DUBY'S DOCTOR
An Unlikely Bodyguard for a Killer-Turned-Child
by
Iris Chacon
CHAPTER 1
As he fell, he wondered why he had jumped from a perfectly good aircraft. He assumed it was perfectly good because he heard the helicopter’s rotor blades beating the air as its engine noise moved off into the distance somewhere above him.
Half-formed thoughts lumbered through his muggy brain.
Pain.
Pain screamed through every nerve ending of his body. So much of it, he couldn’t even pinpoint its source.
Cold.
Wind whipped at bare skin as he fell.
Where are my clothes?
Self-preservation bellowed at him from deep within a mind-shrouding fog, “Look down, Dilbert!”
He seemed to be stretched out on his back in the air; he fought the up-rushing wind stream to turn his head slightly. In his peripheral vision, Caribbean-blue ocean stretched in all directions.
“Prepare to hit the water!” Self-preservation yelled.
He tried to pull himself into a tight ball, rather than smack the surface like a pancake, possibly breaking every bone in his body. If he could become a hydrodynamic object, and if he hit the water at a good angle, and if he could manage to swim, or at least float, an undetermined number of miles, he just might survive this. Whatever this was.
He tried to wrap his arms around his knees and pull them into his chest, but one knee wasn’t following instructions. One leg bent toward his torso as he ordered, but the other leg was AWOL for all intents and purposes, being dragged along for the ride. Oh, well, he would just do the best he could.
Impact was sudden, loud, and painful at a level he had never dreamed possible. He was mildly aware of being warmer now that he was underwater instead of plummeting through air. But, the altitude from which he had fallen, combined with his weight concentrated into a small irregular ball, sent him many meters beneath the surface.
Briefly he hung suspended, virtually weightless, in a womb of warm, salty water. He sensed, close at hand, a great darkness that promised relief from the horrible pain if he would only relax and let endless blackness swallow him.
“Up! Up! Air! Air!” shouted Self-preservation.
Leave me alone. I just want to sleep.
“Kick!” Self-preservation insisted. “Kick your feet! Move your arms! Go up! Up!”
Reluctantly, he forced his limbs to move, though it seemed not all of them obeyed. Still, he followed the bubbles rising from his mouth and nose, and he defied the pain and blackness, until his head broke the water’s surface. Involuntary gasps siphoned air into his aching lungs again and again until he was breathing almost normally.
“Float,” was the last word Self-preservation uttered.
Lying on his back, the man floated upon the gently rolling sea and let his mind fade into the welcoming darkness.
He neither knew nor cared whether he would somehow survive the hours and miles of sea that lay between him and the nearest land.
At dawn over Elliot Key, seagulls glided across the pink-orange-blue pastel streaks of sunrise mirrored in the glassy blue-silver ocean. Waves swished against the soft sand that fringed the island, and a sailboat sloughed at its anchor cable. Against the eastern sky, the boat’s tri-corn sails formed a romantic silhouette against the sky, while its three-sided shadow doppelganger rippled on the surface of the water.
Halfway between the sailboat and the shore, a honeymooning couple rowed their dinghy toward the beach. She giggled at something he said. He crooned something seductive. She laughed and swatted him playfully.
Miami city lights adorned the northwestern horizon like a diamond choker, two dozen miles away as the osprey flew.
Gulls cawed to one another, the sea gurgled against the shore, and the honeymooners’ oars softly slapped the water. A breeze off the ocean rustled dry palm fronds. A four-foot-tall blue heron stood sentinel among flying buttresses of mangrove roots.
When they reached the shore, the couple dragged their little boat shushing across the sand onto the beach, beyond the water’s grasp. They kissed beneath the rustling palms, and when they stepped apart, the man tickled the woman.
She twisted away, laughing and scolding, and ran from him, come-hither fashion. He pursued. They left two sets of footprints in the dimpled sand as they trotted like children along the beach in the pale dawn.
From time to time the mangrove trees’ arching roots crept all the way to the water line, forcing the couple to detour into ankle-deep surf and come back to the sand. At one such spot, the woman was several yards ahead of the man because he had stopped to examine a nearly intact conch shell. She worked her way from sand to water, wading around a mangrove root, and glanced back at her pursuer.
He straightened from his shell collecting and winked at her.
She giggled and turned to look ahead of her again. As she rounded the mangrove, she screamed.
The man reacted to her scream and doubled his pace. He found her standing rigidly beside the mangrove, screaming again and again. He took in the situation and, with protective arms around her, he turned, putting himself between her and the source of her horror: a man’s naked body sprawled face down, tangled in the arching tree roots.
A bedside telephone rang at the home of Frank and Mandy Stone. Frank reached across Mandy’s impersonation of Moby Dick in curlers. He lifted the receiver and answered with a sleepy grunt.
“Monitoring per your orders, sir,” said a young man. “I think the Coast Guard has your boy out on Elliot Key.”
“Alive?”
“Uncertain, sir. They’re airlifting to Ryder Trauma Center.”
“Well done. Thanks for the call.” Frank replaced the receiver and sank back onto his pillow. He said a short, silent prayer for a miracle then he rose and began to dress.
Inside a Coast Guard helicopter, two medics worked efficiently over an unconscious man. One medic bandaged a head wound while the other splinted and wrapped the man’s left leg.
“Femoral artery remained intact. That’s the only reason he didn’t bleed out. But somebody’s got their work cut out rebuilding this leg.”
