Downfall

ALSO BY MARK RUBINSTEIN FICTION The Mad Dog Trilogy Mad Dog House Mad Dog Justice Mad Dog Vengeance STANDALONES Love Gone Mad The Foot Soldier: A Novella of War Return to Sandara: A Novella of Love and Destruction The Lovers’ Tango Assassin’s Lullaby NONFICTION The Storytellers: Straight Talk from the Planet’s Most Acclaimed Suspense and Thriller Authors Beyond Bedlam’s Door: True Tales from the Couch and Courtroom Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness & Hope Copyright © 2023 by Mark Rubinstein All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. ISBN 978-1-60809-546-9 Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Sarasota, Florida www.oceanviewpub.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For Linda “For a deadly blow let him pay with a deadly blow; he who has done a deed must suffer.” —Aeschylus “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” —Joan Didion NOVEMBER 1982 PROLOGUE CARRYING A MEDICAL bag, the doctor approaches the apartment building. It’s close to eleven o’clock at night and Brooklyn’s East Nineteenth Street is dark and deserted. The branches of bare sycamore trees sway in a frigid November wind. Opening the outer door, he enters the building’s vestibule. Before pressing the button on the directory, he wonders if at sixty-four he’s too old to be making house calls. His colleagues insist that medicine isn’t practiced this way, not anymore. Giving up the house calls would have made Claire happy. She’s always hated how the telephone would ring in the middle of the night when a patient called in distress. But he’s always felt an obligation to his patients. Maybe they could have avoided the separation if he’d paid more attention to Claire and less to the practice. But here he is, entering a building late at night, a place where a few older people are still patients in his ever-dwindling practice. Okay, he regrets having never foreseen what would happen when he reached his mid-sixties, when new patients never materialized and he started to become irrelevant as a physician. Oh how he hates having regrets. But there are no regrets about refusing to make the payoffs to those bastards. He’ll never concede a thing to those crooks. Not now, not ever. In the building’s vestibule, he’s about to reach for the directory call button—apartment 3-B—Donovan. Feeling a draft of icy air on his neck, he realizes the outer door hasn’t closed properly. About to turn back and shut the door, he catches a glimpse of a figure standing in the open doorway. Before he can register who it is, his back explodes. The impact is so massive he’s thrust forward, and there’s no feeling from his chest down. He knows his spine has been shattered, and he realizes his heart has burst—and he’s bleeding out. So this is what dying feels like, he thinks as he starts falling, and there’s another blow so powerful it thrusts him farther forward, and then another as the world fades, then goes dark. But none of this has happened yet. CHAPTER ONE SITTING AT A table on the glass-enclosed porch of the Skyline Diner, Rick Shepherd smiles as he does each time he sees the sign on the wall behind the counter: LIFE IS UNCERTAIN EAT DESSERT FIRST It’s good to appreciate humor, no matter how upset you feel about what’s going on at the office with Kurt Messner. Upset? It’s anger. Anger? It’s more than that; it’s rage. And it’s smoldering inside him. It’s erosive and could lead to very bad things. Bad things? Sure, it sometimes feels like he could kill that son of a bitch. Murder? Really? Don’t be a drama queen. Leave that to your ex-wife. It’s just a figure of speech. He wonders how it came to the point where, as a thirty-four-year-old physician, he feels he’s living the wrong life. The wrong life? That too is absurd. Okay, so it’s not the wrong life, but it feels like he’s living in the middle of a mistake. A huge mistake—like having joined East Side Medical Associates a few years ago. Kurt Messner, an orthopedic surgeon and the group’s managing partner, is driving everyone berserk. He cares only about having wall-to-wall patients, nonstop from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. so he can maximize the bottom line. It’s all about the money. A medical office isn’t a carousel, and yet, the pace of the practice is dizzying. Rick knows he’s little more than a cog in a well-oiled medical machine. It sometimes feels like they’re spitting out patients on a conveyor belt. Yes, it’s the wrong practice. For him. He never imagined being a doctor would involve the compromises he’s been forced to accept. Okay, so he’s not happy with the practice. But living the wrong life? That’s no way to feel about things. There are good things in his world and it’s important to appreciate them. There’s Jackie and Dad and Mom and Katie, but there’s gotta be a way to change the direction of his professional life. He still tastes last night’s wine, now fermented on his tongue. His queasy stomach isn’t helped by the diner’s lingering aromas of eggs, home fries, and bacon. Having awakened early this morning from a clammy sleep, he’s steeped in an alcohol-induced fog. While he never uses drugs—doesn’t even smoke a joint—he feels narcotized. He takes another sip of a third cup of coffee generously refilled by Mary, the fifty-something waitress. It’s bland Silex crap, but it’s hot and