Hahnemann Hospital, January 1, 1990

The orderly strolled into the room to collect his cadaver. He had been at the job for a little more than a year now, and he loved it. Working in the hospital morgue paid well and afforded him the peace and quiet that he needed to study for his premed courses. The job suited him more than most, as his goal was to become a surgeon. He was now in his final year of premed, and one semester away from actual medical school, where he would be cutting open bodies and not just transporting them from one floor to another.

The body that he was picking up now was fresh. The gunshot victim had just been called, and his family had just walked out of the room. Probably the guy’s wife or fiancée or something, but whoever she was, she certainly had a nice little ass on her. This poor, unlucky bastard would now be staring down or up, watching somebody else plow that fat-ass onion she had back there.

The orderly lifted the cadaver’s hanging hand to lay it on the bed. The hand felt weird. Stranger than any other dead guy’s hand he had ever touched. The damn thing was warm, really warm. And more than that, it had a fucking pulse.

“Oh, shit!” The orderly rushed into the hall to find a nurse, a doctor, anyone who looked like they could do something. “Excuse me, ma’am. I have an emergency.”

Dr. Hopkins stopped and read the orderly’s name tag. “Stan, what can I do for you?”

“Doc, I got a dead guy in there who ain’t dead,” Stan told her.

“What?” Dr. Hopkins rushed into the emergency operating room. She clasped Quadir’s pulse. Sure as shit, he had one. She rushed to the wall and pressed the intercom.

“Stat. Emergency room personnel to the OR, stat. This is Dr. Amelia Hopkins. Emergency room surgical personnel to the OR, immediately!”

Masked emergency room personnel ran into the operating room, some of them still covered with Quadir’s blood from minutes ago.

“We got a live one here, people!” Dr. Hopkins shouted. She rushed to a corner of the room to scrub up before several nurses dressed her in surgical garb. Two more surgeons, Dr. Benjamin Brant and Dr. William Hartley, rushed into the room. “Ben, he’s still alive.”

“Hot damn!” Dr. Brant rushed to Quadir and immediately began working on him.

Dr. Hartley began issuing orders as he scrubbed up and the nurses dressed him in surgical garb.

“You’re a tough son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Dr. Brant said, smiling at Quadir. “Fight, son. That’s right, fight.”

“Set up a pint of plasma for him.” Hopkins ordered one of the nurses. “Get him hooked back up so that we can monitor his blood pressure. What’s the deal, Benny?”

“Couldn’t find that last fucking bullet. It hid behind his heart. He flatlined and we couldn’t get him back. We called him.”

“You need a woman’s touch in here,” Hopkins told him. “My hands are a lot smaller than yours. Let me see if I can work my way around in there and get that little booger.”

Dr. Brant maneuvered out of the way and allowed Dr. Hopkins to become the primary surgeon. Within seconds she was smiling at him beneath her surgical mask.

“Was this the pesky little thing you were looking for?” she asked, holding up a small, bloody, lead ball. She placed the bullet into a small dish, and then proceeded to repair the internal damage it had caused.

“Ben and I repaired most of the damage already,” Hartley told her.

“I see; you guys did a fantastic job,” she told him, assuaging their egos. Dr. Hopkins reconnected a severed artery, suctioned the blood from the wound, and monitored her patient for several moments before turning to a nurse. “What’s he looking like?”

“Blood pressure has climbed to 112 over 70 and is holding steady. Everything looks good.”

“Close him up for me, get him into ICU, and page me in an hour with his vitals,” Hopkins told them. She lifted the chart from the bottom of the bed. “Deceased” had been scrawled across it. “Get him a new chart. The patient’s name is John Smith. Everybody clear on that?”

Dr. Brant peered over at his colleague.

“I’ll alert the authorities and his family,” Dr. Hopkins told them. “Until I or the authorities say otherwise, Mr. Richards is deceased. Mr. Smith, however, is alive and doing quite well.”

“I signed the death certificate,” Hartley told her.

“I’ll take care of that, too,” Hopkins said. She turned to the orderly, who had watched the whole thing from the corner of the operating room. “Come with me.”

Amelia Hopkins led Stan out into the hallway and maneuvered him into a corner. “Stan, what I am about to say to you is very important. And I need to have your undivided attention. Do I have that, Stan? Do I have your undivided attention?”

Stan nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Stan, I have a patient in there who had a whole lot of bullet holes inside of him. Somebody doesn’t like Mr. Richards, and thought it best that he not remain with us in this life. My job, as a doctor, is to see to it that he does. But in order to do that, I am going to need your help. Can I count on you to help me?”

Stan nodded again.

“Good. Now, how many John Does do you have down there in the morgue?”

“Right now, about four or five, but the weekend is coming up. We should have a shitload of ’em coming in.”

Amelia Hopkins nodded. “Any of the ones we have fit the description of Mr. Richards in there?”

Stan smiled and scratched his chin. “One, maybe. A buddy of mines works over in the morgue at the County Hospital. I’m sure I could get you a John Doe close enough to match.”

It was Dr. Hopkins’s turn to smile. “You do that. You get me a John Doe to match, and you put this chart on him. Make sure that John Doe becomes Quadir Richards. And you let no one in to see it. He’s already been identified by his family, and you tell them that the authorities are not allowing anyone else to see the body at this time. You got that?”

Stan nodded. “Dr. Hopkins, in a few years, I’ll need a surgeon to intern under.”

Amelia shoved the chart into his hand. “You want to be a surgeon, I’ll get you there. But you better have the grades and the stamina to keep up with me.”

Stan nodded. “Deal.”

Dr. Hopkins walked to the nurses’ station. “That patient in the OR. I need for you to get me his family’s address and telephone number. You’ll probably have to look it up. You know what, see if you can cross-reference the information that you find and get me the name and telephone number of his parents.”

The nurse nodded and lifted a large telephone book from beneath the nurses’ station.

Dr. Hopkins knew that one thing was for certain: a mother would do anything to keep her child alive. A wife or girlfriend could be after an insurance policy, or her jealous lover could have been the gunman. But a mother, she would kill or die to protect her offspring. She needed the mother’s address.

The nurses and a couple of ICU orderlies wheeled Quadir out of the operating room, heading for the elevator.

“What’s he look like?” Hopkins asked.

“Vitals are stable. Blood pressure is 118 over 80.”

“Good job, Amelia,” Dr. Brant told her, exiting the operating room.

“Thanks, Benny.”

“I’m heading over to the cafeteria. Want to join me?” Dr. Brant asked.

Amelia nodded. She could use something to eat. Besides, she wanted to run a few things by Dr. Brant. He was her mentor, and she trusted him completely. It had been Dr. Brant who had trained her and helped her to hone her surgical skills to what they were today. Benny Brant was probably one of the top surgeons in the country. And for him, a wealthy Jewish surgeon from New York, to have taken a poor black girl from the Alabama countryside under his wing was unfathomable. He had dozens of doctors from some of the finest families all over the country trying to intern under him, some of whom where the sons of his colleagues. The fact that he had pulled her under his wing was something that she would forever be grateful for.