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  Eric reached down and pushed the ignition button to start the car. As he began to move from his parking spot he saw Gale run from the shop waving a piece of paper. He lowered the window as she approached.

  “Hey Eric, I forgot to give you the coupon for the fifty-dollar rebate from Sig Sauer. It takes about six weeks for them to get the money to you, probably an Amazon gift card.”

  “Thanks. Fifty bucks is fifty bucks.”

  Gale stepped back and looked at his car. “Well, can’t say fifty bucks is all that important to you.”

  Eric smiled. “Hey, fifty bucks gets me a tank of gas.”

  “Right, mister. That’s why I drive a Subaru. You take care.”

  Chapter Two

  Lisa Hollgren worked her fingers into the latex gloves, pulled her face shield down, and scanned the barcode label on the front of the cabinet to unlock the tray carriers. She had to rise on her toes to ease the tray of thirty-six blood vials from the top shelf. She used care gained from years of experience working with blood as she placed the tray on her work bench. Her eyes locked on the vials in the back row. Something was wrong. All six were missing the required labels. Her heartbeat quickened and she felt a tightness in her chest. Labels on three vials in the second to last row hung loose. She slumped onto her stool and searched through the bottom of the carrier tray—nothing. After she checked for the missing labels beneath all the vials in the selected tray, she examined the next two trays in the cabinet. An unlabeled or mislabeled blood sample was the lab’s greatest fear. Her hands shook as she scanned the barcode on the front of the tray a second time and looked at her computer screen. All the blood samples belonged to Doctor Hechtua’s patients. She felt the hair on her arms lift. She scrolled through the document on the screen to find the name of the last technician to handle the tray—B.Myerson. Lisa studied the words on the screen. She did not know any ‘B.Myerson’. The clinic did employ two shifts of technicians making it impossible to know everyone.

  The row of blood vials without labels stared back at her like a multi-eyed creature from a 1960s horror movie. She flipped her face shield up and, careful not to drag a sleeve through the tray, reached over for the phone. She knew her supervisor’s number by heart. “Randy? Lisa, downstairs. I think you should come down here. We have a situation.”

  As Randy Immersen approached the row of doctors’ offices he slowed his pace hoping to relieve the knot-like feeling in his stomach. For the past hour he’d practiced what he would say and how he would say it when he confronted Doctor Hechtua. He disliked his job and disliked the pompous Doctor H even more. He thought Pat Travino, the clinic manager, was at least tolerable. He saw the lights were off in Hechtua’s office and released a deep breath.

  “Hi Randy,” Mellisa, the office assistant, said. “The man left for the day. Family emergency, he claimed. Should be back in by noon, Wednesday.”

  “Family emergency early on a Friday? Thanks. Say, is Pat in?”

  “Sure. She’s always here. Sleeps in her office, I think. At least I often see her wearing the same clothes two days in a row, if you know what I mean,” she said and winked.

  “Always on top of things, aren’t you, Mellisa?”

  “Oh Randy, you sound just like my boyfriend,” she said as she moved to answer the phone.

  Randy tapped on the door frame of the clinic manager’s office. “Hey Pat, got a minute?”

  “For you Randy, always,” she said and released a breath. “Especially if you’re here to turn in your resignation.”

  “I should be so lucky. No, not today. We have a bit of a crisis—I think. Might be an easy way out, but I wanted to discuss the idea with Doctor H. I guess he’s gone for the day.”

  “Doctor Hechtua is a crisis by himself. What’s the problem?” she said and pushed her eyeglasses onto her head, leaned back in her chair, and clasped her hands behind her neck. “Come on in here, for Christ’s sake. And shut the door so Mellisa can tell everyone we’re having sex at three in the afternoon.”

  “Pat, you are one bitchy lady. Apparently, a tray of blood samples, not all of them, a half dozen or so, the labels have gone missing. Looks like that whacko, Bev Myerson, was the last to handle them.”

  “The crazy I fired a couple days ago? Shit. So, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is, if we can’t determine whose blood is whom’s—is that the right word?—we might, potentially, give the wrong information to one of the docs. Since the samples with the missing labels all belong to Doctor Hechtua’s patients, chances are good, well the situation is bad actually, that he might have jumped to prescribe something for someone before we ran the final tests, which is what Lisa was planning to do this morning. The labels could have gone missing a few days, or as much as a week, ago. My guess is, Doctor H might have acted on incomplete information and possibly prescribed medication. He’s quick to react, let’s say. He doesn’t go to those pharmaceutical conferences just because he likes to talk, you know.”

  “Ouch, Randy, but I don’t understand why you think this is a crisis. My cat hacking up fur balls on the carpet in the middle of the night is a crisis. We just call in the patients affected and take some more blood samples. Start the tests over.”

  Immersen shook his head. “For a smart lady you often miss the point. We use numbers in the lab. We don’t know, or care, which patients belong to which blood sample. Only Doctor H could match the numbers with the names. And when word gets out that we mixed up some test results, just once, and caused doctors to prescribe incorrect medications? Or, misdiagnosed something that caused lots of people irreparable mental trauma? Or if a person had something nasty, like AIDS and has passed it around for a couple weeks? One word: Lawyers. I won’t look good in prison orange. You, on the other hand, might enjoy time behind bars.”

