There Will Be Killing (8 page)

Izzy could not believe he had made it to “three fifty-seven and a wake up” in one piece and was sitting through yet another of Colonel Kohn's morning reports. Margie hit him with a knock-out smile that should be illegal for making him want something he could but absolutely could not have. He had already lost too much to sacrifice the better part of his character, the best part of his life.

Two letters from Rachel, his first in Vietnam, had arrived yesterday. Just touching them had been like fingering precious jewels. He was beyond excited but had made himself wait to open them, savoring the anticipation. Then he decided to forego dinner at the officer's mess, make a date out of it. He showered, shaved, put on some Coppertone Suntan Lotion because it smelled of Coney Island. Then all he had to do was go to the beach and the picnic came to him. A succession of vendors were always plying the area, so he brought a couple of icy cold Cokes, fresh pineapple from the mama-san selling fruit, a beautiful baguette sandwich. He settled in for his little beach picnic in a special spot he found under some ironwood pines. The setting was so perfect—except for Rachel not actually being there—that he decided this would become his ritual whenever a new letter arrived.

The two from yesterday were folded up now, stashed inside the pocket of his jungle fatigues, along with the new picture Rachel had sent. With her dark curly hair straightened and a kind of leather Indian headband across her forehead, he wasn't wild about the new look. Probably because he wasn't there to see how her new straight hair felt between his fingers. That and her mention of “hanging out with some new friends in the Village.”

New. The reference had never bothered him before. And, he certainly liked new letters, so he told himself again to let it go and discreetly touched them, parked safely in his back pants pocket—yet another reminder of where his true affections belonged despite the residual effects of Margie's smile, her proximity.

How much was owed to Rachel's reassurances, how much to Margie's attention, and how much to just getting his bearings after a really rough start with a lot of help from his own new friends, Izzy wasn't sure. But amazingly, he had begun to feel like he actually knew what he was doing. Maybe the military brass knew what they were doing, too, because most of his patients were all young, and in their anguish and trauma, like big kids anyway. He loathed admitting it, but drafting a child psychiatrist had perhaps not been a bad call on the US Draft Board's end. They were bastards anyway, the whole filthy lot of them.

Not the patients though. They were as innocent in all this as him, Gregg, the psych techs, just about everyone at the table except J.D. and career officers like Peck who seemed to have some kind of control over Nikki, and wouldn't understand the concept of nobility if it bit him in his ass.

Nobility aside, in the past week it had dawned on Izzy that not only could he help these mentally messed up soldiers, he
wanted
to help them. He just had to get his own stuff together to do it.

Izzy felt the unit's mascot K.O. push her snout against his hip and gave her an appreciative scratch behind the ears before picking up his coffee—then almost immediately put the cup down before he spilled it into his lap. Quickly clasping his hands under the table, he frantically held onto his mantra:
Wake the fuck up.

“Dr. Moskowitz?”

“Yes sir, Colonel Kohn.”

“Well good, thank you, I was just saying that if you didn't want to lead on the sodium pentothal procedure with our catatonic Lieutenant Wilson, you can assist Dr. Peck. I leave the choice to you. Sergeant Washington, will you stand in for the procedure with us? I don't expect Wilson to get agitated but good to have you there, just in case.”

“No problem, sir,” said the hugely muscled specialist Sgt. Washington.

Oh shit, what had he missed?
Izzy darted a glance at his hands. Steady now, maybe they hadn't been shaking as bad as he thought; maybe he had them under control.
Sodium pentothal procedure.
Top of his residency on those kinds of procedures, if he could do it back home in the hospital, surely he could do it here, spare the already damaged soldier from whatever Peck might dole out. Izzy subscribed to the basic goodness in man, but Peck seemed to have been shortchanged when those particular goods were being distributed. At last week's crazy dinner party, Margie had confirmed as much with the whisper
I'd better drive along with Nikki to make sure he doesn't mess with her.

“Absolutely, Colonel. I can lead.” The words were out before Izzy could stop them.

Kohn looked pleased. Peck, not at all.

“Margie, could you prep the examining room for us?” requested Colonel Kohn.

