Franklin was speaking to Walt, both of them with their heads almost inside the chest. “All right, can you see it? A hole in the ventricular wall… right there. It just missed the L.A.D. coronary artery. See? It’s a little hard with all this fat. Just follow the spurts.”
He stuck a red hand out at the nurse next to him. “Four-oh cardiovascular and a big needle, single-ended.”
Equipped with his sewing kit, he reached back into the cavity, made a couple of quick sutures, and stopped the bleeding. “Okay, the hole’s been placated; how’s he doin’?”
The technician at the head answered. “Systolic ninety-five, pulse sixty. Nice job, Doctor.”
Franklin withdrew both his hands and straightened. “Nice job, Mr. Crawford. With any luck, maybe you can go back home and die of a heart attack, like you deserve.”
One of the nurses laughed. The tension eased measurably. I could sense not victory-the chest was still wide open, after all-but certainly a growing optimism. If death had not yet blinked, it was beginning to yield.
“All right, let’s heat up some saline and clean up a little here. You people have really let things go to the dogs.”
This drew a couple of more timid laughs, and the team shifted into gear. The grotto, now deprived of its primary liquid source, was suctioned almost dry, more blood bags were hung and fed into the IV tubing, crimson-soaked pads were removed from the cavity and hung out for later counting and collection, and Franklin’s requested hot saline, warmed to just above body temperature in a nearby microwave oven, was applied to swab Milly’s interior.
Walt was still in place, bent over holding the lung out of the way. My back hurt just looking at him. “Dr. Franklin, where’s the bullet then?”
There was a skipped beat in the room. No one had forgotten the bullet, but with the flush of success, it had slipped to second billing. That changed with Walt’s question.
Franklin looked over to one of the nurses. “Let’s do a portable film.”
She left the room, returning soon with another technician in tow, both of them lugging a large X-ray machine on wheels, whose odd, birdlike shape was made even more alarming by its appearing from the peripheral gloom. Everyone pitched in to gingerly hoist Milly up high enough so a film plate could be slid underneath him; the exposure was made, and the technician and his machine exited.
The results were delivered a few minutes later, and Franklin held the film up to one of the floodlights so Walt could see it from his stooped position.
“There it is, lodged against the spine. That’ll probably take care of his walking days.”
“What did it go through to get there?” Walt asked in a soft voice.
Franklin used his scalpel as a pointer, trying to trace the course of the bullet, muttering anatomical landmarks as he went. He finally paused, let a few seconds of silence pass, and then muttered, “damn.”
“What?” The nurse’s voice was nervous, not wanting to hear that victory might still elude them.
“It looks like the bullet passed through the back wall of the left atrium.”
Dead silence greeted this piece of news.
“Vitals are improving,” the woman with the ambu bag said hopefully.
“That’s because we’re still feeding him blood. There’s a hole there, I’m afraid. Let’s just cross our fingers it’s a simple in-and-out. We might pull this off yet, people. Come on, hope springs eternal.”
The tension I’d noticed easing earlier returned with force. The room was so still the quietest mutterings between both surgeons were easily overheard.
Franklin was back with both his hands inside the chest. “Okay, it’s going to be tight back here. We got pulmonary veins, the artery, and the bronchus to contend with, all jammed in together. Maybe the bullet whacked the bunch of them, and their being so tight together has stopped a major bleed, or maybe the exit is just beyond by a hair and we’re sitting pretty. Here, hold this clear while I rotate the heart. Little more… Ah, there we go. We’ve got some arterial blood here. Little more… Hold it there… Oh, shit.”
There was a sudden whooshing sound, followed by a cascading of liquid. Bright-scarlet blood, as if poured from a garden hose, abruptly filled the chest to overflowing and splashed noisily onto the already soaking floor.
“Lap pad, now.” Franklin shoved the pad deep into the chest and looked without speaking at the oxygen therapist.
“BP falling, pulse falling.”
Franklin was now talking to himself. “Looked like the whole back of the atrial wall gave away. Crawford, you bastard, if you’d taken better care of yourself, you might have had a stronger heart. What the fuck do you expect me to do, goddamn it?” He kept looking into the chest. “Keep up the suction and hang more blood.”
“Twenty beats per minute,” the woman’s voice intoned, in the quiet, gloomy room to her motionless audience. Her gradual countdown took five minutes, during which not another voice was heard. “Ten… Two… There’s been one in the last two minutes.” And finally: “No cardiac activity.”
In the stillness greeting this statement, Franklin straightened for the last time. He peeled off his gloves and dropped them on Milly’s stomach, pulled off his hat and mask, and, walking away into the dark, let them both fall to the floor as he vanished stoop-shouldered through the door.
There were a few half mutterings as people followed his example, some to go back to tend to the living, others to get the necessary equipment to clean up the mess.
In less than a minute, I was alone with Milly Crawford, as I had been when I’d first found him in his apartment. His eyes were half open, staring unblinking into the hot, bright lamps. The fat tube protruded from his mouth, silent and without purpose. His body, where it wasn’t covered by the stained green sheets, was as white as marble and would soon be as cold.
“You know who did it?” Harry stepped out from the surrounding darkness, his eyes sad and his voice gentle.
“I was hoping to ask him.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shifted my gaze back to Milly. “So am I.”
12
Klesczewski couldn’t stop smiling at my lime-green attire.“No Doctor Kildare jokes.”
He shook his head. We were standing at the threshold to Milly’s ransacked apartment. The pool of blood had congealed and now looked more like a huge spread of dried blackberry jam. Without a body at its center, it took on a horrifying, suggestive aspect, one that prompted me to keep my eyes instead on Tyler and his men as they picked their way from one end of the apartment to the other, scrutinizing and photographing every square inch.
“I take it you didn’t find the shooter.”
Ron shook his head. “We’re still interviewing, but it looks like a clean getaway. I’m not even sure which direction he took.”
I turned and glanced up the hall stairs, not surprised at this bit of news. As spontaneous as I guessed Milly’s murder to have been, it hadn’t struck me as a crime of passion, where the killer would be found, blood-soaked and distraught, lurking around some nearby corner. Milly’s death had been rushed and risky but planned all the same; that much I could feel in my bones. “How many ways out are there?”
He followed my glance upstairs. “Well, that’s one of them. The door to the roof is wide open, for ventilation, and the roof connects to buildings on either side. There’re front and back doors to the place, plus a cellar with a bulkhead entrance. The guy had his pick.”
“Assuming he left at all.” Here I was playing the devil’s advocate, virtually positive the killer was long gone.
“That’s what we’re checking on now, door to door. We sealed the area. The same landlord owns all three buildings, so we’re using him as a passkey. If the killer is here, we should find him, unless he lives here.”
I raised my eyebrows at him silently. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Well, you know, if the killer’s one of the neighbors, then we’ll find him at home, looking perfectly normal.”