Silent Treatment Read Free Page B

fluorescent glare of the intake area.
    The minutes that followed were a blur of questions, needles, spasms of pain, and examinations from people dressed in surgical scrubs. Ron was wheeled to a small room with open shelves of supplies and a suction bottle on the wall. The staff had addressed him courteously enough, but it was clear that everyone was harried. Ron’s personal physician wasn’t affiliated with Good Samaritan, as far as he knew. There was really nothing he could think of to do except wait for the medication he had been promised to take the pain away.
    “You are feeling better, yes?” a man’s voice said in a thick foreign accent that Ron could not identify.
    Still in the fetal position that gave him the least discomfort, Ron blinked his eyes open, and looked up. The man, dressed in blue surgical scrubs like most of the ER staff, smiled down at him. The overhead light, eclipsed by his head, formed a bright halo around him and darkened his face.
    “I am Dr. Kozlansky,” he said. “It appears you and the others have developed food poisoning.”
    “Goddamn Jade Dragon. Is my wife all right?”
    “Oh yes. Oh yes, I assure you, she is most fine.”
    “Great. Listen, Doc, my stomach’s killing me. Can you give me something for this pain?”
    “That is exactly why I am here,” he said.
    “Wonderful.”
    The physician produced a syringe half full of clear liquid and emptied it into the intravenous line.
    “Thanks, Doc,” Farrell said.
    “You may wish to wait and thank me when … when we see how this works.”
    “Okay, have it your—”
    Farrell was suddenly unable to speak. There was a horrible, consuming emptiness within his chest. And he knew in that moment that his heart had stopped beating.
    The man continued smiling down at him benignly.
    “You are feeling better, yes?” he asked.
    Ron felt his arms and legs begin to shake uncontrollably. His back arched until only his heels and the back of hishead touched the bed. His teeth jackhammered together. Then his consciousness began to fade. His thoughts became more disjointed. His dreadful fear lessened and then finally vanished. His body dropped lifelessly back onto the bed.
    For a full minute the man stood there watching. Then he slipped the syringe into his pocket.
    “I’m afraid I must leave you now,” he whispered in a voice free of any accent. “Please try to get some rest.”

1 YEAR LATER

CHAPTER 1
    Harry Corbett was on his fifteenth lap around the indoor track when he first sensed the pain in his chest. The track, a balcony just under an eighth of a mile around, was on the top floor of the Grey Building of the Manhattan Medical Center. Ten feet below it was a modestly equipped gym with weights, the usual machines, heavy bags, and some mats. The fitness center, unique in the city, was exclusively for the hospital staff and employees. It had been created through the legacy of Dr. George Pollock, a cardiologist who had twice swum the English Channel. Pollock’s death, at age ninety, had resulted from his falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters of his country home.
    At the moment of his awareness of the pain, Harry was actually thinking about Pollock and about what it would be like to live until ninety. He slowed a bit and rotated his shoulders. The pain persisted. It wasn’t much—maybe two on the scale of one to ten that physicians used. But it wasthere. Reluctant to stop running, Harry swallowed and massaged his upper abdomen. The discomfort was impossible to localize. One moment it seemed to be beneath his breastbone, the next in the middle of his back. He slowed a bit more, down from an eight-minutes-per-mile pace to about ten-and-a-half. The ache was in his left chest now … no, it was gone … no, not gone, somewhere between his right nipple and clavicle.
    He slowed still more. Then, finally, he stopped. He bent forward, his hands on his thighs. It wasn’t angina, he told himself. Nothing about the character of the