"A custom job, is that what you're saying?"
She cringed at the term. "It's a specific match. That is what I'm saying. A special order."
The elevator opened. Dr. Light Horse caught it and held it for Boldt and his restless passenger.
She walked him to the front of the building. She walked quickly, expecting him to keep up.
As they stopped to shake hands, she said, "The implications of what you're suggesting are horrible, of course. The medical community as a whole and surgeons in particular are just beginning to address ways of more closely monitoring the donor crisis. If more people donated their organs at death, we wouldn't be seeing any of this. If you're looking for a possible candidate," she continued, "I would start with surgeons reprimanded by the AMA-someone suspended and out of work. Frustrated. Angry. I assume we agree this person is deranged, and such thinking could easily distort the Hippocratic Oath. As doctors, we're sworn to save human life wherever possible. He or she reasons that the donor can get by on one kidney, that the recipient will die without that replacement organ. You have three dead, you said. Three out of a hundred or three out of five? That is how he is thinking. He may be playing percentages, I'm sorry to say." She touched his arm. "All this is just the long way of saying that it could be anyone disturbed enough to convince himself that what he's doing is not only acceptable, but ethically sound. He may see himself as an angel of mercy."
Mention of the word "angel" triggered vivid images from his youth. He remembered playing in the snow, lying down and fanning his arms and legs so that the impression he left behind resembled that of an angel. Only now he saw things differently: Inside that impression lay the bleached white bones of a skeleton. He said, "An angel? Hardly. An angel maker is more like it."
It gave Pamela Chase a sense of importance to be summoned at a moment's notice out to the farm. He needed her! Perhaps he would make love to her again; perhaps his calling-her out here had nothing whatsoever to do with work, as his phone call had implied.
A low, mid-morning smoke-gray fog hung over the area where the farm sat, running from the ground to the tops of the tall trees that rimmed the ridges behind it. She spotted the fog only briefly before disappearing into it, and this made her wonder whether you ever saw things for what they were while you were inside them, a part of them.
The fog forced her to drive more slowly, and it gave her a few minutes to think. Seemed like all she did was think-that's how a person all alone spends her time, she thought, trapped inside your thoughts and dreams as this car was trapped inside the fog. Moving slowly. Crawling. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the workday to start. Waiting. Always thinking ahead, never really being where you are, but somewhere you hope to be. Strange way to live your life.
She parked alongside his Trooper and watched the mud as she climbed out, because she had been on her way to work when the phone had rung and wasn't very well prepared for the conditions out here. She loved the man-that was her problem. He knew it, too, which put her at a disadvantage because there was little she wouldn't do for him, and he made the most of it. With sex now part of their relationship, she wondered where it might lead next. Either it would turn magical or sour-no telling which. If those tics of his were any indication, then it was going sour. She wasn't sure where they had come from, but it gave her an incredibly creepy feeling each time one happened, and they were getting worse. No doubt about that.
She trudged around to the basement door and knocked. It was colder in the fog. She was shivering by the time he answered.
He locked the door securely behind her and started giving orders before he even said hello. "Run the blood tests, will you? Then scrub up and prep him please. Right kidney and spleen." "Both?"
He stopped, turned, and looked her in the eye. "Are you questioning me?" It was just a flicker, just something passing across his eyes like a reflection on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, but it ran her blood cold. There was an implied threat behind this question of his. There was someone else someone she didn't know-behind his eyes. just a flicker, then gone, like the tics when they had first started. "Right kidney and spleen," she repeated obediently. "Good," he said, turning his back on her. He had one of those tics then. His head snapped violently toward his lifting shoulder, remained pinched there, intractable, and finally relaxed. She wanted to offer her hands to him-to rub the knots out of his back. She knew the pain of these tics because she had witnessed his face recently all the muscles twitching and distorting like some kind of Halloween mask. It just had to hurt. A short backrub was just the thing for him. But she didn't offer it. They didn't talk about the tics; they both pretended they never happened at all.
She had to think: Was that the way their moment of intimacy was to be as well? As if it had never happened at all? It had happened right here in this room, and now she was to go parading about her work as Pam the Helper. Pam the Lover was apparently lost in the shadows. Burned to a crisp along with all the other contaminated waste.
He was starting to give her the creeps, the way he was so silent over there.
The donor was a black male between twenty-five and thirty. He was naked, face up, eyes open from the Ketamine, which paralyzed him but didn't actually render him unconscious. She was used to those eyes now, but at first they had really terrified her. Elden used Ketamine on all the donors, despite the dangers, because of its effect on memory. On some, he followed this up with electroshock. She didn't approve, but she understood.
That was how she felt about much of this. Elden's strength, his power of conviction, left little room for argument. She noticed this man's upper arm then, and like so often in her life, words came babbling out before she could control them. "My God, Elden! What happened to his arm?"
"His arm! Did Donnie do this to his arm?"
"Donnie?"
"It's a mess.
Lacerated, bruised. It might even be broken by the look of it."
"Yes, I noticed that. Perhaps we can help. But not now. Hmm?
Right kidney and spleen, Pamela. Are you ready for me or not?"
The image of him, framed against the silvery plastic wall, was something surreal, something not of this world. It seemed fitting somehow, for a man of such talents.
She collected herself and asked, "Do you want me to dress it?"
"Prep him," he instructed. He never did pay much attention to what she said. He was in a mood today. More and more so in the last few days. You couldn't reach him when he was in a mood, so she gave up trying. She drew several samples of blood, labeled them, started the HIV test on one of them, the hepatitis A and B test on another, and placed the third in the waist-high fridge. There were a number of drugs missing from the door of the fridge. She was about to mention this when she caught herself. Antibiotics mostly. Some Demerol and Valium, too. The thought briefly crossed her mind that perhaps Elden was experimenting with the drugs himself; perhaps this helped to explain his recent erratic behavior. But not Demerol and Valium, she corrected herself. If anything, he seemed wound up and agitated of late, more like on an amphetamine high.
Donnie had probably stolen them; he was always sneaking drugs.