The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 (37 page)

“Not for a while anyhow,” answered the second helicopter’s pilot.

“I don’t think we have a while,” said a female voice. It was the flight nurse, strapped into the rear-facing jump seat on the opposite side of the gurney from me. “His pulse is getting real thready. He’s barely hanging on.”

“Do we need to get him back to the ER?” It was the second pilot—Wimberly was his name, but his colleagues called him Wimby.

“I give this guy a couple hours, tops,” the nurse said. “If we take him back inside, he’ll be in the morgue by suppertime, and his hands will go to waste.”

“I’ve got faith in you, Nancy,” said Wimberly. “I’ve flown…what, fifty, sixty missions with you, and you’ve never lost a patient.”

“I’m telling you, Wimby, this guy’s close to coding.”

“If he codes,” asked Hawkins, “how much time do we have to get him to Emory?”

“None,” she answered. “Their protocol requires a beating-heart donor. They won’t take the hands if his heart’s stopped.”

From the helicopter base, the flight controller radioed with an update. “Radar’s showing a solid line of storm cells to the west, Hawk, stretching all the way to Nashville. Won’t blow through till tonight.”

“Well, crap,” said Hawkins. “This isn’t looking like our day. Or Dr. Garcia’s.”

For what seemed a long time, there was no sound but the steady whine of the turbine and the fluctuating lash of the weather. Then, over the radio, came a soft voice. “Please,” said Carmen Garcia, who was in the other helicopter alongside Eddie. “Please.” There was no hysteria or panic in her voice, only sorrow.

“If we go now, my husband still has a chance to use these hands. If we don’t go, he loses them—he loses these hands.”

Neither pilot answered, and the silence was excruciating. The flight nurse gave me an agonized look.

“Please,” repeated Carmen. “I beseech you.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” said Hawkins finally, “we can’t take off in this. We’d be breaking federal regulations. And we’d be putting people at risk. You and your husband. Dr. Brockton. The flight crews. People on the ground, if we crashed. We can’t take off in these conditions.”

Through the background hiss on the radio came the sound of ragged breaths. “Of course. I understand. Forgive me. Forgive me for being selfish.”

Across the gurney from me, the nurse removed her helmet and mask. Bending forward, she buried her face in her hands and wept.

I heard a long, shuddering breath, then Carmen’s voice, practically a whisper, hypnotic and incantatory in its cadence. At first I couldn’t make it out, but soon I realized she was speaking in Spanish.“Ave María, llena eres de gracia…” She was praying, I realized, and I recognized the prayer: “Hail Mary, full of grace…”

Suddenly the helicopter was buffeted by a ferocious gust of wind. The aircraft shuddered and rocked, and then I felt one skid lift off the pad as the wind swirled beneath the rotor from one side and flipped upward. “JesusChrist, ” said the pilot, “hold on,” and with that we were in the air. It wasn’t that the helicopter had lifted off; it was more that it had been ripped from the pad. The aircraft lurched and bucked, and the flight nurse and I grabbed for the handrails of the gurney and the vertical bars attached to the sides of the cabin. The outside world had vanished, as thoroughly as if the windows had been draped with white blankets. The helicopter slammed and lurched and whipped like a rat being shaken by a terrier. Finally the turbulence eased and the aircraft seemed to level off, or at least to find a reasonably stable zone of cloud. I heard a loud exhalation through the headset, and the pilot’s voice—shaken but relieved—said, “Y’all okay back there?”

The nurse was tugging her helmet back onto her head. I was about to say that we were fine when an agitated voice cut in. “LifeStar One, LifeStar One, this is Flight Control, do you read?”

“Control, LifeStar One reading you loud and clear.”

“What the hell, Hawk?” The agitation in the controller’s voice had been replaced by a mixture of relief and anger—the mixture a parent’s voice tended to have when a small son or daughter narrowly but successfully dodged danger. “Damn it, Hawk, what the bloody hell are you doing taking off in these conditions? This might cost you your job. Maybe your license, too.”

“Look, here’s what happened,” began Hawkins.

“What happened,” broke in Wimberly, “was the strangest damn thing. All of a sudden this hole opened up in the ceiling.”

“Oh, bullshit,” spat the controller. “You stay out of this, Wimby.”

“No kidding, a hole,” insisted Wimberly. “Four hundred, maybe five hundred feet high. Three, four miles visibility. I can’t believe you didn’t see it.” The flight nurse and I looked at each other. She rolled her eyes and shook her head dramatically:No way. I began to catch on to what the second pilot was doing. “It was amazing,” he said. “Hawk, how’s the ride up there?”

