The Surgeon: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel: With Bonus Content

followed. The ticking of the kitchen clock. The sound of my own heart pounding in my ears. I am listening, straining to hear your footsteps. To hear you tell me it is time to leave, and quickly. I am afraid to move.
    At last I force myself to walk down the hall, into her bedroom. I stop in the doorway.
    It takes a moment for me to comprehend the horror.
    She lies with her body draped over the side of the bed, struggling to pull herself back onto the mattress. A gun has fallen from her hand. I cross to the bed, grasp a surgical retractor from the nightstand, and slam it against her temple. She falls still.
    I turn and focus on you.
    Your eyes are open, and you lie on your back, staring up at me. A pool of blood spreads around you. Your lips move, but I can’t hear any words. You do not move your legs, and I realize the bullet has damaged your spinal cord. Again you try to speak, and this time I understand what you are telling me:
    Do it. Finish it.
    You are not talking about her, but about yourself.
    I shake my head, appalled by what you ask me to do. I cannot. Please don’t expect me to do this! I stand trapped between your desperate request and my panic to flee.
    Do it now, your eyes plead with me.
Before they come.
    I look at your legs, splayed out and useless. I consider the horrors that lie ahead for you, should you live. I could spare you all of this.
    Please.
    I look at the woman. She doesn’t move, doesn’t register my presence. I would like to wrench her hair back, to bare her neck and sink the blade deep in her throat, for what she has done to you. But they must find her alive. Only if she is alive will I be able to walk away, unpursued.
    My hands are sweating inside the latex gloves, and when I pick up the gun it feels clumsy, foreign in my grasp.
    I stand at the edge of the pool of blood, looking down at you. I think of that magical evening, when we wandered the Temple of Artemis. It was misty, and in the gathering dusk I caught fleeting glimpses of you, walking among the trees. Suddenly you stopped, and smiled at me through the twilight. And our gazes seemed to meet across the great divide that stretches between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
    I am looking across that divide now, and I feel your gaze on mine.
    This is all for you, Andrew, I think. I do this for you.
    I see gratitude in your eyes. It is there even as I raise the gun in my shaking hands. Even as I pull the trigger.
    Your blood flicks against my face, warm as tears.
    I turn to the woman who still sprawls senseless over the side of the bed. I place the gun by her hand. I grasp her hair, and with the scalpel, I slice off a lock near the nape of her neck, where its absence will not be noticed. With this lock, I will remember her. By its scent will I remember her fear, as heady as the smell of blood. It will tide me over until I meet her again.
    I walk out the back door, into the night.
     
    I no longer possess that precious lock of hair. But I do not need it now, because I know her scent as well as I know my own. I know the taste of her blood. I know the silken glaze of sweat on her skin. All this do I carry in my dreams, where pleasure shrieks like a woman and walks with bloody footprints. Not all souvenirs can be held in one’s hand, or fondled with a touch. Some we can only store in that deepest part of our brains, our reptilian core, from which we have all sprung.
    That part inside us all which so many of us would deny.
    I have never denied it. I acknowledge my essential nature; I embrace it. I am as God created me, as God created us all.
    As the lamb is blessed, so is the lion.
    So is the hunter.

 
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    I owe a very special thanks to:
    Bruce Blake and Detective Wayne R. Rock of the Boston Police Department, and to Chris Michalakes, M.D., for their technical assistance.
    Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, and Andrea Cirillo for their helpful comments on the first draft.
    My editor, Linda Marrow, for gently pointing the way.
    My guardian angel, Meg Ruley. (Every writer needs a Meg Ruley!)
    And to my husband, Jacob. Always, to Jacob.

 
    Also by Tess Gerritsen
    Featuring Jane Rizzoli & Maura Isles
THE APPRENTICE
THE SINNER
BODY DOUBLE
VANISH
THE MEPHISTO CLUB
THE BONE GARDEN
THE KEEPSAKE
    Other Novels
HARVEST
LIFE SUPPORT
BLOODSTREAM
GRAVITY
    And the latest thriller in the Rizzoli & Isles series

ICE COLD

Tess Gerritsen is a physician and an internationally bestselling author. She gained nationwide acclaim for