The ER doc taps the monitor and says twelve hours, maybe less. Something about telemetry anomalies, something about my pacemaker throwing flags like a nervous referee. He talks like a man who doesn’t want to be sued. I nod like a man who doesn’t have time to.
“This model talks to the cloud,” he says, as if he’s telling me my heart commutes to work. “You’ll feel fine, until you don’t. If you leave, you do so against medical advice.”
“I’ve been against advice my whole life,” I tell him, and sign the form.
Outside, Los Angeles has that early-evening shine, a wet neon even when the pavement’s dry. The hospital glass throws back a warped version of the city—cleaner, kinder, not ours. I stand on the curb and listen to the traffic. Somewhere an ambulance laughs without humor. The monitor in my chest hums a quiet note I pretend I can’t hear.
Twelve hours. If I pace it like a night shift, it’s four quarters and a two-minute drill. I’ve done worse. I’ve also done better. The trick is knowing the difference while your heart negotiates with software.
I start with the only friend I still pretend is a colleague.
“Edison,” I say when he picks up. “You still consult for Medinet or just play chess with their lawyers?”
“Depends,” he says. “On which answer keeps me out of your story.”
“Something got into my pacer,” I say. “A pushed update. After that, skipped beats like a bad DJ. I need the log.”
“You need a warrant.”
“I need a miracle,” I say. “Warrants take time. I have twelve hours. Eleven now.”
Edison exhales through his nose. I can see him: glasses smudged, shirt untucked, conscience half-pressed. “You always come back to me when dying’s on the table.”
“It makes me sentimental.”
He gives me a number. A receptionist who answers to no one. A building in Glendale that says MEDINET on the glass but answers to a private equity fund with a taste for polished vultures. He tells me not to go. I tell him I’m already there.
The lobby smells like citrus and confidence. The receptionist looks like a person who grew up being rewarded for telling men no. She tells me no before I open my mouth.
I slide my old badge across the counter. It isn’t gold anymore. Time took the shine and left the weight.
“You can’t,” she says, studying the ghost of authority. “HIPAA.”
I pull out the only card I have that isn’t sentimental. I put a hand on my chest and tap the thin square of plastic and wire under the skin. “It’s my heart, sweetheart. If I can’t consent to my own records, send the flowers now and save me a trip.”
A man in a blue blazer materializes from an elevator like a stage direction. His smile reaches the lobby but not his eyes. “Sir,” he says. “Let’s not make a scene.”
“Mr. Bigelow,” I tell him. “Frank. The scene’s already in my chest.”
His eyes flick to a tablet. He knows my name before I say it, which means Edison called ahead or their system did. Either way, we’re all living in the same aquarium.
“Conference Room C,” he says to the receptionist without looking. To me he says, “Five minutes.”
Five turns into fifteen. A young engineer in a hoodie with a haircut that cost more than my last suit slides a laptop across the table. I read my life in timestamps and error codes. The log looks like a late-night lie detector, spikes and stutters and a line that should be smooth.
“Here,” the kid says, pointing. “Firmware patch. Pushed at 10:32 a.m. Device accepts at 10:41. Telemetry goes unstable at 11:04.”
“What’s the patch for?”
“Hardening,” he says. “Security fixes, closed a vuln.”
“What vuln?”
He tastes the word like it’s spicy. “A remote telemetry escalation. Hypothetical. Could let a bad actor impersonate the clinic.”
“Then why am I impersonating a corpse?” I ask.
He scrolls. Points again. “The patch didn’t brick you. Something else came with it.” He tilts his head. “A script.”
The blazer clears his throat. He has the air of a man who liked you better before you could ruin his lunch. “That’s not an official conclusion.”
“It’s the only kind we have time for,” I say. “Where’d the push come from?”
He doesn’t answer. The kid does. “Downtown relay. The Medinet tower on Hill. But the origin—” He shrugs. “Could be anywhere.”
I thank them with a look that isn’t one and walk out before the liability can catch up.
Hill Street climbs out of downtown like a dare. The Medinet tower is a glass obelisk with a lobby full of succulents and a security desk with a guard who worked hard to look bored. I don’t bother him. I take the service elevator like a man who’s learned which doors are meant to be opened without knock or flourish.
The server floor is a cold wind with a hum under it, the sound a city makes when it’s pretending to be quiet. Racks blink their insect eyes as I pass. Somewhere a fan stutters; somewhere a human being doesn’t.
A badge would be useful. So would an accomplice. I have neither. What I have is a pocketknife, habits, and a phone Edison convinced me to buy that thinks it’s a lockpick. I palm the knife because old reflexes like the weight. I use the phone because new sins like results.
