Duma Key

I stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. "Elizabeth's doctor? What are you talking about?"

"For a physical. Word on the street is you've been putting it off, boss."

"Wireman did this," I muttered, and ran my hand through my hair. "Wireman the doctor-hater. I'll never let him hear the end of it. You're my witness, Jack, I will never -"

"Nope, he said you'd say that," Jack said. He tugged me back into motion. "Come on, come on, we'll never beat the rush hour traffic if we don't get rolling."

"Who? If Wireman didn't make the appointment, then who?"

"Your other friend. The big black dude. Man, I liked him, he was totally chilly."

We'd reached the Malibu and Jack opened the passenger door for me, but for a moment I just stood there looking at him, thunderstruck. " Kamen? "

"Yep. Him and Dr. Hadlock got talking at your reception after the lecture, and Dr. Kamen just happened to mention that he was concerned because you still hadn't had the checkup you'd been promising to get. Dr. Hadlock volunteered to give you one."

"Volunteered," I said.

Jack nodded, smiling in the bright Florida sunshine. Impossibly young, with a canary-yellow copy of Mortuary Science for Dummies tucked under his arm. "Hadlock told Dr. Kamen they couldn't let anything happen to such an important newly-discovered talent. And just for the record, I agree."

"Thanks a pantload, Jack."

He laughed. "You're a trip, Edgar."

"May I assume I'm also chilly?"

"Yup, you're a bad refrigerator. Get in, and let's get back over the bridge while we still can."

iii

As it happened, we got to Dr. Hadlock's Beneva Road office on the dot. Freemantle's Theorem of Office Waiting states that one must add thirty minutes to the time of one's appointment to arrive at the time one is actually seen, but in this case I was pleasantly surprised. The receptionist called my name at only ten past the hour and ushered me into a cheerful examination room where a poster to my left depicted a heart drowning in fat and one to my right showed a lung that looked charbroiled. The eye-chart directly ahead was a relief, even though I wasn't much good after the sixth line.

A nurse came in, put a thermometer under my tongue, took my pulse, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm, inflated it, studied the readout. When I asked her how I was doing, she smiled noncommittally and said, "You pass." Then she drew blood. After that I retired to the bathroom with a plastic cup, sending Kamen bitter vibes as I unzipped my fly. A one-armed man can provide a urine sample, but the potential for accidents is greatly magnified.

When I returned to the exam room, the nurse was gone. She had left a folder with my name on it. Beside the folder was a red pen. My stump gave a twinge. Without thinking about what I was doing, I took the pen and put it in my pants pocket. There was a blue Bic clipped to my shirt pocket. I took it out and put it where the red pen had been lying.

And what are you going to say when she comes back? I asked myself. That the Pen Fairy came in and decided to make a swap?

Before I could answer that question - or consider why I had stolen the red pen to begin with - Gene Hadlock came in and offered his hand. His left hand... which in my case was the right one. I found I liked him quite a lot better when he was divorced from Principe, the goateed neurologist. He was about sixty, a little on the pudgy side, with a white mustache of the toothbrush variety and a pleasant examining-table manner. He had me strip down to my shorts and examined my right leg and side at some length. He prodded me in several places, enquiring about the level of pain. He asked me what I was taking for painkillers and seemed surprised when I told him I was getting by on aspirin.

"I'm going to examine your stump," he said. "That all right?"

"Yes. Just take it easy."

"I'll do my best."

I sat with my left hand resting on my bare left thigh, looking at the eye-chart as he grasped my shoulder with one hand and cupped my stump in the other. The seventh line on the chart looked like AGODSED. A god said what? I wondered.

From somewhere, very distant, I felt faint pressure. "Hurt?"

"No."

"Okay. No, don't look down, just keep looking straight ahead. Do you feel my hand?"

"Uh- huh. Way off. Pressure." But no twinge. Why would there be? The arm that was no longer there had wanted the pen, and the pen was in my pocket, so now the arm was asleep again.

"And how about this, Edgar? May I call you Edgar?"

"Anything but late to dinner. The same. Pressure. Faint."

"Now you can look."

I looked. One hand was still on my shoulder, but the other was at his side. Nowhere near the stump. "Oops."

"Not at all, phantom sensations in the stump of a limb are normal. I'm just surprised at the rate of healing. And the lack of pain. I squeezed pretty darn hard to begin with. This is all good." He cupped the stump again and pushed upward. "Does that give pain?"

It did - a dull, low sparkle, vaguely hot. "A little," I said.