Shedrow

  SHEDROW

  SHEDROW

  A NOVEL

  DEAN M. DELUKE

  Publisher of Fine Books www.greyswanpress.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Dean M. DeLuke. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Grey Swan Press

  www.greyswanpress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used ficticiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Grey Swan Press hardcover edition, August 2010

  100% acid-free paper

  Printed in the United States

  __________________

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010927308

  __________________

  PERMISSIONS

  Tell Me On A Sunday

  From SONG & DANCE

  Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

  Lyrics by Don Black

  © Copyright 1979 Andrew Lloyd Webber licensed to The Really Useful Group

  Ltd. And Universal/Dick James Music Ltd.

  All Rights for Universal/Dick James Music Ltd. In the U.S. and Canada Controlled and Administered by Universal – PolyGram International Publishing, Inc.

  International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  Story of My Life

  Words and Music by Jon Bon Jovi and Billy Falcon

  © Copyright 2005 Universal – Polygram International Publishing, Inc., Bon Jovi

  Publishing, Warner – Tamerlane Publishing Corp. and Pretty Blue Songs

  All Rights for Bon Jovi Publishing Controlled and Administered by Universal – PolyGram

  International Publishing, Inc.

  All Rights Resered. Used by Permission.

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  Headline and news article reprinted with the permission of the Lexington Herald-Ledger,

  copyright 2007. Permission does not imply endorsement.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9800377-6-0

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgements

  At the first writers workshop that I attended, a three day course given by Michael Palmer and Tess Gerritsen on medical fiction writing, Michael Palmer said of the writing process, “It’s hard work.” He was right, and my work was made lighter by many mentors and assistants, including the above two masters of the medical thriller. Another master, Robert Dugoni, was invaluable as well. All three authors take part in the SEAK Writing Seminars, the creation of Steven Babitsky, Esq.

  Jim Thayer and Amy Wallen are both accomplished writers and wonderful teachers, and they critiqued portions of my work at various stages of development. I thank them for their patience and apologize for any stubbornness.

  My wife Theresa faithfully read the first draft of every chapter, providing important first blush commentary and continuing encouragement.

  My daughter Deanna, a voracious reader and gifted writer, has great editing instincts. She is as adept at finding the dropped comma as she is at prescribing plot refinement. She made this a better story before it ever met the critical eye of an agent or editor.

  Mary Jane Howell is the Public Relations Director for Dogwood Stable. She has been around thoroughbred horses all her life, and she knows the business inside out. She was my first pick for an insider review, and I’m grateful for her assistance.

  Many other friends and associates were kind enough to read my story prior to publication, and each of them provided meaningful appraisal: Barry Roy, Paul, Nick and Joe Madelone, Dr. Bret Gelder and Dr. Agnes Gelder, Deborah Douglas, Bernard Conners, Dr. Robert Liebers and Dr. Susan DeLuke.

  Special thanks to Gloria and Jocelyn Kelley of Kelley and Hall Book Publicity and to Monica Driver of Equus Media.

  My father, Dr. Dominick DeLuke, smuggled me into Green Mountain Park to see my first horse race at the tender age of eleven, with a wink and a nod from the gate attendant—you had to be eighteen in those days at that particular race track. He later employed me on our farm in Chestertown, NY, during my high school and college years, at a time when he was a preeminent force in the breeding and the racing scene in New York, and I was just a college kid enjoying the horses.

  W. Cothran Campbell is the founder of Dogwood Stable and the patriarch of the thoroughbred racing partnership. He has written three books on thoroughbred racing, chronicling a lifetime of people and places. His business model has been copied endlessly, but Cot continues to have that special knack for selecting a good horse at a moderate price. I’ve had the privilege of partnering on some of them.

  Finally, for the cover, Barbara Livingston allowed me to use and modify her photo of Walsh, a Seattle Slew allowance horse, taken at trainer Pete Vestal’s barn. Additionally, her photo of a morning workout in the mist at Saratoga was used for the title page. Barbara is an enormously talented equine photographer and a delightful person.

  I have come to learn a great deal about the horses, the people, and the sport of thoroughbred racing over the years. It is a wonderful sport with a rich history, colorful characters, and at its epicenter, the magnificent thoroughbred racehorse.

  “And of all the nonsensical things—I keep thinking about

  the horse!”

  –Equus, Peter Shaffer

  Prologue

  The blindfold was torn off Dr. Gianni’s eyes, and he squinted at the light, trying to focus on the two men who had dragged him from his office at gunpoint, thrown him into the back seat of a car, and transported him to the small room where he now sat. There were no windows, the only light coming from a bare bulb in a ceiling fixture. The walls were all cinder block, except for a metal garage door that had been closed behind them. The room seemed like part of a warehouse, or one of those self-storage units. With the blindfold off, Gianni could see a hint of sunlight where the cinder blocks abutted a tin roof.

  Gianni was seated at a metal table, his hands bound behind his back. At one end of the table stood Sal Catroni. Unlike the other man, he wore no disguise. His longish hair was slicked back neatly, white at the sides, darker on top. His brow was furrowed in a scowl, amplifying the deep frown lines between his black-looking eyes.

