“Any blankets, doctor?”
“N…no. No blankets.”
“What about hospital gowns? Do you have any of those in here?”
“No, I… This room’s low on supplies, I think. I heard the nurses talking about it earlier.”
“Okay. Then I guess we can… Here. We’ll use my windbreaker.” Zeke slipped the gun off his shoulder, removed his jacket and put the gun back in place. He tossed the jacket to Finley. “Put that on.” Finley pulled it on over his smock. Zeke looked around. “What else? You’ll need your feet elevated. I guess we’ll lay you out on the floor face up after I do the chopping, and I’ll put something under your heels. But that’ll make the blood rush to your hand, won’t it, lying down like that?” He looked at the floor. “This is going to be messy, even with a tourniquet. I don’t guess you have any towels either, huh?”
“Just…Â Just paper towels, I think.”
Finley gestured to a wall-mounted towel dispenser that was next to a sink set into one of the counters. Zeke popped the dispenser open. “Hmpf. Not enough.” He looked in the cabinet above the sink, then the cabinet below.
Finley cringed at the sight of the cardboard box Zeke pulled from beneath the plumbing. He left the box on the linoleum, rooted through it and straightened up holding a cranial perforator. It was rusty.
Dr. Mossa showed Finley the box of antique instruments the day he came to work at the clinic. He said Finley would be using them, since he was the new kid on the block, then after a long moment he laughed. The old fart’s idea of a professional joke. Finley couldn’t wait for Mossa to retire. In a month he’d be gone and Finley would throw out the box. Then he’d help supervise the hiring of a new junior doctor and make sure that all the abortions were assigned to him. Or her. Why couldn’t Zeke have waited a few weeks to go psychotic?
Zeke put the perforator back in the box and held up an old decapitator–a forceps device with a thin wire chainsaw blade running from the tip of one pincer to the other.
“What’s this?”
“It’s… It belongs to Dr. Mossa. I’m not sure what it is.”
“It’s a decapitator,” Zeke said, giving Finley a censuring look. “We both know that.” He started to drop the instrument back into the box, but he paused. “You know, we might be able to use this.” He turned the decapitator this way and that, examining it. “To remove your hand.”
Zeke experimented with the decapitator. Finley watched as he drew the saw wire back and forth, back and forth. “Yeah,” Zeke nodded. “This could work. It would take awhile, but, hmmm… It would do the trick.”
Zeke placed a bundle of towels on the sink counter, and then he went to work making a tourniquet. Finley watched him wrap the hose around his forearm, estimate the length needed, and cut it with the shears. When he finished he set the leftover tubing aside and shoved the tourniquet into a pocket. Then he pointed to the countertop to the right of the sink. “I think that would be the best place for the surgery. If you put your arm on the counter and aim your stump at the basin, that should catch most of the blood.” He looked at Finley. “You couldn’t bleed to death could you, with your arm tied off?”
Finley didn’t seem to have enough breath in his lungs to answer. It had been squeezed out by events pressing him against a wall of inevitability.
Zeke shrugged and explained how he planned to remove Finley’s hand. He acted out both his part and Finley’s at the counter while he talked. “See, you’ll rest your arm here, near the edge of the sink, and I’ll tie it off just above the wrist. And then…” He repositioned himself and placed the hand holding the shears so it was knuckles down on the countertop. “And then I’ll lean into the cut like this.” He raised himself up on the balls of his feet and rocked forward. “I’ll put as much of my body weight as I can into it, see?”
“You… You… No. You can’t really be serious about this.”
“Of course I am. And I think it’ll work. These shears are heavy-duty and I’m a carpenter, just like you know who was, so I’m strong enough to do it.”
Zeke tore open the fresh bundle of towels. He began humming too, and after working for a while at the counter he said, “That’s the song I mentioned earlier. God Moves in Mysterious Ways. An old hymn we sing in church.” He stood back to look at the bed of towels laid out where he’d said Finley’s arm would rest. “It’s not an operating table, but it’ll do, don’t you think?”
Finley still couldn’t speak. The press of events that had squeezed his breath out of him was now squeezing his gorge up.  He thought he might vomit. He must have looked pretty bad because Zeke asked if he was steady enough to stand. “I mean, can you stand at the counter here while I operate?”
Finley tried to answer but felt even sicker. He made a retching sound in the back of his throat.
“No, I guess you can’t,” Zeke said. “So we’ll, uh…” He looked around. “I’ll fix it so you can sit while I’m working.”
He went to the door and grabbed a stool from the pile of stuff stacked against it. He set the stool near the sink, patted the seat and said, “Here you go, doctor. Come on over.”
Finley couldn’t make himself get up from his chair.
“Come on.”
With a great deal of effort Finley forced himself to stand. His legs were shaky. Zeke slid the chair over to the door and jammed it where the stool had been, then he returned to the stool and gave the seat another pat.
“Come on, doctor.”
“Wait. I have… I have something I want to… The way I understand this, you want to amputate my right hand so I can’t perform abortions, right?”
“Well, I don’t want to, I have to.”
“Good. You don’t want to. That’s good. So…what if I promise I won’t do any more? Abortions, I mean. I could do that. I could promise.”
“Yeah, well maybe you’d keep that promise and maybe you wouldn’t. This is the only way to make sure. Come on. Have a seat.”
“No, wait. I mean, that’s so drastic, to cut off my hand. There must be another way. I mean…there must be.”
Zeke started to reply, but then he seemed to think of something. He told Finley to pick up a tongue depressor.
“What?”
“Pick up a tongue depressor. With your right hand.”
Finley did as instructed.
“Now hold it the way you would a scalpel.”
Again Finley did as he was told.
Zeke looked at the hand holding the depressor and rubbed his chin.
“What are you thinking?” Finley asked.
“Just that I might not need to cut off your hand. Maybe I can just disable you somehow, so you can’t operate. Let me think.”
He bobbed and craned, studying Finley’s hand from different angles.
Finley wondered how Zeke would disable him. Probably by removing a finger, or no, his thumb. He wouldn’t be able to hold a surgical instrument without an opposable thumb. Losing the thumb would be awful, but just seconds ago Zeke had been talking about cutting off his hand. And before that he wanted to kill him. So things were looking up. Finley told himself that with a little more time he might be able to get away with his life, his hand, and all the hand’s component parts.