Izzy glanced at Gregg for support. He was too busy machine-gunning eye darts into J.D. to notice. J.D., having just resurfaced after several days' absence, could have patented Teflon. He gave Izzy an encouraging nod.

K.O. wagged her tail and Izzy took further comfort in patting her head—until the growing sound of converging helicopters coincided with the shrill ring of the unit's phone.

Margie grabbed the receiver en route to the examining room. For several moments her anxious expression did all the talking until she announced, “Big casualties coming in, you can hear them already, and they need extra help on the pads and extra docs for triage.”

Kohn sprang into immediate action: “Doctors Kelly and Mikel you two stay with me. Dr. Moskowitz, you go with Sergeant Washington and Specialist Bayer out to the pads—”

Izzy didn't wait to hear more. It was blindingly bright and ungodly hot as their team raced toward the huge sound of choppers coming down, their exhaust mixed with shouting and screaming and crying of wounded men coming in directly from a battle. Medics hurried from all directions to the stretchers to get the bloody, wounded, and burned off the helicopters so the next aircraft already hovering overhead could descend and unload more.

Gregg and J.D. grabbed a stretcher, headed toward surgery with Kohn. Robert David joined a triage team while Sergeant Washington, built like an NFL linebacker, grabbed the end of yet another stretcher with a soldier close to his own size, and yelled for Bayer and Izzy to grab the other end together.

Izzy did as instructed, grateful to have someone tell him what to do in this frenzy that had them rushing to the ER with a kid who couldn't be more than twenty, and so horribly burnt his lips looked like melted puddles of wax that semi-intelligibly moaned, “Please, man, help me, please I can't see, do I still have my eyes?”

“Talk to him, Doc, talk to him,” urged Washington.

Izzy made himself look down at the oozing place where eyes were meant to be and choked back breakfast as he told the young soldier, “I'm here, right here with you, and I'm a doctor so you can trust me. You made it, you are at the hospital, and you are going to be okay.”

Izzy could only pray the kid believed the lie. If by some cursed miracle he lived, the only visible thing that wasn't burned or disfigured was the left hand he somehow found the fortitude to lift, begging, “Hold my hand, Doc? I'm so scared. I don't want to die, but I'm more afraid of the news killing my ma if I do.”

Izzy took his hand, held it, and the moment slowed for Izzy as he realized they were joined in some sort of tenderness, the young man holding his hand as he'd once held his own father's as he crossed a street as a young child, full of belief and confidence that whatever was hurtling towards them or swirling around them was halted by the sanctuary of their joined grip.

“I got the stretcher, Doc.” Hertz suddenly showed up and grabbed the other handle Izzy was still holding onto, allowing him to free up both hands. “You bring him in, keep talking.”

Izzy moved to the side, never letting go of the hand he covered protectively now with both of his. “We've got you. I am right here with you. We are taking you right through this, son. You are going to make it. We have you.”

And then they were in the receiving area of the hospital. White light and a blast of cool air from real air conditioning, it felt almost like a real hospital, but then the reality of the scene hit Izzy. It was a painting of a white hell splashed with blood and green jungle fatigues being cut off the bodies of black and red burnt men who were screaming and sobbing and crying. The decibel level of suffering so stunned him that Izzy could feel himself splitting off to some safe place of numbness—but then he felt again the hand he was holding, gently squeezed back and leaned over the young soldier and promised:

“I am right here, right here with you, and you are going to make it.”

Almost exactly twenty-four hours later the catatonic patient lay on his side on the treatment table. He was naked to the waist and now his blue hospital pajamas were being pulled down to his knees to expose and prep his lower spine.

Izzy struggled to focus. He had to keep reminding himself they weren't in a bloodbath room; that at least he didn't have to break the news to a heartbroken mother who would never know her son had died holding the hand of a doctor who didn't even know his name. Or the name of the one after that or after that. . .

“Izzy?” It was Gregg, sitting between J.D. and Colonel Kohn in front of the patient, gently calling Izzy back to the present with that quiet, comforting voice he should be hoarse from using that endless day before.

