Carved in Bone

brother. Tom Kitchings let out a loud groan, and then another. Then he clutched his chest, sank to his knees, and toppled to the ground, unconscious.
    I was no medical expert—I was the doctor who lost every single patient, after all—but I was pretty sure the sheriff had just suffered a coronary. That meant time was of the essence. We had only sixty minutes—the so-called “golden hour”—to prevent serious cardiac damage. After that, I knew, his blood-starved heart muscle would start to die. “We’ve got to get him to the hospital right away,” I said.
    “I’ll call for an ambulance,” said Williams, reaching for his radio.
    “Too slow,” I said. “We’re half an hour outside of town here. By the time they get here and get him back to town, he’ll suffer permanent damage. We’ve got to get him to a cardiologist within an hour.”
    “Goddamnit, Doc,” he shouted, “we ain’t got a cardiologist out here.”
    “No, but we can get him to one faster than we can get him back to town. Call your dispatcher; get ’em to patch us through to LifeStar.”
    LifeStar—UT Medical Center’s air ambulance service—had two helicopters based behind the hospital, within sniffing distance of the Body Farm. It took less than a minute for the dispatcher to patch Williams through to LifeStar’s flight coordinator. The deputy described the sheriff’s symptoms and asked if they could send a chopper. “What’s your location?”
    “We’re in a small valley six or eight miles southeast of Jonesport,” said Williams. “Brush Creek Mountain is directly to our west, and—”
    “Wait wait wait,” said the coordinator. “Anybody there got a GPS unit?”
    “Oh. Yeah. Affirmative,” said Williams. He pulled a handheld Global Positioning System receiver from a pouch on his belt and powered it up. The display showed signals from four orbiting satellites. “Stand by for coordinates,” said Williams. As he began rattling off numbers, I looked over his shoulder at the display. “Latitude three-five-point-niner-five-three-five degrees north. Longitude eight-two-point-seven-niner-six-eight degrees west.”
    As the dispatcher read the coordinates back for confirmation, I realized something was wrong. I tapped his shoulder to get his attention, but he shrugged me off in annoyance. I tapped again, harder. “LifeStar, stand by,” he snapped, then whirled to confront me. “What the fuck ?”
    “You transposed two numbers in the longitude,” I said urgently, pointing at the display. “You said ‘point seven nine’; the display says ‘point nine seven.’” I did some quick math in my head. “That’s almost two-tenths of a degree. They’re going to land ten or twelve miles from here, somewhere over in North Carolina.”
    Williams looked ready to explode. He radioed the flight coordinator to correct the number, and the coordinator read the revised longitude back. “Readback is correct,” said Williams. I reached to take the radio from him. He relinquished it with a look of supreme annoyance.
    “How soon can they be in the air?” I asked.
    “Thirty seconds ago,” said the coordinator. “Should be landing in about twelve minutes.”
    “Wow, that’s great. Anything we can do for the patient here in the meantime?”
    “Stand by.” The radio was silent for nearly a minute before the LifeStar dispatcher came back on. “The flight nurse says keep him quiet, feet elevated. If he’s conscious and you can round up an aspirin tablet, give him one to chew. That’ll thin his blood a little, maybe help restore some flow to the coronary artery.”
    “Will do,” I said. “Signing off now. Thanks for the help.”
    “It’s what we’re here for.”
    I handed the radio back to Williams and sprinted to the back of my truck, where I always kept a first aid kit. Somewhere among all the bandages and wet wipes, ointments and surgical gloves, I knew there was a packet of aspirin. The profusion of tiny containers was maddening. Finally I found it: a single foil pack containing two aspirin. With trembling fingers, I tore open the foil. Both pills popped out, skittered across the truck bed, and began rolling toward the gap in the tailgate. As the first pill rattled down into the recesses of the bumper, I lunged desperately, snagging the other just as it reached the opening. My own heart was pounding now.
    Kitchings had regained consciousness by now, so Williams and I propped him against one wheel of the Jeep. As he