  “Ah shit. Can’t we break into his computer to find out what he’s doing? I’ll think about this.”

  “Don’t think too long or too hard. And I know a few hackers if we really need to get to his patient lists.” Randy said as he left.

  Pat spun her chair around and walked to the window. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass and watched people in the parking lot go about their duties; reminding her of ants scurrying to and from the nest. She wondered why she always had to hire the least capable of those ants? Why couldn’t she raise the funding to make this place a first-class operation? More important, what should she wear on her date tonight with that reporter guy she met at Marcie’s party last week? The guy might be a challenge—just her type. She smiled at the thought of how he said he was ‘in a relationship,’ then, in the next sentence, asked her out.

  Wednesday morning, Pat walked into Doctor Hechtua’s office and quietly closed the door. He turned from his computer. “Ah, what’s up?” he asked as he wiped what she hoped was powdered sugar from his mustache.

  “Enjoy a restful, really long weekend, Paul?”

  “Yes, and what’s it to you?”

  “Well, first, essentially, I’m your boss. You are supposed to at least show me the courtesy of telling me when you will and will not be in the office. But that’s not the real issue.”

  Paul sighed, removed his glasses and leaned back in his chair. “Okay, Pat. I’m sorry. I had a lot on my mind and—”

  “And you’ll have a lot more on your mind when we’re finished here,” she said as she locked her arms across her chest and lowered herself into the chair next to his desk. “One of the techs, Lisa Hollgren, discovered a tray of blood samples, all your patients I believe, with labels missing; some loose on the vials. We’ve scanned the ones with labels still affixed and matched them to a list we got from your computer—don’t ask me how we got into your computer—and eliminated those people. However, there are at least four people where we can’t determine whose blood belongs to whom. And one of those samples shows positive for HIV.”

  Paul’s eyebrows furro
wed as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “I see the potential, ah, situation. Well, we call in those few and retest. Not a big deal. You hacking into my computer is bigger issue here.”

  “Neither is a big deal—unless you’ve jumped at the opportunity and told someone he, or she, has HIV-1, or AIDS and prescribed medication from whichever company rep last sat next to you in a bar.”

  “Even so, I don’t think the person would have been taking it long enough to cause any damage. Those blood samples cannot be more than a week—”

  “And what about someone who was given a clean bill of health, out there, screwing their brains out because they were so delighted?”

  “Pat, I think you’re overreacting, here. We just retest, find the person with HIV, and put them on the pill. Easy peasy.”

  “Paul, are you familiar with the terms ‘mental anguish’ or ‘mental trauma’? Even if we catch up on the errors, if the misdiagnosed person knows a shyster lawyer, you’ll be riding a bicycle to work at the free clinic, not that fancy Tesla you drive now—when you get out of jail, that is.”

  Paul picked up a pencil and made a few doodles on his desk pad. “Well, I don’t see any way out but to call the people in, admit we made an error, and get them on the proper regimen. I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. There’s insurance against this sort of thing.”

  Pat leaned toward him, rested her hands on the edge of his desk, and lowered her voice. “We had insurance. You know the financial bind we’ve been in. We dropped all but the bare minimum on the coverage, and fuck-ups like this are not covered. I checked with legal—hypothetically, of course.”

  Doctor Hechtua leaned back in his chair. “Well, I, ah. What do you propose?”

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought over the weekend while you were out playing golf or doing whatever you do for recreation. Here’s how this is going to play out: You are going to use that brilliant mind and high-cost education of yours to determine which blood goes with which patient. It might be, if we’re lucky, there has been no mix up and everyone is healthy and the sick one got the meds, like we figured in the first place. However, if that’s not the case—and there’s only a one-in-four chance that you’ll get it right—we call in all four of those patients. We retest to find the bad apple. The now-clean one who might have received the meds, we’ll give a placebo for a year or so, then tell him or her a miracle has happened, and they’re cured. The patient who should have received the meds, if we’re unlucky, we’ll offer a generous stipend if they’ll agree to participate in a clinical study. And we’ll give him or her the meds, not a placebo. Got that?”

  “No way, Pat, no way. I’m a doctor. I can’t do that. It’s not—”

  “You can and you will. Or the world will enjoy a look at your Oscar-winning performance in some nasty videos of you taken during your latest vacation in Thailand. We found that in your computer, too.”

  Paul leaned back in his chair and covered his face with his hands.

  Pat could not understand whatever it was he mumbled. “Get going on this. I want results, at least your plan, by the end of business, today,” she said as she moved to the door.

  Paul stood and looked out the window at the sea of cars in the Walmart parking lot next to the building. The first patient to come to mind was Eric Yates. I must have gotten it right, he thought. The guy had a bullshit story. Claimed his blood was sent to the clinic because a monkey bit him. They always try the bullshit story, first. The guy was the best possible candidate for HIV. However, none of the other patients he saw last week admitted to homosexual activity, either.

