Chapter 6
Dr. Benjamin Jameson was having a bad morning. Not only did he awake to the sounds of the FBI pounding on his door at 6am to perform yet another search of his house, but when he arrived at work, he was called into a meeting with the chief of staff and the hospital president to discuss his current situation with his wife and the FBI's investigation.
It turned out that the FBI had been digging into his work life and had discovered the affair he had begun several months ago with his secretary, Shirley, bringing their concerns about this and his possible involvement with his wife's disappearance to the hospital leadership. They were naturally concerned, uncertain if they should allow him to continue working for now or let him go and they had called a meeting to discuss the matter in length later that afternoon with the board of directors. It would be then that they would decide his future with the hospital, if there was one.
The FBI and the cops seemed hell-bent on destroying his life and he hated them more and more as each day passed since he reported Liz missing. Six weeks ago he had the perfect life. A wonderful paying job, a beautiful wife and even a mistress on the side. But when Liz discovered the letters Shirley had sent him in his briefcase, she flipped out, demanding a divorce and slapping him hard across the face. He snapped. That was all. He was not an evil man, he just lost control and hadn't meant to push her down the stairs.
With her at the bottom of the stairwell bruised and dazed, her leg most likely broken, she spat venomous insults at him and threatened to divorce him, taking all that he had worked so hard to build. In a rage he ran back to the bedroom, going to the closet and pulling out the gun that he had bought several years ago for home protection, but had never used more than once at a firing range. He ran down the stairs to her, unable to get up, she continued her verbal assault until he hit her over the head with it the butt of the weapon, knocking her unconscious. After he saw her inert form on the floor he panicked. What was he to do then? He would have to get rid of her now, she would certainly bring up charges now, he would lose his medical license, his career, everything. It was too much for him to take, so he dragged her out to the car, heaving her into the trunk.
There had been no plan, but he was a smart man and had seen his fair share of crime dramas to know that if he killed her in the house or in his car, then blood evidence would be too difficult to destroy. So he drove for more than an hour until he came to a secluded bridge and pulled her unconscious form out of the car and dragged her towards the edge. He was just going to throw her in at first, but figured at the last moment that the chances that she would wake up were pretty high and he didn't want her to be able to swim out or to wash up again the next day. Thinking quickly, he opened his trunk and pulled out his spare tire and some bungee cords he had stored in there, wrapping the cord around her waist and attaching it to the full-sized tire. He prayed that it would be secured enough and heavy enough to weigh her down so she could never surface again.
The hard part came next. He had to kill her before he tossed her over the edge. He wasn't a monster. He had never killed anyone before, but he didn't want her to suffer unnecessarily if she did wake up and find herself under water. So, he had to pull the trigger and make her death swift. Several minutes passed, psyching himself up, pointing the trigger to her head several times only to chicken out and turn away. It wasn't until she began to moan that it hit him that if her didn't do this then she would survive and destroy him for sure. Gathering his courage, he put the pistol to her head, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
He could hardly believe that he had done it. He killed Liz, his wife of nearly 15 years and then he was pushing her body over the edge of the bridge, watching her blond hair fade into the shadows as it sank under the water and disappeared under it's murky depths. He became detached from it all, like someone taking in a really bad horror movie.
He returned home in a daze, but knew he had a lot of work to do to cover up the evidence of his crime. Destroying the letters and coming up with a plausible story first on his list of many things to do if he was to get away with this. Almost as an afterthought, he remembered the gun.
Knowing that the gun could be traced back to him should it be found, he brought it to the basement and dug around in his tools until he found a pipe file and began to scratch away at the numbers on the side of the weapon's barrel until they could no longer be discernible.
Liz was a nurse and her absence would be missed at work, so he had to come up with a story. She was an avid runner, so he decided it best to say that she had gone for a run that morning, but had not returned by the time he left for work. So instead of going straight to the police, he went to work, tossing the gun into a dumpster behind the coffee shop he often stopped by on his way to the hospital, forgetting that he had left it loaded and ignoring the dirty vagrant sitting beside the trash receptacle.
He did his best to play it cool that day while he was a work, returning home later that evening and calling the police in tears, some of which where actually real and unforced. Immediately the police were suspicious and the FBI was called in. Over and over again he recounted his story until he had it down to a science, his words memorized. The feds tried and tried their best to trip him up as they interrogated him several times, but could find no evidence to hold against him. Thankfully, Liz hadn't bled in their home or in his car and he had been extremely careful to make sure that not a trace of hair or fibers from her left in the trunk of his car.
After everyone he knew learned of Liz's disappearance, he had to work hard to maintain the pretense of the grieving husband, desperately searching for his missing wife. At first, his co-workers supported him, helping to look for her, organizing searches and spreading fliers out over the city in an effort to locate her. But, as the FBI applied more pressure to him and began questioning his friends at work, he knew it would only be a matter of time before they found out about his affair with Shirley and then everything would come apart.
Thankfully, he managed to convince Shirley that he had nothing to do with Liz's disappearance and that she should keep their affair a secret from the police and FBI, professing his love for her and promising to marry her and give her a life of pampering, spas, new cars, high fashion and bright shiny jewelry. But, she must have cracked under the pressure and told the FBI about them.
Needless to say, it was quite possibly the worst day of his life and it wasn't even noon yet. It was as though the walls had decided to start moving in on him, crumbling as his house of cards fell apart and he was trapped inside After the meeting, he was certain that the chief of staff and hospital president had drawn their own conclusions already and convicted him in their own heads. They had no proof that he had anything to do with her going missing and could do little to remove his medical license until he was convicted, but they could still fire him from the hospital and now it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would.
