Finding Davey by Jonathan Gash Read Free Book Online Page A

accidents, right?”
    “Right.”
    “This clinic’s the best for accidents. Pop and Mom already knew that.”
    Alone, Clint clicked the remote control. On came a show, much laughter and clapping. He liked these shows. He didn’t know any answers, because he’d had an accident.
    He dozed, was woken later for medication by another nurse. For an instant he imagined he’d heard a child cry out, but he must have been wrong because here was nice. They wouldn’t let anybody cry.
    This nurse wasn’t fat like the morning nurse. She showed him pictures of her children. The children’s daddy was a pilot on a plane. The children went to school. One was in second grade, just like he’d been before his accident.
    Doctor interrogated the nurse near the secluded room.
    “How did he respond to the photographs?”
    “I showed him Number Forty-One M and Sixty-Two N,” she said quietly. “I gave him school grading information and my supposed husband’s career. Clint responded as you predicted, Doctor. Acceptance plus.”
    “What TV does he select?”
    “Comedy, cartoons.”
    Doctor harrumphed. “That travel programme was careless. Delete it.”
    “Right away, Doctor.”
    “Take no chances with this one.”
    The nurse hesitated. “Should we worry, Doctor?”
    “This kid’s buyer is a real operator. Know what I’m saying?”
    In the room the sleeping boy didn’t stir. Vapour trails crossed as blue sky darkened to indigo.
    On the ceiling and the wall shadows cast by the fading sun became diverse shapes with blurred outlines. The boy’s eyes opened. For a moment he glimpsed the shadows, then he dozed, his mind slipping away. Doctor and nurses were nice.

    Doctor sat at his desk across from his framed diplomas, reviewing the listed staff of his Special Care Rehabilitation Unit. He had a star system – four stars for maximum reliability, down to one star. Such was his scheme of profit sharing, and so expert was he in employment pre-selection, that only three ancillary staff had ever merited only one star.
    One star meant deletion, death by accident.
    The first had been a medical technician, now twenty years deceased. A road accident was always the most reliable, and least investigated, means of elimination. The second had been a nurse whose man, a loutish beachblower, persuaded her to attempt to blackmail Doctor, so amateurish as to be laughable. Both had oh-so-accidentally drowned, drugged up, under the breakwaters by Old Bayonne Beach. He didn’t regret the cost. Their insolence deserved an ugly death.
    The third member of staff had been a secretary. Her jealousy had become intolerable and her imperious demands on him ridiculous. He regarded hysteria as forgivable. But to insist that he decline sex with willing nurses in her favour was effrontery. From a mere clerk, to the prime mover of the enterprise that put bread in her mouth? Yet, he thought with satisfaction, her shrieked ultimatum that he marry her had been a compliment. She was found dead, victim of an unsolved assault in her apartment on Congreve and Vane. Expensive again, but requisite.
    None of these deaths was Doctor’s fault, for the Clinic had to remain sacrosanct. Every employee received a heavy bonus for each child abducted from its parents and satisfactorily processed before being sold on with its new identity. Staff either believed, or were removed. Simple asthat. And only three among so many was a superb track record.
    Starkly, the truth was this: The original parents of the children he acquired didn’t
deserve
them. Society needed somebody to rescue the children, and simply transfer them to decent strangers. If biological parents couldn’t be bothered, then he, the Doctor, had a medical duty to pass their children to better parents.
    That’s all it was: duty fulfilled. Richer people, sure, who could pay well. But so?
    There were fees, naturally. Had to be. He set the fees at whatever he judged they could afford. They were glad to pay.
    After all,