  Catroni spoke first. “You know who I am?” he said.

  Gianni shook his head.

  “I’m Sal Catroni, of the Catroni family, and this here is Hector. Hector was a medic in the marines. He’s here to help you with some medical treatment.”

  Hector stood at least six-two, all of it solid muscle. He wore a tight white dress shirt, its silk sleeves rolled neatly to the middle of his massive forearms. A ski mask, open at the forehead, concealed his face, and his closely cropped black hair stood mostly on end. It reminded Gianni of a 1960s style flat-top cut, only not as stiff.

  “Hector has some tools for you, Doc,” Catroni said.

  Hector opened a clean white linen cloth, the texture of a dishrag but with a starched white appearance. Inside were surgical instruments. Dr. Gianni instantly recognized them—there was a blade handle and several large #10 blades, the kind a surgeon would use to make a long incision. It was not a delicate blade, but one meant to cut hard and fast through a lot of tissue with a single swipe. Next to the blades was a bone cutting forceps, which Gianni knew to be a Rongeurs forceps. Then there was a large pile of neatly folded gauze pads.

  “Recognize those tools?” Catroni asked.

  Gianni nodded.

  “Well, Hector here is prepared to do a little surgery today.”

  Catroni released Giann
i’s hands, placing his left hand on the table beside the white cloth, and the other hand behind Gianni’s back, re-binding it tightly to the chair with duct tape.

  “Now Dr. Gianni, Hector here is going to start with the tip of your ring finger, on your left hand. You are right-handed, aren’t you?”

  “What do you want from me?” Gianni said. He tried not to appear flustered. Years of surgical training and interminable hours on call had left him with a coolness under pressure, evident even now.

  Catroni continued to talk. “It’ll just be the tip, so he won’t need that bone cutter, not right off anyway. And of course, we do have a few questions to ask you along the way, and maybe a favor or two, as well.”

  Hector struggled to put a pair of latex surgical gloves over his huge hands, then attached the blade to the handle with a dexterity that surprised Gianni, given the sheer size of his hands.

  Hector said, “Hey, Sal, he’s got no ring on it, no wedding band. You and Janice still married, Doc? Hold still, now, so I only take the tip.”

  Gianni thought the voice was vaguely familiar.

  He used one hand to reinforce Catroni’s grip on Gianni’s left hand, isolating the finger and then slicing cleanly through the tip, taking less than an eighth of an inch with the blade cut. The cut was so fast that Gianni barely registered any pain, but he screamed, his sangfroid suddenly gone, when he saw Hector reach for the bone cutter.

  “Relax,” Hector said, “I just want to clip the nail end, so it’s nice and neat. I want it to be nice and neat.” He clipped the nail end square and flush with the amputated finger stump. Blood poured out from the cut skin and Gianni winced as Hector grabbed a clump of gauze and squeezed it over the bloody digit.

  Catroni then untied Gianni’s right hand, and Gianni instinctively clenched the blood drenched gauze in an attempt to slow the bleeding.

  “Look,” Hector said. “The doctor knows what to do for the bleeding.”

  Catroni spoke next. “Now you know that will heal just fine in no time. It was only a sliver, after all. And once it does, why, you’ll be just as good a surgeon as you ever were, so we have no problem…yet. But the problems will begin when Hector has to do more. Because the next cut is on the next finger over, the middle finger, and just a little farther up. So this time Hector gets to use that bone cutter to clip a little bone, too. Then it’s on to the index finger, and a little higher up still. So by the time we get around to the thumb, the whole thing pretty much goes, Doc.”

  Chapter One

  New York, NY

  Dr. Anthony Gianni entered OR Suite 5 with his hands raised up as if in prayer, scrubbed and ready for the towel.

  “Music to my ears,” Dr. Larry Rosen said, stroking his salt and pepper goatee through his surgical mask.

  “What’s that?” asked Dr. Gianni.

  “Regular sinus rhythm,” Rosen said, looking up at the EKG machine. “It’s music to my ears.”

  Rosen was not Gianni’s favorite anesthesiologist, especially on a difficult case, though he was a damn good one and probably had an IQ that placed him in the upper echelons of Mensa. Gianni was perfectly comfortable with Larry’s intelligence and clinical skills, it was just that the constant banter could wear on him after a while.

  “You know what they say about anesthesia,” Rosen continued, “Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. I just love the boredom of that normal sinus rhythm: beep…beep…beep.”

  “Me, too.” Over the years he had probably heard Larry profess that cliché no less than fifty times. He had also heard far too much about Rosen’s computer whiz son, his shopaholic wife, and assorted gossip dealing with any of the OR staff who were fortunate enough to be in another room at that moment. Then, of course, there were countless jokes, mostly bad ones.

  Gianni’s hands were now dry and he thrust them one at a time into the gloves held by the scrub nurse.

  “Anthony, how are your horses doing?” Rosen asked.

  “Not now, Larry,” Gianni said.

  Rosen looked up at Gianni from his stool at the patient’s head, then continued his banter. “All right, so listen to this joke, then. You hear the one about the definition of fascinate?”

