Chương 5 - Whispers in the Marrow
The ultrasound monitor was nine inches wide, black and white, the cathode ray tube flickering with horizontal lines from the house’s old electrical wiring.
Sarah Ramos moved the plastic transducer across the cold, blue-tinted gel on Jolene’s abdomen. The sound filled the kitchen—a wet, rhythmic, horse-gallop beat: *thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump*.
One hundred and forty beats a minute.
Grant stood at the head of the table. Jolene’s right hand was clamped around his three fingers, her nails digging into the meat of his knuckles so hard the skin had turned white, then purple. She had her head thrown back against the folded wool blanket Mrs. Gable had placed under her neck, her teeth gritted against the chill of the gel.
"Thirty-one weeks," Ramos said, her eyes tracking the gray shadows on the screen. She pressed a key on the small plastic keyboard; a yellow line measured the femur length. "He’s small. Maybe three pounds, four ounces. But the lungs are moving. See that?"
She pointed with a blunt, latex-covered finger to a tiny, dark shadow that expanded and contracted within the rib cage.
"He's swallowing fluid," Ramos said. "That’s good. The heart has four clear chambers. But look here."
She moved the wand an inch lower, toward the pelvic bone.
A dark, crescent-shaped band sat directly across the internal os of the cervix.
"Complete placenta previa," Ramos said, her voice dropping into the flat, unhurried cadence of a surgeon delivering bad news to people who had guns on the table. "The placenta is sitting right on top of the exit. It’s vascular. If she goes into labor naturally, the placenta tears before the head crowns. She’ll bleed out in eight minutes. So will he."
Grant’s fingers didn't move in Jolene’s grip. "Can you move it?"
"You don't move a placenta, Holloway," Ramos said, looking up at him with cold, clinical eyes. "It’s grown into the uterine wall. It stays where it is until the child comes out. And the only way that child comes out without killing both of them is a scalpel, six units of blood, and a sterile field."
"How long?" Grant asked.
"Two weeks. Three if she stays in bed and doesn't sneeze. But she has a bronchial infection that’s turning into right-lower-lobe pneumonia. Every time she coughs, she puts thirty pounds of pressure on that lower segment. If that seal breaks..."
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
The kitchen went very quiet, save for the wet, frantic gallop on the monitor: *thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump*.
Jolene’s eyes opened. They were glassy, wet with the heat of the fever, but they were fixed on Grant’s face.
"Grant," she whispered.
"Hush," he said.
"Grant, listen to me." Her fingers pulled at his knuckles with surprising strength. "If it starts... if it happens before you finish this... you tell her to take the baby. You hear me? You don't look at me. You tell her to take him."
Grant leaned down until his mouth was against her ear.
"Nobody is taking anyone," he said, his voice a harsh, serrated rasp. "You didn't crawl through three miles of salt mud in January to die on my kitchen table in June. You’re going to sit in this chair, and you’re going to drink the ginger, and you’re going to let Ramos put the penicillin into your arm. And then you’re going to watch me take Desmond’s skin off."
He looked at Ramos.
"Can you do it here?"
"In a kitchen?" Ramos looked around the room—at the cast-iron pots, the grease on the range hood, the salt air coming through the screen door. "Are you out of your mind? If I open her up here, sepsis will kill her in forty-eight hours even if she doesn't bleed out."
"Then where?"
"Memorial has the surgical suites," Ramos said. "The fifth floor. It’s private. Julian Langford doesn't control the surgical rotation; that’s Dr. Chen’s department. Chen doesn't take Langford money."
"Chen takes my money," Grant said.
"Then you get her into Memorial," Ramos said, pulling the transducer away and wiping the blue gel from Jolene’s belly with a paper towel. "Not next week. Not Saturday. You get her in there before this lung fills up with fluid. By tomorrow night, Holloway. Or you’re going to be buying two coffins instead of one."
A heavy thump echoed from the front of the house.
It was not a knock. It was the dull, reverberating shock of a heavy automobile door slamming shut on the gravel drive.
Then another. And a third.
Trent appeared in the kitchen doorway. He didn't have his spectacles on; he had an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun held low along his thigh, the safety off, his finger straight along the guard.
"Company," Trent said.
"How many?" Grant asked, not letting go of Jolene’s hand.
"Three cars," Trent said. "The black town car from the Yacht Club, and two Suburbans with Glynn County plates. Desmond is in the town car. Monica is with him."
Jolene’s breath caught in her throat with a wet, bubbling rattle. Her hand jerked in Grant’s grip.
Grant slowly extracted his fingers from hers. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the plain silver band he had worn for five months, and laid it on the palm of her hand.
"Close your fingers," he said.
She looked down at the silver ring, then up at him, her lips trembling.
"Close them," he repeated.
She curled her fingers into a ball around the silver.
Grant turned to Mrs. Gable. "Take Ramos and Jolene into the wine cellar. Pull the iron bolts behind you. If anyone who isn't me or Trent touches that brass handle, you dump the ten-gallon kerosene drum under the door and light it. Understood?"
Mrs. Gable didn't nod. She simply reached behind the pantry door, pulled out an old nickel-plated .38 revolver, and cocked the hammer with her thumb.
"Get," the old woman said to Ramos.
May you like
Grant picked up the blued Colt from the table. He racked the slide once to ensure a round was seated, then walked out of the kitchen, down the long, heart-pine hallway toward the front door.
***