A door says NETWORK OPERATIONS. A camera watches the door watch me. I give it my best cop smile. It doesn’t smile back.
I’m almost out of charm when the door opens from the inside and a woman in a gray sweater edges out with a paper cup and the haunted look of someone spending her youth inside a refrigerated wind. She holds the door without thinking. I thank her like a gentleman and slide through like a thief.
Inside, the air is colder. Four techs wear headphones like religious objects. A fifth looks up and sees a man who doesn’t belong.
“You lost?” he asks.
“All the time,” I say. “I’m looking for where the heartbeats go.”
He blinks. I don’t. The pause gives me enough time to reach the station nearest the back wall, an admin console that hasn’t learned fear. The keyboard welcomes my fingers the way keyboards always have, with a clack that feels like confession. The screen blooms.
Medinet Relay—Ingress—10:32 a.m. Patch. 10:41 a.m. Accepted. 11:04 a.m.—there it is. Script. The file has a name that looks like a joke you tell a computer: luminous_code.bin. Somebody had a sense of humor. Or a history degree.
I trace the origin. The logs fold into each other and then ravel out like yarn. An IP, then a tunnel, then a name.
A clinic in Artesia. A storefront that sells Dr. Feel-Good by appointment and cotton swabs by the case.
I’ve been there before.
Artesia is what happens when a city keeps its promises to no one. The clinic’s front is clean. The alley is not. There’s a metal door scarred by shopping carts and the backs of men who didn’t pay.
Inside, the waiting room is a jar of saltwater taffy: pink chairs, blue brochures, green plants that forgot what sunlight was. The receptionist wears a white coat to look like she can save you money. She can.
“Doctor?” I ask.
“Appointment?” she says.
“Death,” I tell her. “It’s a walk-in.”
She hesitates just long enough to tell me it’s not the weirdest thing she’s heard. Then she presses a button with her knee and a lock unlatches with a metallic sigh. The hallway back is narrow, the walls the color of compromise.
He’s in a room with a window that looks out on a wall. He wears the white coat that belongs to men who didn’t graduate from being men. He has a haircut that tells me he advertises with billboards, and teeth that tell me the ad buys worked.
“Frank,” he says, too familiar. “Long time.”
“Not long enough, Dr. Halliday.”
He smiles like a crocodile that learned to pronounce empathy. “Your records flagged you. I heard you stopped by Medinet.”
“You heard because you were listening.”
He spreads his hands. “I listen when it concerns my patients.”
“I’m not yours anymore.”
“Everyone’s someone’s,” he says. “Sit. If you fall, I don’t have the right forms.”
I don’t sit. There’s a trick to staying alive in rooms like this: stay close to the door and tell the truth until the lies show up.
“You pushed a script,” I say. “Came with the patch.”
He tilts his head. “That’s a serious accusation.”
“It’s a serious day.” I tap my chest with two fingers. “We both know what it’s doing to me.”
He shrugs. He loves the shrug. It’s his way of saying the world is complicated and you should give him money to simplify it.
“Why?” I ask.
“What’s your working theory?” he says, and that’s when the old voice in my head—the one from briefing rooms and murder books and nights with stale coffee—whispers the only rule I never stopped following: when a suspect invites you to tell the story, it’s because he wants to see which version you bought.
“Blackmail,” I say. “There’s a market for pacers and monitors and insulin pumps that misbehave. Make a device hiccup, sell the cure. If the patient doesn’t pay, he drops. If he does, you roll the fix into ‘service enhancements’ and let the fund take its cut.”
He keeps his face still. His eyes flick to the glass. There’s a reflection there I don’t like: my shoulders squarer than they feel, my jaw tighter than it should be. The pacer hums. My heart misses a step and then two, catching on the third like a man tripping on a curb he forgot to see.
He moves to a cabinet. There’s a tray inside. A device that looks like a TV remote for God.
“Let me fix you,” he says. “I’ll push a corrective—”
“From here,” I say. “Like last time.”
“We made improvements.”
“You made a market.”
His smile loses a tooth. “You think too big, Frank. You always did. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s capitalism with better adjectives. Everybody pays for uptime. We just made it legible.”
“I’m going to make it evidence,” I say.
“That would require living,” he says gently. “Which still requires me.”
There’s a sound in the hall. The soft shoe of a man who doesn’t ask for permission. He walks like a solution. He has shoulders that go on for a week and a neck that missed the memo about curves. He’s holding something dietary: a quiet gun that eats appetite.
“Chester,” Halliday says. “Mr. Bigelow would like to reconsider his options.”
Chester smiles without using his mouth.
The heart makes a decision then. It punches a stutter into my ribs, the kind that rearranges priorities. The room shrinks. The fluorescent light flickers like a bad alibi.
