paramedic up in Detroit? Kid said it was some of the best first aid he’d ever seen.”
    “Battlefield medicine.”
    “Probab lee .”
    Hours later, undressed and dressed yet again, feet hurting in my $400 cross-trainers that I still called tennis shoes, I asked for more suction. Janis Banks was running the table. Melinda Arnold was circulating.
    Gordie Blythe looked up from his nice stool at the head of the table. “BP’s holding fine, Lamar.”
    “Always good to hear. And while we’re on the subject of hearing, who picked today’s music?”
    Dolly, our surgical orderly, raised her gloved hand. “Flutes from the Andes. Or maybe American Indian, I’m not sure. Beautiful, huh?”
    Commentary circled the table—
    “Very interesting,” complete with trilled r ’s.
    “Unworldly.”
    “Ethereal.”
    —and came back to me. “Sounds like an asthmatic cat, one maybe the size of a cow, trying to breathe.”
    Dolly’s eyes went wide. “You can’t see it, but under this mask I’m making my little-girl face. A moue, or whatever it’s called.”
    “It’s okay, I like cats fine. And Richard’s asthmatic.” I bent closer. “What is that?” I pushed flesh aside with the edge of the scalpel. “Can you get a retractor in there?”
    Gordie leaned in on his stool. “What?”
    The man’s leg had been struck by two, perhaps three pieces of jagged metal. One had slammed against the knee, rippedaway skin but done, as far as I could see, no joint damage. From a gash farther down, tibia peeked out. Another metal piece hit high, close to the hip. That was my field. I was checking for bleeders. And I was seeing the border of something pale and amorphous.
    “Do we have this man’s history?”
    “Only basics, from his personnel file.”
    As Janis scissored the retractor, I saw what I was half expecting. Gordie had come around from his stool and stood by me looking down. “That’s a proud one,” he said. A tumor on the order of four kilograms, snuggled up low in the abdominal cavity, tucked away there like an old sock at the back of a drawer.
    I probed at the mass.
    “I wouldn’t be leaning in too hard on it, Lamar,” Gordie said. “That femoral looks right thin.”
    And about to erode. Gordie had called it. Ten days from now, or a month, or two, it would have given way and the man would have bled out in minutes.
    “How providential that we all happen to be standing here,” I said, “with time on our hands. Shall we have this little bugger out?”
    Within the hour Mr. Patmore lay in recovery, trussed, ticked like a mattress with stitches, pillow-propped, pale and befuddled. I explained it all to him once he was awake, then again a couple of hours later in his room. The tumor, I was able to tell him subsequently, was benign.
    Wellman and Seb Daiche sat in the waiting room outside Recovery, Wellman watching TV with no affect, as though it were broadcasting in some language he didn’t know, Seb punching away at the keys of a laptop. I ran it down again for them after telling Wellman he’d done good work out there. He looked at me