Godplayer (30 page)

If Cassi had felt out of place walking the hospital dressed as a patient that afternoon, now she felt positively delinquent. The corridors were deserted, and within the stairwell there wasn’t a sound. Cassi hurried up to Robert’s room hoping no one in authority would spot her and send her back to seventeen.

She ducked inside the darkened room. The only light came from the bathroom whose door was slightly open. Cassi could not see Robert but she could hear his regular breathing. Silently moving over next to the bed, she got a glimpse of his face; he was still fast asleep.

She was about to leave when she again noticed the computer printout on the night stand. As quietly as possible she picked it up. Then she moved her hand blindly over the surface of the table to search for the pencil she’d seen that afternoon. Her fingers found a water glass, then a wristwatch, and finally a pen.

Retreating to the bathroom, Cassi tore a blank sheet from the printout.

Pressing against the edge of the sink she wrote: “Couldn’t fall asleep. Borrowed the SSD material. Statistics always knock me out. Love, Cassi.”

When she came out of the lighted bathroom, Cassi found it even harder to see as she made her way back to the night stand. Feeling her way, she propped her note on the water glass and was about to leave when the door slowly swung open.

Suppressing a cry of fright, Cassi nearly collided with a figure coming into the room. “My God, what are you doing here?” she whispered. Some of the computer papers slipped from her hands.

Thomas, still holding the door, motioned for Cassi to be quiet. Light from the corridor fell on Robert’s face, but he did not stir. Convinced he was not going to wake up, Thomas bent to help Cassi gather her papers.

As they stood up, Cassi whispered again, “What on earth are you doing here?”

In answer, Thomas silently guided her out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind them. “Why aren’t you asleep?” he said crossly. “You’ve got surgery in the morning! I stopped by your room to make sure everything was in order only to find an empty bed. It wasn’t hard to guess where you might be.”

“I’m flattered you came to see me,” whispered Cassi with a smile.

“This is not a joking matter,” said Thomas sternly. “You’re supposed to be asleep. What are you doing up here at two A.M.?”

Cassi held up the computer sheets. “I couldn’t fall asleep so I thought I’d be industrious.”

This is ridiculous,” said Thomas, taking Cassi’s arm and leading her back to the stairs. “You should have been asleep hours ago!”

“The sleeping pill didn’t work,” explained Cassi as they went downstairs.

“Then you’re supposed to ask for another. My word, Cassi. You should know that.”

Outside her room, Cassi stopped and looked up at Thomas. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What’s done is done,” said Thomas. “You get into bed. I’ll get you another pill.”

For a moment Cassi watched Thomas resolutely walk down the corridor toward the nurses’ station. Then she turned into her room. Putting the SSD data on her night table, she tossed her robe onto the chair and kicked off her slippers. With Thomas in charge she felt more secure.

When he returned with the pill, he stood by the bed watching as she swallowed it. Then, half-teasing, he opened her mouth and pretended to search inside to see if it was gone.

“That’s a violation of privacy,” said Cassi, pulling her face away.

“Children must be treated like children,” he laughed.

He picked up the printout, carried it over to the bureau, and dumped it into a lower drawer. “No more of this stuff tonight. You’re going to sleep.”

Thomas pulled the chair over to the bed, switched off the reading light, and took Cassi’s hand.

He told Cassi he wanted her to relax and think about their upcoming vacation. Quietly he described the untouched sands, the crystal water, and the warm tropical sunshine.

Cassi listened, enjoying the images. Soon she felt a peace settle over her. With Thomas there she could relax. Consciously she could feel the sleeping pill begin to work, and she realized that she was falling asleep.

Robert was caught in the netherworld between sleep and consciousness.

He’d been having a terrifying dream: he was imprisoned between two walls that were relentlessly closing in on him. The space where he stood became smaller and smaller. He could no longer breathe.

Desperately he pulled himself awake. The entrapping walls were gone. The dream was over, but the awful sense of suffocation was still there. It was as if the room had been sucked dry of its air.

In panic he tried to sit up, but his body would not obey. Flailing his arms in terror, he thrashed around looking for the call button. Then his hand touched someone standing silently in the dark. He had help!

“Thank God,” he gasped, recognizing his visitor. “Something’s wrong. Help me. I need air! Help me, I’m suffocating!”

Robert’s visitor pushed Robert back onto the bed so roughly the empty syringe in his hand almost dropped to the floor. Robert again reached out, grabbing the man’s jacket. His legs kicked at the bed rails setting up a metallic clamor. He tried to scream, but his voice came out muffled and incoherent. Hoping to silence Robert before anyone came to investigate, the man leaned over to cover his mouth. Robert’s knee flew up and thumped the man on the chin, snapping his teeth on the tip of his tongue.

Enraged by the pain, the man leaned his entire weight on the hand clamped over Robert’s face, pushing his head deep into the pillow. For a few minutes more Robert’s legs jerked and twitched. Then he lay still. The man straightened up, removing his hand slowly as if he expected the boy to struggle anew. But Robert was no longer breathing; his face was almost black in the dim light.

The man felt drained. Trying not to think, he went into the bathroom and rinsed the blood out of his mouth. Always before when he dispatched a patient, he had known he was doing the right thing. He gave life; he took life. But death was only administered to further the larger good.

The man remembered the first time he had been responsible for a patient’s death. He had never doubted it was the right thing to do. It had been many years ago, back when he was a junior resident on thoracic surgery.

A crisis had arisen in the intensive care unit.

All the patients had developed complications. None could be discharged, and all elective cardiac surgery in the hospital had come to a halt.

Every day at rounds the chief resident Barney Kaufman went from bed to bed to see if anyone was ready to be transferred, but no one was. And each day, they stopped last by a patient Barney had labeled Frank Gork.

