Dr. Peter Brown is an intern at Manhattan's worst hospital. He has a talent for medicine, a shift from hell, and a past he'd prefer to keep hidden. Whether it's a blocked circumflex artery or a plan to land a massive malpractice suit, he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.
Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwna is a hit man for the mob, with a genius for violence, a well-earned fear of sharks, and an overly close relationship with the Federal Witness Relocation Program. More likely to leave a trail of dead gangsters than a molecule of evidence, he's the last person you want to see in your hospital room.
Nicholas LoBrutto, aka Eddy Squillante, is Dr. Brown’s new patient, with three months to live and a very strange idea: that Peter Brown and Pietro Brnwna might — just might — be the same person …
‘Beat the Reaper’ excerpt
I’m feeling slightly more focused now, but still not focused enough to talk to patients, so I go and check labs on the computer. Akfal has already copied most of them into the charts. But there’s a pathology report on a patient of Dr. Nordenskirk’s who actually has insurance, so Akfal hasn’t touched it. Dr. Nordenskirk doesn’t let anyone who’s not white or Asian interact with patients with insurance.
So I scan the report on-screen. It’s a bunch of bad news for a man named Nicholas LoBrutto. The Italian name alarm in my head goes off, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard of this guy. And anyway mobsters — like most people with options — don’t come to Manhattan Catholic. It’s why I’m allowed to work here.
The key phrase in the pathology report is “positive for signet cells.” A signet cell is a cell that looks like a ring with a diamond (or a signet, if you’re still sealing your letters with wax) on it, because its nucleus, which is supposed to be in the center, has been pushed to the wall by all the proteins the cell can’t stop making because it’s cancer. Specifically, either stomach cancer or cancer that was stomach cancer and has now metastasized, like to your brain, or your lungs.
All stomach cancers suck, but signet cell is the worst. Where most stomach cancers just drill a hole through your stomach wall, so you can have half your stomach cut out and conceivably live, just not be able to s--- solid, signet cell cancer infiltrates the stomach along the surface, producing a condition known as “leather bottle stomach.” The whole organ has to go. And even then, by the time you’re diagnosed it’s usually too late.
The CT scan of Nicholas LoBrutto’s abdomen is inconclusive about whether his cancer has spread or not. (Although, helpfully, he now has a 1 in 1,200 chance of contracting some other form of cancer just from the radiation of the scan. He should live so long.) Only surgery will say for sure.
And in the meantime, at six thirty in the morning, I get to go tell him all of this.
Mr. LoBrutto? There’s a call for you on line one. He didn’t say, but it sounded like the Reaper.
Even for me, it’s early to be wanting a drink.
LoBrutto is bedded down in the Anadale Wing, the tiny deluxe ward of the hospital. The Anadale Wing tries to look like a hotel. Its reception area has wood-patterned linoleum and a schmuck in a tuxedo playing a piano.
If it really were a hotel, though, you’d get better health care. The Anadale Wing actually does have hot 1960s nurses. I don’t mean they’re hot now. I mean they were hot in the 1960s, when they first started working at Manhattan Catholic. Now they’re mostly bitter and demented.
One of them shouts out to ask where the hell I’m going as I pass the charge desk, but I ignore her on my way to LoBrutto’s “suite.”
When I open the door I have to admit it’s pretty nice for a hospital room. It’s got an accordioning wall, now mostly retracted, that divides it into a “living room” — where your family can come eat dinner with you at an octagonal table covered with vinyl that looks easy to clean vomit off of — and a “bedroom” with the actual hospital bed. The whole thing has floor-to-ceiling windows, with a view, at the moment, of the Hudson River just starting to catch light from the east.
It’s dazzling. They’re the first windows I’ve looked out since I got to work. And they backlight LoBrutto in his bed, so he recognizes me before I recognize him.
“Holy s---!” he says, trying to crawl away from me up the bed, but held back by all his IV and monitor lines. “It’s the Bearclaw! They sent you to kill me!”
Excerpted from “Beat the Reaper” by Josh Bazell. Copyright (c) 2009, reprinted with permission from Little, Brown and Company.