“Okay,” I say, and let my knees bend just enough to say I’m tired. I’m not. I’m counting. There are three steps between Chester and me, four to the door, two to the tray with God’s remote. You can live a whole life in numbers like that if you count fast.
Chester moves because men like Chester always move when they think you’re surrendering. He’s kind enough to step within reach. I go up instead of down. My palm hits his wrist and slides the gun along the vector it already wanted, past my shoulder and into the wall, where it coughs drywall and embarrassment. My other hand introduces his nose to my jacket button and he folds like paperwork.
Halliday grabs the remote, because of course he does. I grab the tray and clock him across the temple with six stainless steel ounces of insurance fraud. He staggers backward into the cabinet and rethinks his life goals.
I’ve got the remote and the gun now. Both are heavier than they look. My chest feels light as paper.
“Sit,” I tell him, and he does. “Hands where your billboards can see them.”
“You don’t know how to use that,” he says, looking at the remote with a creep’s tenderness.
“I know how to point at a man and press a button,” I say. “Between the two of us, it’s practically poetry.”
He breathes through his mouth. “What do you want?”
“The script,” I say. “And the bank.”
Something passes over his face. Not fear. Not yet. Just arithmetic. How many people to pay off, how many calls to make, how many backups of the log where he thinks I can’t find them.
“You won’t make it to the car,” he says softly.
“Maybe,” I say. “But you won’t make it to dinner.”
Silence sits down with us and gets comfortable. In its lap I put my phone on speaker and call Paula.
She answers on the first ring. Always has. “Frank?”
“Hey, kid,” I say. “You still keep a file on me labeled ‘Rash Decisions’?”
“It has volumes,” she says. “Where are you?”
“In a clinic that sells fear wholesale,” I say. “Tell Edison to meet me at Union Station, East Portal, in an hour. Tell him to bring a burner I can love for twelve minutes. And tell him if he ever wanted to be brave, now’s a discount day.”
“Frank—”
“Later,” I say.
“Promise,” she says.
“You know I don’t,” I tell her, and hang up before the part where voices break.
I point the remote at my chest. Halliday blanches, which is how you know I’m pointing in the right direction.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Something you should’ve built into the first patch,” I say. “Local control.”
“That’s not how it—”
I press the button.
The sensation is a thunderclap without sound. The pacer kicks, stutters, resets. For two seconds I’m convinced I’ve invented a new way to die. Then the rhythm returns: slow, then steady, like a beat cop finding his route again after being spin-kicked by an alley.
It won’t last. I know it the way you know a bad battery. But I bought myself twelve more minutes. Maybe fifteen if I don’t climb stairs.
“USB,” I say. “Your port. The one that pretends not to exist.”
He looks at the cabinet. I look at the gun. He opens a hidden panel because men like Halliday always hide things in places the fire inspector doesn’t.
The laptop blinks awake. The script is there, arrogant and tidy. I push it to my phone and then to three places I owe favors to: a journalist who owes me one, a fed who thinks he doesn’t, and a pastor who understands what confession is for.
Halliday watches the files fly like a man watching weather arrive on a screen. There’s a moment where I almost feel sorry for him. It passes.
“Chester,” I say without looking. “How’s your nose?”
He says something like “gnarls,” which I translate as “not ideal.”
“Good,” I say. “You’ll remember this conversation when she deposes you.”
“Who?”
“The receptionist at Medinet,” I say. “She knows how to tell men no.”
I walk out slowly because running would jar the metronome in my chest and dignity never enjoyed moving fast.
The night is full now. Sunset has done its trick and left the sky a bruise. I point the car toward Union Station and the city peels back like a sticker, leaving glue and corners. Neon tricks of light turn faces into masks and masks into faces. On the radio, jazz pretends there’s a right answer to a wrong question.
I park where the station meets the old tunnels. The East Portal has the quiet benches and the pigeons who read your mail. Edison’s there with a paper bag that looks like lunch and weighs like regret.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“Perfect,” I say. “Then I’m on-theme.”
We sit like we’re waiting for a train that stopped running when men stopped wearing hats. I hand him the phone and the burner and the list of places the files went.
“You’re going to live?” he asks. It’s not the kind of question that likes an answer.
“I bought time,” I say. “You buy the rest.”
“I’m a consultant,” he says. “Not a magician.”
“Same job,” I tell him. “Different hat.”
He thumbs through the bag and pulls out a cable and a fear he keeps in his pocket for days like this. He plugs my phone into his battery. The pacer hums differently. The app on his screen shows my heart as a cartoon that forgot it’s not a joke.
“You sure about going public?” he asks. “You’ll blow every clinic in the county into panic.”
