LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Mel! Mel! Get over here.”

      Mel ran up, Matthew’s tone telling him it was time to spring.

      “Ms. Ginelli here lives in that house.”

      She pointed.

      “She did not lock her back door. The perp could have gotten inside. Take two officers and go to the front and the back. There’s an adult couple . . . ”

      She turned to me.

      “Names?”

      “Carol and Giles.”

      “And two kids in the house. Ring. If there’s no answer, we’ll call for back up.”

      “And a dog,” I managed. “A dog. Friendly.”

      Mel sprinted away at a good clip toward the other campus cop cars that had pulled up. The city cops had not yet put in an appearance. I had to follow. I had to follow.

      I started down the alley, struggling at every step, and Matthews stepped in front of me.

      “You’re not going to be able to help. Mel’s good. He’ll let us know.”

      She walked me toward one of the university police cars and gently took my arm to try to usher me inside. I just wearily shook my head and slumped back to the ground.

      Mel had better be good.

      The wait was excruciating. Matthews stood next to me. I was just struggling to my feet again when her radio crackled.

      “Matthews? Billman here.”

      Mel?

      “Just checked the Ginelli residence. A couple answered the door. They let us in and we did a thorough check. The children were sleeping and the premises are clear. They said they’d lock up behind us. Oh, and the woman wants to know if Ms. Ginelli wants her to accompany her to the emergency room or stay here.”

      I let out the breath I’d been holding for the last ten minutes and looked up at Matthews. She was raising a questioning eyebrow.

      “No. Tell Carol, her name’s Carol, to stay with her husband and the children. If the kids wake up, they’ll want her there.”

      Matthews nodded. She must have kids, I thought.

      So, I’d let them fix my arm now. If the boys had been killed like Marco, I wouldn’t have wanted to go to an ER to stop the blood flow. In fact, I’d just have cut the other arm too and waited to bleed out.

      * * * *

      I’d been sitting for the better part of an hour in a little room that could easily double as a meat freezer. Matthews had dropped me off at the ER instead of making me wait for the ambulance, for which favor I was profoundly grateful.

      A nurse had ushered me into this cubicle after making sure I passed that most important of medical tests, the valid insurance test. By coming up as a member in good standing of the university’s health plan, I was ushered in and given a blanket that seemed to be made of tissue paper.

      After a few minutes, a young woman who identified herself as a medical student and who seemed about twelve-years-old had come in briefly, taken my temperature and blood pressure and then lifted the tee shirt on my arm to look at the cut. She had blanched and looked away. I bet medical school was kind of a trial when you can’t stand the sight of blood. She quickly had left and that had been that, for nearly an hour.

      I knew the symptoms of shock well enough to know I was not in immediate danger of dying. At least I hoped not. I was still somewhat shocky, I thought, and I was having trouble regulating my body temperature. But still, I bet it was fifty degrees in this little white on white room. There was no thermostat that I could discover.

      My head was beginning to clear and I was starting to get seriously annoyed. None of the other meat-lockers seemed occupied. Where were they all and when was someone older than twelve who could stand the sight of blood coming to see me? I gathered my tissue paper blanket around me and leaned out the door. The only person I could see was a woman in a flowered tunic, whom I took to be a nurse, sitting at a computer down the hall. She had a magazine open on her lap. I called out.

      “Nurse!”

      She turned her head toward me and amazingly enough her helmet of blond, teased hair did not seem to move with it. She looked darkly at me over pink plastic reading glasses while placing a finger in the magazine I’d so rudely interrupted her reading.

      “Yes?”

      This nurse could give Frost lessons in the art of freezing someone over with just a word or a glance.

      “When will the doctor be here? I’ve been waiting nearly an hour.”

      I tried to keep the annoyance out my voice, but I’m pretty sure I did not succeed. I wondered if nursey would turn down the temperature even more just to punish me for wanting medical services in a hospital.

      “I’ll check.”

      She turned toward the desk the computer was sitting on and picked up an in-house phone. She dialed a number and waited. And waited. And so I waited.

      Finally, without having spoken to anyone, she hung up.

      “I will let you know as soon as someone is available.”

      And astonishingly, she turned back to her magazine.

      I went back to the examining table and sat down. I thought about the assault. To be mugged for your purse or wallet is bad, but it’s reasonable. You have some money, some credit cards. Your car keys. Somebody else wants them. There was a certain kind of rotten logic to that.

      Sexual assault is brutal, but even sexual assault has a logic. Some guy who has trouble with women wants to control them, see their fear. That also makes terrible sense.

      But to have someone try to pierce you from stem to stern at random and with no warning is disconcerting in the extreme. What possible reason could he have had to lunge at me with clearly lethal intent? There seemed to be no motive. There are plenty of drive-by shootings in Chicago, but I’d never heard of a run-by knifing. Maybe there was such a thing, but I doubted it.

      I went over and over every detail of the struggle in my mind, racing through the images like running a video at triple speed. One frame racing by might contain a useable image. But nothing would stick. Possibly because I had lost blood, was exhausted, in pain and freezing to death.

      I’d had enough. Walking out was no good. I needed the arm sewed up.

      Just then I remembered I knew a surgeon. I served on a university committee with him, a committee that oversaw all human science research to make sure it was compliant with current ethical regulations.

      What was his name?

      Tom. Tom Grayson.

      I picked up the in-house phone on the wall of the cubicle and asked for paging. I asked to page Dr. Grayson and even though it was nearly midnight, he was listed as ‘in, on call.’ I gave the page operator the extension on the wall phone.

      I jumped when the phone rang almost immediately.

      “This is Dr. Grayson answering a page,” said the voice on the other end.

      I explained in rough outline the events of the evening, ending with my current frustration and location.

      “You’re in the ER? What number is the examining room?”

      I told Tom to hang on and I opened the door to look.

      “Four.”

      “You just caught me cutting through the ER on my way to the parking garage. I’m just about fifty feet away from you. I’ll be there in a couple of seconds.”

      I sat back down on the examining table and further shredded the crinkly paper I’d been sitting on for the last hour.

      The door opened and Grayson came in. Followed closely

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