I want to do it. It’s entirely out of character for me, but who cares? I’m going to call Barnaby tonight and tell him he can have it his way. We can see other people. And I’m going to say yes to J.J. Santos and go out with him once he’s on his feet again.
But when I round the corner and come within sight of his room, the bed is empty. It’s been stripped, all the equipment that had surrounded it last night is gone, and his large family is nowhere in sight. For a second I’m confused, thinking I got turned around somehow and wound up in the wrong area of the ICU, but everything else is just where it should be.
“Morning, Dr. Nicolo,” the nurse at the station says.
“Please tell me they moved Mr. Santos to another floor.”
“Hmm, let me check.” She pauses to look at her monitor, and I get impatient and pull out my tablet to check myself. Patients get moved all the time, and I’m not exactly at the top of the list to notify when it happens.
“Oh.” She lets out a disconcerted sound the same moment I find the chart, and my heart drops into my stomach.
“Dead? No! This can’t be right. He was fine when I left!”
I scroll madly through the digital record of his treatment, but hit a brick wall at the end. One that makes no sense. Only it does, at least on paper. “Oth postproc cardiac functn disturb following oth surgery.”
The listed cause of death looks like gibberish, but the shorthand is a language I understand. Evidently, complications caused his heart to stop after surgery. Except it didn’t. I was there. He was still breathing—talking, even—when I left last night. He was stable with a strong prognosis.
“Is Dr. Yao here yet? I need to talk to him.” My voice sounds brittle and my hands start shaking.
The nurse gives me a worried look as she nods and picks up the phone. I’m too engrossed in picking over the chart to hear the call. I’m supposed to be in the pit by now, but I can’t leave until I get answers. When Dr. Yao arrives and sees me, his face goes stony.
I wave my tablet at him. “Please tell me this is a lie. I was the last surgeon who touched him. I was with him for a couple hours after he got out of recovery. He was fine!”
He lifts his hands, palms out. “It was beyond our control, Callie. He complained of chest pains, then went into cardiac arrest on the way to get an MRI. Cardio thinks they missed some trauma. Bullets can do a real number on someone at close range. You saw the state he was in—all those wounds, the bruises. They had to open him up again, but he was too far gone. It’s a miracle he made it through the spinal surgery to begin with. It had nothing to do with you, I promise. Nothing.”
Nothing to do with you. It echoes in my head, but still doesn’t quite gel. There should be more in his chart if it’s like Dr. Yao says. But there isn’t. There’s way too much missing if he had a second surgery. Especially if he died while on the table.
“Then explain why there’s no autopsy order! They have to do one to cover our asses if nothing else.”
He gives me a helpless look and shakes his head. “Patients die, Dr. Nicolo. Just learn what you can from it and move on.”
“Learn what I can?” I glare at him, jabbing my finger at the tablet. “From what? There’s no record here of what happened. Nothing for me to learn from. What really happened?”
His eyes blaze and he grabs my arm, pulling me aside. In a low voice, he grates out, “I know how you can be a pit bull when it comes to finding answers. That’s a perfect quality for this specialty, for the surgical profession in general. But trust me, this is one case you need to let go for your own safety, got it? Now drop it and get downstairs before Blanchard gets pissed and takes you off her service.”
I stare like he just slapped me. “Are you saying it wasn’t an accident?”
“He. Was. Shot. There was nothing fucking accidental about it. That’s all. Now drop it before I write you up.”
He stalks away red-faced, and I stand there still shaking.
The image of J.J.’s tattoo flashes in my mind. Not the one I stitched together last night, but the living one swimming beneath his skin in my dream. I’d planned to ask him about it today if he was awake, just to have an excuse for a conversation.
Dr. Yao’s ominous words finally sink in, but they don’t manage to calm me down. I manage to get my legs to work and make my way to the elevator down to the ER. I assume he means that J.J. was mixed up with Arturo Flores somehow. That asking too many questions would be dangerous. I can at least read between the lines well enough to figure that out.
But I’m not going to forget it. Somehow, I will find out what happened.
3 Mason
Three Years Later
Near the California-Mexico Border
The plane ride from hell is finally near its end when I feel the thunk of landing gear lowering beneath me. The sound reverberates up through my skull where I’m pressed to the coarse carpet on the floor. I try to roll over, but only make it halfway before pain lances through my right shoulder. It was dislocated when I was thrown on this thing, but I managed to get it back into its socket despite being zip-tied.
Out of the corner of one swollen eye, I see only dark sky through the small windows. There’s nothing to give a clue where the fuck they’ve taken me. Across the border, I assume. Zavala wants in on the action and knows I’m the
