Authors: Eileen Dreyer
Kate immediately feared the worst. “Oh, God, I didn’t take somebody else out with me?” She heard the steady beeping of her monitor stutter a little. She felt it in her chest with a rush of fear. “Tell me it wasn’t my fault, Jules.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” her friend said without hesitation. “You don’t remember?”
Kate relaxed a little. “Nothing. Just…eating Sunday dinner in the lounge with Tim. I remember how beat I was. What day is this?”
“Saturday.”
Saturday. Good God, she’d been here almost a week! Almost seven days completely lost to the mists and the theater of the absurd.
“Do you know? What happened, I mean.”
“Telephone pole bit you.”
Now Kate was amazed. “I fell asleep? I never fall asleep.”
“Listen, kid. They’re making faces at me. You get some sleep.”
Sleep. Seems she’d done that. She’d wrapped her beautiful, shiny, vintage, midnight-blue Mustang around a telephone pole. And then she’d killed the nurse who’d taken care of her.
It was B.J. who told her the truth. Right after he had the lady from Patient Accounting for lunch.
Kate had actually been managing some sleep. Uninterrupted, dream-free, restful sleep. She should have known it couldn’t last.
“Excuse me, Ms. Manion,” a high-pitched voice interrupted.
Somebody was bumping against the bed. Didn’t they realize that hurt?
“Stop it.”
“Your nurse said you were awake.”
Kate didn’t even bother to open her eyes. “She lied. They’re all liars. Didn’t anybody tell you that?”
“It’s important that you talk to me. You’ve amassed quite a bill here, and we can’t locate any family to guarantee payment.”
“No,” she said, still not bothering to face the woman. “No family.”
None who would answer. None who would want to be found anymore. But that wasn’t anyone’s business but hers.
Kate recognized the voice now, clipped and precise, like an algebra teacher. Mrs. Warner. Patient Accounting. Kate had personally kicked the woman out of more than one intensive-care
room when she’d marched in to inform the patient that since he’d failed to take his acute inferior myocardial infarction to the hospital covered by his HMO, he wasn’t going to be covered and what did he wish to do about it? As if that was going to help a guy with a big old heart attack feel better. Oh, well, they said paybacks were hell.
“I’m not paying, Mrs. Warner,” Kate assured her. “Not a penny. I plan to suck off the hospital as long as I can and then sue for not reading the surgical release forms to me in Spanish. Got any problems with that?”
This time Kate got her eyes open. Mrs. Warner must have been impressed, because she took a full step backward.
“Don’t think I don’t know who you are,” the sharp-faced little woman accused, levering a pencil at Kate like a lance.
“Well, good. That’s one of us.”
“I’m still trying to clean up the mess from when you erased the Breedlove file from the computer.”
That actually made Kate smile. “Didn’t you read the new directive? You’re only allowed to harass people for payment for six months after their insurance company pays you. It’s a law. I was just trying to help.”
“That problem would have been resolved soon.”
“Their little girl died. I didn’t think they needed to be tortured by you too.”
“You have no right blaming me. It wasn’t my fault.”
“That’s right. It’s never anybody’s fault anymore. You’re all just doing your jobs.”
“Well, I’m sorry if you have a problem with that. My job right now is to discuss your insurance. It isn’t going to cover all this.”
Kate just sighed. “Of course it isn’t.”
“Not only that but there’s the question of how you were injured. The incident report can’t be completed until you talk to the hospital lawyer, and until that happens—”
That got Kate’s eyes finally and permanently open. Her chest was hurting again. “Lawyer? Incident report? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, you were off hospital property. You can’t possibly expect workmen’s compensation.”
“Workmen’s…”
She tried hard. Dug through the morass of memory, desperately sought out anything that would sound familiar. Anything that would connect her, a telephone pole, and workmen’s comp.
“Get out.”
The words came from the doorway, quietly, succinctly, and with an authority Mrs. Warner couldn’t ignore.
“The nurse told me it was all right,” she protested weakly.
Kate turned to take in the vision of Woodstock Past approaching at a martial pace and knew help was at hand.
He obviously wasn’t going to waste any energy on the now hapless Mrs. Warner. Taking hold of her by the lapels of her lilac double-knit suit, he
heaved her from the room with one more “Get out” and then turned to greet Kate.
