Page 70 of Hard to Kill

“Call it an appraisal contingency,” Allen Reese says before he slams the big door behind me.

FIFTY-FIVE

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I spend over an hour driving on Route 27 to my regularly scheduled appointment with Dr. Sam Wylie. She has nothing new to report, nor does my oncologist, Dr. Gellis. She just wants to make sure I’m still good with resuming chemo, even with the trial date being moved up.

“Can’t wait!” I say.

“I’m immune to your sarcasm by now,” Sam says. “You know that, right?”

“It had to happen eventually,” I tell her, before hugging her good-bye and reminding her that I love her madly.

The trip home takes an hour. I do a couple of hours of prep work on the case, then consider driving over to Three Mile Harbor to do some running and shooting. I haven’t done much of either lately, mostly because I’ve abandoned the idea of competing in my no-snow biathlon in the fall.

I still like to run and shoot.

Instead I take Rip the dog, who continues to defy his own bleak prognosis and keeps getting stronger—one of us has to—for a long walk on the beach, Indian Wells to Atlantic and back.

It is a beautiful afternoon, one ofthoseafternoons out here,and I am happier than ever to be making this walk with my dog, happy to be walking these beaches, wind in my hair, ocean at full voice, hardly any clouds in the sky.

I put Rip into the car and then walk back down to the water, not wanting to leave until I offer one of my quiet prayers—the praying always seems to go better here—for this not to all be taken away from me.

Not just these beaches.

“I like my life now,” I say quietly, talking to God or to the ocean or to both of them. “I finally likeme.”

I’ve just gotten out of the shower an hour later when I get the call about what happened to Dr. Ben.

FIFTY-SIX

SOMEBODY BROKE INTO DR. Ben Kalinsky’s office, swung away at him with a baseball bat, then fled. He awakened long enough to call 911 before passing out again.

When the cops and EMTs got there, a little after eight, Ben was still unconscious near the back door, bleeding from the head. I knew he was always the first to show up in the morning and the last to leave the office at night.

A friend from the East Hampton cops called Jimmy and told him that the locked cabinet where Dr. Ben kept his drugs had been broken into and apparently cleaned out.

“He only keeps heavy-duty pain pills in case of an emergency,” I tell Jimmy.

“Addicts don’t care how many, or how they get them,” Jimmy says. The last thing Ben remembered, according to the first cops on the scene, was walking to the back room to lock up, hearing a noise, and seeing the bat coming for his head.

The EMTs got him into the ambulance and on his way to the trauma center in Bridgehampton.

“How bad is it?” I ask Jimmy from the car.

“They’re trying to find out how much swelling there mightbe near the brain, and whether they might need to go in as a way of alleviating it,” Jimmy says.

It’s just Jimmy and me in the waiting area when I arrive at the trauma center. No other patients tonight except for the kindest man I’ve ever known, somewhere inside with his head cracked open like a walnut.

Maybe because of me.

By now I’ve told Jimmy about Allen Reese warning me that I was messing with the wrong people.

“You think he called Salvatore after you left him?”

“It’s what I would have done,” I say. “Maybe he was afraid that I might go around and tell people that he and Salvatore were besties.”

I stare down at my hands, inspecting what’s left of my last manicure, not even sure what the color was when I’d had the nails done. Wanting to think about anything except what’s happening with the doctors on the other side of the double doors.

“What’s taking them so long?” I ask.

---