The dreaded Mm-hmm.
She told me the surgical resident on call would be in shortly and left. It didn’t seem short to me. The pain in my side was growing more intense, as was my fear of Marco Di Pietra. Whatever hate he’d had on for me before was nothing compared to what would be building inside him now. He was one sick man, and he had the men and money to move against me in ways I couldn’t hope to defend.
Some time later-measured in throbs per second-a gloved and gowned doctor pushed aside the curtain. His photo ID said he was Dr. Klein. His mother probably didn’t worry when he didn’t answer his phone.
Klein wiped the gash clean of blood, then spread it apart with his fingers. I gasped loudly. “The laceration appears superficial,” he said. “You’re lucky your assailant slashed you instead of stabbing you.”
“I wasn’t assailed,” I said. “I mean, assaulted. I fell on a wineglass.”
His look was withering in its skepticism. “You got this from a wineglass? I suppose it bounced up and cut you front to back with a slashing motion?”
“Wow. It’s like you were there when it happened.”
“Mr. Geller-”
“David Wells told the same story when he was pitching for the Padres and everyone believed him.”
“No, they didn’t,” Klein said. “They just couldn’t prove otherwise.”
“Precisely.”
“All right, Mr. Geller. If you want to insult someone’s intelligence, do it on your own time. You’ll need some blood work and imaging. Then I’ll see you in the operating theatre.”
“You can’t stitch it here?”
“We don’t do glass cuts in ER,” he said with a thin smile.
An orderly wheeled my gurney down a hallway and left me staring at the ceiling. I was trying hard not to remember the last time I’d been there: the aftermath of the Ensign case. I focused instead on a damp stain on the ceiling, trying to decide whether it looked more like Africa or a broken heart. Another orderly returned to wheel me into an imaging centre where a technician did an ultrasound test on my abdomen and ribs. I felt like a purchase being scanned at a checkout. About twenty minutes later, the first orderly wheeled me into an operating theatre where Dr. Klein waited with a surgical nurse.
“Your good fortune continues, Mr. Geller,” he said. “The knife-”
“Wineglass,” I insisted.
“The knife cut no deeper than the subcutaneous tissue. There’s no damage to the muscle or abdomen. No organ pathology. Spleen and liver intact. We can patch you up here without putting you under.”
Jonah Geller: unlucky in love, but freakishly lucky when shot or stabbed.
The nurse turned me onto my side, sterilized the area around the wound and draped it off. She wheeled over a tray on which rested scalpels, retractors and suturing equipment. Klein irrigated the wound, then picked a retractor from the tray and used it to spread the gash even farther than he had in the ER. I tried not to gasp and failed miserably. “No debris or contamination,” Klein said. “He must have washed the wineglass first.”
He asked the nurse for five cc’s of one per cent xylocaine. Given the pain I was in, it didn’t sound nearly enough. He injected some of the contents under the skin just above the wound, then did the same just below it. While we waited for the local to take effect, Dr. Klein told me that new legislation required him to report stab wounds to police.
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “That legislation hasn’t been proclaimed. Hasn’t even passed third reading.”
“You a lawyer?”
“From your mouth to God’s ear. Anyway, you said yourself I wasn’t stabbed. I was slashed.”
“You’re going to split hairs on this?”
“Two Jews arguing, Doctor, we could be here all night. Don’t you have other patients?”
He admitted that he did. Then picked up a scalpel.
“Aren’t I already cut enough?”
“Not nearly enough,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” the nurse said. “The doctor just has to extend the laceration on either side to ensure a tight closure.”
“If I didn’t want him to worry, I would have said so myself,” Klein muttered. For the next few minutes he sewed quietly. I knew the routine: catgut to close the deeper layers of the wound, silk to close the skin. When he was done, he wrote a prescription for my old friend Percocet and told me to take it easy for a few days. “No heavy lifting. No running. Come back if there’s any sign of infection, such as redness, swelling or extreme pain. And you might want to pick up a stool softener. Most people experience constipation from Percocet. It’s up to you to decide which is worse, that or the pain. Also, please remember that Percocet is a narcotic and that you may feel giddy-or in your case, giddier-after taking it. You might want to avoid driving.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“And Mr. Geller?”
“Yes?”
“Stay away from stemware for a while.”
I got off the elevator at 18 and walked slowly toward my apartment. I listened at my door and heard nothing. Checked the lock and jamb for signs of forced entry. Also nothing. I unlocked the door and pushed it open, then stood back against the outside wall and waited. I reached in and flipped on the light switch, then withdrew my hand and waited some more. If someone was in there lying in wait, maybe they’d get bored to death.
When I felt too tired to stand in the hall anymore, I stepped inside. There was no one in the living room or dining room. No one in the galley kitchen. I went in there and got my big chopping knife and made my way through the rest of the apartment. There was no one in my bedroom, bathroom or closets. No one on the balcony.
I was alone. As usual.
I went back to the front door and was locking the dead-bolt when the phone rang. I almost stabbed myself with the knife at the sound; that would have been fun to explain to Dr. Klein. I set down the knife on the coffee table and answered my phone. Dial tone. Somewhere else a phone kept ringing-the cell Dante Ryan had given me. I found it on a chair in the bedroom where I’d left it while showering.
“Jonah Geller’s armed guard speaking. How may I direct your call?”
“It’s me,” Ryan said. “How’d you make out?”
I gave him the stitch count. “It would have been worse if you hadn’t warned me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well. I got caught up in the moment.”
“I’m trying to say thank you,” I said.
“I’m the one who should thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“You made him cry,” Ryan said. “He cried all the way home. Whatever else happens, I saw the man cry. The man. Big fucking baby, more like it.”
“His elbow dislocated?”
“Fractured in two places. One of them the funny-sounding one.”
“The humerus.”
“Yeah. The other one I forget. Doctor said he was lucky he didn’t need traction.”
“He’s in a cast?”
“From his wrist to above the elbow. Looks like a fucking salesman, wants to shake hands with everyone.”
“I guess I’ve moved up on his shit list.”
“You are his shit list.”
“He’s lucky that’s all I did to him. Tell me something. If Phil hadn’t been there-”
“No names, I said”
“Okay. If it had been me and the big baby one on one, what would you have done?”
“Given you a standing ovation.”
“Seriously, would you have stopped me?”
“From what, killing him? Can you do that with your kung fu shit?”
“I practise karate, not kung fu, but yes, I could have killed him. You’d be surprised how easy it is.”
“No,” Ryan drawled. “I don’t think I would.” I heard him suck in air and guessed he’d just lit up. “I got to get away from these people. They’re poisoning me. I got to spend more time with my kid. I miss him so much-Christ, I even miss my wife. I want to do things normal people do. Take my boy fishing. To a ball game. Run a hose in the sun so he can see how rainbows are made. But my wife won’t even let him leave the house with me. All this talk of war between the brothers, she’s afraid someone will take a crack at me when I’m with our son. Or maybe I’ll corrupt him just by being with him, like something’ll leach out of me straight into him. All the kids his age, they play with water guns and shit? First time he picked one up, I swear, my wife turned white and ragged on me for fucking hours, how he’s going to end up like me.”