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capeeshing that, you dickhead?”
    He nods.
    I grab the phone cord and rip it out of the wall on my way out.
    I reach the code. The hallway outside of it, anyway.
    All the world loves a code, because you get to act like you’re on television. Even if you don’t get to yell “Clear!” with the defibrillator paddles, you might get to squeeze the respirator bag, or inject drugs handed to you by nurses from out of the crash cart. Also, people come from all over the hospital—not just from Medicine, for whom it’s mandatory—so it’s a great opportunity to socialize. And if the person who called the code did it because the patient is actually crashing, you might even save someone’s life, and justify your awful career choice.
    This is not one of those times, however, I remember as soon as I get there. This is one of those times when the patient’s been dead for hours, and some nurse is trying to cover his Latvian ass.
    “Who’s got time?” I say.
    A nurse named Lainie turns around with a stopwatch and a checklist of who’s required to be there. “Yo hi, Dr. Brown,” she says. She winks. “I already put you down.”
    “Thanks,” I say. Lainie’s foxy, but she’s married. Granted, to a man who looks twelve and wears a basketball jersey long enough to be a cocktail dress, but homey don’t play that.
    What homey do play is getting back to Squillante’s room. And either killing him or figuring out what to do about him instead.
    There doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice. If I let him live, and he tells David Locano where I am, I’m either dead or on the run. On the other hand, supposedly I work at a hospital to make up for killing people.
    Or something along those lines.
    “Sir?” It’s a small voice behind me. I turn.
    My medical students. Two cups of human misery in short white coats. One is male and the other one female, and they both have names. That’s all I can ever remember about them.
    “Good morning, sir.”
    “Don’t call me sir. I work for a living,” I say. “Go check labs.”
    This mostly confuses them, but one of them says, “We already did.”
    “Then just stay here.”
    “But—”
    “Sorry, kids. I’ll teach you something later. * And I’ll see you at Attending Rounds at seven thirty.”
    Of course, ten feet farther on I get beeped by Akfal, who’s in the Intensive Care Unit. “You got a minute?” he says when I phone him back.
    Instead of “No,” I say, “Is it serious?” Which is a stupid question, since Akfal wouldn’t page me if it wasn’t. He doesn’t have that kind of time.
    “I need your help on a thoracostomy.”
    Fuck. “I’ll be right there,” I tell him.
    I turn back to my med students. “Change of plans, kids,” I tell them. “Uncle Akfal’s got a procedure for us.”
    As we head toward the fire stairs, one of the med students nods nervously back toward the code. “Isn’t that our patient, sir?”
    “She’s God’s patient now.”
    Thoracostomy is just sticking a sharpened tube through someone’s chest wall. You do it when the amount of blood—or pus, or air, or whatever—in their thorax is starting to compress one or both lungs, making it difficult for the person to breathe. You have to avoid the key organs—lungs, spleen, liver—and the undersides of the ribs, since the undersides are where the vein, artery, and nerve run. (You can see this on a rack of ribs, even after it’s been cooked. Then you can go yack.) But otherwise placing a chest tube is simple, as long as the patient’s holding still.
    Which is never. That’s where I come in. Though it gives me no joy to admit it, the medical task I perform nearest to perfection is holding people down. My med students are about to get a rare glimpse of genius.
    So I’m surprised when we get to the Intensive Care Unit to find the patient canted over on his side, with his eyes open and his tongue hanging out. In fact I’m worried he died while Akfal was phoning me, but then I feel the