Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3 Read online

  Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3

  By

  Robert I. Katz

  Other Books by Robert I. Katz

  Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future

  The Cannibal’s Feast

  The Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series:

  Surgical Risk

  The Anatomy Lesson

  Seizure

  The Chairmen

  Brighton Beach

  If a Tree Falls

  The Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind:

  The Game Players of Meridien

  The City of Ashes

  The Empire of Dust

  The Empire of Ruin

  The Well of Time

  The Survivors:

  The Towering Flame

  Praise for the Books of Robert I. Katz

  “Surgical Risk is a highly original medical mystery…Peppered with insightful comments on medicine and its practitioners, Surgical Risk is a well-crafted and richly different mystery.”—Mystery Scene Magazine

  “…Kurtz and Barent make a compelling investigative team, and Surgical Risk is a mystery with plenty of suspense and twists”—Mystery Review Magazine

  “…the expertly realized background and the solid professionalism of the prose and dialogue mark Katz a writer to watch.”—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (About The Anatomy Lesson)

  “…a suspenseful medical mystery which grabs the reader from the first page and takes us on a ride you won’t soon forget…You can’t put it down.”—Midwest Book Review (About Seizure)

  “…one of the most unlikely and enjoyable amateur detectives around…this battle-loving doc with the snarky sense of humor is outrageous fun.”—Mystery Scene Magazine (About Seizure)

  “Recommended…”—Library Journal (About Seizure)

  Table of Contents

  Kurtz and Barent Mystery Series: Books 1-3

  Other Books by Robert I. Katz

  Praise for the Books of Robert I. Katz

  Table of Contents

  Surgical Risk

  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

  —The End—

  The Anatomy Lesson

  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

  —The End—

  Seizure

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  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

  —The End—

  Want to read more about Richard Kurtz?

  Surgical Risk

  A Kurtz and Barent Mystery

  by

  Robert I. Katz

  Surgical Risk: A Kurtz and Barent Mystery

  Copyright © 2002 by Robert I. Katz

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form, without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Steven A. Katz

  To Bob

  Chapter 1

  “So this character comes into the Emergency Room,” Nolan said. “He’s well dressed. He looks normal. He smiles politely, apologizes for bothering us, and says he has six acupuncture needles up his penis.” Crane, Liebert and Kurtz silently ate their pizza while they considered Nolan’s statement. Six acupuncture needles up the penis, all of them felt, deserved at least a moment of silence.

  Crane wiped olive oil from his fingers, opened the box and picked out the last slice of pepperoni. “Didn’t that hurt?” he asked.

  “It didn’t seem to bother him,” Nolan said.

  “But why did he do it?”

  Nolan grinned. “Probably because he’s a pervert.”

  “He didn’t say that, did he? ‘I like to shove things up my penis because I’m a pervert.’”

  “I guess not,” Nolan said.

  “Well, what did he say?”

  “He said that he had an itch.”

  “Hell of an itch,” Crane said, and took a bite out of his pizza.

  Crane was stout, with broad shoulders and thick, muscular arms. Nolan was tall, stooped and lean. Both men were pale, pasty faced and sunken eyed. It was a body habitus endemic to surgery residents, a breed that rarely saw the sun and subsisted for the most part on pizza, take out Chinese and junk food.

  “So what did you do?” Kurtz asked. Richard Kurtz had been an attending surgeon for nearly three years. He was almost as pale as the residents but somewhat better rested and much better fed. The others stared at him. Nolan gave a quick, cautious smile. Three nights before, a skinny kid with a pierced tongue, a pierced nose and probably a pierced brain, tripping out of his mind on amphetamines, with tattoos covering most of his torso, had tried to strangle one of the orderlies; but beyond the simple application of brute force the kid had no technique whatsoever. Kurtz had knocked him down and sat on him, an act which considerably reinforced Kurtz’ already macho reputation. Privately, Kurtz thought the reputation absurd, but he wasn’t going to fight it.

  “We took him to the O.R., did a cysto and managed to grab them with
a biopsy forceps. Turned out there weren’t six of them. There were eight.”

  “Jesus,” Crane said with a shudder.

  Kurtz raised a brow, shook his head and took a sip of his coke. “That’s even weirder than a gerbil up the ass,” Liebert said.

  They all nodded in unison but the gerbil story was old hat, and probably untrue. Kurtz had heard it from several different sources over the years. Supposedly one of Hollywood’s top action heroes, a guy married to a gorgeous model whose face had appeared on every magazine cover in America, had come into the E.R. at New York Hospital with a gerbil up his ass. It made a great story—but no such case report had ever appeared in the medical literature.

