Thanks to his Marine Corps training, which had included crowd control and dog attacks, George lifted his arms over his head to deny the shepherd a handy target. George absorbed the sizable dog’s attack and stayed on his feet. Although the dog was able to get a bite full of George’s right jacket sleeve, Keyon had his Beretta out and shot the animal twice in the chest. At first the bullets seemed to have had no effect, since the dog continued to shake its head, trying to tear George’s jacket. Then, with the same suddenness that the attack began, the dog let go of its hold on George’s sleeve, teetered for a moment, whimpered, and then sank to the floor. A moment later it rolled onto its side.
Seeing what had happened to her dog, Margaret began screaming, even as Keyon pointed the gun in her direction and yelled for her to shut up.
“You bastards,” she cried, her face a picture of terror and anguish. She started coming at Keyon with fire in her eyes. Keyon responded by shooting her in the forehead. The result was the same as it had been for Gary Sheffield. Margaret was knocked over backward onto the floor. For a second or two there was some quivering in her limbs. A moment later her sightless eyes stared up at the ceiling.
“Goddamn it,” George exploded. “Now we can’t question her.”
Before Keyon could respond, both heard a male voice coming from Margaret’s mobile phone. She had dropped it onto the hall carpet when she was shot. “This is the Plymouth Police Department. Is everything okay there, Miss Stonebrenner?”
Keyon snapped up the phone, turned it off, and pocketed it. “We have to get the fuck out of here.”
“We need her computer,” George said.
“I see it,” Keyon said. He pushed past George into the dining room, where an open computer sat on the table. Keyon slammed it shut and took it under his arm. There was also a woman’s purse. He snapped that up as well.
While Keyon was in the dining room, George hurriedly pulled on some latex gloves. Going to an open roll-top desk, he rifled through a few drawers, leaving them open, dumping one onto the floor. Then the two men hurried out into the night, slowing to a normal walk when they reached the street. As they headed for the van, they cast worried glances at the neighboring houses, but nothing had changed. The neighborhood seemed as quiet as it had been earlier.
“That was messy,” George said with disgust as he climbed into the van’s driver’s seat. It was his turn to drive. “Probably our worst job.” He snapped off the gloves before starting the engine.
“In this business, you never know what you’re going to get,” Keyon said. “Let’s not own up to what happened unless we are specifically asked. Let’s also hope the new VPN is as good as it’s claimed to be so this is our last job like this.”
“I’ll second that,” George said. “But you know what surprised me? How normal this Stonebrenner looked. I expected her to be more like the others, like Sheffield. Somebody you wouldn’t look at twice, living a boring humdrum life, kinda nerdy and dumb, relying on social media to have a life, even if only virtual. She didn’t strike me like that. And she didn’t buy our FBI story, not for a second.”
“Social media is taking over our culture,” Keyon said. “It’s not just the teenyboppers anymore. It’s everybody.”
To avoid driving back through town, George took a circuitous route to I-93 on their way back to Boston.
18
FRIDAY, JULY 21, 9:15 P.M.
For a bit of variety after exhausting the Toscano menu for five nights in a row, Noah was back in the Thai restaurant called King & I. He’d called in an order after leaving the hospital and talking briefly with Ava to get her preferences, and now he stood by the cashier to wait.
It had been a very busy Friday. It had started earlier than usual because Friday morning’s basic science lecturer had canceled, forcing Noah to give the important lecture on postoperative electrolyte maintenance, which required a bit of preparation. To do so, he’d awakened at 4:00 A.M. and managed to leave Ava’s without waking her.
Following the basic science lecture, Noah had four surgeries, including a complicated esophagectomy, or removal and replacement of the esophagus. It was a difficult procedure that he’d done only once before. Luckily it had gone well, although he didn’t have high hopes for the patient; esophageal cancer was a particularly difficult disease for the oncologists.
Although all the surgeries had gone well, there was one unfortunate occurrence. Although he generally tried to avoid running into Dr. Mason by keeping track of his schedule, that morning it had happened despite his best intentions. Noah had just finished his first case and was accompanying the patient along with the anesthesiologist to the PACU when Dr. Mason unexpectedly appeared out of a case that was supposed to take four hours yet had been under way for only less than two. Despite Noah’s attempts to indicate he was busy, Dr. Mason insisted he talk and pulled him aside. He then proceeded to rail Noah about the quality of residents Noah was assigning to Dr. Mason’s cases. “With the kind of patients I bring into this hospital, I shouldn’t have to deal with incompetence in the assistants I’m assigned,” Mason had spat. “And let me tell you, I’m going to bring this up with Dr. Herandez, Dr. Cantor, and Ms. Hutchinson.” Gloria Hutchinson was the president of BMH.
Of course, Dr. Mason’s complaints were baseless. If anything, Noah went out of his way always to provide as senior as possible residents for Dr. Mason, anticipating the man’s tendency to blame everyone around him whenever something out of the ordinary happened. It was also true that Noah had not received any complaints about surgical resident assistants from any other surgeon, and that included all twenty-four of the first-year people.
Noah had tried to end the conversation by asking Dr. Mason if he might provide Noah with a list of the residents he enjoyed working with so that Noah could attempt to assign those people to Mason. But instead of taking this peace offering, Dr. Mason had switched the subject of the conversation to the upcoming M&M.
“I hope to God you are not planning on shielding your incompetent lover like you so obviously did with the Vincent case,” Dr. Mason had snarled. “Because you are not going to get away with it this time. I had to hold my tongue during the last conference because I was the surgeon. Not so on this occasion. No free lunch this time.”
Once again, Noah had to endure being stabbed in the chest by Dr. Mason’s persistent index finger as the surgeon made his final point before he continued toward the surgical lounge.
“Your take-out is ready,” the King & I cashier said, pulling Noah back to the present.
Noah paid and left the restaurant. Charles Street was alive, with people enjoying themselves. As he walked he felt one with this world, which was unique for him. Anticipating spending another pleasant evening with Ava, he didn’t feel his usual sense of isolation from normal society, as he now had a life outside of the hospital. He smiled, thinking that maybe there was hope for him after all.
As he trudged up Pinckney Street on his way to Louisburg Square his thoughts went back to his busy day, which had included several important conversations that he was eager to share with Ava. After the run-in with Dr. Mason, which jolted him into remembering exactly how close the M&M Conference was, he first made it a point to investigate which junior resident had been assigned to the emergency room on that particular day. It was Dr. Harriet Schonfeld. He’d found her in the ER sewing up a laceration. He was pleased with what he had learned from her and looked forward to telling Ava.
Next Noah had met with the anesthesia resident, Dr. Carla Violeta, plus the circulating nurse and the scrub nurse on the Gibson case, but he didn’t learn anything from the three of them that he didn’t already know. Finally, following Ava’s encouragement the night before, he had arranged to meet with Dr. Warren Jackson, which he dreaded and had put off just as he had put off meeting with Dr. Mason before the last M&M. As an older surgeon who had trained at the same place Dr. Mason had trained, Dr. Jackson shared some of Dr. Mason’s unpleasant narcissistic traits, in particular an easily offended, arrogant attitude and a stubborn reluctance to accept any blame, even if warranted. To his surprise, Noah had found Dr. Jackson much more reasonable than Dr. Mason.