The Inquisitor Read Online Free Page B

continued, "but first, such a serious bunch as yourselves will frighten the sick into a relapse, so here's a joke to lighten the mood." He lifted the microphone off its stand and walked free of the podium. "Did you hear the one about the priest, the minister, and the rabbi who went to Disneyland together?"
    Everybody waited for the answer.
    "They got in a fight about where to go first. I mean, it got loud. The priest shouted, 'Fantasylandl' The rabbi, 'Tomorrowlandl' The minister, 'Frontierlandl' They even started pulling on the map, pushing and shoving each other, kicking up the dust. Grown men, squabbling like you wouldn't believe. Then Goofy walks up. 'Hey, Mickey,' he says, 'look! It's Holyland.'"
    Groans filled the air again, but this time they were good-natured.
    Jimmy continued to walk the stage. "Sorry, but when I entered the seminary, it was a toss-up between that and being a stand-up comic. I'm still working on my act, in case I get the call. What'd'ya think?"
    "Don't give up your day job," someone shouted.
    A few people chuckled.
    Jimmy pointed to the heavens and shook his head. "You know, that's what He keeps telling me."
    This got him a round of applause.
    "Make your point, Jimmy," Earl muttered none too quietly. He was impatient to say his own piece so he could get the hell back and reassess the man he'd left in ER.
    The chaplain gave him a nod. "Not to take up any more of your busy morning, but I'm here to invite you all to our annual Run for Fun this Saturday. That's when you, healthy, young, and strong, get to put your professors, weak, old, and flabby- well, some of them, anyway- to shame by humiliating them in a two-K jaunt through scenic downtown Buffalo, entirely in the name of charity. Oh, by the way, the lot of you will be pushing hospital beds, each complete with a simulated patient and half-full bedpan from which you must not spill a drop. Thanks for your time."
    Earl joined in the clapping, ready to take the stage, when the overhead PA crackled to life.
    "Drs. Garnet, Deloram, Biggs- ER; Father Jimmy Fitzpatrick- ER stat!"
    Artie Baxter, the stockbroker, lay on his stretcher frowning and blinking furiously. He couldn't speak because of the tube in his throat, and he breathed thanks to a respiratory technician who kept ventilating his lungs with an Ambu bag, twelve squeezes to the minute. J.S. provided the chest compressions, five at a time, strands of her thick black hair slipping from under her cap and flopping over her forehead as she worked. A cloying scent of singed flesh hung in the air despite the gobs of contact gel that glistened in the tight curls on Artie's chest, and his cardiac monitor showed the zigzag line of a fibrillating heart.
    "We were on him so quickly when he arrested, he never lost consciousness," Susanne whispered to Earl.
    At her side stood a heavyset, pear-shaped man with worried, tired-looking eyes and the edges of a salt-and-pepper beard sticking out the bottom of his mask. Dr. Michael Popovitch was a longtime friend, director of the department's residency program, and acting chief of ER during Earl's many absences. He'd once shared the fire in the belly that's a prerequisite for long-term survival in emergency medicine, but lately the cases seemed to weigh heavily on him. Each month his gaze grew a little sadder. "We've maxed him with epi, Lidocaine, procainamide- every antiarrhythmic we have," he said, terse and to the point, "and shocked him silly. Bottom line, nothing's worked."
    The causes of refractory V-fib. automatically flashed through Earl's mind. "How's his potassium, sugar-"
    "No metabolic problems," Michael cut in, "other than a slightly high glucose after the bolus you gave him-"
    "An overdose, maybe?" Stewart Deloram interrupted, inserting himself as part of the huddle. "Tricyclics, aminophylline, speed…" He rattled off the drugs that might precipitate this kind of arrest.
    Thomas Biggs stood a little off to one side. He watched the proceedings but offered