Animals: Chapters Six, Seven and Eight
WHEN SURGEONS OPERATE ON PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED IT, HOW FAR WILL THEY GO TO PROTECT THE SECRET AND KEEP THE MONEY COMING IN?
Chapter Six
Halloween 2024
Coming up on the gates of his driveway, Jack Connor noticed the parents and children with their costumes and glowing plastic pumpkins, and only then remembered it was Halloween. He had always thought Halloween was stupid.
He pulled the Aston Martin into the right bay and sat a moment with the engine off in the silence of the garage. The Mercedes GL sat in the next bay, two trash cans against the far wall, everything in its place on the clean concrete floor. The kind of garage that exists to prove its owner can have more cars than needed and the taste not to fill the empty bays with the accumulated evidence of a life if they don’t.
The door came down behind him. He killed the gate lights. He didn’t want to be bothered with little kids ringing his bell looking for candy.
He went through the mud room, hit the seven-digit code, and stripped off his scrubs and surgical clogs the way a man does a sequence he’s run ten thousand times and reduced to pure mechanism. Connor was fifty-five, broad through the shoulders and chest in the way of men who’ve made the gym non-negotiable for thirty years, the muscle dense and deliberate rather than incidental. His head was shaved close on the sides and back and bare on top, which he wore without apology, and a neat dark beard, trimmed to the millimeter, gave his face a precision that softened nothing. He was handsome the way rich and fit men are handsome, less a matter of features than of resources, the kind of good looks that require maintenance and can afford it.
