Read Online Rubbernecker by Belinda Bauer - Free Book Online Page A

me. Then he gets all serious and lowers his voice – as if I can’t hear him.
    ‘But I need to warn you not to get your hopes up too high. He’s not out of the woods yet. This may be as good as it gets, or he may even regress. We know so little about emergence; it’s never straightforward, and he’s still incredibly vulnerable.’
    The woman nods and catches her mascara on the back of her fingers, her optimism tempered.
    My optimism is sky high! He may or may not be a killer, but the doctor is my new best friend. He gave me a ten, didn’t he? I feel like a traitor, but I’m so grateful to him that I don’t care about the man in the next bed. I’ll worry about him later.
    Or maybe I won’t.
    He’s dead and I’m not, and that’s all that matters right now.
    When Tracy Evans and the doctor finally go away, the woman in the mask lays a rubber-gloved hand on my head.
    ‘I knew you were in there. I
knew
it!’ she says like a zealot.
    Then she leans down and kisses me dryly through the blue paper mask. ‘I love you, darling.’
    Well, thank you
, I think.
But who the hell are you?

13
    PATRICK WAS DISAPPOINTED by the heart. He wasn’t expecting an on-off switch, but he’d hoped they’d find more than a mere pump made of meat and rubbery veins, and felt deceived by popular sentiment. So far people were almost as impenetrable on the inside as he’d always found them on the outside.
    Other students had discovered scars and fused toes and numerous tattoos. Number 4 had one running around his ankle –
Diane and Maria, 1966
– that had provoked much speculation. The only vaguely interesting thing so far about Number 19 had been a small puckered hole in his side.
    ‘Feeding tube,’ Dilip had said with confidence. ‘My grandmother had one before she died.’
    ‘He probably died in hospital then,’ said Rob. ‘Unless it’s old.’
    Patrick had pushed his little finger carefully into the dark spot, and felt it travel easily through the skin and flesh. ‘It hasn’t healed.’
    ‘Fucking
gross
!’ Scott had laughed, and Spicer had given him a look that shut him up.
    Now the hole had disappeared, along with most of the skin from the torso, and the body on the white table lay opened like a butterfly chicken in an Italian restaurant. In late October they had gone through the ribs with saws bearing the brand name TUFF®. They were tentative at first, but increasingly sweaty and workmanlike, with goggles to keep the bone dust and shreds of flesh from going in their eyes. They had allowed Scott to take the lead, and he’d proved as gleeful with a saw as Patrick was devoted to bagging and tagging every tiny fragment of Number 19 spat out by the metal teeth. Theirs was the cleanest dissection area in the whole room.
    Table 22 became the first to establish a cause of death.
    ‘They could hardly miss it,’ said Scott sourly. ‘The guy’s heart is bigger than his head.’
    Five others found signs of cardiac or vascular disease that enabled them to make similar diagnoses, and each was confirmed by Mick, who ticked them off his closely guarded list.
    Patrick was not here for the cause of death, but he was still annoyed that they hadn’t got there first, and now put his money on a brain tumour. He imagined finding the pink lump nestled in the grey matter, like a pearl in an oyster.
    Meg stared down at the still-wrapped head of the dead man, as if she were thinking the very same thing.
    ‘You know,’ she said, ‘in Thailand medical students bring flowers to their cadavers as a gesture of gratitude and respect.’
    ‘OK,’ said Rob. ‘You call Interflora, we’ll all chip in.’
    ‘I’m not chipping in,’ said Patrick quickly. He only had twenty pounds a week for groceries.
    ‘Duh,’ said Scott.
    Rob hadn’t fainted since the first day, and now he dug the handle of a spoon under one thick cord running from the wrist up the forearm, and levered it up. The cadaver’s fingers curled in towards the palm. ‘Look