Enough of this bullshit. Time to show him I’m serious.
“I’m going to give you one more chance,” I say, the gun now pointed directly at my professor’s forehead. “Tell me how you killed Frank.”
I pray that Conlon will come clean with me. Because I don’t have a choice anymore.
Dr. Conlon shakes his head. He speaks the next sentence slowly and clearly: “I’m really sorry.”
He’s sorry. It’s as good as a confession as far as I’m concerned.
So I squeeze the trigger, just like my father taught me to do when I was a kid.
The force of the gun firing travels up the length of my arm and knocks me back slightly. I haven’t fired a gun in a long time, and I’d forgotten to compensate for the backward momentum. When I lower the pistol, I feel a sharp ache in my shoulder.
Dr. Conlon’s head is slumped forward. There are little pieces of skull and brain splattered all over the wall behind him. It looks so… real. Unlike the cadaver, which never looked quite like a real human being. I let the gun slip from my fingers and fall onto the floor. I stare at my anatomy professor’s dead body as the bile rises up my throat.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” I whisper the words over and over again as I fall to my knees on the floor.
He deserved this. You did what you had to do.
“Shut up!” I scream. I bury my face in my hands and rock back and forth. I’ve done something too horrible for words.
There’s no taking back what I’ve just done. My hand rests on the gun on the floor. I pick it up and place it back in my jacket pocket. I struggle to my feet and leave Dr. Conlon’s office for the last time.
But as I’m shutting the door to the office, I realize I’m not alone in the hallway. Dr. Patrice Winters is coming around the corner, wearing a dress suit that seems so bizarre since it’s practically midnight. She is absolutely the last person I want to see right now.
Her symmetric features are filled with alarm as she hurries toward me. “Mason,” she says, “what was that sound?”
Then her gaze drops to the gun in my hand. She freezes in her tracks as her lips form a little surprised “O.” She has put two and two together, and now her fate is sealed.
Patrice opens her mouth as if to say something, but I don’t want to hear it. I raise the gun, and for the second time tonight, I pull the trigger.
It’s easier the second time.
Much like Dr. Conlon, Patrice drops instantly. I shot Dr. Conlon in the head, but I hit her square in the chest, possibly right through her heart, judging by the amount of blood pooling beneath her body. She dies almost instantly, right before my eyes.
The Magnum holds six rounds, and I’ve used two, which means I have four more bullets left in the chamber. And I’m not leaving here until every single potential witness is dead.
PART V
SASHA
75
THE FIRST DAY
“Lookto your left and look to your right.”
It’s a ridiculous exercise, but I do it anyway. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to check out my classmates, and now I’ve got one. I look around and scope out the competition.
I’m underwhelmed.
Everyone talks about how talented and brilliant med students are. Nobody in this room looks particularly talented or brilliant, though. For the most part, they look like a bunch of kids. Most of them are dressed in jeans and T-shirts with dumb slogans on them. One girl has the word “sweet” written entirely in glitter across her chest. I’m sure she’s going to be a stellar physician.
People ask me all the time if I’m still in high school, but I’m actually twenty-six years old—older than most of my classmates. In college, I worked as a waitress to help pay my tuition and then took on a second job as a nanny (for a spoiled three-year-old brat) when Dad got sick and needed help paying bills. Do you think it’s easy to be premed while working two part-time jobs? It isn’t. I ended up having to take a bunch of postbacc classes just to finish my premed requirements.
I also took care of my father. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when I was in high school and declined pretty fast. Lots of people live for decades with Parkinson’s, but my father wasn’t so lucky. By the time I was in college, he had to give up his job, and I moved back home to help my mother take care of him. It all fell on my shoulders.
Dad hated how much I had to give up for him. I’m his youngest daughter, and he came to this country from Russia in his twenties and worked hard his whole life at minimum-wage jobs so I could have every opportunity available to me. He kept saying to me, “Sasha, don’t worry about me. Go become a doctor. I’ll be fine.”
