The Axeman's Jazz

The guy had a nasty gunshot wound, probably wouldn’t make it.
    The defibrillator sounded its little alarm; it was charged.
    “Everybody clear; I’m going to shock him.” Sonny moved away from the table.
    Two hundred joules. Nothing.
    Three hundred. Still flat.
    Three-sixty. Sonny’s pulse was going crazy. The uneven peaks and valleys of normal sinus rhythm appeared on the screen.
    “Okay,” said the resident. “Call the lab and tell them he’s going to surgery. Get that blood upstairs.”
    The guy had a good chance. Sonny had to shake his head to get the hang of it, had to come out of a kind of trance. He’d been so sure this one was going to go. So sure. He must have fallen into that weird half-trance to protect himself against it.
    Great. A fat lot of good it would have done if the guy had died. He’d still have to come out of it and he’d still feel just as bad as he ever did. But never mind, who the hell cared? He felt great now. It really did feel good when you saved them. This was what being a doc was all about. This was why people did it. (People other than the Gerards.)
    He’d been such lousy company lately that he hunted up Missy, thinking to tell her … what? Well, just how good he felt. To “share” that, he thought with a smirk.
    “Can you take a break?”
    She looked at her watch. “Five, ten minutes.”
    “Let’s go.”
    “Where?”
    “The roof.”
    But once in the elevator he had a better idea. He knew a room, several of them, in fact, with keys hidden over the doors—the old call rooms.
    “Where are we going?”
    “In here.” He hustled her into one.
    “Why?” She had on a tiny lime-green miniskirt, a crisp white blouse—a madonna in a mini. She was so beautiful. Why didn’t he notice it more often?
    He felt so tender, so choked up with love for her, he could barely whisper. “I want to make love to you.” It came out a croak.
    “Sonny!” Her voice was a schoolteacher’s, shrill and punishing.
    He put his arms around her, kissed her. Her arms didn’t go around him. “Sonny, are you crazy?”
    “Yes. Yes. I’m absolutely crazy.” He took her arms and put them around his shoulders, prompting her. He ground his groin into hers.
    “What the hell is wrong with you?”
    Missy never talked like that. Not Missy McClellan, the woman he loved, who was so afraid of displeasing anyone, he’d never heard her raise her voice. Never even heard her say “hell.”
    Oddly, it made her more human, endeared her to him all the more.
    “Everything’s tight with me. We just saved a guy and nature’s juices are flowing in my veins.” He was kissing her shoulder, nibbling her ear.
    “Sonny Gerard, will you for once act like the grown-up I wish you were?”
    Feeling slapped, he stared at her. “What did you say?”
    “I have to get back to work.”
    “Shit. Well, just shit.”
    He sat on the bed, dejected, not believing what was happening.
    “For once I feel good, for once I want to share something with you, and this is what I get!”
    Instantly, she was sitting beside him, massaging his temple. He’d hardly seen what was happening, she’d moved so fast. “Oh, Sonny, I’m so sorry. It’s just that it’s in the middle of the workday. I’ve got clients to see.”
    His beeper went off. Another emergency. Maybe another chance to save someone’s life. Maybe death instead; the patient’s and his own, that little death he always experienced, a draining of his own, along with the slipping-away of the patient on the table. A sick lurch in his belly, a panic that lasted, that wouldn’t go away. He’d have to go in a minute.
    “You bitch!”
    “What?”
    She probably hadn’t even known he knew the word.
    “Bitch! Do you know how you made me feel?”
    Her mouth twisted, her whole face started to writhe in pain. She was going to cry. It made him furious. He had no idea why, had no notion Missy could rouse such a feeling in him.
    “Sonny, don’t!”
    Startled, he looked behind him, sure she was warning him of something, some danger to both of them, she sounded so frightened….
    But even as he turned his head, he realized that his hand was moving down, that it had been up, at shoulder level, coming at her, ready to hit.
    That wasn’t all. He looked at it, not believing. The fingers were curled in a fist.

TWENTY-ONE
    “I’M SORRY, ALEX.”
    “Shit.” His first publisher had turned down his last book, and now his second one was throwing him out. He had given his agent