  “Does anybody know which particular foreign body in the rectum is responsible for the greatest number of E.R. visits?” Kurtz asked.

  “Dildos,” Nolan said immediately. “And vibrators.”

  “Very good,” Kurtz said. “What’s number two?”

  “Cucumbers?” Crane said.

  “Nope. They’ve been reported, but they’re not in the top two or three. Anybody?”

  Nolan shrugged. Crane ate his pizza. Liebert smiled like the good little medical student that he was, waiting to be enlightened.

  “Depends on the study, actually,” Kurtz said. “One says rubber balls, one says glass bottles, another one says wooden dowels.” He shrugged.

  Crane visibly winced. “I’ve seen a couple of vibrators. I haven’t seen any wooden dowels.”

  “Trust me,” Kurtz said. “You will.”

  “I read a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine a couple of years ago,” Nolan said. “It was written by a British urologist visiting America. He was invited to look in on a cysto and he sees a sign in the patient’s bladder saying, ‘Drink at Joe’s Bar.’ At first, he thought it was the American penchant for advertising carried to an extreme, before he realized that the guy had shoved a swizzle stick up his urethra.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Kurtz said. “There are just as many nut cases in England as there are over here.”

  “Hey, I’m just telling you what it said.”

  Crane leaned back in his seat and covered a yawn with his fist. “I read a letter in The New England Journal from a physician who was out jogging in the middle of winter. It was really cold out and his running suit wasn’t warm enough. By the time he got home, he could barely feel his penis. Nobody was home, so he dropped his pants and began to warm it up with his hand. At the same time, while he’s standing there in the foyer, he begins to flip through the latest issue of the New England Journal, which is sitting there with the mail. Just then, the front door opens and in walks his wife. The letter said that she wasn’t amused.”

  “I don’t get it,” Liebert said. “What do you mean?”

  Crane rolled his eyes. Nolan grinned. “The wife thought he was jerking off while reading the New England Journal.”

  “And the New England Journal printed this?” Leibert said.

  “I guess they figured it was sort of a human interest story.”

  Kurtz put his feet up on the edge of the desk, took a slow deep breath and willed his tight muscles to relax. The hall outside his office was dimly lit and silent. It was one A.M. Only an hour before, they had finished sewing up a young woman who had been stabbed in the chest by a jealous boyfriend. But at the moment things were quiet: no cases in the E.R., all the patients tucked in and sleeping, no vomiting or sudden fever or cardiac arrest. Nothing to do but sit tight and wait for the shift to end. They should go get some sleep themselves, Kurtz thought. You never knew.

  “But wasn’t he embarrassed?” Liebert asked.

  “Who?” said Nolan.

  “The guy with the acupuncture needles: wasn’t he embarrassed?”

  “Oh, him.” Nolan yawned, seemingly bored with the subject. “Not in the slightest. The attending urologist told me afterward that the guy would probably get a stricture. He’ll have trouble peeing for the rest of his life.” He shook his head again. “Crazy.”

  “Crazy,” Kurtz murmured. He put his feet down from the desk, opened a drawer and began to rummage through it. “You want to see crazy?” He found what he was looking for buried under a pile of old papers. “This is really crazy.” He held it up.

  Crane scratched his head. Nolan slowly nodded. Liebert blinked, wrinkled his nose and stared.

  It was a chest x-ray. Three flat razor blades nestled between the lungs, obscuring the shadow of the heart. “A psych patient,” Kurtz said. “His name is Bill Mose; he’s a schizophrenic. He sits around, watches T.V. and smokes cigarettes.” Kurtz shrugged. “You talk to him, he makes no sense whatsoever but he occasionally expresses the opinion that he’s being persecuted. He considers himself to be misunderstood and perfectly well adjusted. He likes to eat things.”

  “Jeez,” said Crane, “like Hannibal the Cannibal.”

  “He doesn’t eat people,” Kurtz said, “just things.”

  “I thought they didn’t allow smoking in the hospital,” Liebert said.

  “They do for the long-term inpatients. Some idiot decided to make a civil rights case out of it and threatened to sue.”

  “What happened to him?” Liebert asked.

  “We got the razor blades out with an endoscope. Within a week, he had swallowed a pencil eraser and a couple of pens, so we took him to the O.R. and did it again.”

