Dead Certain

unfeeling and monolithic corporation. This struck me as so preposterous that I was worried about keeping a straight face, but just as Denise had predicted, the reporters ate it up.
    When her PR handlers signaled that it was time for Mother to move on to her schedule of print interviews, I was grateful. Even the horror show of a day that I was facing seemed preferable to a daylong grin fest with the press—and that was even taking into account the fact that my first call of the day was at the hospital.
    It always amazes me how quickly the prosperity of the business district gives way to something else. Five blocks from where the young Turks of the financial markets juggle buy and sell orders from Japan and worry about making the payments on their Ferraris, families live from welfare check to welfare check from one generation to the next. There were no Starbucks on these street corners, no Armani-clad strivers, just empty bottles and swirling trash and the hard, cold reality of the street.
    Traffic thinned out as soon as I shook clear of the Loop. Everybody who had someplace to go was heading in the other direction, trying to get to work on time. I turned west on Sixteenth Street, heading over the railroad yards toward Canal. In the daytime the neighborhood surrounding Prescott Memorial looked even shabbier than at night. Fast-food wrappers blew through the streets carried by the breeze while the asphalt glittered with shards of broken glass.
    I parked in the lot closest to the main building and said a silent prayer for my car. My grandfather had always envisioned his hospital as an oasis, a place of beauty as well as healing. Now the eaves sagged on the stately red brick buildings, the lawn was trampled, and the sidewalks were cracked. Still, compared to what lay around it, the hospital campus looked like Lourdes.
    I decided to see Bill Delius first. I was also hoping that I might bump into Claudia. Something about the hang-up calls was still nagging at me, and I wanted to ask her about her weekend schedule. I also wanted to wish her luck in today’s morbidity and mortality conference.
    But when I arrived on the postsurgical floor, there was another doctor sitting at the nurses’ station. When I asked, he told me that a construction worker had just been helicoptered in from the work site where he’d fallen, impaling himself on a ten-foot length of steel pipe. My roommate would be in the operating room for the foreseeable future.
    I found Bill Delius easily enough. He may have been only a semi-impoverished college professor, but by the standards of Prescott Memorial, the fact that he had health insurance made him a wealthy man. He had one of the private rooms reserved for paying patients down at the end of the hall. I knocked softly, not wanting to disturb him if he was resting. Receiving no reply, I stuck my head in cautiously for a peek.
    He looked terrible, though I don’t know what else I expected. After all, they’d opened him up from stem to stern and even harvested veins from his legs to graft onto the vessels leading to his heart. According to Claudia, even though the procedure is common, it’s one of the most invasive—and for the surgeon, exhausting—in the medical repertoire. When they’re done, they still have to connect the two sides of the breastbone with steel wires, and just sewing everything back up can take two surgeons working together for hours.
    Looking closely, I thought Delius seemed more out of it than asleep. The drugs that poured in through the IV line to control his blood pressure, his heart rate, and his pain also caused a backlash of interactions and side effects. As I eased myself into the visitor’s chair it occurred to me just how vulnerable he was lying there unconscious and alone. I thought of Mrs. Estrada and the other patients who had died, and wondered if they had been on this floor.
    Bill Delius wasn’t dying—at least not while I was in the room—but unfortunately he wasn’t doing anything else either. Seeing him hooked to monitors and with tubes running in and out of his body, I felt all my Monday-morning bravado drain away. I’d known what Bill Delius had wanted before his heart attack, but everything had changed in those terrible seconds on the sidewalk outside of McCormack Place. Did I have any idea of what he would want now? And who the hell did I think I was, going to bat in his place with Mark Millman and whatever graduate student he managed to get ahold