Chapter 3 - The Pulse in the Granite
The canyon road at eleven-fifteen at night was a dark chute of wind-scoured ice.
The headlights of my Audi cut narrow, vibrating tunnels through the snow blowing across the asphalt of Wasatch Boulevard. I didn't take the curves at forty miles an hour like Russell did in his lifted four-wheel-drive; I drove with both hands locked at nine and three, feeling the anti-lock brakes pulse against the sole of my boot whenever the tires drifted into the frozen ruts left by the sand trucks.
When I turned into the driveway of the house on Mount Olympus, the exterior lights were all on.
The sixty-foot blue spruces along the property line were thrashing in the canyon gusts, their heavy branches throwing long, jagged shadows across the snow-drifted lawn. The garage doors stood wide open, exposing Russell’s black F-350, its tailpipe still ticking softly as the hot exhaust metal cooled in the freezing air.
I didn't take my briefcase. I took my coat, my phone, and my keys.
The front door was unlatched, swinging three inches in the wind, the brass knocker clattering against the oak every time a gust hit the porch.
Inside, the house smelled of burning sugar.
Someone had left the candied sweet potatoes in the oven with the broiler on; a thin, greasy blue haze hung beneath the fourteen-foot ceilings of the entrance hall, catching the glare of the recessed halogen spots.
"Dad?" I called out, my boots squeaking on the wet slate of the foyer.
A sound came from the master study down the east hallway—a low, rhythmic, animal wheezing that stopped and started with the terrifying irregularity of an engine seizing on its crankshaft.
I ran down the hall.
The study was forty feet square, walled in dark cherry wainscoting and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding fifty years of civil engineering texts, municipal bid registers, and framed photographs of Calvin Vance standing in mud pits with mayors and governors who had been dead for twenty years.
Calvin was not on the floor.
He was slumped in his heavy, leather-upholstered executive swivel chair behind his walnut desk. His navy blazer was half-off his left shoulder, his silk necktie pulled loose, his white shirt open at the throat to reveal a chest that was gray, hollow, and heaving with desperate, jagged inhalations.
His right hand was clamped around a blue plastic inhaler that was completely empty; his left hand was clawing at the leather armrest, his thick fingers digging through the upholstery into the foam padding.
Beside the desk, on her knees on the Persian rug, was Darlene.
Her crimson wool knit dress was smeared with ash from the fireplace; her hair, which had been set by a stylist on South Temple that morning, hung in wild, sweaty wisps across her eyes. She was holding a landline telephone receiver in her right hand, but the cord was coiled around her wrist, the dial tone buzzing through the earpiece with a flat, indifferent electronic hum: beep-beep-beep-beep.
"He won't breathe, Naomi," Darlene sobbed, looking up at me with eyes that were bloodshot, dilated, and completely stripped of their dinner-table authority. "He read the notice from Arthur Pendelton. He went into the safe... he saw the wire transfers. He won't breathe."
I didn't look at her.
I dropped my coat on the floor, crossed the room in three strides, and dropped to my knees beside Calvin’s chair.
His skin was cold. Not cool—cold like refrigerated suet, coated in a greasy, clammy perspiration that smelled of stale tobacco and ammonia. His lips had the bluish-violet tinge of acute cyanosis; his pupils were small, unequal, his eyes darting frantically around the room without locking onto my face.
"Dad," I said, my fingers finding the carotid artery beneath the angle of his jaw.
The pulse was there.
It was running at one hundred and sixty beats a minute—a chaotic, fluttering, thready tachycardia that felt like a trapped moth battering itself against the inside of a paper lantern.
"Ventricular strain," I muttered.
I pulled my phone from my pocket, hit the emergency slider on the lock screen, and put the speaker to my ear while my left hand tore open his shirt buttons, feeling for the apex of his heart beneath his fourth rib.
"Salt Lake County 911, what is the address of your emergency?"
"Forty-two hundred Mount Olympus Drive," I said, my voice dropping into that cold, diagnostic baseline that had kept me calm through venture board battles and software infrastructure failures. "I have a sixty-six-year-old male with acute myocardial infarction, severe pulmonary edema, and cardiogenic shock. History of mild hypertension. He is non-responsive to verbal stimuli, profound peripheral cyanosis, respiratory rate thirty-six and shallow. I need an Advanced Life Support rig and a cardiac team prepped at Intermountain Medical Center."
"Are you trained in CPR, ma'am?"
"I’m an infrastructure engineer," I snapped. "Send the medic unit out of Station 104 with a Lifepak fifteen and twelve-lead capability. Tell them the driveway has six inches of unplowed snow on a fourteen-percent grade. They need chains on the drive axles."
I dropped the phone on the desk.
"Where is his nitroglycerin, Darlene?" I demanded, turning to my mother.
She blinked at me, her mouth hanging open, her mascara running in black, muddy tracks down into the corners of her mouth. "His... his what?"
"His heart pills! The little brown glass bottle with the gold cap he keeps for his angina!"
"He... he threw them away," she whispered, her hands trembling so violently that the telephone receiver slipped from her grip and hit the floorboards with a dull plastic clatter. "Two months ago. When the first audit notice came from the city. He said... he said heart medicine was for old men who were ready to give up their licenses."
I looked at Calvin.
His head fell back against the headrest of the chair, his jaw dropping open, a thin string of white, frothy saliva bubbling over the corner of his lower lip.
"Russ!" I screamed toward the hallway. "Get in here!"
No answer.
"Russell!"
From the front of the house came the sound of a diesel engine revving high in reverse, followed by the wet, concussive crunch of a truck bumper striking the stone retaining wall of the driveway, the tires spinning on the packed ice with a high-pitched, screaming howl that echoed off the canyon rock.
Russell wasn't coming.
Russell had seen the state auditor’s signature on the kitchen table, heard his father hit the armrest, and had taken his four-wheel-drive down the mountain before the sheriff’s deputies could block the mouth of the canyon.
"Help me get him onto the floor," I told Darlene.
"No, don't move him—"
"Get him on the floor now, or he dies in this chair before the sand truck reaches the gate!"
I grabbed Calvin under the armpits.
He was heavy—two hundred and twenty pounds of dead, ischemic mass—but adrenaline is a strange, hydraulic substance. I hauled him forward, his knees catching on the edge of the walnut desk, and lowered his torso onto the Persian rug, flat on his back, his head tilted back to clear his airway.
His chest wasn't rising.
The thready pulse at his jaw had vanished, replaced by an empty, vibrating stillness that felt like an unpressurized main.
I locked my fingers together, placed the heel of my right hand directly over the lower half of his breastbone, positioned my shoulders over my wrists, and leaned down with my full body weight.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The cartilage in his ribs popped with a sickening, wet crack beneath my palms.
Darlene screamed—a sharp, animal shriek that tore the wallpaper—and threw her hands over her face, curling into a ball against the base of the bookshelves.
"Shut up, Darlene," I said between compressions, my breath coming in short, rhythmic grunts of oxygen. "Just shut up and count."
Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
May you like
Beneath my hands, Calvin Vance’s chest rose and fell, not with the warm, voluntary momentum of life, but with the cold, mechanical rhythm of a pump being primed by force.
Through the high windows of the study, three miles down in the valley, the blue and red strobe lights of the paramedic unit from Station 104 began to flicker against the snow on the canyon ridges, small, cold, and desperately far away.