“You can’t—” could be heard from the work lane before another door slammed.
“Beej?” Kate managed.
“Breathe,” he commanded. Kate should have been mad that there was a wry twinkle in those gray eyes.
“What did she…mean?”
“Breathe some more. Then we’ll talk. The monitor tech is using your rhythm to teach the rhumba out there.”
She breathed. Her visitor held on to her bed rails and watched the monitor.
B.J. was there. Good old B.J., with his denim and tie-dyed uniform, his ubiquitous bottle of Dr Pepper, and his perpetual scowl. The only way Kate could tell he was on call was the fact that his hair was tied back. Other than that, Dr. Brian Joseph O’Brien went out of his way to thumb his nose at propriety.
He was also notoriously short of fortifying platitudes.
“What was she talking about?” Kate demanded, feeling the pressure ease, hearing the staccato of her heart slow perceptively.
Pulling a cigarette from the pack in his sleeve, B.J. didn’t even bother to put it to his lips. He just stuffed it behind his ear to match the pen on the other side. “Woman’s an idiot. You havin’ gas yet like a good girl?”
Kate actually wanted to smile. Thank God B.J. was a doctor. He’d make a lousy minister. Come
to think of it, she’d written every prescription he’d ordered as an intern because he couldn’t spell, either. But that had been a few years ago. Now he was here in her room glowering at her as if she’d just wet the bed.
“As sore as I am, I wouldn’t know if I blew up,” she informed him, getting a hand up and noticing that IV tubing snaked from its back. That hurt too. What a surprise. Somebody’d managed to get a Cathlon in her hand the size of a garden hose. That’d get them a gold star in the Pig Nurse newsletter. “You never answered my question.”
Evidently he wasn’t going to, either. “You were dead, ya know.”
Kate was well used to his abrupt changes of course. This time, though, he caught her up short.
“But I’m feeling much better now, thanks.”
She thought of all those hallucinations, the cast that had peopled her hell, and she wondered.
“Arnstein cracked your skinny little chest right in ER. They said the blood was a foot deep. He rode the cart all the way in with his finger in your aorta. Quite a sight.”
It was Kate’s turn to scowl. She’d participated in the Rodeo Roundup herself, straddling a dying patient as the trauma team pushed the cart carrying them through the halls toward OR at breakneck pace. It was a hell of a ride, especially if you could feel the life slipping away beneath your fingers. But Kate didn’t think she wanted a surgical resident yelling “Yippee-o-ki-yay!” atop her as they made that sharp turn down by the
elevator banks. Especially Arnstein. He’d probably felt up her lungs while he was in there.
“You’re a comfort, B.J.,” she assured him dryly. The funny part was, he was.
He leaned right over the bed rail, his soda forgotten, eyes suddenly avid. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Tunnel? Voices? Visitors? What was it?”
Kate couldn’t think of any better retreat than just closing her eyes. She should have expected this. Maybe if she weren’t still draining any number of bodily fluids out through plastic tubes, she might have. She knew what B.J. wanted. He wanted verification. He wanted to be able to share something very special with Kate. At any other time, Kate would have been touched. B.J. didn’t hang around intensive-care units just for the view. B.J. didn’t do live people. B.J. was a medical examiner, a forensic pathologist whose work was almost as legendary as his personality. Even for Kate, B.J. wouldn’t have crossed the barrier he’d imposed on himself almost ten years ago, unless he’d had a reason. He’d come for answers. And she had none.
“Can we talk about it later, Beej?” she asked wearily.
She could hear him trying his best to maintain control. This was important to B.J. It was kind of important to Kate, too. She had the feeling that when she had more energy, she was going to be really pissed about the answer she’d finally have for him.
“Jules tells me you don’t remember anything.”
Kate opened her eyes to see a curious softening in his. It should have forewarned her. “Just who the president is, and who wants to remember that?”
“Well, you’re a big girl….”
That was the intro she knew she didn’t want. Her chest began to tighten again. Kate imagined it was right where Arnstein’s fingers had been. “Spit it out, boy. Who did I kill?”
His eyes flashed like agates. “You didn’t kill anybody—not counting Attila anyway.”