  Back in her office, Pat pounded on the desk until her left hand hurt. She wanted to kick something, but gave it a second thought when she remembered she was wearing her Christian Louboutin pumps that cost her nearly a thousand bucks. She searched through the contacts on her phone until she found Mike’s number. Their first date had gone well. She shrugged at the thought of not jumping into bed with him Saturday night. Tonight she needed some special diversion from this current clinic drama.

  Mike picked up on the fourth ring. “Mike Rollings.”

  She heard voices in the background. “Hey Mike, it’s Pat Travino. Is this a bad time to chat?”

  “Hey Pat. In the news business any time is a bad time. Enjoyed Saturday’s dinner, by the way.”

  “Me too. In fact, that’s why I’m calling. I come from a long line of great Italian cooks. One of my grandma’s cookbook has a killer recipe for lasagna I feel like making. Interested?”

  “Sure. Name the time, place and what kind of wine to bring.”

  “How’s eight tonight, my place?”

  He hesitated, knowing he’d promised a night out with Diane just that morning.

  “Oh, too soon?” Pat said.

  “Ah, no. Not at all. Just noodling out the timeline to finish this piece I’m working on. Eight tonight works.”

  “Perfect. And any wine you bring will be the right one.”

  Chapter Three

  Eric shook rain water from his jacket as he entered Starbucks, pleased to be out of the February drizzle. The aroma of roasted coffee beans, however, failed to warm him this morning. He shivered while he waited in line. To him, the noise coming from a nearby espresso machine sounded like a death-rattle. As he scanned the chalk board to locate the coffee of the day, he sensed body heat and dampness of a person standing too close behind him.

  A voice near his ear whispered, “Come here often, sailor?”

  “Jesus!” He jumped, turned and stared into her gray eyes. “Aston, you were about to get—” He caught his breath. “Hey, good to see you.”

  She pushed her rain hood back and shook her blond braid as she unzipped her jacket. Had it really been only a week since she flipped off the skateboard? he thought She still wore the T-shirt with the pirate’s skull, and her hair was still in the long braid. Steady your breath, it’ll settle your heart, he told himself.

  “That the only shirt you own?”

  Aston glanced down at her chest. “This? Actually, I have a dozen of this same shirt. Makes choosing a wardrobe in the morning a lot easier.”

  “Sort of like being in the Army. Doesn’t your boss mind if you wear the same thing every day?”

  “She’s very liberal. She’s me.”

  Eric turned to the barista then back to Aston. “Can I buy you something?”

  “Nope. Got a raise from the boss last week, so I’m flush.”

  “How about we share a table?”

  “Sure.”

  The shop was crowded. Eric stood next to a table where two old men sat, silent, their cups empty. The men looked up at him, grabbed their jackets and left. He used three napkins the men left behind to wipe the table before Aston joined him.

  “Well, what is it that you do that your liberal boss gave you a raise for?” he asked as she sat across from him.

  “Mostly graphic design things. Some industrial design stuff. I’m a ‘sometimes’ student, too.”

  “So, where did, or do, you go to school?”

  “Iowa.”

  “I’d guess you want to be a writer, then.”

  “You’d guess wrong.”

  “What’s your major?”

  Aston squinted, tipped her head to one side and said, “This is beginning to sound like a bad bar come-on. Besides, what difference does it make?”

  Eric looked at his coffee and wondered if Aston ever gave straight answers to questions of any sort. At her age, his life had been different. He grew up in a place and time stifled with vegetation, blue skies and the over-powering aroma of freshly mowed lawns. His father always expected straight answers to questions.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to pry or anything. Just making conversation.”

  The left corner of her mouth curled a bit. He kept his eyes on her face and anticipated the
full smile. Instead, she shook her head and stirred her latte.

  “Right. That’s the problem with you—oops, I almost said ‘old’ people. I’ll say ‘some’ people. When they get together with friends, they sit around and reminisce about fun times or crap they’re not real sure happened in the first place. Sooner or later, they run out of all those good-old-days stories and pour themselves another drink,” she said, speaking more to the coffee cup than to him.

  Her near-smile remained as she turned toward him. She cleared her throat. “How many people do you know who sit around, shoot the shit, but never do anything? I want to do things with my life, Eric. People need to talk and think about the future. You never run out of things to talk about if you think of the future. What matters most? What happens next? Not, what happened when. Get it?”

  He examined the backs of his hands. The comfort and coolness of the revolver he had purchased days before still burned on his palms. Its smooth barrel, the reassurance of the knurling in its grip. He knew what mattered most and how to control the future. He’d been afraid to open the package when he got home that day so it sat in its black and red box on the top shelf of his walk-in closet. “Ah, well, I guess I never thought of it, life, like that. Not lately,” he said, and let his eyes follow the rain drops as they scurried down the window.

  “Of course not. Most people don’t. Most people live with some sappy image of their life, like it’s an hourglass and all the sand runs to the bottom. They’re not smart enough to know they can turn that hourglass upside down and start over.”