“Panic’s just attention without manners,” I say. “Sometimes the only way to get a man off a cliff is to shout ‘fire’ in the canyon.”
He cracks a smile because I paid attention in the same civics class he skipped. We let the pigeons file a flight plan. The terminal clock glares at us like an old cop who knows when to stop writing.
A woman sits two benches over with a suitcase that cost her last three paychecks. She watches me the way people watch men who know the end of things: with curiosity and a little fear. I give her a nod that says it’s all right even when it isn’t. She nods back like she understood even before I said it.
The battery in my chest drops a beat then another. Edison sees it and pretends he didn’t. The portal breathes in people and breathes them out. Los Angeles never learned to exhale properly.
I give Edison my keys.
“You hate my car,” he says.
“Exactly,” I say. “You’ll drive it carefully.”
He takes the keys like a man being handed a confession. “What do I tell Paula?”
I think about the sound of her voice saying my name. I think about the times I didn’t deserve it. “Tell her I was stubborn to the end,” I say. “She’ll call that Tuesday.”
He stands like the bench hurt him. He doesn’t say what he wants to. We were never good at the parts with feeling.
“Frank,” he says finally. “You’re—”
But he doesn’t know which word comes next: brave, doomed, impossible, tired. I save him the trouble.
“I’m a man who didn’t like the odds and played anyway,” I say. “It’s not noble. It’s habit.”
He leaves. He has work to do. So do I.
There’s a place in Chinatown where the tea is good and the quiet’s better. I walk there because I can. Every step is a ledger entry. The owner knows me as the man who sits in the corner and pretends to read. She brings me a cup that tastes like the memory of rain on a hot roof.
The street outside hums with conversations I’ll never get to hear the end of. That’s the thing about cities—you never get the endings. You get the middles and the almosts and the fights that pretended they were foreplay. Endings are private. Even the bad ones.
I open the burner and write the note I don’t want to. Not to Paula—that one’s for voice. To the kid I once told not to take the front seat. To the woman who asked me to tie a tie. To the monk and the drag queen and the man with the change under the floor mat. To every stranger who told me a story because I kept my hands at ten and two and my mouth mostly shut.
The pacer misses one and then decides to miss two in a row to see if I’m paying attention. I am. I’ve never been more.
Across the street a neon character blinks on and off, a little red man bowed in permanent greeting. He disappears, returns, disappears again. Even light needs to rest.
I pay the check and leave the tip and step outside into a night that doesn’t care and never pretended to. The air tastes like oil and oranges. The city leans against me the way the ocean leans against a pier.
When the heart goes, it doesn’t shout. It does what all faithful servants do when the master falls asleep: it tidies up, turns off the lights, and pulls the door gently closed.
The last thing I see is the reflection in the tea shop window—Venetian blinds across my eyes, neon on my cheekbones, the old cop in the glass smirking like the joke finally landed. For once, we agree on the punch line.
There’s an ambulance somewhere singing a song I won’t finish. There’s a phone buzzing on a table I won’t pick up. There’s a city pretending it will miss me.
Somewhere, Edison pushes SEND and a dozen inboxes light up like a runway at midnight. Somewhere, a receptionist says no to a different man with a different badge. Somewhere, Paula promises herself not to cry in front of the screen and breaks it the way all good promises break—because the heart insisted.
I always thought courage was loud. Turns out it’s the opposite. It’s the quiet you make when the lights flicker, when the cloud goes out, when the body that learned to be a machine asks to be human one last time.
I walk until the sidewalk remembers my name. I stop when it doesn’t matter.
In my chest, the metronome forgets the tune but remembers the beat. Once. Then not at all.
I sit down on a step that belongs to no one and listen to the city’s pulse take over the part I can’t do anymore. It’s a good trade. It always was.
When the medic finds me, he’ll ask for a name and someone will tell him. He’ll write it down and spell it right on the second try. He’ll shake his head the way men do when they’re not thinking about their own endings yet.
The police will walk the room in their heads and I’ll be there on the edge of it, a smudge in a corner that smelled like tea. They’ll ask the questions I taught them to ask and get the answers I left scattered like breath.
A sergeant will tell a clerk what to write. The clerk will write it.
D.O.A.
Dead on arrival.
My favorite part of arrivals was always the departures. No one notices them because they look like the way we live: a man walking out into a night he can’t fix, with a rhythm in his chest that can, briefly, be mistaken for courage.
I used to think I was chasing the surge—money, danger, that electric edge that makes a man slick with purpose. I wasn’t. I was chasing the heartbeat in the cloud. The one that isn’t on a server and can’t be patched. The one you only hear when the rest of the world finally shuts up.
There it is now.
Listen.
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