The Hand of Christ (25 page)

It was their chance encounter – precipitated by their own respective relationship pains – at a piano bar that revealed new plans for the two of them.

After spending an evening drunk in each other’s words, the instant connection between them was obvious; from that moment forward not one day would go by without a word between the two in some manner.

In the beginning, it was deliberately slow. Each understood what they had, how they felt, but were convinced that it couldn’t be true.

Not willing to travel the same path that leads to usual despair between every star-crossed love, Michael and Sonia approached their growing braided love in a tantric manner much the way a man climbs Everest: slowly, carefully, and with a forcibly controlled anticipation and expectation, but expecting a storm induced fatal avalanche.

They made it to the top.

Before the Flight Attendant with the drink cart could arrive and Michael could begin his rehearsal, the man sitting in the middle seat
had
to use the restroom, Murphy’s Law he supposed.

Tapping on Michael’s shoulder, the man said, “Sorry, fella, gotta use the can. Do you mind?”

“
No, no, of course not,” but Michael really did mind, this was one trip where he didn’t want to get out of his seat.

With deliberate and intentional movements, Michael shifted in his seat to make standing up much easier. Pushing himself up with his strong upper body, Michael pulled his one good leg under him as best that he could to stand; unfortunately, cattle-class is not conducive for these types of precise movements, even for the physically gifted. Before he fell, Michael knew it was going to happen. He attempted to put all of his weight from his good side to the already stiffened bad side, a necessary movement given the contortion required to stand on a full plane. The sharp pain that had seemed to be content to reside in his hip while sitting unexpectedly tore through his torn muscles and down the side of his thigh.

The wounds opened where the butterfly stitches and the super glue had been hastily applied.

The flash of new pain ran white-hot throughout his nervous system. Impervious to any need to retain his dignity, Michael lost his short fight with gravity. Without any ability to stop the inevitable, Michael fell into the man sitting across the aisle from him.

The collision caused a collective gasp from nearly everyone in the rows behind him. Fortunately, the man with whom Michael suddenly became intimate had an abdomen that any corpulent Texan would be proud to carry.

If one is to fall on top of another be sure that it is into the distended belly of a rather happily fed man.

The sudden thought of a smiling, happy Buddha uttering such insightfulness didn’t do much to shed the forthcoming embarrassment; if it hadn’t been for the sudden and excruciating pain screaming down his side, Michael may have cared more for his impending disposition.

In the face of danger, Michael has learned on numerous occasions that time does indeed slow down. With the help of adrenaline, all senses become hyper aware. Such a phenomenon offers recourse in less than desirable situations, and has served to help Michael on a number of missions.

While falling, Michael could see the large abdomen rushing toward him; this is where his fortune ended.

The bottom two buttons were unfastened, perhaps to give the man’s girth more room to expand, leaving the lower part of the man’s shirt open and baring an overly hairy naval that looked as if its hair had been parted down the middle. The worst part was that Michael could actually see little droplets of sweat beaded up and suspended on the hairs.

Just moments later, the sensation of his face planting nose down into the man’s belly was followed by the nearly convulsive reaction by his gag-reflex. The smell was acrid and wafted through his nostrils. The pungent taste of the sweaty, fat, and hair-infested stomach was coupled with the sensation of a sticky wetness on the man’s sudoriferous abdomen. All of it permeated the barrier offered by Michael’s lips, which was completely ineffective at protecting Michael’s tongue.

Michael swallowed the inevitable regurgitating side effects, thankful that he didn’t vomit in the man’s lap, and attempted to right himself, but found that the awkward position he was now in, coupled with the currents of pain flowing through his lower extremities, made lifting himself difficult.

This must have been obvious; he felt the hands of the man from the middle seat reach under his arms and swiftly extricate him from his unenviable location.

The man raised Michael to his feet; another wave of pain rushed through Michael. This time the pain was not isolated to just one side but screamed through his entire body. Michael doubled over and nearly fell to his knees. If it hadn’t been for the man from the middle seat who still had a firm hold of him, Michael would have fallen again. Instead, he vomited into the aisle, and a bit went down the front of his shirt.

“
Let me help you to the bathroom buddy, you need it more than me,” said the man.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Cherry Creek

Denver, Colorado

Dr. Sonia Sterling, MD had just arrived home from the hospital; the shift had been long and ended with one of her most difficult patients’ mother being led away in handcuffs, and the little girl taken into the protective custody of Child Protective Services.

Her patient, a young girl, was barely eight-years old, and had been brought in for her twelfth visit over the past three months. The first visit was seemingly standard: vomiting, fever, diarrhea, and a sore throat. Sonia had run the standard tests on the girl and prescribed antibiotics for what appeared to be a case of strep throat. She had sent the mother off with instructions to finish the antibiotic regimen, and to keep her daughter well hydrated and rested.

During the following three months, the mother returned, at first only about once every other week, but then had escalated the frequency of her visits. This had been the third time this week that she showed up unannounced.

Her daughter’s strep throat had never really been cured, and the little girl displayed other maladies that soon became difficult to explain.

The lab work had initially come back negative for strep throat, or for any infection. Initially, Sonia had no reason for large-scale concern given that the throat symptoms were seemingly minor. Often overprotective parents filled her waiting room with snot nosed, sniffling, coughing, and crying kids that had picked up every childhood bug and virus imaginable. However, Sonia’s lack of concern had been short lived.