“The ride’s good,” Hawkins said. “We’re just coming out on top at seven thousand feet. Beautiful up here.” He paused. “I don’t suppose that hole’s still open down there, is it, Wimby?”

“Say again?”

“Any chance that hole’s still open?”

I held my breath.

“I’ll be damned,” said Wimberly slowly. “Sure enough, still is. LifeStar Two’s departing.” His voice ratcheted up half an octave and a dozen decibels as he said it.“Whoa,” he added after a moment, “that was interesting.”

The flight controller radioed again, and I pictured him scanning the rulebook to see how many regulations the pilots had violated. This time, though, his voice seemed to contain concern and a touch of admiration.

“Wimby, did you make it up through that…uh, hole in the sky okay?” The nurse grinned at me.

“Sure did,” he said. “Piece of cake. LifeStar Two’s climbing to seven thousand.” His voice had switched back to the polished smoothness of the professional pilot, though I thought I detected a big dose of relief and a slight hint of swagger underneath.

“Have a safe flight,” said the controller. “You guys must have friends up there.”

Let’s hope,I thought, as the second helicopter emerged from the clouds below us and both aircraft banked toward Atlanta.

I glanced at the heart monitor above Faust’s gurney. He was still with us. It was amazing he’d made it even this far. As an experimental procedure, hand transplantation wasn’t covered by the standard organ-donor consent Faust had on file. Mercifully, the rules for organ donation allowed for verbal consent. I’d recounted Faust’s last wish—“Give my hands to Garcia”—and Rankin had corroborated my story. I wasn’t sure how Rankin had managed to hear the words, since Faust couldn’t speak above a whisper, but he swore he had, and I chose to believe him. Within minutes after Faust’s brain ceased to function, UT’s organ-donation coordinator called Tennessee Donor Services, and a few hours after that, Dr. Alvarez had accepted the donation. Her original plan had been to bring Faust down by conventional ambulance, but when UT notified her that his condition was rapidly deteriorating, she’d arranged for the airlift—the airlift into the teeth of a gale.

We caught up with the storm front swiftly, just as the helicopter reached the crest of the Smoky Mountains. Pressing my head to the helicopter’s window and looking down, I glimpsed the grass-lined bowl of Cades Cove and, looming above it, Thunderhead Mountain, where I’d been caught in the cold and the darkness.

I was still weary from the ordeal in the mountains and the maelstrom of events since, and I closed my eyes and let the aircraft’s drone and vibration lull me to sleep. I was just drifting off when an urgent voice snapped me awake. “We’re losing him.” It was the flight nurse. “Guys, we’re losing him.” Her eyes were darting between the gurney and the monitor. “Pulse is irregular, blood pressure’s dropping.” The pulse line on the screen grew ragged, the peaks fluctuating in height, like a stock-market graph charting a volatile month. The heart-rate readout skittered rapidly: 88, 72, 79, 67, 59. The blood-pressure readout on the monitor edged downward: 140/80, 117/72, 88/60. Suddenly the blood-pressure numbers were replaced by dashes. The heart line went flat, and the pulse readout went blank. Even through the thick cushions of the headset, I could hear the monitor’s shrill alarm. “He’s coded; he’s coded. I’m going to defib.” She snatched a pair of defibrillator paddles from the rear wall of the compartment and pressed them to Faust’s chest. She glanced to make sure I wasn’t touching Faust or the gurney—“Clear”—and squeezed a switch in the handle of one of the paddles; as the electricity coursed through Faust’s body, it jerked against the nylon straps. She glanced at the monitor, still flashing its dashes and shrieking its alarm.

“Clear.” The body jumped again, but that was the only response to the jolt of current.

“Damn it,” said the nurse, “don’t do this to me.”

Flipping back the lid of a medical case, she removed a syringe and tore open a sterile wrapper, then depressed the plunger just far enough to spray a droplet out the end of the needle. “I’m giving him epinephrine,” she said. Sliding the needle into Faust’s arm, she slammed the plunger home and then yanked the empty syringe into a waste slot. She applied the defibrillator paddles again. “Clear.” The body twitched, and the blinking dashes on the monitor were replaced by numbers. Fluctuating, frightening, beautiful numbers.