“Beej—”
He waved a hand at her, as if she had no sense of humor. She bet, when he’d been lying in bed twenty-two years ago earning his own scars, his sense of humor had been a little slim too.
“You were on a transfer. A little kid with total body trauma you took by ambulance because you couldn’t get the helicopter. Remember anything now?”
Transfer. Again she fought for images, sounds, anything.
“Nothing,” she admitted, with a sigh that belied the fact that the monitors were starting to dance again.
Kate saw Terry Martin, her nurse for the day, detach himself from the desk and lean in the door. “B.J., this isn’t funny,” he warned, an eye obviously on the same monitors.
B.J. didn’t even bother to turn around.
“Yank it off fast,” Kate told him. “It ends up hurting less.”
B.J. respected that kind of advice. “Ambulance was sideswiped by some asshole playing chicken
on the highway. Everybody went tit over tail down the embankment.” Kate saw the final tally in those deceptive eyes before he ever told her. “The only one they pulled out alive was you.”
“Who was the team?” She asked anyway.
“Pepper and Theresa.”
God. Oh, God, no. Not strangers, like many of the transfer teams. Local paramedics, a team she’d helped train and then recommended to the board of the fire district. Fire-eaters with good hearts who must have pulled real big strings to help her get that baby out the door in a hurry. Who were dead now because of her.
Kate didn’t cry. She’d forgotten how to do that a long time ago.
“Phyl didn’t want me to do it, did she?”
Phyllis McGill—nicknamed by the less charitable as Phyl the Gorilla, after a legendary beast of a much sunnier disposition still stuffed in the St. Louis zoo—Kate’s supervisor and not ever to be confused with someone who liked or respected Kate. A classic case of the Peter Principle caught in a middle-management squeeze and rendered totally incompetent.
It must have been a hell of a fight.
“She accused you of grandstanding.”
Kate wished she could breathe better. “Oh, I probably was. You know how I love to show off with a bad baby or two…the baby was lost?”
“Just God’s way of saying it was that kid’s day to go. If it makes you feel any better, they found you wrapped around him, like you were trying to protect him from the fall.”
It didn’t make her feel better at all. “How old?”
“Four.”
Kate might not have remembered what happened, but she bet she knew. Patient with no insurance, taken to the very insurance-driven St. Simon’s Medical Center, aka St. Serious Money, in the Better Part of Town. Maybe the doc on hadn’t believed the little thing was quite as bad as Kate thought. Maybe they just didn’t want to spring for the money to transfer him to one of the pediatric neurosurgical units down at the kiddie hospitals in the city. One way or another, Kate had probably spent frantic minutes on the phone trying to convince someone to take him and then find somebody to ship him down. And then someone to approve payment for the helicopter, which cost a fortune, or even a transfer ambulance with full support team, which still cost some bucks. Everything cost bucks in medicine.
If it had been a late shift, Kate never would have had a problem. One of the supervisors would have okayed everything. Being away from all the brass tends to give a person initiative. But Phyl had no initiative. She had a budget. And helicopters and paramedics simply stretched her budget to the point where she might not get her year-end bonus.
And Kate, as usual, had undoubtedly handled the whole thing with grace and dignity. She wondered if she’d called her supervisor a worthless maggot again.
“Here, Kate.”
She felt a cold swab against her arm and real
ized Terry had appeared at her side with a syringe of something.
“Get out of here with that shit,” she said, her voice a little thin.
“It’s nothin’ but a little Valium. You need it right about now.”
Kate turned her head so she could glare at him eyeball to eyeball. “And I’m refusing it. Now, go away.”
Terry wasn’t used to being contradicted by his unit patients. Kate could see his instinctive displeasure, the urge to control. And if B.J. hadn’t been there to tip the balance, Terry probably would have ended up winning, because Kate suddenly realized she was just too tired to fight.
But B.J.
was
there.
“Hard to sneak in an injection with a witness standing here,” he drawled.
Even here in the unit where B.J. rarely visited in his official capacity, the crew knew his reputation. Terry recapped the syringe and turned away.
Kate turned back to B.J. and the answers she knew he’d give her.
“I really did kill Attila, though, huh?”
“All right,” B.J. snapped. “Yes. You killed her. There is dancing in the streets, and several of your cohorts have asked if you do requests.”