Chapter 13: The Garage

The kid wheeled the first box into Mercy's boardroom on a hand truck at six fifty-eight.

Two paramedics from the night crew came in behind him with four more each.

They stacked them along the wall under the oil portraits of dead chairmen.

Thirty-one banker's boxes, every one with a year and a month on the end in black marker.

Cornelia looked up from her agenda.

"What is this?"

"Public comment," I said. "And my seat."

Fifteen chairs.

One of them had a brass plate that said BONDHOLDER, and nobody had sat in it in the twenty years since the bonds were sold.

I pulled it out and sat down.

"You're suspended," Cornelia's lawyer said from her right hand.

"From medicine. Not from forty million dollars."

Down the table, Davis was in the foundation chair with a legal pad and no notes on it.

He looked at me once and looked away.

The back of the room was full.

The Globe. Two television crews. Nurses in scrubs and sneakers who'd come up from the floor on their dinner break.

My charge nurse sat in the first row of public chairs with the legal pad from Conall's kitchen on her knees.

Conall wasn't there.

I'd asked him to wait in the car.

"If you're in the room, it's about you," I'd said.

"And if I'm not?"

"It's about four thousand people."

Cornelia called the meeting to order.

Gwyneth gave the presentation.

She wore navy and spoke softly into a little microphone clipped to her collar.

The glass towers. The marina. The little ambulance icon.

"Mercy General's trauma center is underutilized," she said. "Those patients will be absorbed seamlessly."

Seamlessly.

"Questions?" Cornelia said, already reaching for the next page.

"One," I said.

I stood up.

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