Not as great an actor as his father, Fric knew louis vuitton outlet he couldn’t long stand up to interrogation by an ex-cop. He was so nervous that in a minute he’d need to take a leak in one of the Rubbermaid jars.
     “Ummm, well, gotta go, things to do, things up in my room, you know,” he muttered, once more sounding like a cousin from the feeble-minded branch of the Hobbit clan.
     He swung the cart around Mr. Truman and pushed it east along the main hall. He didn’t look back.
     Chapter 50
     THE DOME LIGHT ATOP OUR chanel bags sale LADY OF ANGELS Hospital was a golden beacon. High above the dome, at the top of the radio mast, the red aircraft-warning lamp winked in the gray mist, as if the storm were a living beast and this were its malevolent Cyclopean eye.
     In the elevator, on the way from the garage to the fifth floor, Ethan listened to a lushly orchestrated version of a classic Elvis Costello number tricked up with violins and fulsome French horns. This cable-hung cubicle, ascending and descending chanel bags twenty-four hours a day, was a little outpost of Hell in perpetual motion.
     The physicians’ lounge on the fifth floor, to which he’d been given directions by phone, was nothing more than a dreary windowless vending-machine room with a pair of Formica-topped tables in the center. The orange plastic items that surrounded the tables qualified as chairs no more than the room deserved the grand name on its door.
     Having arrived five minutes early, Ethan fed coins to one of the machines and selected chanel bags black coffee. When he sipped the stuff, he knew what death must taste like, but he drank it anyway because he’d slept only four or five hours and needed the kick.
     Dr. Kevin O’Brien arrived precisely on time. About forty-five, [347] handsome, he had the vaguely haunted look and the well-suppressed but still-apparent nervous edge of one who had spent two-thirds of his life in arduous scholarship, only to find that the hammers wielded by HMOs, government bureaucracy, and greedy trial attorneys were chanel handbags daily degrading his profession and destroying the medical system to which he’d dedicated his life. His eyes were pinched at the corners. He frequently licked his lips. Stress lent a gray tint to his pallor. Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he seemed to be a bright man who would not much longer be able to delude himself into believing that the quicksand under his feet was actually solid ground.