Izzy nodded, letting Gregg know he was functional.

J.D. gave him a discreet thumb up sign of encouragement.

Although J.D. was about as much a real doctor as Betty Crocker was a cook, he had a way of imparting confidence. Izzy appreciated that as a particular kind of gift, even knowing J.D.'s presence was owed to hoping the catatonic Lt. Wilson might reveal something to assist in the case once the sodium pentothal procedure commenced. As for how things were commencing on J.D.'s end, who knew? Besides a fleeting mention of bringing them along to an area called the Highlands, thus far he had only asked his two recruits to generate some character sketches for prolific killers into mutilation and slipped Izzy a list of questions since the colonel had forbade J.D. from speaking during the procedure.

Izzy was about to look at his hands again from his position of privacy behind the examining table, when the exam room door opened. Robert David, Peck, Margie, and the techs lined up behind the front row to observe. Sergeant Washington came in last and Izzy welcomed the large man's presence beside him. They had worked side-by-side throughout yesterday's endless nightmare and Izzy couldn't imagine anyone he would rather have as a cellmate in hell. Even with the Sergeant holding steady by his side, the room felt crowded and hot and a lot like a make-it-or-break-it test of some kind that Izzy had a gut deep terror of failing.

He could feel the critical eyes of Peck looking at him. He remembered Margie telling him that Nikki had several bruises she tried to pass off as bumping into a filing cabinet at the Red Cross a few days before. Margie wasn't buying it. Neither was Izzy.

Yeah. He was glad Peck wasn't doing the procedure. He just wished he could get his nerves to settle down so he wasn't gripping the examination table like a man clinging to a ledge. Maybe he could get amply calm by narrating the steps, verbally remind himself he had the A-B-Cs of the procedure down as he went.

Sergeant Washington extended surgical gloves and Izzy put them on as best he could while he tried to stay focused on keeping his voice steady, not rushing his words as he typically did when he got nervous.

“Thank you, Sergeant Washington,” Izzy began, and immediately wondered what puppet master was controlling his vocal chords because he sounded perfectly normal, even pleasant. “And a big welcome to the gallery. Lieutenant Wilson is prepped and ready. Despite appearances to the contrary, we have cause to believe that patients afflicted with this rare condition can hear and understand everything around them, so the Lieutenant and I had a nice little chat about this procedure earlier. Didn't we, Lieutenant?” Silence. “Now, Lieutenant Wilson, as I said before, I'm Dr. Moskowitz and this morning we are going to try to retrieve some of your memory. What I will do first is inject the medicine. . .”

Izzy pointed the needle that seemed huge even to him into the air, careful to keep it out of Wilson's frozen peripheral vision. Margie nodded. Her silent support was almost enough to believe he truly was capable of hitting just between the vertebrae sited between his left thumb and forefinger. He even started to push the long spinal needle forward.

The needle slightly shook. Izzy froze, kept talking in his freakishly conversational voice.

“And so we want to very carefully site the needle at the exact point of entry so that the needle is entering the spinal column and. . .” And all he could imagine was that if he jabbed now he would be watching himself create a quadriplegic with his own hands.
Morrie.

“I can't. . . ”

Just as he was ready to quit and let Peck take over, Sergeant Washington leaned closer and in his deep voice said, “Let me see just how you do that, Doc.” And without the others able to observe, Washington closed his huge dark hand over Izzy's and held his hand steady as a rock and guided the needle right in. As the needle popped into the spinal column cord right on target, the Sergeant exclaimed, “Wow, perfect shot, Doc, and I actually heard that pop.”

Izzy glanced over to see the Sergeant smile at him. For the rest of his life Izzy knew he would remember that singular moment of grace and kindness.

“Yes, and. . . and thank you, Sarge. And now, Lieutenant, as we inject the medicine …” Izzy slowly pressed the plunger into the tube, dispensing the medication with exacting precision as he instructed, “Let's take just a couple of deep breaths now Lieutenant and. . .good, that's right. . . ”

Wilson's face changed as if he had come back to life inside his own body. One moment he was not there and the next he was back from the far place in his mind where he had been safely residing.