Crisis by Robin Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

the apartment, relax with a glass of wine and the newest New England Journal of Medicine for an hour or so, then on to the Museum of Fine Arts to check out the current exhibition, and finally go to dinner at a new, trendy restaurant in the Back Bay.
    Whistling under his breath, Craig walked from the locker room out into the main lobby of the club. To his left was the sign-in desk, while to his right down a corridor past the bank of elevators were the bar and restaurant. Muted music could be heard from the general area. Although the athletic facilities were generally not crowded on Friday afternoons, happy hour at the bar was another story and was just beginning to gear up.
    Craig checked his watch. He'd timed things perfectly. It was quarter to five: the exact time he'd agreed to meet Leona. Although they came to the club and left together, while they were there, they each did their own thing. Leona was currently into the stair machine, Pilates, and yoga, none of which thrilled Craig.
    A quick visual sweep of the sitting area confirmed that Leona had yet to emerge from the women's side. Craig wasn't surprised. Along with a relative lack of reserve, punctuality was not one of her strong points. He took a seat, perfectly content to watch the parade of attractive people coming and going. Six months ago, in a similar circumstance he would have felt like the odd man out. Now he felt entirely at ease, but no sooner had he gotten comfortable than Leona appeared, coming through the women's locker room door.
    Just as he had critically regarded himself a few minutes earlier, Craig gave Leona a quick once-over. The workouts were benefiting her as well, though, due to her comparative youth, she'd been firm, rosy-cheeked, and shapely from the start. As she drew near, he could appreciate that she was an attractive as well as a high-spirited and headstrong young woman. Her main handicap from Craig's perspective was her Revere, Massachusetts, accent and syntax. Particularly grating was her tendency to pronounce every word ending in an "er" as if it ended in a short but harsh "a." Believing he had her interests at heart, Craig had tried to call her attention to her habit with the hope of getting her to change, but she'd reacted angrily, venomously accusing him of being an Ivy League elitist. So Craig had wisely given up. Over time, his ear had acclimated to a degree, and in the heat of the night he really didn't care whether she had an accent.
    "How was your workout?" Craig asked, getting to his feet.
    "Terrific," Leona responded. "Better than usual."
    Craig winced. The accent on terrific was on the first syllable instead of the second, and better came out as "beddah." As they walked to the elevator, he resisted the urge to comment by tuning her out. While she carried on about her workout and why he should try both Pilates and yoga, he contentedly mused about the upcoming evening and what a pleasant day it had been so far. That morning at the office he'd seen twelve patients: not too many and not too few. There had been no rushing frantically from one exam room to another, which was the usual course of events at his old practice.
    Over the months he and Marlene, his matronly main secretary and receptionist, had developed a system of scheduling patients according to each patient's need, based on the diagnosis and the individual's personality. The shortest visits were fifteen minutes for rapid, return-visit checkups with compliant and knowledgeable patients, and the longest was one and a half hours. The hour-plus visits were generally for new patients with known and serious medical problems. Healthy new patients were scheduled from forty-five minutes to one hour, depending on age and seriousness of the complaints. If an unexpected problem developed during the course of the day, such as an unscheduled patient needing to be seen or Craig having to go over to the hospital, which hadn't happened that day, Marlene would call the upcoming patients to