Fallen: A Novel by Slaughter Karin

Author:Slaughter, Karin [Slaughter, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub, mobi
Tags: Sample Book
ISBN: 9780345528223
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Published: 2011-06-21T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

SO, HE TELLS ME HE WAS CHANGING THE OIL IN HIS CAR, AND it was hot in the garage, so he took off his pants …”

“Uh-huh,” Sara Linton managed, trying to feign interest as she picked at her salad.

“And I say, ‘Lookit, bud, I’m a doctor. I’m not here to judge. You can be honest about …’ ”

Sara watched Dale Dugan’s mouth move, his voice mercifully blending in with the lunchtime noise of the pizza parlor. Soft music playing. People laughing. Plates sliding around the kitchen. His story was not particularly riveting, or even new. Sara was a pediatric attending doctor in the emergency department at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital. She’d had her own practice for twelve years before that, all the while working part-time as the county coroner for a small but active college town. There was not an implement, tool, household product, or glass figurine she had not at some point or another seen lodged inside a human body.

Still, Dale continued, “Then the nurse comes in with the X-ray.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, trying to inject some curiosity into her tone.

Dale smiled at her. There was some cheese lodged between his central and lateral incisors. Sara tried not to judge. Dale Dugan was a nice man. He wasn’t handsome, but he was okay-looking, with the sort of features many women found attractive once they learned he’d graduated from medical school. Sara was not as easily swayed. And she was starving, because she’d been told by the friend who’d set her up on this ridiculous blind date that she should order a salad instead of a pizza because it looked better.

“So, I hold up the X-ray and what do I see …”

Socket wrench, she thought, just before he finally reached the punch line.

“A socket wrench! Can you believe it?”

“No!” She forced a laugh that sounded like the sort of thing that came out of a windup toy.

“And he still kept saying he slipped.”

She tsked her tongue. “Quite a fall.”

“I know, right?” He smiled at her again before taking a healthy bite of pizza.

Sara chewed some lettuce. The digital clock over Dale’s head showed 2:12 and a handful of seconds. The red LED numbers were a painful reminder that she could be at home right now watching basketball and folding the mountain of laundry on her couch. Sara had made a game of not looking at the clock, seeing how long she could go before her self-control crumbled and she watched the blurring seconds tick by. Three minutes twenty-two seconds was her record. She took another bite of salad, vowing to beat it.

“So,” Dale said. “You went to Emory.”

She nodded. “You were at Duke?”

Predictably, he began what turned into a lengthy description of his academic achievements, including published journal articles and keynote speeches at various conferences. Again, Sara feigned attention, willing herself not to look at the clock, chewing lettuce as slowly as a cow in a pasture so that Dale would not feel compelled to ask her a question.

This was not Sara’s first blind date, nor, unfortunately, was it her least tedious.

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