“Dragged him!” She sighed with a fond smile for her husband. “He was too weak to fight. But after his last experience with his knee, Tom didn’t want to come back.”

Kilburn cocked his head. “Tell me about that visit.”

“Out of control …” Mallek gasped. “Never seen anything like …”

Annie stopped him with another dab of his brow. “He was here on the previous Friday evening. The place was just wild. Took three hours before the doctor saw him.”

Mallek turned to his wife. “Hon, tell him … about the girl.”

Annie nodded vehemently. “While Tom was waiting for his x-ray, they brought a girl into the stretcher beside his. A young drug user. She was in rough shape.”

“Was she coughing?” Kilburn asked, trying to fit the pieces together.

Mallek shook his head.

“Tom said she had a big infection on her leg.” Annie’s face crumpled into a quizzical frown. “An abscess or something?”

“Sounds right,” Kilburn said. “Go on.”

“They had to open it up then and there.” Her expression hardened with sudden indignation. “They didn’t even move her away from Tom. They just stuck a knife in it right there. He saw the whole thing. Not only that, but he got sprayed by pus!”

“Really?” Kilburn asked, amazed.

“Could have been … partly my fault,” Mallek said with obvious effort.

“It wasn’t, Tom!” She looked to Kilburn. “Because he didn’t say anything when they set up for the procedure, Tom thinks he was to blame for getting soaked with body fluids. It’s outrageous.”

Kilburn found himself nodding in agreement. The blatant breaches in infection control that he saw around the hospital aggravated him to no end. “Where did Tom get sprayed?”

“On the side of his face.” Annie ran a finger down her own cheek and lip, and then shook her head. “Probably how he got this infection, right?”

“I’m not sure.” Kilburn shook his head. “It would be an unusual way to get pneumonia, but the whole incident is bizarre.” He made a mental note to track down the young drug user from the ER, hoping the staff had taken swabs from her wound so he could compare them to the bugs growing in Mallek’s sputum.

“Okay, just a couple more questions.” Kilburn led Annie and Mallek, who chimed in with a few choppy phrases of clarification, through a standard infectious-diseases interrogation. But he learned nothing that he hadn’t already read in the chart. Then Kilburn plugged his stethoscope into his ears and put the patient through an equally unenlightening physical exam.

Annie turned to him, eyes hungry for news. “What do you think, Dr. Kilburn?”

Kilburn slung his stethoscope over his shoulders. “Tom has a progressive pneumonia that hasn’t responded to two different antibiotics as well as I would have anticipated.”

“What does that mean?” Annie demanded, her voice quivering.