  “Is he still alive?” asked Crane.

  “So far as I know, he’s upstairs,” Kurtz said. “On the locked ward. He’s been there for years.”

  Three nights later, a pharmacist’s aide came to the door of the locked ward, peered in through the glass and waited until every patient within sight had moved away to a healthy distance. At this hour of the night, there were only a handful: Bill Mose and a few others whose inner clocks ticked to their own distinctive beat. The aide looked to be a new one. Mose didn’t recognize him, but he obviously knew the routine, quietly waiting by the doorway while the patients shuffled off. As always, Mose was the last, but finally he too reluctantly moved down the hall, and the aide turned the key in the lock and entered, closing the door behind.

  The patients ignored him, all except Mose, who pretended to as much apathy as the rest but whose attention focused like radar on the jangling keys that represented freedom.

  The pharmacist’s aide handed over his shipment of pills while the head nurse signed for them and a little redhead with a sour face named Weems began to put the pills into each patient’s medicine drawer.

  The pharmacist’s aide walked back down the hall, scanned the immediate area to make certain that none of the patients were near enough to slip out and inserted his key. The door opened. The door closed. Sadly, Mose shook his head and shuffled up to the solid steel barrier, staring down the hall outside the unit to the elevators. As he always did, Mose grasped the doorknob and tried to turn it, expecting the usual solid resistance, but this time something was different. It took him a moment to realize what it was: the doorknob turned smoothly in his fist. The door swung open.

  Confused, Mose peered out into the hallway, then back into the ward. He frowned, uncertain, then he slowly smiled. His heart pounding, fully expecting to hear the nurses’ excited voices yelling behind him, he stepped out into the corridor, closed the door silently and padded down the hall, whistling between his teeth.

  Dr. Sharon Lee let the hot water run over her face and stood under the shower for a long, luxurious moment, forcing herself to relax. It was three A.M.

  Sharon Lee hated stat C-sections. Everybody did. A fifteen year old girl, with no history of pre-natal care, had come into the E.R. in labor and been rushed up to obstetrics with a frank breech. Sharon shuddered and breathed a long sigh and felt her heart finally begin to slow down. The residents had started without her and a good thing, too. Mother and baby were both doing fine but they had been very, very lucky.

  Sharon had a clinic in the morning but it would take a half hour to get home and the same amount of time to get b
ack. The call room beds were lumpy but the rooms were quiet and it wasn’t worth the bother to leave and then return.

  She finished her shower, got into clean surgical scrubs and crawled under the covers. Then she turned out the light and rolled over, snuggling into the pillow. Her eyes closed and within minutes she was asleep.

  The sound of a door creaking open awakened her and she wondered for a hazy moment where she was before a pair of hands gripped her throat. She tried to struggle, to cry out, but the hands were too strong and soon a red haze settled over her eyes and her struggles grew weaker and then she shuddered one final time and was dead.

  At nine A.M., as he did every weekday morning, Oscar Hernandez knocked on the call room door and waited. After a moment, he slid his key into the lock and pushed the door open. He stopped suddenly, gulped and stared. “Oh, my God,” he whispered. Carefully, he closed the door and re-locked it, then he hurried down the hallway to the nearest phone.

  Chapter 2

  Kurtz’ first patient in the morning was a burly construction worker who clung to a conviction that nothing was really wrong with him, despite the pain that made him wince whenever he moved his right side. The anesthesiologist, Vinnie Steinberg, had given the patient a sedative as soon as they entered the room and now his eyelids fluttered and he smiled sleepily while they put on the EKG and the blood pressure cuff. Steinberg took a quick look at the monitors, made a notation on the anesthesia record, winked at Kurtz and pushed the plunger on a syringe of propofol. The patient mumbled once more that he only had a “stomach ache,” then his eyes glazed over and Kurtz went outside to scrub.

  When he got back ten minutes later, Nolan and Crane had already put the drapes up and Nolan was standing by the patient’s side, holding a knife and looking at Kurtz expectantly. “Go ahead,” Kurtz said.

  Nolan’s knife slid in, split skin, fat, fascia and muscle. Crane helped him while Kurtz silently watched. Nolan reached the bowel, followed it along to the cecum and pulled it up onto the skin. The appendix sat there on the end, long, red and swollen, oozing a bit of serous fluid from the tip. “Just in time,” Nolan said. Kurtz nodded. The appendix would have ruptured soon; the patient was lucky.