LITMIR.BIZ

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keeping him from his exit. “So, in other words, I owe you.”

      Harold snorted. “In any words you owe me.”

      Ivan blew out a breath, a condemned man resigning himself to his firing squad. “And there’s no other way to repay the debt? Shine your shoes, take you to Disneyland? Wear a hair shirt for a week?”

      Harold smiled, anticipating a truce. “The hair shirt has possibilities, but we can explore that at another time. I told the board that you were taking an active part in training our residents—”

      Ivan allowed himself a smug moment. “In other words, you, Dr. Harold Bennett, chief of staff, our standard bearer of the truth, lied.”

      Harold’s faded gray eyebrows drew together in one tufted, ragged line. “I don’t lie, Ivan. And in order for you to remain in the board’s good graces, you are going to have to at least appear to be involved with the residents.”

      A fate, Ivan thought, only slightly less worse than death. Or maybe it was a tie. “Couldn’t I just drink hemlock?”

      Harold spread his hands out. They were wide hands, capable hands, but not the hands of a skilled surgeon. He’d always envied Ivan that. But then, he was not at the top of people’s hate list, either. People liked him. In the long run, that balanced things out.

      “Fresh out, Ivan. Now—” sitting up, he straightened the files on his desk and moved the tray aside “—you have the rest of the day to bemoan your fate. Report to my office tomorrow morning at eight.”

      The dour look on Ivan’s face, the one that sent residents and attendings scrambling for high ground, returned. “I always thought I’d be shot at sunrise, not eight.”

      Harold laughed. “Don’t put ideas in my head, Ivan. Tomorrow, eight.”

      “Eight.” Ivan sighed mightily and then nodded, his slightly unruly mop of deep chestnut hair underscoring the motion almost independently. “Well, not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have a surgery to scrub in for.” He paused one last time to level a steely gaze at Harold. It was obvious that his seas were choppy. “If Mr. Dombrowski never dances again, it’s on your head.”

      It was hard to tell whether or not Ivan meant it. The man did not possess what passed for a typical sense of humor. Maybe it was time to start thinking about retiring, Harold thought as the door to his office closed, with Ivan on the other side.

      To reassure himself that he had done the right thing, Harold pulled over the dark blue folder and reviewed the pages in it again. He looked down at the picture in the file. The young blonde was smiling.

      “I’m sorry,” he said to the image. “But he really is as good as he thinks he is. And you’ll learn a great deal. Once you get over hating me.”

      

      THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Ivan briefly entertained the thought of picking up the phone and calling in sick. The idea died. Not out of some misplaced nobility on his part, nor did he revisit his resistance and find it suddenly appalling. What he found appalling was the idea of a resident living in his shadow and calling it hers. He didn’t call in to postpone the inevitable because he didn’t know how. Didn’t know who to call because in the twelve years he’d been with Blair Memorial, he had never done it.

      Sick or well, he had always shown up at the hospital. Even on the worst of days, he mustered on. Day in, day out. Ivan took no note of the months or even the seasons. Had Blair’s chief administrative assistant, a young woman aptly named Debi by her intuitive parents and afflicted with a case of terminal perkiness, not felt compelled to decorate the hospital halls, he wouldn’t have known what month it was. The woman felt some sort of obligation to celebrate every holiday known to God, man and the eternally vigilant greeting card people.

      If the woman had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have even known when holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas came around. Except for his older brother John, who he hadn’t heard from in years, he had no family. No one to drag him off for the purpose of spending the holidays with them. Because of that, each day seemed identical to the one that had come before. Some days necessitated short-sleeved shirts, others generated a need for sweaters, but by and large, the days Ivan experienced were all the same except for the weather.

      Ivan switched on the TV just before he prepared to leave the apartment he’d been living in for the last twelve years. Living in Southern California, he was accustomed to periodically hearing the dire predictions of “the big one” coming, the earthquake of the magnitude that would destroy life and civilization as they all knew it.

      He should only be so lucky today, he mused.

      Buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his slacks, Ivan paused to listen as a very blond woman with flawless skin, what looked to be surgically enhanced lips and hypnotically blue eyes, summarized the day’s current local news.

      Same old, same old, he thought.

      “C’mon,” he murmured under his breath, talking to her as if she could hear. “If the big one’s coming, now would be a good day for it to get here.”

      But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to the idea of earthquakes or any disturbances that might be called upon to rescue him. Contrarily, she appeared quite content to pour her heart into a story about how the department stores were bearing up to the after-Christmas slump in sales.

      Ivan gave it a few minutes, waited to hear something promising, then shook his head as the story dragged on forever.

      If more people were like him, he thought, the department stores would find themselves in a permanent slump. As a rule, shopping had never tempted him. He bought only what he needed and he needed very little. A few serviceable shirts and slacks with an equal number of socks and underwear to go with them were practically all he ever required.

      His one weakness, his only hobby, was Philharmonic concerts. He attended them religiously, going all over the western map, arranging his schedule and people’s operations, whenever possible, around concert dates. Music was the very core of his existence, the only time he ever felt mellow, although he would have opted to be burned at the stake rather than admit that to a living soul.

      He preferred to be viewed as a godless, soulless, unrelenting holy terror who inspired admiration, respect and fear in his fellow surgeons, not necessarily in that order. As for the hospital’s fresh crop of residents, in Ivan’s view, they hardly existed, ranking only slightly higher than the rodents that could be found on the food chain.

      And, though the thought really bothered him, he was going to have to put up with one for the sake of continuing to do that which gave his life purpose and meaning.

      Grunting, he switched off the television set and then tossed aside the remote. It bounced off his sofa, falling on the floor beneath the glass-topped coffee table. He left it there.

      “No earthquakes,” he muttered, disgruntled. That meant that he was going to have to find a way to get this resident to request a transfer. And quickly.

      He smiled as he left the house. No problem. By the time he was finished with this resident, she would think pairing up with Satan was an improvement.

      CHAPTER 4

      She sternly told herself that she wasn’t going to be nervous.

      In all honesty, she hadn’t thought she would be because ordinarily, she wasn’t. Life, which had tossed its curveballs and its change-ups at her when she least expected them, had trained her to be prepared for anything. An ordinary case of first-day nerves did not figure into it.

      Having gone through all that she had in her thirty-four years, Bailey DelMonico liked to think of herself as fearless.

      For the most part, especially in the eyes of her family, she was.

      And she should be now, she told herself. With a stifled sigh, she discarded the plaid garment she’d just tried on and returned to her first choice, a subdued pencil skirt. Black to match the chief of neurosurgery’s

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