Duby's Doctor
Authors: Iris Chacon
Tags: #damaged hero, #bodyguard romance, #amnesia romance mystery, #betrayal and forgiveness, #child abuse by parents, #doctor and patient romance, #artist and arts festival, #lady doctor wounded hero, #mystery painting, #undercover anti terrorist agent
by Iris Chacon
copyright 2016 by Delia L. Stewart
Smashwords Edition
Please note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales
is entirely coincidental.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Additional
Books by Iris Chacon
As he fell, he wondered why he had jumped
from a perfectly good aircraft. He assumed it was perfectly good
because he heard the helicopter’s rotor blades beating the air as
its engine noise moved off into the distance somewhere above
him.
Half-formed thoughts lumbered through his
muggy brain.
Pain.
Pain screamed through every nerve ending of
his body. So much of it, he couldn’t even pinpoint its source.
Cold.
Wind whipped at bare skin as he fell.
Where are my clothes?
Self-preservation bellowed at him from deep
within a mind-shrouding fog, “Look down, Dilbert!”
He seemed to be stretched out on his back in
the air; he fought the up-rushing wind stream to turn his head
slightly. In his peripheral vision, Caribbean-blue ocean stretched
in all directions.
“Prepare to hit the water!” Self-preservation
yelled.
He tried to pull himself into a tight ball,
rather than smack the surface like a pancake, possibly breaking
every bone in his body. If he could become a hydrodynamic object,
and if he hit the water at a good angle, and if he could manage to
swim, or at least float, an undetermined number of miles, he just
might survive this. Whatever this was.
He tried to wrap his arms around his knees
and pull them into his chest, but one knee wasn’t following
instructions. One leg bent toward his torso as he ordered, but the
other leg was AWOL for all intents and purposes, being dragged
along for the ride. Oh, well, he would just do the best he
could.
Impact was sudden, loud, and painful at a
level he had never dreamed possible. He was mildly aware of being
warmer now that he was underwater instead of plummeting through
air. But, the altitude from which he had fallen, combined with his
weight concentrated into a small irregular ball, sent him many
meters beneath the surface.
Briefly he hung suspended, virtually
weightless, in a womb of warm, salty water. He sensed, close at
hand, a great darkness that promised relief from the horrible pain
if he would only relax and let endless blackness swallow him.
“Up! Up! Air! Air!” shouted
Self-preservation.
Leave me alone. I just want to
sleep.
“Kick!” Self-preservation insisted. “Kick
your feet! Move your arms! Go up! Up!”
Reluctantly, he forced his limbs to move,
though it seemed not all of them obeyed. Still, he followed the
bubbles rising from his mouth and nose, and he defied the pain and
blackness, until his head broke the water’s surface. Involuntary
gasps siphoned air into his aching lungs again and again until he
was breathing almost normally.
“Float,” was the last word Self-preservation
uttered.
Lying on his back, the man floated upon the
gently rolling sea and let his mind fade into the welcoming
darkness.
He neither knew nor cared whether he would
somehow survive the hours and miles of sea that lay between him and
the nearest land.
BETWEEN
CHAPTER 1 – AIRBORNE
At dawn over Elliot Key, seagulls glided
across the pink-orange-blue pastel streaks of sunrise mirrored in
the glassy blue-silver ocean. Waves swished against the soft sand
that fringed the island, and a sailboat sloughed at its anchor
cable. Against the eastern sky, the boat’s tri-corn sails formed a
romantic silhouette against the sky, while its three-sided shadow
doppelganger rippled on the surface of the water.
Halfway between the sailboat and the shore, a
honeymooning couple rowed their dinghy toward the beach. She
giggled at something he said. He crooned something seductive. She
laughed and swatted him playfully.
Miami city lights adorned the northwestern
horizon like a diamond choker, two dozen miles away as the osprey
flew.
Gulls cawed to one another, the sea gurgled
against the shore, and the honeymooners’ oars softly slapped the
water. A breeze off the ocean rustled dry palm fronds. A
four-foot-tall blue heron stood sentinel among flying buttresses of
mangrove roots.
When they reached the shore, the couple
dragged their little boat shushing across the sand onto the beach,
beyond the water’s grasp. They kissed beneath the rustling palms,
and when they stepped apart, the man tickled the woman.
She twisted away, laughing and scolding, and
ran from him, come-hither fashion. He pursued. They left two sets
of footprints in the dimpled sand as they trotted like children
along the beach in the pale dawn.
