A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

opposite him. She talked for a while with a man who appeared to be in his sixties. The man laughed and shook his head. Stone couldn’t hear the conversation but he had a pretty good idea what it was about.
    Curious, the chef kept watching as she moved to a booth where a young man sat alone. The man looked up, grinned at the woman, and Ike saw that they seemed to be getting along well, as he turned away to put the woman’s order in a bag.
    When she came to pick up her tuna melt and fries, the tall young fellow was with her. They were chatting easily, although Ike couldn’t tell if they were old friends or new acquaintances. They walked out the door together and Ike Stone dismissed them from his mind. He was looking forward to the two-hour break the Take 5 employees got when the restaurant closed for cleaning up before the breakfast rush.
    Stone worked in a kitchen that had a solid wall on the west side. The noise of the jukebox, the hum of voices from the restaurant patrons, and the clang of pots and pans overwhelmed any street noise. So Stone neither saw nor heard what was happening outside. But he
could
see the enraged woman who ran into the Take 5 a few moments later. It was the patron in the green pantsuit who’d ordered the tuna and cheese to go. She was holding what appeared to be a black wig at arm’s length and screaming, “Look what he did to me!” at the top of her lungs.
    Ike looked twice. Without her wig, it was apparent now that the woman wasn’t what she had seemed to be; usually Ike could spot one of the numerous transvestites who frequented the Pike Street stroll, but this one had fooled him completely.
    Before Ike could stop him, the man in drag reached into a tray of silverware kept near the first booth and grabbed what looked to Stone like a knife. In an instant, the cook was around the serving barrier and wrestling the weapon away from the maddened man, kicking it with his foot so that it slid away from him. Thwarted, the man in the green pantsuit turned and ran back outside.
    Curious, Ike Stone stepped outside to see what was going on. He could see that a crowd had gathered around someone on the sidewalk. When he pushed his way in, Stone recognized the young man who had left the restaurant with the transvestite. The youth appeared to be seized by convulsions. Stone could see no wounds, but he knew the kid was in trouble. He turned and went to the phone next to the cash register and dialed 911. He requested a Medic One aid car, on the double.
    It was only a few minutes before paramedics from the Seattle Fire Department responded, followed by Seattle Police patrol officers K. Christophersen and P. McCloud. A call of a fight or a “man down” on Pike Street was hardly unusual. The tall husky youth was semiconscious now, and he appeared to be cyanotic, his face suffused with a gray-purple tinge. He seemed to have suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure, from the descriptions of the bystanders. If that was the case, he should have begun to come around by now, but he seemed to be getting worse.
    As the paramedics checked him carefully, they found a very small lateral wound in his right upper chest. It was almost bloodless, and didn’t appear to be serious. They began immediate efforts to combat shock and the nameless young man was transported to the emergency room at Harborview Hospital, only a few blocks away.
    Harborview Hospital (the King County Medical Center) is used to dealing with patients with major trauma and its physicians and staff are probably the best in the county in dealing with the results of violence and accidents. If a patient could be saved, they would do it. They had a chance with this patient, it seemed; his admission came well within the parameters of the “Golden Hour” before shock can begin to shut down the body’s functions forever.
    “John Doe” was admitted with a systolic blood pressure of fifty, and a diastolic so low that it was off the scale of the sphygmomanometer. His pulse rate was fifty-six beats a minute and dropping rapidly. He could still speak, and he asked weakly where he was, and what had happened to him. ER physicians couldn’t answer his second question. They had hoped
he
could tell
them.
When they asked for his name, he was able to gasp, “Brad Bass.”
    The only wound he had was the tiny transverse cut in his upper chest, and it wasn’t bleeding—at least externally. The first danger in a knife wound is exsanguination—death by loss of