LITMIR.BIZ

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a woman. Does he swing the other way?”

      “He’s got a girlfriend,” Dennis said. “A real looker, way too hot for him.”

      “I guess you checked her out,” Guilliot said.

      “Me? Mess around with a friend’s woman? You know me better than that.”

      Easy chatter, the kind you didn’t get in a big city hospital. That was one of the reasons Dennis had jumped at the offer to work with Dr. Guilliot at his private clinic. Not only that, but he and the surgeon got along great. If Guilliot treated him any better, Dennis would expect to be in the will.

      But the deal clincher for accepting the position had been location. The restored plantation house was practically in his backyard, and good Cajun boys like himself didn’t like straying too far from home.

      Angela moved in beside the doctor as he started the procedure. She’d been his tech nurse for twenty years, had come with him sixteen years ago when Dr. Guilliot had left his position as chief of reconstructive surgery at a New Orleans hospital and established the Magnolia Plantation Restorative and Therapeutic Center.

      Like any good tech nurse, Angela worked like a seamless extension of the surgeon’s arm. He reached, she was ready with forceps, scalpel, surgery scissors, lighted retractor or lap sponge.

      “How are her vitals?” Dr. Guilliot asked.

      “Blood pressure’s down. Ninety systolic. I’ll drop off on the gasses.” Dennis turned the knobs, making small, precise adjustments. “How’s the new Porsche?” he asked. “Had it full throttle yet?”

      “Close. She’s one sweet piece of dynamics.”

      “How ’bout I take her for the weekend and break her in the rest of the way for you?”

      “Touch that car, and you lose an arm.”

      The chatter continued, from cars to fishing and back again. They were thirty minutes into the operation when Dennis felt the first pangs of apprehension. “Pulse rate is dropping,” he said. “I’m going to inject a vial of ephedrine.”

      “What’s the reading?”

      “Fifty-five.”

      Dennis opened the vial, injected it through the IV line and watched the monitor, confident the ephedrine would kick in and do its job. The seconds ticked away.

      “How we coming?” Guilliot asked without looking up from his work.

      “Pulse and pressure not responding.” Dennis opened another vial of ephedrine and injected it through the IV. “This should take care of it.”

      It didn’t. The numbers continued to slide. Dennis’s hands shook as he tore open the next vial and injected the drug. Still no change. Damn. There was no explanation for this. The woman was healthy. He’d read her chart.

      Susan rounded the operating table, took one look at the monitor and gasped.

      “What the devil’s going on?” Guilliot demanded.

      “Not looking good.”

      “Then do something, Dennis. I’ve got her wide open here, and I’m not losing a patient on the table.”

      Dennis hadn’t prayed in quite a while. It came naturally now, under his breath, interspersed with curses as sweat pooled under his armpits and dripped from his brow.

      Guilliot kept working. “Give me a reading.”

      “She’s full code.”

      “Sonofabitch!”

      Susan moved to Dennis’s elbow. “Stay calm. You can do it. What else do you have?”

      “Calcium gluconate.” He injected the drug. Fragments of his own life flashed in front of him as if he were the one slipping away. The sound of his Puh-paw’s voice singing along to his fiddle music on Saturday nights. The smell of venison frying in the big black skillet. The way Kippie Beaudreaux’s tongue had felt the first time he’d kissed her.

      The past collided with the present, all bucking around inside Dennis while the monitor continued to glare at him, daring him to defy it.

      No easy chatter now. No reassurance. Just deadly silence. He turned to Guilliot. The usually imperturbable surgeon had backed away from the table, jaw clenched, looking totally stunned.

      None of the glory. All of the blame. The role of the anesthetist. Dennis grabbed a vial of bretyllium.

      Too little, too late.

      “Oh, shit!” Angela shoved the instrument cart out of the way, jumped on the black footstool and started pumping on the patient’s chest, hand over hand.

      Finally Guilliot snapped out of his paralysis and took over for Angela, pressing the patient’s heart between the sternum and the spine with quick, steady motions.

      Dennis was so scared, it was all he could do to hold the long needle as he filled it with epinephrine.

      Susan grabbed his arm. “Not intracardiac, Dennis. Not yet.”

      “Get the hell out of the way.” Holding the needle in one hand, he grabbed the edge of the sterile drape with his other and ripped the fabric from the runners.

      Guilliot stopped pumping as Dennis slid the point of the needle under the breast bone. The room felt small. Icy cold. Quiet, as if they’d quit breathing so that the patient could have their breaths.

      They all watched the abnormal rhythm play across the face of the monitor, but Angela said the words out loud. “The tack.”

      Dennis snatched the paddles from the crash cart and stuck them to the patient’s chest. The shock lifted her off the table, but still the monitor screen went blank.

      Asystole.

      Dennis administered the shock again. And again.

      Finally Susan took his arm. “She’s gone, Dennis.”

      “No one loses a cosmetic surgery patient on the table.” Guilliot’s voice boomed across the operating room, as if he were God issuing an eleventh commandment.

      It changed nothing. Ginny Lynn Flanders was dead.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Six months later

      CASSIE HAVELIN PIERSON stared at the sheet of paper. The divorce decree. All that was left of her marriage to Attorney Drake Pierson. She’d have expected the finality of it to be more traumatic, had thought she’d feel anger or pain or maybe even a surge of relief. Instead she felt a kind of numbness, as if the constant onslaught of emotional upheavals over the past year had anesthetized her system to the point that it was unable to respond.

      She tossed the decree into a wire basket on the corner of her desk and went back to pounding keys on her computer. Almost ironic that the next word she typed was the name of her ex-husband, but he was all the news these days—him and his client’s suit against Dr. Norman Guilliot.

      Leave it to Drake to snare the hottest case of the year. Acclaimed plastic surgeon to the wealthy pitted against the best-known TV evangelist in the south. The locals fed on the details like starving piranhas on fresh flesh, but then New Orleanians always loved a good scandal. So did her boss. It sold magazines, and circulation numbers sold advertising.

      The Flanders case had been the hottest news item going for the past six months, even beating out the young woman who’d accused one of the city’s famous athletes of rape. The reverend was on TV every week, proclaiming the gospel according to Flanders and shedding tears over the wife he claimed had been lost to a case of malpractice by the famed Cajun surgeon. And somehow Drake had expedited the trial beyond belief to take advantage of the hype.

      Cassie finished the article, hit the print key and picked up the phone on the corner of her desk to make another stab at reaching her dad in Houston. The president of the United

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