Cooks Overboard by Joanne Pence

“Hmm.”
    “What is it, doctor?” the nurse asked.
    “Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”
    “But…as you see in the chart, the botulism was too far advanced by the time we saw him. He’s not expected to last the night. All we can do is keep him comfortable.”
    “Yes.” He took off his stethoscope and lightly rapped it against his hand while staring at her. He ran a finger up and down the long, flexible cord. His gaze jumped from it, to her thin neck.
    “There’s an emergency under way,” he said abruptly. “Don’t you think you should check on the other patients while their nurses are busy trying to save a life? I don’t need my hand held.”
    The young nurse blushed fiercely. “Oh, I’msorry. I didn’t mean…excuse me, doctor.” She hurried down the hall.
    As soon as she was gone, he entered the room, shutting the door behind him. “Sven,” he called, his hand on the patient’s chest. “Sven, wake up! The Hydra sent me. The Hydra. Even if you’re asleep, you’ve got to know what that means.” He waited. “Come on, Sven! I can’t give her no for an answer, and you know it.”
    He lifted Ingerson’s eyelids. “Yo, Sven!” He shone a light into the glazed eyes, but Sven seemed to be somewhere over the rainbow.
    He turned around and started to go through Ingerson’s belongings—the clothes he’d been wearing and his papers—but quickly gave up and simply stuffed them all into his satchel. He walked over to Sven again. “Wake up, goddammit. She’s going to fry us both. I might as well crawl into the bed next to you right now, ’cause that’s where I’ll end up if you don’t tell me where in the hell you put the microfilm, or whatever it is. She won’t tell me what’s on it, the bitch. What does she think, that I’ll steal it from her or something? Goddammit, Sven.” He grabbed Sven by the shoulders and started shaking him. “Wake the hell up!”
    “Doctor?”
    He looked up. The young nurse was standing in the doorway staring at him, her mouth gaping.
    He withdrew his hands and stepped back. “It’s the latest technique, nurse,” he said. “Thebrain, you see, actually does hear and understand what’s going on, even if the patient appears to be in a deep sleep or coma. So, you just demand that he wake up. Sometimes it works.”
    He grabbed his clipboard and headed out the door. “And then sometimes it doesn’t.”

20
    About an hour later, Angie changed to a simple yellow cotton dress and walked into the galley. Mike Jones and his assistant, Andrew Brown, were in a corner talking, Brown perched on a counter and Jones sitting in a chair. They smiled in greeting when they saw her, Brown quickly hopping off the counter and retreating to the back of the kitchen with his habitual timidity.
    “Please make yourself at home, Miss Amalfi,” Jones said, approaching her. “I leave it to you to look around and decide what you’d like to cook. We’ve got a pretty good selection of spices and foods to choose from.”
    “I will, thanks,” Angie said.
    “Can I take your things?” Jones asked as he led her to the food storage room.
    All she had was her tote bag. “It’s no problem,” she said, putting it down just inside thedoor. She immediately began checking canned goods on shelves, refrigerated items, and those in an enormous freezer compartment. After last night’s storm, she could understand why everything was so snugly packed and braced. If her kitchen at home had been thrown around the way this galley and storage area was, everything she owned would be in the middle of the floor in a thousand pieces.
    She checked the meat and fish, telling herself it didn’t matter that Paavo hadn’t joined her out by the pool. It was clear he wasn’t at all interested in how she would be spending the rest of the afternoon.
    Had he joined her now, the only thing he could have done was peel garlic, anyway. He was great at it once she’d showed him the trick of slightly mashing the clove