On her visits, the mother often conversed with relative ease about medical topics and treatments, and ranted about how she always knew that she could have made a good doctor. Something about the way she let on nagged at Sonia. It hadn’t been until the second set of lab results that connected the mother’s preoccupation with medicine and her daughter’s problems. Sonia had spent the past few nights scouring her medical texts to connect the lab results with the mother’s preoccupations. Finally, she had found it, which led to Sonia’s diagnosis, not just of the daughter, but of the mother as well.

“
Sodium dichlorisocyanurate,” the lab results had said. The compound is often found in pool cleaners, but when Sonia learned that the family didn’t have a pool and that the daughter does not swim she dug a little further. What she found was that the compound was an active ingredient in Comet, a household cleanser.

The mother had been feeding her daughter the abrasive cleanser; she was slowly poisoning her daughter to death.

Sonia diagnosed the mother with Munchausen’s by Proxy, a Fabricated or Induced Illness (FII) where, in this case, the mother purposely injures her child. On today’s visit – and what would be her final visit – the child had been close to death. Gaunt, lethargic, and eyes more shallow than Sonia had remembered, the little girl’s blood pressure was dangerously low. The child’s skin was pasty and gray and she was coughing bloody sputum. In the back of her throat, Sonia could see newly formed, open wounds burned from the ingestion of the cleanser.

Hospital Security was in Sonia’s office only moments after she depressed a hidden alarm. The paper work and requisite questions by the police and protective services had consumed much of her afternoon, time that she had planned to spend away from the hospital and preparing for Michael.

Michael would be home soon and Sonia wanted to be ready for him. She hated his last minute trips, but knew it was part of his job and accepted it. It was the life of a corporate finance guy.

She was always excited when he was on his way home; an hour ago she received a text message from him: “Flight on time. Be home by 8:00, LUME.” She loved how he always ended a text with “LUME”; it was his quick way of saying “Love U, ME.”

She had just enough time for a quick shower and to prepare Michael a simple dinner. Before jumping into the waiting stream of therapeutic hot water, Sonia opened a bottle of Michael’s favorite chardonnay: Yellow Tail, a reasonably cheap Australian white wine.

Michael loved wine, and had spent some of his spare time trying to learn about vintage, flavors, and those pretentious things that make a wine good. She secretly made fun of him when he put the cork to his nose and whiffed; she had tried this once herself, but couldn’t smell anything but wet cork.

His foray into the world of wine-tasting was even more entertaining at neighborhood parties when Michael would take a glass of wine, hold it up to the light, and peer at the liquid as if certain secrets were being divulged only to him about the wines clarity, purity, and color.

He would follow the same steps: spin the liquid in the glass, tilt it to his nose, and take a deep snort followed by a taste. Always, Michael would attempt to impress with his less than level-one sommelier expertise.

“
A good blend of dark cherry and tobacco, hints of cedar.”

What the hell does that mean? Why would anyone want to drink wood and tobacco? Does it taste good, that’s all she really wanted to know? To her, the “markings” of a good wine meant little.

On the other hand, a crisp martini, now that was a drink: lots of alcohol, a pretty glass with one purpose, and no pomp. She knew that some of their friends thought he was showing off when tasting a new one; however, those that knew him, that really knew him, would understand that, simply, he just enjoyed wine.

It was part of his personality, that part that she really adored about him. He had a need to understand all things to their finest detail. Wine was merely an extension of this need: delicate, intricate, and defined by its heritage, year, and reaction to climate. She understood why he appreciated it, even if she, or their friends, didn’t get it.

Sonia opened the bottle of Yellow Tail chardonnay; it would
need to breath
he would say. She marveled at how his lack of pretension allowed him to call this one his favorite. The bottle was often on sale for $6.99 at the liquor store shelved as far away from the good wines as possible, and next to those interesting wines whose bottles had small handles, came in jug form, or in boxes.

What she didn’t know was that the loyalty Michael displayed to all things important to him could be explained by his choice in this particular chardonnay.

Unknown to her, it was the result of one particular mission that had gone terribly wrong, which gave Michael his seemingly inexplicable affinity for Yellow Tail. A double agent of the CIA – that Michael had uncovered – had been en route to her hospital with the mission to inject Sonia with a lethal dose of a batrachotoxin, a poison derived from colorful and seemingly harmless, hopping Dendrobates.

Used by the Choco Indians of Western Colombia, the toxin from the skin of the poison dart frog has no effective antidote. For Sonia’s petite frame, the double agent needed an amount that weighed less than a large grain of sand to kill her. It was to be retaliation against Michael;
professional discourtesy
they called it.

She had been within minutes of her life ending, but Michael had found the double agent first, and had terminated the man’s life with a chokehold so fierce he would later be told that the pressure from the strangulation, not only crushed the hyoid, but also caused the double agent’s eyes to dislodge. The clean-up team had also found the man with the poisoned syringe sticking in his chest. A bit of overkill perhaps, but Michael was pissed.

Sonia had been in the hospital’s gym running on the treadmill. A patient had failed to show up for his appointment and she decided to use the time to get some exercise; it had been a fortunate twist of luck.

Michael was shaken by the event; never had his work come so close to home. After being debriefed, he had gone to the nearest bar and ordered the house chardonnay; a chilled Yellow Tail was delivered. It was the best pour of wine that he had ever tasted, even though it had been served in the wrong glass.

From that day forward, Michael always had a pour after returning home from a successful mission. Although there was no way that Sonia could know, it was a simple nostalgic reminder to Michael of the love he had waiting at home, and how close he had been to losing her.

After opening the wine, Sonia went to the third floor master bedroom of their tony Cherry Creek townhome and shed her clothes. Demure and lean, at thirty-seven she looked ten years younger than her age, and still maintained a physique of which any woman would be jealous.