The Body Human Read Online Free

on the porch steps, ten or twelve of them. There are no kids waiting for school buses, no cars pulling out of driveways on the way to work. The hospital parking lot has huge empty stretches between cars. At the last minute I drive on through the lot, parking instead across the street in somebody’s empty driveway, under a clump of trees.
    Nobody sits at the information desk. The gift shop is locked. Nobody speaks to me as I study the directory on the lobby wall, even though two figures in gowns and masks hurry past. CHIEF OF MEDICINE, DR. RANDOLF SATLER. Third floor, east wing. The elevator is deserted.
    It stops at the second floor. When the doors open a man stands there, a middle-aged farmer in overalls and work boots, his eyes red and swollen like he’s been crying. There are tinted windows across from the elevators and I can see the back of him reflected in the glass. Coming and going. From somewhere I hear a voice calling, “Nurse, oh nurse, oh God…” A gurney sits in the hallway, the body on it covered by a sheet up to the neck. The man in overalls looks at me and raises both hands to ward off the elevator, like it’s some kind of demon. He steps backward. The doors close.
    I grip the railing on the elevator wall.
    The third floor looks empty. Bright arrows lead along the hallways: yellow for PATHOLOGY and LAB SERVICES, green for RESPIRATORY THERAPY, red for SUPPORT SERVICES. I follow the yellow arrow.
    It dead-ends at an empty alcove with chairs, magazines thrown on the floor. And three locked doors off a short corridor that’s little more than an alcove.
    I pick the farthest door and pound on it. No words, just regular blows of my fist. After a minute, I start on the second one. A voice calls, “Who’s there?”
    I recognize the voice, even through the locked door. Even after seventeen years. I shout, “Police! Open the door!”
    And he does. The second it cracks, I shove it hard and push my way into the lab.
    “ Elizabeth ?”
    He’s older, heavier, but still the same. Dark hair, blue eyes…I look at that face every day at dinner. I’ve looked at it at soccer matches, in school plays, in his playpen. Dr. Satler looks more shaken to see me than I would have thought, his face white, sweat on his forehead.
    “Hello, Randy.”
    “Elizabeth. You can’t come in here. You have to leave—”
    “Because of the staph? Do you think I care about that? After all, I’m in the hospital, right, Randy? This is where the endozine is. This place is safe. Unless it gets blown up while I’m standing here.”
    He stares at my left hand, still gripping the doorknob behind me. Then at the gun in my right hand. A seve n teen-year-old Smith & Wesson, and for five of those years the gun wasn’t cleaned or oiled, hidden under my aunt’s garage. But it still fires.
    “I’m not going to shoot you, Randy. I don’t care if you’re alive or dead. But you’re going to help me. I can’t find my son,”— your son —“and Sylvia Goddard told me he’s mixed up with that group that blew up the bridge. He’s hiding with them someplace, probably scared out of his skull. You know everybody in town, everybody with power, you’re going to get on that phone there and find out where Sean is.”
    “I would do that anyway,” Randy says, and now he looks the way I remember him: impatient and arrogant. But not completely. There’s still sweat on his pale face. “Put that stupid thing away, Elizabeth.”
    “No.”
    “Oh, for…” He turns his back on me and punches at the phone.
    “Cam? Randy Satler here. Could you…no, it’s not about that…No. Not yet.”
    Cameron Witt. The mayor. His son is chief of Eme r ton’s five cops.
    “I need a favor. There’s a kid missing…I know that, Cam. You don’t have to lecture me on how bad delay could…But you might know about this kid. Sean Baker.”
    “Pulaski. Sean Pulaski.” He doesn’t even know that.
    “Sean Pulaski. Yeah, that one…okay. Get back to me…I told you.