  “Don’t think I have,” Gianni said. “Can we put a CD in, Brenda?”

  Brenda Byrne was functioning as the circulating nurse, coordinating the needs of the patient and the surgical team and working outside of the sterile field around the operating table. She answered in a husky voice that betrayed her long term smoking habit. “Sure, what do you have in mind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…how about something classical to start with.”

  “Uggh,” Rosen said, “Nothing worse than classical music at this hour of the morning.”

  “Too bad, Dr. Rosen,” Brenda replied. “The surgeon is captain of the ship, you know.”

  “All right, so here’s the story,” Rosen went on undaunted.

  Blue surgical drapes were placed over the patient, and the scrub nurse and surgical assistant took their positions around the operating table. Directly opposite Gianni was Dr. Willard Drew, who would act as first assistant on the case. Drew stood on a stool that boosted him eight inches. He remained quietly focused on the surgical site, now draped off and painted bright orange with betadyne, ready for the incision.

  “Okay to begin?” Gianni asked.

  “He’s quiet as a puppy,” Rosen said. “Go for it. Start time… 8:10 AM.”

  Gianni began with a single, smooth cut four inches in length. As blood oozed into the wound, Dr. Drew used the cautery to zap the bleeders.

  “Great, Will, keep up with those.”

  “So these three kids are in their third grade class,” Rosen started.

  “Clamp, please.” Dr. Drew continued to clamp off and cauterize the bleeders.

  “And the teacher says, ‘Who knows the definition of fascinate?’ She says, ‘You have to use the word properly in a sentence.’”

  The surgeons were already through the skin and underlying structures, almost ready to expose the tumor in bone.

  “The first kid says, ‘I can do it…I can. When I see a bird fly, it fascinates me.’ So the teacher says, ‘That’s good, Mary, that’s good. Let’s have another.’”

  A Mozart piano concerto diluted Rosen’s chatter, and Gianni spoke to Drew. “The tumor has broken through the bone right here, and based on the CT scan I think the margin of our resection should be over here.”

  “So the second kid says, ‘The full moon in a clear sky is fascinating.’”

  “We’re ready for the surgical saw now,” Gianni said.

  Rosen continued, “So then the third kid chimes in with his answer. ‘Well, last Christmas we got this sweater for my Aunt Sharon. And it had twelve buttons. But she’s so fat and her boobs are so big that she could only fasten eight.’”

  Dr. Rosen let out a big belly laugh, but it was drowned out by the whine from the surgical saw as it cut through the diseased bone. Brenda and the scrub nurse groaned.

  “You like that one, Anthony?”

  “I think I heard it before,” he said, passing the saw across to his assistant to complete the second cut, which would allow them to take out the tumor-filled bone and place a metal plate to bridge the defect.

  Dr. Drew shifted his stance on the footstool and placed the saw tentatively. The beam from his headlight darted back and forth as he looked from the wound to the x-ray viewbox, then back again. “Here? What do you think, Anthony?”

  “Well, you have to be sure you get all the diseased bone, so you have to be pretty high up, but we don’t want to bag the maxillary artery. I can probably reach it from this side if you want, Will.”

  “No, I should do it, I’ve got a more direct line of vision on it.”

  Rosen stood up from his stool at the patient’s head and peered into the surgical field. “Everything okay, boys?”

  “Making good time,” Gianni replied.

  Drew began the cut and within seconds the entire fi
eld filled with bright red blood, as if a faucet had just been turned wide open. Drew froze.

  Gianni spoke calmly but loudly now. “Two inch packing, lots of it and quickly please.”

  Drew recoiled somewhat unsurely, and Gianni spoke again. “There are four hands in this wound now, and they all need to be put to use. Will, suction.” As quickly as he suctioned the field became completely filled with blood, the faucet still turned on full blast.

  “Back to basics,” Gianni said, “We pack the site and wait ten minutes.”

  Rosen looked at the suction canister filling with blood. “Okay, boys, from the looks of that canister we just lost about three units of blood. I’m calling for two units and some fresh frozen plasma. His pressure is down and we have a pulse of 130, sinus tach.”

  Blood continued to pour into the canister as Gianni packed several feet of gauze into the wound, like an accordion. It took several feet to completely pack the site. When the last of the gauze was pushed into the wound to tamponade the bleeding vessel, Gianni applied some hand pressure to the outer portion of the pack, and looked up at Drew.

  After a few more minutes, Drew seemed to have regained his composure. He said, “The bleeding has slowed to a trickle, but we need to just sit tight for a few minutes now.”

  Gianni removed his hand from the top of the packing. “Ten more minutes by the clock,” he said. “Countdown begins now, 8:40 a.m.”

  “Can’t you clamp the damn thing?” Rosen asked.

  Gianni loved it when the anesthesiologist suddenly became a surgeon. “Probably not, Larry. It’s inaccessible to begin with, and it usually retracts up under the bone when it’s cut. But with the pack we can stabilize things, and worst case scenario, we leave it in and return to the OR in forty-eight hours to remove it.”

  “Can you tie off the carotid?” Rosen asked.

  “Won’t help. Too much collateral flow from the opposite side of the neck.”