Dead Certain

other, but how can it be possible to compare the two rivers as a whole?”
    “I don’t know,” I replied, feeling out of my depth in this Yoda-like discussion. “How do you decide anything? Economists talk about weighing different bundles of goods. Businessmen use cost-benefit analysis....”
    “Oh, my way is much simpler than that,” announced Hurt.
    “What way is that?”
    “I simply choose the best person to solve the problem.”
    “Meaning?”
    “The input driver Delirium has today is not the same one that Icon will put on the market in a year or eighteen months. Between the prototype and the marketplace lie a thousand different problems—some small, some large, some of them unforeseen and others unforeseeable. The question then becomes one of choosing who will do a better job of solving those problems.”
    “So how do you decide that?”
    “I need to sit down with Bill Delius.”
    “He’s in the hospital for observation,” I replied instinctively, withholding the truth as much from the negotiator’s habit of hoarding information as uncertainty over how best to proceed.
    “No rush,” said Hurt, getting neatly to his feet. “I’m in town until Monday. Get in touch with me anytime between now and then and we’ll set something up.”
     
    As I drove home I mentally kicked myself for having lied to Gabriel Hurt. Well, I hadn’t exactly lied, but failing to mention a client’s double bypass had to at least fall into the category of dishonesty by omission. I tried telling myself that, like Gabriel Hurt, my job was to keep my options open. But at the same time I couldn’t shake the feeling that the road I was on inevitably led to disaster.
    I’d started out the day delighted that Bill Delius was still alive, but was ending it disgusted that he wasn’t well enough to sit down and take a meeting with Gabriel Hurt. By the time I pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment, I was so thoroughly disgusted with myself that even Leo’s cheerful banter couldn’t improve my state of mind. I just wanted to pour myself a big Scotch, take a long hot bath, and crawl into bed.
    But as soon as I walked in the front door, I knew that something was terribly wrong. Claudia’s shoes were lying inside the door exactly where she’d kicked them off, their laces soaked with blood. The lights were on, but there were no sounds of movement or music in the apartment. I stood for a long time in the front hall and listened before I heard anything at all, and even then I couldn’t be really sure.
    Claudia and I had known each other for a long time, and we had been through a lot together. She’d held my head as I lay weeping through the desolate months that followed Russell’s death. I’d listened as she whispered her secret fears about succeeding in a profession filled with men who wanted nothing more than to see her fail. I had seen her stumble home, drunk with fatigue and emotionally battered. I’d seen her on mornings after she’d been up all night stitching up people who’d been hacked to pieces by hatred; nights when she’d had to strip to the skin because everything she wore—right down to her underwear—was soaked in a dead man’s blood; nights when she’d held dead children in her arms knowing that they’d been killed by their parent’s hand.
    But in all that time, I don’t think I’d ever heard her cry.
     

CHAPTER 9
     
    I know it must seem strange that it took me so long to decide what to do. Claudia was my closest friend, but she was also someone whose character had been forged in the crucible of the operating room. The better part of me hesitated because I didn’t know if she would want me to see her cry, while the less admirable part of me held back from fear. Twenty-four hours ago I’d seen her slide her hand inside Bill Delius’s dead chest and with perfect calm squeeze life back into his heart. What was it that was devastating enough to have reduced her to tears?
    The only thing I could think of was that something terrible must have happened to one of her parents and I made my way down the hall toward her bedroom. Like all the others in the building, the apartment that I shared with Claudia was laid out railroad style. The living room and dining room, both palatially proportioned, sat at the front of the apartment, their grand windows facing the street. The other rooms all branched off a central hallway whose resemblance to the passageway of a railroad car had given the floor plan