Beneath The Wake , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Ross Pennie

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183 pages

English

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'The eagerly anticipated fourth medical thriller in the award-winning series Epidemic investigator Dr. Zol Szabo hopes an extended cruise on the Indian Ocean with his girlfriend and his son will salve the wounds of the rough times they ve been weathering at home. As they set sail coddled in unaccustomed luxury on the Coral Dynasty, things below deck are a little less sunny for the ship s physician. Dr. Noah Ferguson reckons that bandaging the wounds of the crew s seedy missteps is just part of a job that comes with a fair share of loneliness, but he s increasingly frustrated that the most rewarding aspect of his practice must remain unspoken. When a mysterious microbe cuts a lethal swath through the crew s quarters, Noah enlists a reluctant Zol, who must put his vacation on hold to investigate the illness before it consumes everyone on board. As the body count climbs, it becomes apparent that everybody carries a secret in international waters. Miles from

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	09 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773050201
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery
ROSS PENNIE

THE DR. ZOL SZABO MEDICAL MYSTERY SERIES
Tainted
Tampered
Up in Smoke
Beneath the Wake

CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright

CHAPTER 1
Noah Ferguson had no illusions about his profession. He knew it was mostly booze, carelessness, and anonymous sex that kept him in his job. And the sailor standing opposite him in the infirmary’s harsh light epitomized that triumvirate in good measure.
Noah aimed his attention at the bandage wrapped around the man’s right forearm. Though it was smudged with some sort of dark greasy substance, it was basically intact. Not too much blood had seeped through overnight, which meant the seventeen sutures he’d put in yesterday might be doing their job. He pulled out a chair. “Okay, Tony. Have a seat. And let’s see what that souvenir from the fine city of Perth looks like today.”
The man blinked at his injured limb. His lids widened with apprehension as sheepishness tightened his lips.
Noah shrugged out of his suit jacket and took a fresh surgical gown from a cupboard. He slipped the thing over his white shirt, favourite batik tie, and freshly pressed trousers. He lifted a pair of sterile gloves from a drawer and pulled them on.
At about this time yesterday afternoon, just as the ship was about to quit Australia’s west coast, Tony had shown up with a bloodied towel wrapped around his forearm. A few minutes’ detailed inspection revealed the slash was more show than substance. Tony’s hand was intact, and despite all the blood, no arteries were severed. No tendons either. The laceration had limited itself more or less to the skin on the underside of the forearm. A defensive wound. Inflicted, no doubt, by a shattered beer bottle in the hand of an irate husband. Noah pictured a miner arriving home unexpectedly from the region’s iron pits or gold fields.
Today, as he unwrapped the bandage, Noah asked, “What brand of beer was it? Foster’s or Four-X?”
Tony wiped the sweat from his forehead with his good hand. “Sorry, Doc. The curtains, they were closed. Too dark to tell.” Filipinos didn’t do irony or sarcasm. Their specialties were humility and graciousness, too often performed to their disadvantage.
He hadn’t needed to check Tony’s chart for his tetanus-shot status. The sailor was a regular here at the infirmary, and Noah knew his stories by heart. How his brain and good manners had helped him escape the slums along Manila’s filthy Pasig River. But Tony was still single, something of an oddity among the ship’s Asian crew, most of whom claimed to have spouses or romantic partners back home.
No matter how many onshore brawls Tony got tangled in, or how many times Noah had to stitch him up, neither Captain Mario nor the cruise line’s owner, Aslan Aksoy, would ever send Tony packing. A fix-anything guy like Tony Castillo was a valuable asset to a five-star operation like Coral Cruises. Out of seemingly nothing, the man could repair anything on a vessel, from the stovetops in the galleys to the autoclave in the infirmary. At sea, and at rinky-dink ports from Suva to Banjul, Alofi to Lüderitz, replacement parts were impossible to come by. A mechanical virtuoso like Tony — who was always sober and obliging aboard the ship — was worth his weight in a thousand onshore skirmishes with angry husbands. The odd thing was, he had no imagination. He was hopeless at constructing anything new or coming up with inventive modifications to make something work better. He was strictly a repairman.
The only thing that could get Tony booted off the ship before you could say Imelda Marcos’s o utlandish s hoe c ollection would be a positive result on the obligatory annual HIV test. With the high-spirited partner swapping shoreside and below decks, the company couldn’t afford to be seen as a breeding ground for AIDS. Not with 150 upper-deck suites coddling political conservatives and industrial magnates. Noah prayed that Tony devoted as much attention to protecting his dick as he did to maintaining the mechanical innards of the Coral Dynasty .
