Chapter 8: Don't

Dante drank the coffee standing up.

He had not expected it.

He had not expected anything, standing in that doorway with blood on his cuff, except to be asked to leave.

Instead there was a mug in his hand, and Javier's back, and the scratch of a red pen.

"Tell me what you know about heparin," Javier said again.

"Nothing."

"Good. You can be an honest reader." Javier turned the sheet around. "Question four. Read it aloud."

Dante read it.

"Eighty thousand units. That sounds like a lot."

"It's ten times too much. A patient who gets that bleeds from every place a body can bleed."

Javier tapped the page.

"There are eight like it. Somebody wrote a whole paper of wrong answers and made it look like a leak."

Dante set the mug down.

"On purpose?"

"On purpose."

"Who?"

"I have a guess." Javier's mouth twisted. "I don't have proof."

"Thomas," said Daniel, from the bed, in a voice full of sleep.

"I said I don't have proof."

"I'm not using proof. I'm using his face." Daniel yawned until his jaw cracked. "I'm going back to sleep. Wake me for the revolution."

Dante looked at the sheet.

Under the typeface he saw the shape of a long, quiet cruelty.

A hundred students, and their futures, and their patients someday.

At the top of the rank list was the one person who would never use it.

He would be blamed anyway when the class scored badly.

His hands went cold, and then very, very calm.

He knew exactly how to deal with this.

He had done it for years.

"Excuse me," he said. "I need to make a call."

He went out into the corridor and shut the door.

The hall was empty and yellow, with a vending machine humming at the end of it.

He dialed a number he had known by heart for eleven years.

"Boss." The voice was thick with night. "Is it the cellar?"

"No. Another thing." Dante kept his voice low. "A student called Thomas. His father owns a shipping line."

"Yes, boss."

"Find me everything about it. The loans, the insurers, the harbor leases. I want it on my desk by noon."

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