Deadly Design - Emarsan Page 0,103

just get it, and a blood pressure cuff.”

I force my head upright. There’s a man hovering over me.

“Rubenstein?”

“Yep,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you, Kyle McAdams.

I thought you fell off the face of the earth. I don’t suppose that bitch Bartholomew had anything to do with that.”

The pharmacist hands him a box, and he slides something out of it. He slips it under my shirt, and he must see the incisions because it takes a moment for him to press the cold metal against my chest. He listens, moving the cold metal around, but it feels good, almost soothing.

“She do this?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Call my office. Tell them to send an ambulance here. A discreet ambulance.”

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“Discreet?” the pharmacist asks.

“They’ll know what I mean. Just make the call.”

“Do you have it?” I ask. Knowing he must. He has to have it, or he wouldn’t know who I am. He wouldn’t have been looking for me.

“I do. I’ve been trying to find you, so you better not die.”

He is young. How old did Matt say he was? Twenty-one?

Twenty-two? His straight brown hair is cut at odd angles, like maybe he’d gone to one of those schools where they train hair cutters and he’d gotten one who was off their meds.

“You’re not going to die, are you, Kyle,” he says, not like he’s asking me, but telling me. I want to believe him. I want to trust him. Virginia and Gene helped me. Even the girl on the bus, a complete stranger, helped me. They were all complete strangers, really, and I trusted them, but can I trust him?

I don’t have a choice.

His clean-shaven, boyish face grins. “I tell you what,” he says, leaning in close to me. “How about I save your life, then we fly to the Bahamas. We’ll stand on the beach holding up a poster that says ‘Fuck you, Bartholomew.’ We’ll take a selfie and send it to her. What do you think of that?”

I can see it in my mind. Me and this man I don’t know, standing barefoot in the sand, wearing gaudy floral shirts and Bermuda shorts. We both have one hand on the sign, and we’re both tanned and healthy. “Fuck you, Bartholomew.” And then everything goes black.

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Time to wake up, Kyle.”

I hear the voice, but I don’t want to answer it. I want to sleep. I just want to keep my eyes closed and drift.

“Kyle,” he says again. “You’ve been out long enough, buddy.

You need food. I suppose I can stick in a feeding tube.”

I open my eyes.

“I thought that’d get your attention.” It’s Dr. Rubenstein.

The Dr. Rubenstein, the one who has the research that can save me. He’d said that, hadn’t he? He said he can save me.

I try to move, try to clear my head more. There’s a heart monitor on my finger and an IV in my arm. I can hear the continuous beeping of a machine keeping track of my vitals, and I feel the blood pressure cuff tighten around my arm.

“You really scared me. Your temperature was a hundred and three when we got you here. You had a bad infection where Dr.

Bartholomew had been playing tic-tac-toe with her scalpel.”

“You know her?”

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so that the seat is higher than my bed. He’s tall and lanky, and his long legs dangle. “Before I met her brother, I interned under her at Johns Hopkins. She rode my ass like crazy, and not because she wanted to push me. I mean, she did want to push me, right out the door. She thought I was a snot-nosed brat with acne. No way did she think I deserved to be there. She didn’t care if my IQ was a bazillion, which it is, by the way.

God, it would be so sweet if I could call her up and tell her who her sociopath of a brother gave his research to. He sure didn’t give it to her. Nope. He gave it to the little twit she can’t stand.

But it’s mutual, because I can’t stand her. She beats me out of every research grant I apply for. She may be petite, but she’s got

Deadly Design - Emarsan Page 0,103

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