Code 15 Gary Birken

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.She was halfway to the front door when her pager went off.She glanced down at the digital display.It was the emergency room—the last place she wanted to hear from.After an aggravated groan, she picked up her cordless phone and dialed the number.A man answered on the third ring.“This is Dr.Barnes.”Barnes was the vice chief of Emergency Medicine.He was an accommodating and even-tempered man who had always been supportive of Morgan’s agenda as the department chief.“Hi, Charles, it’s Morgan.Somebody paged me.”“I paged you.Are you in the hospital?” he asked in an unusually serious tone.Fearing she was in peril of missing her yoga class, she said, “C’mon, Charles.This is my first day off in weeks.Whatever the catastrophe is, can’t it wait until tomorrow?”“I’m not calling about a departmental problem, Morgan.”With a measured amount of concern creeping into her voice, she asked, “You sound awful.What’s going on?”“I’m afraid it’s your father.”“My father?” she grumbled with relief.“Don’t tell me he yelled at one of the nurses again.I told him the next time he did that I wouldn’t be able to save his—”“Morgan, your father was attacked in his office a little while ago.The paramedics brought him straight here.”Her purse slipped from her hand.She fell into the couch.“Attacked?”“At first I thought he had had a heart attack or stroke.But when I saw the marks on his throat.”Morgan clamped down on the receiver, sending every muscle in her hand into spasm.Desperately trying to maintain her composure, she asked, “Is.is he okay? Have the trauma surgeons seen him? It doesn’t matter who’s on call today, he’d want Katz or Fairland called.”After a difficult pause, Barnes said, “When he arrived, he was in full cardiac arrest.We.we tried to.I’m so sorry, Morgan.We tried everything.We just couldn’t get him back.”With the finality of the words reverberating in her head, Morgan found herself helpless to move or speak.She heard what Charles had told her, but she couldn’t fully process it.Finally she uttered, “I.I don’t—”“May’s our charge nurse today.She said she’d come get you.”A few more seconds passed.Feeling as if everything was happening in slow motion, Morgan whispered, “No, I’d prefer to drive myself.”Her hand opened and the phone fell out.She glanced at her credenza where she had displayed a dozen or so framed photographs.Her favorite was the one of her father and her taken in Park City, Utah, on a skiing vacation.Involuntarily, Morgan’s eyes closed.The thought that Charles Barnes’s phone call was some horrible mistake or awful nightmare from which she would soon awaken never entered her mind.As inconceivable as it was, she knew her father was gone.Having the presence of mind to slow her breathing, she waited a minute before reaching for her purse.She hadn’t taken more than a few steps when she suddenly felt light-headed.Stopping for a few moments, she steadied herself against a high-backed chair.When she felt her legs under her again, she took a few cautious paces toward the entranceway and summoned the elevator.She exited the building and got into her car.It wasn’t until she pulled away that the unthinkable reality of the situation finally got the better of her, leaving her frantically sobbing.CHAPTER 9It had been twelve hours since he had murdered Allen Hawkins.Alone in his den, Gideon considered himself living proof that any rational man was capable of murder.He gazed over at the ornate grandfather clock that had taken him twelve months of painstaking work to restore.It was a hobby that most men would find tedious but one he embraced for just that reason.He had never been a man prone to making capricious choices.In fact, he would defend forever that taking Hawkins’s life was not a decision at all—it was a moral imperative.He imagined that there were unenlightened individuals who might consider his actions unthinkable, but it made no difference.Irrespective of what the future held for him, he would never feel the need to explain himself to anybody—especially anyone who didn’t cling to the same moral ideology as he did.He was quite comfortable in his own skin, required nobody’s approbation, and had no qualms about remaining an unsung hero.Heavy in thought, he reached forward and flipped on a small brass lamp that sat on the corner of his desk.If he had a single regret in life, it was that he hadn’t, in fact, fulfilled his enduring passion of entering the world of academia.Only in the university environment would he have been recognized as a true luminary and given the opportunity to share his wisdom with young, impressionable minds.It would have been a more noble life than his present one, and one that would have pleased his mother.He lightly rubbed his ears.The incessant ringing showed no signs of easing off.He again pledged to himself that he wouldn’t allow the inexplicable annoyance to affect him in any way.Looking down at a white legal pad, he studied the list of names he had carefully printed months earlier [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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