True to the Game III Read Free

bury?”
    Quadir exhaled. He released Gena, took a seat on the wicker sofa across from hers, and settled in for the long story that he was about to tell her. “You may want to eat a little something before I get started.”
    “Quadir, I will die of starvation before I let either of us leave this lanai and I still be in the dark,” Gena told him. “I hope that this little explanation of yours is a good one. If it’s not, I’m going to kill you myself. And this time, there won’t be no coming back.”
    Quadir smiled and leaned back on the sofa. “It’s like this . . .”

Heaven Can Wait
    Hahnemann Hospital, January 1, 1990
    T he orderly strolled into the room to collect his cadaver. He had been at the job for a little more than a year now, and he loved it. Working in the hospital morgue paid well and afforded him the peace and quiet that he needed to study for his premed courses. The job suited him more than most, as his goal was to become a surgeon. He was now in his final year of premed, and one semester away from actual medical school, where he would be cutting open bodies and not just transporting them from one floor to another.
    The body that he was picking up now was fresh. The gunshot victim had just been called, and his family had just walked out of the room.
Probably the guy’s wife or fiancée or something, but whoever she was, she certainly had a nice little ass on her. This poor, unlucky bastard would now be staring down or up, watching somebody else plow that fat-ass onion she had back there.
    The orderly lifted the cadaver’s hanging hand to lay it on the bed. The hand felt weird. Stranger than any other dead guy’s hand he had ever touched. The damn thing was warm, really warm. And more than that, it had a fucking pulse.
    “Oh, shit!” The orderly rushed into the hall to find a nurse, a doctor, anyone who looked like they could do something. “Excuse me, ma’am. I have an emergency.”
    Dr. Hopkins stopped and read the orderly’s name tag. “Stan, what can I do for you?”
    “Doc, I got a dead guy in there who ain’t dead,” Stan told her.
    “What?” Dr. Hopkins rushed into the emergency operating room. She clasped Quadir’s pulse. Sure as shit, he had one. She rushed to the wall and pressed the intercom.
    “Stat. Emergency room personnel to the OR, stat. This is Dr. Amelia Hopkins. Emergency room surgical personnel to the OR, immediately!”
    Masked emergency room personnel ran into the operating room, some of them still covered with Quadir’s blood from minutes ago.
    “We got a live one here, people!” Dr. Hopkins shouted. She rushed to a corner of the room to scrub up before several nurses dressed her in surgical garb. Two more surgeons, Dr. Benjamin Brant and Dr. William Hartley, rushed into the room. “Ben, he’s still alive.”
    “Hot damn!” Dr. Brant rushed to Quadir and immediately began working on him.
    Dr. Hartley began issuing orders as he scrubbed up and the nurses dressed him in surgical garb.
    “You’re a tough son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Dr. Brant said, smiling at Quadir. “Fight, son. That’s right, fight.”
    “Set up a pint of plasma for him.” Hopkins ordered one of the nurses. “Get him hooked back up so that we can monitor his blood pressure. What’s the deal, Benny?”
    “Couldn’t find that last fucking bullet. It hid behind his heart. He flatlined and we couldn’t get him back. We called him.”
    “You need a woman’s touch in here,” Hopkins told him. “My hands are a lot smaller than yours. Let me see if I can work my way around in there and get that little booger.”
    Dr. Brant maneuvered out of the way and allowed Dr. Hopkins to become the primary surgeon. Within seconds she was smiling at him beneath her surgical mask.
    “Was this the pesky little thing you were looking for?” she asked, holding up a small, bloody, lead ball. She placed the bullet into a small dish, and then proceeded to repair the internal damage it had