“It’s that silly guilt-trip business,” Tom murmured. “Billy’s feeling bad because he thinks he screwed up yesterday. Dropping the gun the way he did.”
Sharon’s lips quirked. “I thought he did great, myself. Hey, look, two of us in that madhouse were amateurs. The pro’s the only one who got hurt.”
“Well, yeah. But Billy probably figures if he hadn’t screwed up the pro wouldn’t have been scratched.” He gave his head a little shake. “As it is, I had to stop him from donating too many units. Especially with him also running around organizing so much stuff. I wish we’d had somebody besides him and Dalziel still here with type O-negative.”
Stoner’s lips tightened on that last sentence. Sharon knew that Tom had his own worries. His son Gerry had the universal donor’s blood type also. But Gerry had vanished, along with Frank and Ron, nobody knew where. The documents they’d found at the Marcoli house after the deadly brawl had referred to crazy schemes to liberate Galileo and murder the pope. True, those documents had obviously been planted by Ducos’ agents. But there had also been notes from Joe Buckley—no doubt about it; Joe’s handwriting had been distinctive—which seemed to at least confirm the part about liberating Galileo. Lennox and most of his men were out scouring the city, trying to find out what the truth was.
Sharon shook her head. They’d reached the table now, and there was no time to think about anything other than the work ahead of her. The OR table itself was something Sharon had had designed weeks earlier, blessedly, in case of an emergency. It was a well-made local product, heavily shellacked and polished, and now covered with sterilized absorbent fabric. It wasn’t quite as good as an up-time OR gurney—and certainly a lot harder to move around, between the weight of the wood and the lack of wheels—but it would do fine.
She looked down at the patient lying on the OR table. She’d wondered if it would bother her, having to operate on someone she knew. To her relief, she discovered that it didn’t. The man on the table bore a vague resemblance to a man named Ruy Sanchez, what she could see of the face above the gauze over the nose and mouth that Stoner would use to keep administering the anesthetic. But that was all it was. Just a resemblance. The animation was gone. The skin was pale, the cheeks were flushed. That was fever and blood loss.
The key, though, was the eyes. The patient’s eyes were closed now, but Sharon had seen the dullness come into them in the hours after the fight. Not even Don Quixote on steroids could shrug off these kinds of injuries. The cut to the leg, maybe; that had been a simple flesh wound which Sharon had treated and sewn up quickly hours earlier. But certainly not the other trauma.
That one was a killer. The type of abdominal wound which, at any time prior to the late nineteenth century, would have been accepted as well-nigh certain death. A slow and tortured death, to boot. Sharon knew full well that the reason Stoner had been able to pack the huge salon with observers was because they all wanted to see if the exotic American Dottoressa could do what had always been considered impossible.
She took a slow, deep breath. A man named Ruy Sanchez with dull eyes simply did not exist in the world, she told herself firmly.
Could not exist. A contradiction in terms. All that lay here was a patient. A body. If she did her job, a human being might return into that body. But, for now, it was just a body. One of many. She’d studied and handled bodies for years now. The father who had sired her and raised her and given her his own talent and love for medicine had done the same for decades before that.
She felt calm, now. She’d gained that emotional detachment which, however inhuman it might be from one angle, was utterly necessary for what lay ahead of her.
Stoner had already moved to his part of the OR table and was checking the patient’s vital signs.