Suddenly, the first medic stopped bandaging, felt for a pulse, and swiftly began chest compressions. “May not have to rebuild anything,” the medic said. “I’ve lost him again.”
While one rescuer performed cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, the other administered oxygen and verified the intravenous feed was working.
The first medic chanted in time with his rib-crunching thrusts, “Come on, man; work with me; pump for me; stay with me.”
Minutes later the Coast Guard helicopter landed on the roof of Ryder Trauma Center. White-coated hospital personnel rushed to the aircraft with a gurney, everyone ducking the still-spinning rotors and resultant dust storm. The two Coast Guard medics helped transfer their patient to the gurney, and one of them followed the team into the building to provide a detailed briefing if necessary.
Such briefings were not often needed now that vital signs and treatment information could be transmitted to the hospital directly from the helicopter, but the personal touch was still appreciated. And occasionally there were questions. Given the circumstances, there were bound to be questions about this unidentified patient, but there would be few, if any, answers.
Frank Stone was not a handsome man on a good day, and this was not a good day. He strode into the trauma center emergency room looking rumpled and sleepy, in a gray polyester suit from Sears. The suit needed cleaning.
He took off his sweaty jacket and revealed his short-sleeved, white dress shirt, which he wore with a clip-on bow tie. Shirt buttons strained to cover a beer belly. Frank wore white socks with brown loafers, both nearly covered by the droopy cuffs of slacks that rode beneath his belly, several inches lower than his natural waistline.
No one had ever guessed his age within five years, but people always thought him old enough to know what he was doing.
While not handsome, Frank was winsome in his way. He gave the appearance of a well-used, long-loved teddy bear whose stuffing was lumpy from years of hugging. Nothing about Frank Stone’s appearance seemed threatening. When people met him for the first time, his looks were his initial lie, to be followed inevitably by many more.
Stone wove a path through the emergency room’s rushing interns, nurses, orderlies, and aides, past a waiting room filled with patients and their families, to the registration desk. There, upon his inquiry, a nurse pointed him toward treatment rooms at the rear, where curtains were drawn around a crowded, noisy cubicle.
A female in surgical scrubs emerged from the curtained cubicle, carrying a chart. Stone nabbed her with a big paw on her elbow.
“Is he talking?” Stone asked.
“Are you family?”
Stone fished a wallet from the pocket of his slouchy pants and showed the woman his federal identification. “Uncle,” he said. “Has he said anything? A name? Anything?”
She shook her head. “He’s way under.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Stone, pocketing his wallet. “How long before I can talk to him?”
She sighed with exhaustion. She had been on duty all night, and this new patient would keep her in the operating room most of the day.
“You’ll have to ask the neurology boys that one,” she said. “I’m just here to rebuild the leg – mostly the knee – if he makes it. What’s his name, ‘Uncle’?”
“I can’t say.”
She sighed again. “Second John Doe we’ve had since midnight.” She nodded to the adjacent cubicle, where no one was working on the patient. “And our average isn’t good, so far.”
Stone perked up with new interest. “You had another John Doe last night?”
She nodded. Then, in response to a gesture from Stone, the doctor showed him into the dead John Doe’s cubicle. A body on a gurney was draped completely. Stone walked to the head of the gurney, lifted the sheet, and looked at the man’s ashen, lifeless face.
Then he dropped the sheet, moved to the foot of the gurney, and lifted the covering over the corpse’s feet. A bar-coded toe tag identified the man as “John Doe.”
“Whattaya know about this guy?” asked Stone.
“Homeless. Hit and run on I-95 near Biscayne. Looks like he’d been living under the overpass.”
Stone snatched the toe tag off the body and shoved it into the doctor’s hands.
“For the record, and for the press, I hereby officially identify this dead man as Special Agent Yves Dubreau of the Federal Department of Homeland Security. He has obviously been the victim of a freak fishing accident while on annual leave.” Stone pointed to the cubicle where multiple professionals were attempting to stabilize the man brought in by Coast Guard helicopter. “That one is John Doe. Comprende?”
Dr. Mitchell Oberon stared in horror at this scruffy man, whom she liked less with every passing second. Mitchell led the life of a prudish spinster with time for little outside her work; she kept her person and her surroundings clean and tidy. She drove the speed limit exactly, stopped for yellow lights, followed rules to the letter. This sloppy, round, absurdly demanding person wanted her to flout the law. It was almost incomprehensible to her. Speechless, she turned and led Stone out of the dead man’s cubicle.
Mitchell took Stone to the admitting desk, where she retrieved the electronic tablet containing the medical chart for the corpse. She shook the chart in Stone’s face.
“The answer is no. First of all, that would be lying, and I don’t lie. Second, if I did what you’re asking me to do, I could be in serious trouble for falsifying medical records,” she said.
“Not. Asking.” Stone spoke barely above a whisper. “Listen very carefully, Doctor: Some very bad people want this guy dead.”
He pointed to the cubicle of the injured man. “So, he better be well and truly dead. ‘Cause you ain’t seen trouble until the bad guys learn he ain’t dead, and they come in here looking to correct their little oversight.”
He picked up the stylus from the admitting desk and tapped the electronic chart belonging to the dead man. “Besides, you won’t get in trouble for doing what the law requires you to do. And today I am The Law. Now, mark the chart.”
Mitchell glared at the determined man. “Even if the law is willing to overlook it, my conscience will know what I’ve done is wrong.”
He stared at her.
“Let me see that badge again,” she said.
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