The only break he caught today was an emergency cardiac surgery on a NCIS agent shot during an investigation that he had been called in to perform the anesthesia for when there was no one else available to work. Hopefully, the surgery would be long enough where they would have to delay the meeting until at least tomorrow and give him some more time to think about what he should do, maybe it would only postpone the inevitable, but maybe he could find a way in the mean time to save his career.
As he sat in surgery, he watched the clock tick like a hawk. There was still two hours to go before the meeting and this surgery was already wrapping up, the repair finished, the heart still exposed and ready to be restarted and the patient brought off of the heart-lung machine. Barring any complications, they would be finished within an hour, but he just couldn't face the board, not yet. He desperately needed more time... It was then that a thought entered his head. All he needed to do was increase the anesthesia just enough to prevent the heart from being shocked back to a normal rhythm, thereby extending the surgery and excusing him from his potential firing at least for today, and he could go home an plan out his next move.
He was nervous, hands shaking as he contemplated his decision, hoping no one in the OR would see his internal struggle. Doing this could kill the patient, but complications happened in surgery all of the time, especially open-heart procedures where there were already plenty of inherent risks, his chances of getting caught where negligible and it wasn't like he wanted to kill the patient, he just wanted to the surgery to last long enough for the meeting to be cancelled. The guy would most likely survive, but even if he didn't, he wouldn't be too upset, he was just another one of those damn federal agents anyway and he had had his fill of those people lately.
All he needed to do to get started would be to send his nurse away since she would notice if he did anything to the patients drugs. Deciding that it was now or never, he turned to her.
“Sally, I'm having a hard time reading the monitors, would you mind going to my office and getting my glasses, please? I should be okay on my own for a few minutes.” She gave him a somewhat confused look from under her surgical mask. It was a bit of an unusual request to ask the nurse anesthetist to run such an errand, but Jameson knew that Sally was a people-pleaser and always did whatever was requested of her.
“Uh, okay, Dr. Jameson.”
“Thank-you, they're just sitting on top of my desk.” She nodded and took off, leaving the OR. She would be gone for at least a couple of minutes in order to get to his office and back, plus she would have to scrub up again, giving him a little more time. Being on the other side of the curtain from the rest of the surgery, he was largely ignored as the other medical staff in attendance were focused on the gaping hole in the young man's chest or on his vital signs This gave him the perfect opportunity to change the rate of anesthesia being delivered to his body without rousing suspicion.
Now that was done, all he needed to do was wait and see.
OOOOO
Tony opened a groggy eye, groaning. He was extremely exhausted and headachey, like he had one too many beers the night before, but ten times worse. Feeling a cool cloth cover his forehead, he opened both eyes to see Nonna smoothing the little wet wash towel into place.
“You awake now?” She asked with concern. “You've had me worried, Anthony.” His stomach was doing flip flops and he wanted to sit up, but was too tired to accomplish such a meager feat He noticed then, that he was in what his bed in what used to be his old room in Nonna's apartment. He looked around at the familiar sights, taking it all in. Most of the stuff he had in this room when he was a teenager was gone now that he was an adult, except for the signed poster of Larry Bird from the '86 NBA World Championships where he was named MVP, there was no way he'd ever get rid of that, in fact, it graced the wall in his living room still and it always would no matter how tacky any of his girlfriends thought it was.
“What happened ?” He wanted to know. “Where are Kate and Paula?” The last thing he remembered was drinking coffee with Kate, Paula and Nonna before the world began to do it's best to throw him off the merry-go-round.
“You just passed out, sweetie and they've gone home now.”
“Why?”
“I suppose because you said all that you wanted to say to them and they knew you needed your rest. Don't worry, you'll see them again sometime, but not right now.”
“I was sure I was dying.”
“Maybe you were.” She smiled “Maybe you still are, but you're here now, that's all that matters.” He was bone-weary and he couldn't remember ever feeling this way before, even when he was sick with the plague. Considering how weak he was, he was certain that he had little time left.
“Nonna...” He grabbed for her hand, fighting his eyelids to keep them open.
“Yes, dear?”
“I owe you so much, yet I never even said thank-you or ever told you how much you meant to me and I'm sorry I never told you when you were alive. I was a real jerk when I was a kid.”
“Oh, Hon. You were just a boy and I always knew how you felt, even if it was never said. Nonnas come with that kind of intuition.”
“Thank-you just the same, I never would have made much of myself if it hadn't been for you.”
“Awww, c'mere.” She bent down and he tried to sit up for a hug, but couldn't get far, not that it mattered, for Nonna had him in her arms and was holding him tight. He wrapped a heavy arm around her, enjoying her warmth and the love, something he had been missing out on for far too long. She helped him back down to the pillow and pulled the covers up around his shoulders, tucking him in like a child and kissing him on the cheek. “You're tired. Why don't you go back to sleep now?”
He just wanted to close his eyes and sleep like she said, but there was still so much he wanted to say to her, but she seemed to be reading his mind. Then he remembered that this was all in his mind, so it made sense that she could do that.
“It's okay, don't worry, I know that you want to be with your friends and teammates again and I know how you feel about that partner of yours too." She smiled knowingly. "You'll get that chance as long as you are strong, but even the strong don't get that way without rest, especially before a tough fight like the one you have ahead of you, so just close your eyes, I won't let you go.” She soothed in a soft voice, holding his hand. With her words, there was little Tony could do to resist Morpheus and in moments he was slipping away again, sleep grasping him and not letting go.
To Be Continued.....
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