Lifting his foot back onto the bed hurt Mallek even more than before. He expected Gayle to reach for his knee, but instead the doctor stood back a step and stared from the uninjured knee to the sore one. With a satisfied grunt, he bent over and gently rested the back of his hand on the knee, feeling, Mallek assumed, for warmth. Then the doctor put him through a series of mildly painful manipulations, the worst of which was when he held Mallek’s thigh with one hand and tried to pull his calf forward with the other as if opening a drawer.

Gayle straightened up and folded his arms across his chest. “Hate to be the bearer of bad news, Tom, but I’m concerned you might have torn your ACL. That stands for—”

“Anterior cruciate ligament,” Mallek finished the sentence with a heavy sigh. “I know. It’s a big fear among runners.”

“All athletes,” Gayle said.

“Now what?”

“We should get an x-ray tonight,” Gayle said. “Then we’ll set you up with crutches—”

Before Gayle could finish, a series of unintelligible screams erupted from a flailing drunk in the waiting room, followed immediately by the familiar hiss of the loudspeaker; “Security, stat!”

Gayle smiled sympathetically at Mallek. “It won’t take too long, Tom. Promise.”

Mallek chuckled. “Any chance security could x-ray me? They seem pretty available.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mallek had begun to doubt Gayle’s word. No one had come to get him for an x-ray. Instead, the action had moved closer to him. In the stretcher beside his, the paramedics had unloaded a skinny teenage girl with dyed blue hair and wearing a tattered T-shirt, tartan skirt, and torn stockings. Though the curtain was drawn between their stretchers, one of the two flaps had peeled back giving Mallek a clear view of the girl. Her eyes were half shut and her words were garbled. Mallek assumed she was stoned, but from the way she moaned and thrashed on her bed, he recognized her agony. And the source of her pain—a a swollen, fiery red thigh with a central bull’s-eye-like whitehead about the size of a dollar coin—stared back at him through the curtains’ gap.

When the girl tried to bolt off the bed, the call for security broke again over the loudspeaker.

The team scrambled around her. The three burly security guards, looking like white-shirted cops, barked at her to stay still. The order struck Mallek as redundant because they pinned each of her arms to the bed while they secured thick black belted restraints around her wrists and ankles. A nurse fumbled with IV tubing at her arm. The girl’s moans evolved into screams of indignant outrage.