Tony winced as Noah pulled the last of the bandage away from the sutured wound.
“Looks great, my friend. No bleeding. No infection.”
The man let out a long breath of relief.
“Let me see you curl your fingers into your palm.” Noah checked the strength of Tony’s grip by pulling against the digits. “Good. Now, straighten them.”
Tony beamed shyly and dropped his gaze. He understood mechanics and could tell his hand was going to be fine. No harm done. He looked around the room, his eyes questioning. “No nurses helping today, Doc?”
Anya and Cornelia, still under thirty, hailed from Amsterdam. Not only competent, they were open-minded and discreet, qualities he’d recognized when he’d hired them on behalf of the cruise line three months earlier. Aboard the Coral Dynasty , discretion mattered more than almost anything else. Except, perhaps, for a steady flow of vintage champagne above stairs and draft beer below.
“They’re out on a cabin call.”
Actually, they were checking on a crew member who’d been wobbly on his feet with infectious mononucleosis for the past couple of days. One of his cabin mates had called to say that Jung looked worse and wasn’t talking.
Noah’s stomach tightened. It wouldn’t have happened a third time, would it? He told himself that no, the odds against it were way too high. And a good month had passed since the others.
He completed Tony’s dressing, sent him on his way, then scribbled a note in the chart, grateful not to be encumbered with the electronic medical record plaguing his onshore colleagues. You couldn’t beat the high seas for certain efficiencies like the brief handwritten note. Here in international waters, he was free to work for the direct benefit of his patients and give special attention to those on his Endangered List. He had no need to please cadres of lawmakers and petty bureaucrats pontificating from their computers in cozy offices in cities like Toronto, Louisville, and Henley-on-Thames.
But when he looked up and saw Anya’s stricken face in the doorway, he nearly had to put his head between his knees.
On the face of it, the cause of Jung Lee’s symptoms had seemed clear. Infectious mononucleosis was a rite of passage for a young man of twenty-seven. But Noah had crossed his fingers when he’d given the affable sound-and-light technician the diagnosis. Within the past six weeks, two other crew members — Peng, an apprentice in the engine room, and Wu, an assistant in the laundry — had died in their cabins just a day or two after Noah had told them they had a touch of infectious mono. He’d promised them the disease would run its course and the symptoms would resolve; they might be tired for a few weeks, but eventually they’d be as good as new. Horrified by their unexpected deaths, he’d scrutinized their bodies here in the treatment room. He’d never been trained to carry out a formal autopsy like a pathologist, so he stopped short of slicing into their body cavities. Instead, he performed head-to-toe physical examinations and recorded his findings. The corpse of Peng, the first man to die, revealed the swollen glands and enlarged spleen Noah’s fingers had felt when the mechanic had presented two days earlier at sick parade. But he found nothing else amiss. No needle tracks, no trauma, no buttery xanthelasma around the eyes to suggest a premature heart attack from high cholesterol. Noah wrote “Infectious Mononucleosis” on Peng’s notification-of-death form. Infectious mono was almost never fatal, but medical practice had taught him to expect the unexpected. He’d been almost certain he’d never see a similar case for the rest of his career.
The Malaysian authorities at the port of Sandakan in northeastern Borneo took Noah’s paperwork at face value, completed their own official death certificate using his diagnosis, and allowed the cruise line to ship Peng’s body home to China.
The ship’s hotel director, backed by the captain, announced to the crew that Peng had committed suicide by drug overdose. No specific drug was named, and marital problems were suggested. Such subterfuge left a bad taste in Noah’s mouth, but he understood the officers’ motivation. A crew member’s death from contagious infection would be unsettling in the cramped quarters below decks. A colleague’s suicide would be seen as a clean death without implications for the health of anyone else. Noah had kept his mouth shut and had completed the official paperwork with what he honestly considered the correct cause of Peng’s death. His conscience had been clear.
A week later, he’d found himself shocked and puzzled to be faced with writing the same diagnosis on the deceased laundry worker’s form. But when he examined Wu’s corpse, the armpit lymph nodes were uncharacteristically soft, as if filled with fluid. He made a small incision with the tip of a scalpel blade and released a gush of brown pus. Anya and Cornelia recoiled at the si