I took a deep breath and looked up. Out the front windshield, the approaching skyline of Atlanta glittered like the Emerald City of Oz. Minutes later we settled onto a small rooftop helipad. A metal door at one side opened, and a pair of nurses jogged a gurney toward the helicopter, ducking beneath the spinning rotor. I checked the monitor: Faust’s heart was beating weakly and irregularly, but it was still beating, by damn. Within seconds the nurses had shifted him onto the gurney and hurried into the hospital with him. I unbuckled my harness, removed my headset, and followed.

Ten minutes later I found Carmen in an alcove outside a third-floor operating room. She hugged me and then wiped her eyes. I held my breath, bracing for disappointment again. “It looks good,” she said. “The transplant surgeon says they’re starting the procedure.”

Over the next twelve hours, updates trickled from the operating room: The bones of Faust’s left forearm had been grafted onto Garcia’s radius and ulna by the left-hand team. The bones of the right forearm had been joined by the other team. Left-hand nerves. Right-hand nerves. Right-hand tendons. Left-hand tendons. Left-hand blood vessels. Right-hand blood vessels. By the thirteen-hour mark, I was exhausted, but Carmen seemed as focused and quietly intent as she had at the beginning. When the head of the transplant team, Dr. Alvarez, appeared, Carmen and I stood to receive the news, our eyes boring into the doctor’s in an effort to see if she was bringing good news or bad. “We’ve had a setback,” she said quietly, and for the first time I sensed fear in Carmen. “A damaged blood vessel on the left side.”

Carmen’s voice was quiet but hard as granite. “Does that mean the left hand will fail?”

Dr. Alvarez shook her head. “I hope not. We’re taking a short section of vein from your husband’s leg and splicing it in to repair the damaged section. It’s not difficult to do, but we need to get the blood flowing to that hand as soon as possible. I’m going back to the OR, but I wanted to let you know.”

Carmen nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you for everything you’re doing for him.”

The surgeon smiled through her mask of fatigue as she turned to go.

An hour later she returned. “We’re finished. We got the bleeding stopped. Everything looks very good. There are no guarantees, of course. His body might reject the hands, the nerves might fail to regenerate, the immunosuppressants might cause complications. But if we’re lucky, none of those things will happen. And if we’re very lucky, within six months he’ll be able to hold a scalpel again, and be able to hold hands with you and your son again.”

Carmen’s face quivered, and then she began to tremble from head to toe, and she allowed herself to cry.

“I am…so very grateful. To you. To everyone here at Emory. To that man who gave his hands for my husband. To…” She raised her arms wide, then let them fall with a teary smile. “So grateful.”

“So am I,” said the doctor with a tired but warm smile.

I excused myself to make a phone call. Sixteen hours earlier, just after they’d begun the transplant procedure, I’d phoned Miranda. She hadn’t answered, and the call had rolled to voice mail. “I’m at Emory,” I’d said. “They’ve just taken Eddie into surgery. They’re going for the bilateral transplant. I know you don’t want to talk to me or see me, but I’m sure Carmen and Eddie would appreciate it if you could come.” Then I’d turned off the phone.

Now, when I switched it back on, it chirped at me. The display told me I had new voice-mail messages—twenty-three, in fact, a number that astonished me. Before I got a chance to listen to even one of the twenty-three, though, the phone buzzed in my hand. It was Miranda calling, and she sounded breathless. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“It’s done,” I said. “Both hands. The doctor sounds very hopeful.”

The whoop of delight from my cell phone nearly split my ear. Then I heard a second whoop, this time in stereo: Miranda came sprinting around the corner, nearly careening into Carmen, the surgeon, and me.

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!” Miranda cried. “Oh, how wonderful. Oh, hallelujah!” She threw her arms around Carmen. “I was in Texas, in the middle of a job interview, when the FBI called me.” The words tumbled out of her. “I ran out and jumped on a plane as soon as I heard the message. Oh, happy, happy day!”

Then she turned to me, her face wet with tears. “Damnyou,” she said, and I felt my heart begin to crack, but suddenly she hugged me, as unreservedly and joyously as she’d hugged Carmen. “Damn you,” she repeated, this time through a mixture of tears and laughter. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” She pulled back and wiped her eyes. “I just saw your picture half a dozen times on the CNN monitors in the Atlanta airport. Black-market kidneys from Pakistan, butchered and stolen bodies, a murderous bone thief, and a daring professor who risked his life in an undercover sting. Hell of a story. If I weren’t so mad at you for keeping me in the dark, I’d be really, really proud.” She shook her head. “Damn you for playing your sleazy part so well”—she laughed—“and damn the FBI for being so secretive.” She smiled and planted a big kiss on my cheek.