Chapter 8 - THE PRICE OF ARROGANCE
Two massive hospital security officers, accompanied by two uniformed Dallas police officers, moved down the aisle toward Jack.
“No... wait!” Jack backed away, his hands outstretched, his white coat flapping open. “Robert! Dr. Lehman, please! I’m your best surgeon! I did forty-two bypasses last quarter! You can’t throw me out like garbage! Who is going to run the transplant unit?”
From the fifth row of the auditorium, a young man stood up.
Dr. Marcus Vance.
Jack stared at him. “Marcus?”
“The surgical rotation has already been reassigned, Dr. Walker,” Marcus said calmly, his tone completely steady. “I will be taking over the primary lead on the transplant schedule. With Dr. Lehman’s supervision.”
“You?” Jack laughed, a shrill, manic sound. “You’re just a third-year fellow! You’re a nobody!”
“Marcus is my nephew, Jack,” Megan said from the stage, her voice dropping the final, crushing blow into his shattered reality. “My late father’s brother’s son. Top of his class at Johns Hopkins. He came here to train because he believed in our family’s hospital. You spent two years making him carry your luggage and fetch your dry cleaning because you thought his last name was a coincidence.”
Jack looked from Marcus to Megan.
The pieces fell together with the brutal, blinding clarity of an exploding star.
He had never been the king.
He had never been the master of the hospital.
He had been a court jester, tolerated, indulged, given an empire to play with because the quiet woman who loved him wanted him to feel strong. And instead of treasuring the gift, he had tried to burn down the palace to impress a street thief.
The security guards reached him.
One of them grabbed his arm, while the other reached up and ripped the stethoscope from his neck.
“Take off the coat, sir,” the officer said flatly.
“What?” Jack gasped.
“The coat belongs to Dallas Presbyterian, Dr. Walker,” Gerald’s voice sounded from the stage. “As does your hospital badge, your parking pass, and your medical insurance.”
Jack looked up at Megan.
She stood on the stage, tall, regal, untouchable.
Around him, a hundred pairs of eyes watched in stony, unforgiving silence. The residents he had humiliated, the nurses he had snapped at, the senior doctors whose advice he had ignored—every single person he had stepped on during his climb was watching him fall.
With trembling, clumsy hands, Jack unbuttoned the white coat.
The fabric fell away.
Beneath it, his cheap, wrinkled dress shirt was stained with sweat. He looked small. Shrunken. Pathetic.
The guard took the coat, rolled it up into a ball, and dropped it into a plastic bin.
“Let’s go, sir.”
Jack was marched up the aisle, his shoes shuffling against the carpet, his head down, the whispers of his peers following him like a swarm of hornets out into the corridor.
Outside the auditorium doors, standing in the marble hallway, were Carol and Ashley.
They had taken a city bus to the hospital, desperate, having spent the night in their clothes, hoping Jack could get an advance on his surgical salary to get them into an apartment.
When Carol saw Jack being escorted out by armed police, stripped of his white coat, her knees gave out completely.
“Jack!” she screamed, throwing herself against the security cordon. “Jack, what happened? Where is the board? Where is the money?”
Jack looked at his mother.
For ten years, he had worshipped this woman’s vanity. He had allowed her to belittle Megan, allowed her to demand luxury vacations, allowed her to poison his marriage with her constant, toxic demands for status and wealth.
“There is no money, Mom,” Jack croaked, tears streaming down his hollow cheeks. “There never was.”
“What do you mean?” Carol shrieked, clawing at his arms as the officers pulled him past. “You’re the Chief Resident! You’re Dr. Jack Walker!”
“I’m nothing,” Jack said, his voice breaking into a dry, breathless sob. “We’re nothing. Megan owns everything.”
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Ashley screamed, covering her face with her hands, sliding down against the cold marble wall as two more security officers stepped forward to escort the entire Walker family out through the ambulance bay, into the blistering Texas sun.
***
