Unlike George, Joe had never found Sal worthy of sympathy and, having been awakened after a night of wild sex, he regarded Sal with irritation and disgust.
A naked tattooed young woman had come up and was peeking over Joe’s shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing disturbing everybody!” she yelled at Sal.
Sal didn’t respond. Instead he sprinted away, tearing down the path to his Olds. He yanked open the driver’s-side door. For a moment the world spun. He was forced to wait until the vertigo passed. As the sensation subsided, he climbed behind the steering wheel, still clutching the knife in his right hand. Securing the lap belt he’d retrofitted in the vintage vehicle didn’t cross his mind. He turned the key and the engine roared to life. At least the Olds wasn’t going to let him down. He was vaguely aware of the muffled voice of iDoc Dr. Wilson, still trying to get him to go into the house and relax.
Sal threw the car into reverse and backed up too fast, colliding with the trash cans lined up opposite his parking space. Unconcerned, he put the car in drive and careened down the street. His mental capacity was deteriorating quickly as he tried to get to the L.A. University Medical Center. They had an ER and would help him. George would be there, too. Without thinking about what he was doing, Sal hiked up his T-shirt and used the utility knife to try to cut open the scar on his left side. He had to get the damn device out!
Sal had been told what they were embedding in the fatty tissue just under the skin of his abdomen, but he didn’t really understand. He was leery of all things high-tech but had trusted that the doctors knew what they were doing. Now something had gone wrong. What he sensed on an intuitive level was that the damn thing in his belly was killing him, and he wanted it out. He felt no pain as he cut into his tissue.
Irrational as it was, a part of his compromised brain was horrified by the narrow jets of blood spurting onto the Oldsmobile’s white leather upholstery. But he had no choice. Gritting his teeth, Sal pushed the blade in as far as it would go and then drew it laterally. He could feel the tip scrape across plastic or metal.
Sal knew the route to the medical center by heart. He sped up. Suddenly there was a sickening sound of metal against metal, and he felt the shudder of his car as it ricocheted off a vehicle parked along the street. Jesus! He used the back of his right hand to try to wipe the sweat from his eyes while still holding the utility knife. Suddenly he was bouncing along the sidewalk without knowing how he got there. He wrenched the steering wheel to the left, sending the Olds careening back onto the street, clipping the back end of a parked Mercedes. Now he was driving into oncoming traffic; horns blasted as Sal yanked the car back into his own lane.
Sal thrust his index finger inside the four-inch gaping wound, feeling for the implant. Just as the tip of his finger touched the edge of the object he glimpsed the red blur of a traffic light. Its message no longer registered in his brain, and he sailed through the light and onto Wilshire Boulevard. He was totally oblivious to the cacophony of metal slamming into metal.
“Hey! Watch out!”
The loud yell came from less than a foot away. Sal jerked his head up. He had arrived at the hospital. A man on crutches, crossing the street, whom he had almost hit, had just screamed at him. Sal slumped his weight to the right. At that point it was all he could manage to do, using his body weight to turn the wheel in that direction. The car swerved and jumped the curb, crashing through a privet hedge, still moving at over forty miles per hour.
Sal’s foot no longer responded to the feeble messages sent from his brain and remained heavy on the accelerator. Shocked parking valets dived out of the way as the Oldsmobile plowed across a patch of grass on a direct path toward them. Their abandoned valet stand exploded into a mass of flying wooden shrapnel as the car-turned-ballistic-missile blasted through it on its way toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of the contemporary-designed ER.
The Olds knifed through the plate-glass wall and bounced across the ER’s marbled foyer, barely missing the department’s stunned concierge greeter, frozen in her tracks, digital tablet in hand. The car zipped by Debbie Waters’s command post and smashed into a massive LED screen displaying a slide show of the medical center. The vehicle crashed into the screen’s supporting concrete, its back end rearing up in the air before slamming back down onto the marble floor.
The old car was not equipped with an airbag. Sal was launched through the car’s disintegrating windshield like a rocket-propelled grenade. Headfirst his body buried itself into the display board. He was killed instantly.
Sal’s smartphone followed him through the windshield, deflecting off a shard of glass that sent it skidding across the sign-in desk and into the lap of a shocked Debbie Waters.
For a split second no one in the emergency department moved. Then, as if a television image had suddenly been un-paused, all hell broke loose.
BOOK TWO
14
George felt and heard the tremendous crash. His first thought was earthquake. He’d felt a few temblors in his three years in Los Angeles, but this didn’t seem to fit the bill. It was too localized. His mind raced through the other possibilities, arriving at the one option almost everyone considered these days: Was it a bomb? A terrorist act? All around him, people were leaping out of their seats and heading for the door.
Dust and smoke streamed through the shattered floor-to-ceiling windows. A trail of debris was strewn across the lobby, ending at the smoldering wreckage of an automobile at the base of what had been the ten-foot-high LED screen. Three staffers had surrounded the fuming hulk of the vehicle and were dousing it with fire extinguishers. Patients who had been waiting to be seen were either scrambling to get out the entry doors or were standing immobile, staring vacantly at the scene with shock. Luckily, it appeared that no one, either patient or employee, had been hurt in the crash.
George noticed Debbie Waters trying to get things organized, pointing here and there with a cell phone in her hand, as if it were a conductor’s baton. George scanned the room, coming to rest upon the wrecked vehicle. He froze, recognizing the car immediately, even in its mangled state. Its vintage and rarity left few conclusions for George to draw. His eyes moved past the large fragmented windshield to where a number of orderlies and doctors were extracting a mutilated body.
Rushing forward, George got a look, better than he really wanted. It was Sal. His body was a mess, with major head and torso damage. But George knew it was his friend, and the familiar T-shirt clinched it, even if Sal’s face was unrecognizable. As they pulled the body free, it was placed on a gurney and rushed down to one of the trauma rooms.
At that instant the Los Angeles Fire and Police Departments invaded the ER. A number of firemen in full gear came in through the missing windows. Senior hospital officials arrived as the remaining patients were escorted away from the debris.
George rushed down the main hallway, grabbed one of the portable X-ray machines, and pushed his way into the trauma room where they had taken Sal. By the time he got there the doctors had decided that the patient was beyond saving, mostly due to the massive head trauma.