A shower of emboli from a calcified heart valve had been loosed during surgery and Frank Gork, formally Frank Segelman, had been left brain-dead. He’d been on the unit for over a month. The fact that he was still alive, in the sense that his heart was beating and his kidneys were making urine, was a tribute to the nursing staff.

One afternoon Kaufman looked down at Frank. “Mr. Gork, we all love you, but would you consider checking out of this hotel? I know it’s not the food that’s keeping you here.”

Everyone snickered but the man who had continued to stare into Frank’s empty face. Later that night, the man had gone into the busy intensive care unit and walked up to Frank Gork with a syringe full of potassium chloride. Within seconds Frank’s regular cardiac rhythm degenerated with T waves peaking, and then flattening out. It had been the man himself who called the code, but the team only made a halfhearted attempt at resuscitation.

After the fact everyone was pleased, from the nursing staff to the attending surgeon. The man almost had to restrain himself from taking credit for the event. It had been so simple, clean, definite, and practical.

The man had to admit that killing Robert Seibert had not been like that.

There wasn’t the same sense of euphoria of doing what had to be done and knowing that he was one of the few with the courage to do it. Yet Robert Seibert had had to die. It was his own fault, dredging up all the so-called SSD series.

Returning from the bathroom, the man quickly searched the room for any papers relating to Robert’s research. Finding none, he moved to the door and opened it a crack.

One of the night nurses was coming down the hall with a small metal tray. For a terrifying moment the man thought she might be coming to see Robert. But she turned into another room, leaving the corridor free.

His heart pounding, the man slipped into the hall. It would be a disaster to be seen on the floor. When he was a resident, he had reason to be in the corridors or patients’ rooms or even the intensive care unit at all hours of the night. Now it was different. He had to be more careful.

When he reached the safety of the stairwell, panic overtook him. He plunged down three floors without pausing for breath and kept up this frantic descent until he’d passed the twelfth floor. Only then did he begin to slow down. At the landing on five, he stopped, flattening his back against the bare concrete wall, his chest heaving from his exertion. He knew he had to collect himself Taking a deep breath, the man eased open the stairwell door. Within a few moments he felt safe, but his mind wouldn’t stop racing. He kept thinking about the SSD data, realizing that Robert probably had a source in his office, very likely a floppy disc. With a sigh the man decided he’d better visit pathology right away, before Robert’s death was known. Then the only problem would be Cassi. He wondered exactly how much Robert had told her.

CHAPTER 11

CASSANDRA WOKE UP with a start, looking into the smiling face of a lab technician who was calling “Dr. Cassidy” for the third time.

“You do sleep soundly,” she said, seeing Cassi’s eyes finally open.

Cassi shook her head, wondering why she felt drugged. Then she remembered getting the second sleeping pill.

“I’ve got to draw some blood,” apologized the technician. “You’ve got a fasting blood sugar ordered.”

“Okay,” said Cassi equably. She let the technologist have her left arm, remembering that for the next couple of days she would not be administering her own insulin.

A few minutes later a nurse came in and deftly started an IV in Cassi’s left arm, hanging up a bottle of D5W with ten units of regular insulin.

Then she gave Cassi her preop medication.

“That should hold you,” said the nurse. “Try to relax now. They should be coming for you presently.”

By the time Cassi was picked up and wheeled down to the elevator she felt a strange sense of detachment, as if the experience were happening to someone else. When she reached the OR holding area, she was only vaguely aware of the profusion of gurneys, nurses, and doctors. She didn’t even recognize Thomas until he bent over and kissed her, and then she told him that he looked silly in his operating paraphernalia. At least she thought she told him SO.

“Everything is going to be fine,” said Thomas, squeezing her hand. “I’m glad you decided to go ahead with your surgery. It’s the best thing.”

Dr. Obermeyer materialized on Cassi’s left. “I want you to take good care of my wife!” she heard Thomas say. Then she must have fallen asleep. The next thing she was aware of was being pushed down the OR corridor into the operating room itself. She didn’t feel at all scared.

“I’m going to give you something to make you sleepy,” said the anesthesiologist.

“I am sleepy,” she murmured, watching the drops fall into the micropore chamber of the IV bottle hung over her head. In the next second, she was fast asleep.

The OR team moved swiftly. By 8:05 her eye muscles had been isolated and tapes had been passed around them. As soon as complete immobilization had been achieved, Dr. Obermeyer made stab wounds in the sclera and introduced his cutting and sucking instruments. Using a special microscope, he sighted through the cornea and pupil to the blood-stained vitreous. By 8:45 he began to see Cassi’s retina. By 9:15 he found the source of the recurrent bleeding. It was a single aberrant loop of new vessel coming from Cassi’s optic disc. With great care, Dr. Obermeyer coagulated and obliterated it. He felt very encouraged. Not only was the problem solved, there was no reason to expect it to recur. Cassi was a lucky woman.

Thomas had finished his only coronary bypass for the day. He’d canceled the next two. Happily the case had gone tolerably well although he again had trouble sewing the anastomoses.

Unlike the previous day, though, he was able to finish, but the moment Larry Owen began to close, Thomas changed into his street clothes. Normally he waited until Larry brought the patient to the recovery room, but this morning he was too nervous to sit around with nothing to do. Instead he stopped down in the OR to see how things were going.

“Just fine,” shouted Larry over his shoulder. “We’re closing the skin now. The halothane’s been stopped.”

“Good. I’ve been called on an emergency.”

“Everything under control here.”

Thomas left the hospital, something he rarely did during a working day, and climbed into his Porsche. It thrilled him to hear the powerful engine as he turned on the ignition. After the frustration of the hospital, the car provided an enormous sense of freedom. Nothing on the road could touch him.