The Taker Read Free

with gauze soaked in warm water. The bloody red streaks dissolve, revealing a pale, thin chest without a scratch on it. The nursedrops the forceps holding the gauze into a metal pan noisily and hustles out of the examination room as though she knew all along that they’d find nothing, and yet again, Luke has proven his incompetence.
    He averts his eyes as he drapes a paper sheet over the girl’s naked torso.
    “I’d have told you I wasn’t hurt if you’d asked,” she says to Luke in a low whisper.
    “You didn’t tell the sheriff, though,” Luke says, reaching for a stool.
    “No. But I’d have told you .” She nods at the doctor. “Do you have a cigarette? I’m dying for a smoke.”
    “I’m sorry. Don’t have any. I don’t smoke,” Luke replies.
    The girl looks at him, those ice blue eyes scanning his face. “You gave them up a while ago, but you started again. Not that I blame you, given everything you’ve been through lately. But you have a couple of cigarettes in your lab coat, if I’m not mistaken.”
    His hand goes to the pocket, out of instinct, and he feels the papery touch of the cigarettes right where he had left them. Was that a lucky guess, or did she see them in his pocket?
    And what did she mean by given everything you’ve been through lately ? She’s just pretending to read his mind, trying to get inside his head like any clever girl who finds herself in a fix would do. He has been wearing his troubles on his face lately. He just hasn’t seen a way to fix his life yet; his problems are interconnected, all stacked up. He’d have to know how to fix all of them to take care of even one.
    “There’s no smoking in the building, and in case you’ve forgotten, you’re strapped to a gurney.” Luke clicks the top of his pen and reaches for a clipboard. “We’re a little shorthanded tonight, so I’m going to need to get some information from you for the hospital records. Name?”
    She regards the clipboard warily. “I’d rather not say.”
    “Why? Are you a runaway? Is that why you don’t want to give me your name?” He studies her: she’s tense, guarded, but under control. He’s been around patients involved in accidental deaths and they’reusually hysterical—crying, shaking, screaming. This young woman is trembling slightly under the paper sheet and she jiggles her legs nervously, but by her face Luke can tell she’s in shock.
    He feels, too, that she is warming toward him; he senses a chemistry between them, as though she is willing him to ask her about the terrible thing that happened in the forest. “Do you want to tell me what went on tonight?” he asks, rolling closer to the gurney. “Were you hitchhiking? Maybe you got picked up by someone, the guy in the woods … He attacks you, you defend yourself?”
    She sighs and presses back into the pillow, staring at the ceiling. “It was nothing like that. We knew each other. We came to town together. He”—she stops, choking on the words—“he asked me to help him die.”
    “Euthanasia? Was he already dying? Cancer?” Luke is skeptical. The ones looking to kill themselves usually pick something quiet and surefire: poison, pills, an idling car engine and a length of garden hose. They don’t ask to be stabbed to death. If this friend really wanted to die, he could have just sat under the stars all night until he froze.
    He glances at the woman, trembling under the paper sheet. “Let me get a hospital gown and a blanket for you. You must be cold.”
    “Thank you,” she says, dropping her gaze.
    He comes back with a much-laundered flannel gown edged in pink and a pilling acrylic blanket, baby blue. Maternity colors. He looks down at her hands, bound to the gurney with nylon strap restraints. “Here, we’ll do this one hand at a time,” Luke says, undoing the restraint on the hand closest to the side table where the examination tools are laid out: forceps, bloodied scissors, scalpel.
    Quick as a rabbit, she lunges