AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Not that I could have done much against an unforeseen medical complication, but something about this didn’t sit right. Boris had been on watch the whole time with his men, but I couldn’t shake the smell of foul play from my nostrils.
The hospital was forty minutes away.
I’ll be there in half an hour.
***
I sped the whole way there, mind racing, making plans. I didn’t yet know how bad Ivan was. I didn’t yet know if my concerns about it would bear fruit.
I didn’t know Boris to ever be incompetent, but I had checked my phone records when stuck in traffic ten minutes into the drive. He hadn’t tried to contact me even once.Did you forget in the midst of the chaos, Boris?I wondered. But that wasn’t like him either. He had a chess player’s mind inside that thick skull. His memory was as good as mine.
This wasn’t like him. And that wasn’t the only thing that was off about this situation. It was just the easiest one to put my finger on as I raced toward the hospital.
Boston PD knew my car and kept their distance. Now and then some idealistic upstart of a cop, or even an overzealous detective might come sniffing around me and my uncle’s business, but most knew better. Boston’s Finest would rather have someone like me or my uncle around, keeping order on the streets where they couldn’t, and treating our monthly round of bribes as just the price of doing business, rather than the alternative.
By the time that I pulled into the hospital parking lot, my muscles were so tight that my back was starting to hurt. I wanted to spring into action, find someone to fight, some way to take this situation in hand, besides waiting helplessly by his bedside to see if Ivan made it through the night. But again, I knew, you couldn’t fight old age or medical complications. Not unless you were a surgeon.
I didn’t fix human bodies. I was significantly better at breaking them. And before, that had made me feel strong.
Now, however, it made me feel useless. My fists were balled at my sides as I walked into the crowded lobby to address the desk nurse.
The way her face fell when I asked for Ivan’s current room and status didn’t help my outlook one bit. I kept my composure, as always, and my manners as well. She pointed me down the hall.
“The crash cart came for him fifteen minutes ago,” she called at my back, and I felt a shudder of the darkest kind of apprehension steal through me. What had happened?
I sped up, but didn’t let myself run. I saw the medics with the crash cart come out, rolling it between them, pushing it out into the hallway. Was the crisis over?
Then Boris came out, looking around, and walked toward me, holding up a meaty hand as if he was going to try to block me from seeing whatever was coming out of the door after the cart. “You don’t want to go in there right now, boss,” he told me in Russian. “It’s a bad scene.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “What happened?”
Then I saw them rolling Ivan out on a gurney. His face was covered, the drape falling like tent fabric from his beaky nose.
My eyes widened. “What…? God. Boris! He’s dead? How?”
He moved his mouth soundlessly for a few seconds, trying to put together the right words for what he had to say.
I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Boris! Pull yourself together and tell me.”
“I—” He licked his thick lips and blinked a few more times, his eyes bulging with shock. “I just ran off to take a leak for five goddamn minutes, and when I came back, he was flatlining! The cart was already in there and—”
I let him go, my hands dropping uselessly to my sides. My eyes locked on the gurney with my friend and employee’s corpse being wheeled away, down to the elevator that led to the morgue. There was no battle to be fought here. We had already lost.
And yet…
“Where’s the nurse who was attending him when you left?” I ducked my head inside the room, but saw only a tall, thin man scowling as he examined one of the IVs. He had a medic’s scrubs on.
“He…he was right here.” Boris looked around, then leaned back to look inside the nurse’s station a few doors down the hall. “Not here. Where the fuck did the guy go?”
“Who the hell put this patient on a potassium infusion?” Came the voice from the man inside the suite. He stalked out, blond hair and black glasses askew, and looked around with a scowl before his eyes settled on me. “Excuse me, do you know who the attending was on this? I can’t make out the initials.”
“We were looking for him ourselves. We’re hoping for information about our brother.” I said it smoothly, even as my heart banged away in my chest. Boris nodded beside me.
“Sorry for your loss,” the man said distractedly. “But we have a problem. I’m going to check with the floor nurse right quick.” He loped his way down the hall, and I stared after him, eyes narrowed.
“You think maybe somebody screwed up?” Boris asked quietly, that baffled tone lingering in his voice.
“Potassium.” I was not a medical doctor, but if there was one thing I had learned about, it was crime and punishment. The commonest drug used to stop the heart in the last stage of lethal injection was potassium chloride.
