Into the Inferno Read Online Free Page B

before you gave him the apple?” I asked over my shoulder.
    “Fine. I was reading to him from the Scientific Statement of Being.”
    A finger sweep wasn’t going to work.
    Stan and I hauled McCain off the bed, and Stan turned him around, gripped him from behind, pressed his fists together under his sternum, and compressed violently three times. On the last compression an object flew out of McCain’s mouth past my shoulder and skidded across the floor like a hockey puck. A slice of Braeburn. From New Zealand. Sweet and tangy at the same time. Eager to conceal incriminating evidence, the old woman knelt quickly and put it in the pocket of her housedress.
    It was about the size you would feed a plow horse.
    Now, slumped in Beebe’s thick arms, Joel was gasping for air as if he would never get enough. When it became clear that he wasn’t physically capable of getting his feet beneath him, Beebe, Karrie, and I laid him back on the bed. We tugged his pajama bottoms back up and put a nasal cannula on his face and administered 0 2 . The pajama bottoms bothered all three of us; what bothered us even more was that he was wearing an adult diaper under them. He hadn’t moved a limb on his own since we got there, hadn’t twitched a finger, hadn’t said squat. He hadn’t stopped drooling, and the damp bib tied around his neck told us he wasn’t going to. Karrie straightened it and patted some of his hair into place, as if she might mother him into normalcy.
    “Hey, Joel,” I said amiably. “What the hell? You’re not supposed to swallow the whole thing. Just a bite at a time. How you doin’, buddy?”
    No answer. No eye contact.
    The setup was Spartan, to say the least. The hospital bed was in the center of the living room and had a rack over it with bars for the patient to use when repositioning himself, though I gotta tell you I couldn’t see any evidence that Joel had the capacity to use them. Beside the bed was a single straight-backed chair and, alongside that, a small table. No phone, radio, television, or magazines. No flowers, nothing to indicate it was a sickroom except the hospital bed, the lack of furniture, and, of course, the goggle-eyed patient.
    There was a single item on the table next to the chair, a small book with a leather cover,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
by Mary Baker Eddy. The book was open, a purple ribbon marking the page, several paragraphs limned with blue chalk, as if they’d been read repeatedly.
    “Let’s get a BP and a rate,” I said. I called for a medic unit on our portable radio. The dispatcher confirmed my request and stated the medics would be responding from Bellevue. Normally a choking victim came around as soon as the obstruction was removed, but there was something wrong here.
    Brain death from lack of oxygen occurs in four to six minutes. We all knew that. It had taken us four minutes to get here.
    “How long was he choking before you called?” I asked.
    Joel’s mother-in-law wrung her hands and stared at me. “I don’t know.” She’d been making a point of not looking at Joel, as if not looking at him would make things better. “We’d been praying together, and I thought I saw an improvement, so I went into the kitchen and peeled that apple. I gave him a bite, and then the phone rang and I went back to the kitchen to answer it. When I came back, he was like you saw.”
    “And you called us right away?”
    “I prayed first.”
    “How long did that take?”
    “We said the Scientific Statement of Being a couple of times.”
    “How long did that take?”
    “A couple of minutes.”
    “We? You said
we
were praying?”
    “Joel and I.”
    “He was able to pray with you?” Karrie asked.
    “It was a silent prayer.” She was a diminutive woman, maybe a hundred fifteen pounds.
    She burst into tears when Beebe said, “What’d you do, push it down his throat with a broom handle?”
    “It’s all right.” I put my arm around her heaving shoulders and