back out, the knife hand driving toward my side. I tried to move out of the way but the blade tore my shirt and sliced through the skin between my right hip and my ribs. Warm blood started running down my side.
Marco thrust the knife again, this time straight at my heart. Fuck him. Fuck his gunman too. I caught his hand in my right, locked his arm straight and drove my left palm hard into his elbow. There was a cracking sound like a twig snapping. The knife fell to the ground, followed closely by Marco, who screamed and rolled onto his back, clutching his arm. I ran toward the clutch of ballplayers, looking back over my shoulder. Phil was kneeling at Marco’s side as he writhed and moaned in the grass. Ryan was staring at the ground like he wished it would swallow him.
I realized then it wasn’t a ballplayer who had yelled the warning. It had been Ryan. And once the pain subsided, Marco Di Pietra would realize it too.
CHAPTER 19
Not long after midnight, I eased myself out of a cab and walked gingerly into the lobby of my building. I had sixteen stitches in my side but was feeling no pain. I was happy as a clam, in fact, or at least as happy as a clam who has taken two Percocets and has plenty more in his shell.
All things considered, my brush with death-and I speak here not of being slashed by a psychopath but of dealing with the Canadian medical system-went as well as could be expected. The bearded ballplayer drove me to Beth Israel on the condition that I not bleed on the seat of his Taurus. “It’s a burgundy interior,” he said, “but not the same shade.” Ed had wanted to come too but I told him to do himself a favour and go back to his apartment and not let anyone see him with me.
“I got pictures of them, the bastards,” Ed said. “What should I do with them?”
“Nothing, Ed. Don’t even develop the film till we talk.”
The ballplayer, whose name was Mark, gave me a spare T-shirt from his duffle bag to press against the wound while he drove. When we pulled up to Emerg, I thanked him and his friends for not looking away from trouble.
“I’d recognize the guy,” he said. “If it came down to a lineup.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “Not if you’re smart enough to play centre field. Feel no obligation to provide descriptions to the police, either. None of you. Let it fade. And thanks again.”
On entering the ER, I was required to scour my hands with antiseptic lotion. Personally, I thought the blood leaking out of me posed more of a health hazard than my hands, but as my mother never tires of reminding me, I never went to medical school. Once sanitized, I presented myself, along with my health card, to a nurse behind a counter piled high with files.
She was a tall black woman with regal features and close-cropped hair dyed a ginger blonde. At the sight of my bloody side, she might have raised one eyebrow slightly.
“Take a seat,” she said.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “They’re not exactly burgundy.”
“I didn’t say take one home. Just take one.”
I sat down and started flipping through two-year-old magazines, keeping the T-shirt tight to my side with my elbow. Thankfully, the waiting room was not as full as it would have been during flu season, when anyone with a sniffle heads straight to the nearest ER, instead of taking to their bed and watching daytime TV like normal people. Still, I worked my way through half a dozen magazines before my name was called. A second nurse with twinkling blue eyes and a mop of red curls led me to a curtained-off examination area. She gloved her hands and placed a thick gauze pad on a bed with pale yellow sheets, gripped my hand and eased me down onto my back so the pad was under the wound. She wiped away the blood that had dried on my skin and peered at the slash. I could feel fresh rivulets of blood run down my side like raindrops down a window. “Mm-hmm,” she said.
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
