He was taken down to the cardiology unit on the sixth floor. While being wheeled down the east hallway, he passed the rooms of the lucky and the waiting-patients who had received new hearts or were still waiting. They passed one room where McCaleb glanced through the open door and saw a young boy on the bed, his body tied by tubes to a heart-lung machine. A man in a suit sat in the chair on the other side of the bed, his eyes staring at the boy but seeing something else. McCaleb looked away. He knew the score. The kid was running out of time. The machine would only hold him up for so long. Then the man in the suit-the father, McCaleb assumed-would be staring at a casket with the same look.

They were at his room now. He was moved from the gurney onto the bed and left alone. He settled in for the wait. He knew from experience that it could be as long as six hours before Fox showed up, depending on how quickly the blood work was run through the lab and how soon she came by to pick up the report.

He had come prepared. The old leather bag in which he had once carried his computer and the countless case files he had worked on was now stuffed with back issues of magazines he saved for biopsy days.

Two and a half hours later, Bonnie Fox came through the door. McCaleb put down the copy of Boat Restoration he had been reading.

“Wow, that was fast.”

“It’s slow in the lab. How are you feeling?”

“My neck feels like it had somebody’s foot on it for a couple hours. You’ve already been to the lab?”

“Yup.”

“How’d everything come out?”

“It all looks good. No rejection, all the levels look good. I’m very pleased. We might lower your prednisone in another week.”

She spoke as she spread the lab report out on the bed’s food table and double-checked the good results. She was referring to the carefully orchestrated mix of drugs that McCaleb took every morning and night. Last he’d counted, he was swallowing eighteen pills in the morning and another sixteen at night. The medicine cabinet on the boat wasn’t big enough for all the containers. He had to use one of the storage compartments in the forward berth.