From time to time the mangrove trees’ arching
roots crept all the way to the water line, forcing the couple to
detour into ankle-deep surf and come back to the sand. At one such
spot, the woman was several yards ahead of the man because he had
stopped to examine a nearly intact conch shell. She worked her way
from sand to water, wading around a mangrove root, and glanced back
at her pursuer.
He straightened from his shell collecting and
winked at her.
She giggled and turned to look ahead of her
again. As she rounded the mangrove, she screamed.
The man reacted to her scream and doubled his
pace. He found her standing rigidly beside the mangrove, screaming
again and again. He took in the situation and, with protective arms
around her, he turned, putting himself between her and the source
of her horror: a man’s naked body sprawled face down, tangled in
the arching tree roots.
A bedside telephone rang at the home of Frank
and Mandy Stone. Frank reached across Mandy’s impersonation of Moby
Dick in curlers. He lifted the receiver and answered with a sleepy
grunt.
“Monitoring per your orders, sir,” said a
young man. “I think the Coast Guard has your boy out on Elliot
Key.”
“Alive?”
“Uncertain, sir. They’re airlifting to Ryder
Trauma Center.”
“Well done. Thanks for the call.” Frank
replaced the receiver and sank back onto his pillow. He said a
short, silent prayer for a miracle then he rose and began to
dress.
Inside a Coast Guard helicopter, two medics
worked efficiently over an unconscious man. One medic bandaged a
head wound while the other splinted and wrapped the man’s left
leg.
“Femoral artery remained intact. That’s the
only reason he didn’t bleed out. But somebody’s got their work cut
out rebuilding this leg.”
Suddenly, the first medic stopped bandaging,
felt for a pulse, and swiftly began chest compressions. “May not
have to rebuild anything,” the medic said. “I’ve lost him
again.”
While one rescuer performed cardio-pulmonary
resuscitation, the other administered oxygen and verified the
intravenous feed was working.
The first medic chanted in time with his
rib-crunching thrusts, “Come on, man; work with me; pump for me;
stay with me.”
Minutes later the Coast Guard helicopter
landed on the roof of Ryder Trauma Center. White-coated hospital
personnel rushed to the aircraft with a gurney, everyone ducking
the still-spinning rotors and resultant dust storm. The two Coast
Guard medics helped transfer their patient to the gurney, and one
of them followed the team into the building to provide a detailed
briefing if necessary.
Such briefings were not often needed now that
vital signs and treatment information could be transmitted to the
hospital directly from the helicopter, but the personal touch was
still appreciated. And occasionally there were questions. Given the
circumstances, there were bound to be questions about this
unidentified patient, but there would be few, if any, answers.
Frank Stone was not a handsome man on a good
day, and this was not a good day. He strode into the trauma center
emergency room looking rumpled and sleepy, in a gray polyester suit
from Sears. The suit needed cleaning.
He took off his sweaty jacket and revealed
his short-sleeved, white dress shirt, which he wore with a clip-on
bow tie. Shirt buttons strained to cover a beer belly. Frank wore
white socks with brown loafers, both nearly covered by the droopy
cuffs of slacks that rode beneath his belly, several inches lower
than his natural waistline.
No one had ever guessed his age within five
years, but people always thought him old enough to know what he was
doing.
While not handsome, Frank was winsome in his
way. He gave the appearance of a well-used, long-loved teddy bear
whose stuffing was lumpy from years of hugging. Nothing about Frank
Stone’s appearance seemed threatening. When people met him for the
first time, his looks were his initial lie, to be followed
inevitably by many more.
Stone wove a path through the emergency
room’s rushing interns, nurses, orderlies, and aides, past a
waiting room filled with patients and their families, to the
registration desk. There, upon his inquiry, a nurse pointed him
toward treatment rooms at the rear, where curtains were drawn
around a crowded, noisy cubicle.
A female in surgical scrubs emerged from the
curtained cubicle, carrying a chart. Stone nabbed her with a big
paw on her elbow.
“Is he talking?” Stone asked.
“Are you family?”
Stone fished a wallet from the pocket of his
slouchy pants and showed the woman his federal identification.
“Uncle,” he said. “Has he said anything? A name? Anything?”
She shook her head. “He’s way under.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Stone,
pocketing his wallet. “How long before I can talk to him?”
She sighed with exhaustion. She had been on
duty all night, and this new patient would keep her in the
operating room most of the day.
“You’ll have to ask the neurology boys that
one,” she said. “I’m just here to rebuild the leg – mostly the knee
– if he makes it. What’s his name, ‘Uncle’?”