Alligator Moon

Guilliot kept working. “Give me a reading.”

“She’s full code.”

“Sonofabitch!”

Susan moved to Dennis’s elbow. “Stay calm. You can do it. What else do you have?”

“Calcium gluconate.” He injected the drug. Fragments of his own life flashed in front of him as if he were the one slipping away. The sound of his Puh-paw’s voice singing along to his fiddle music on Saturday nights. The smell of venison frying in the big black skillet. The way Kippie Beaudreaux’s tongue had felt the first time he’d kissed her.

The past collided with the present, all bucking around inside Dennis while the monitor continued to glare at him, daring him to defy it.

No easy chatter now. No reassurance. Just deadly silence. He turned to Guilliot. The usually imperturbable surgeon had backed away from the table, jaw clenched, looking totally stunned.

None of the glory. All of the blame. The role of the anesthetist. Dennis grabbed a vial of bretyllium.

Too little, too late.

“Oh, shit!” Angela shoved the instrument cart out of the way, jumped on the black footstool and started pumping on the patient’s chest, hand over hand.

Finally Guilliot snapped out of his paralysis and took over for Angela, pressing the patient’s heart between the sternum and the spine with quick, steady motions.

Dennis was so scared, it was all he could do to hold the long needle as he filled it with epinephrine.

Susan grabbed his arm. “Not intracardiac, Dennis. Not yet.”

“Get the hell out of the way.” Holding the needle in one hand, he grabbed the edge of the sterile drape with his other and ripped the fabric from the runners.

Guilliot stopped pumping as Dennis slid the point of the needle under the breast bone. The room felt small. Icy cold. Quiet, as if they’d quit breathing so that the patient could have their breaths.

They all watched the abnormal rhythm play across the face of the monitor, but Angela said the words out loud. “The tack.”

Dennis snatched the paddles from the crash cart and stuck them to the patient’s chest. The shock lifted her off the table, but still the monitor screen went blank.

Asystole.

Dennis administered the shock again. And again.

Finally Susan took his arm. “She’s gone, Dennis.”

“No one loses a cosmetic surgery patient on the table.” Guilliot’s voice boomed across the operating room, as if he were God issuing an eleventh commandment.

It changed nothing. Ginny Lynn Flanders was dead.

CHAPTER ONE

Six months later

CASSIE HAVELIN PIERSON stared at the sheet of paper. The divorce decree. All that was left of her marriage to Attorney Drake Pierson. She’d have expected the finality of it to be more traumatic, had thought she’d feel anger or pain or maybe even a surge of relief. Instead she felt a kind of numbness, as if the constant onslaught of emotional upheavals over the past year had anesthetized her system to the point that it was unable to respond.

She tossed the decree into a wire basket on the corner of her desk and went back to pounding keys on her computer. Almost ironic that the next word she typed was the name of her ex-husband, but he was all the news these days—him and his client’s suit against Dr. Norman Guilliot.

Leave it to Drake to snare the hottest case of the year. Acclaimed plastic surgeon to the wealthy pitted against the best-known TV evangelist in the south. The locals fed on the details like starving piranhas on fresh flesh, but then New Orleanians always loved a good scandal. So did her boss. It sold magazines, and circulation numbers sold advertising.

The Flanders case had been the hottest news item going for the past six months, even beating out the young woman who’d accused one of the city’s famous athletes of rape. The reverend was on TV every week, proclaiming the gospel according to Flanders and shedding tears over the wife he claimed had been lost to a case of malpractice by the famed Cajun surgeon. And somehow Drake had expedited the trial beyond belief to take advantage of the hype.

Cassie finished the article, hit the print key and picked up the phone on the corner of her desk to make another stab at reaching her dad in Houston. The president of the United States was probably easier to reach, but then the president didn’t draw nearly the salary Butch Havelin did as CEO of Conner-Marsh Drilling and Exploration.

She dialed the number and waited.

“Mr. Havelin’s office. May I help you?”

“It’s Cassie, Dottie. Is Dad around?”

“I’m sorry. You just missed him again. Did you try his cell phone?”

“I did and left a message there, as well.”

“I’m sure he’ll get back to you soon, but if this is an emergency I might be able to track him down.”

“No need for that, but thanks for the offer.” She hung up the phone and slid her notes on the Flanders v. Guilliot case into a manila folder.

“You’re looking glum for a Friday night,” Janie Winston said, stopping by her desk. “Bad day?”

“No worse than usual.”

“A few of us are going to Lucy’s for happy hour. Why don’t you join us? You can drink as much as you want and stagger home from there.”

“Staggering through the warehouse district on a Friday night. Boy, does that sound exciting.”

“Not only glum but sarcastic. Why do I smell a rat named Drake Pierson behind this mood? What’s he want you to give up now, the sheets off the bed he shared with you?”

“Too late. I burned those after I found he’d brought the Tulane cheerleader to the townhouse to take her testimony. Besides, Drake is old news.” She reached over, retrieved the decree and handed it to her co-worker.

“Over and done with. I’d think you’d be celebrating, not sulking. He really is lower than pond scum, you know?”

“Evan Flanders doesn’t think so.”

“Evan Flanders has visions of dollar signs dancing in his head. So, forget ’em all. Let’s go get a margarita.”

Cassie was tempted. She almost said yes, then spied the postcard propped against her pencil cup. “Actually I’m going shopping tonight.”

“Buying something suitable for a hot divorcée?”

“Could be, or at least for a relaxing vacation far away from this humidity.”

“Now that’s what I call a divorce party. When are you leaving?”

“Immediately, I hope, if the airline will let me use my flight credits for the last trip I had to cancel.”