Acts of Honor (10 page)

Rebelling against her certainty, she stared at him speechless, stunned, and unable to move. He was her patient, for God’s sake. He
couldn’t
be the one. She had to be mistaken.

He maneuvered, and the straitjacket came off. He slung it to the floor and sprang to his feet, his face a mask of outrage. “No!” He ran toward her.
“Noooo!”

Before Sara knew what happened, she lay flat on her back on the padded floor, and Joe straddled her stomach, choking the life out of her and screaming in agony, “I wept! I
 . . .
wept!”

Her head swam. Spots formed before her eyes. She tried to get him to loosen his grip, but even all she’d learned in self-defense training couldn’t knock him off-balance. The man’s physical strength was overpowering. He seemed two steps ahead of her every move to defend and disarm him.
Oh, God.

Sara was losing consciousness. The life was draining out of her body. Her heart thrumming, her temples pounding, his image began fading into white light.

She was dying. Jesus, God. She was
 . . .
dying!

The door buzzed.

Shoes thudded against the floor pads, and Shank, Koloski, and two other male orderlies rushed into the Isolation Room. Surrounding Sara, they pried Joe’s fingers from her neck, loosening his chokehold. The orderlies lifted Joe off her and carried him to the far side of the room.

When the first gasp brought in oxygen, Sara felt a horrible blend of gratitude and fury, of shock and relief and fear. Limp on the floor, she clasped her neck, rolled to her side, and gulped huge gasps of air into her starving lungs.
You’re not going to die. You’re not going to die.
The words raced through her mind over and over again. A little more time, a little more air, and she’d be able to believe them.

Shank dropped to her knees on the floor beside Sara. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Sara answered by rote in a rasped whisper. Her throat ached and burned, and her heart was about to rocket right out of her chest. “I’m fine now.” Weak and winded, she held on to Shank and struggled to her feet, then smoothed down her lab coat with shaky hands.

“Come with me.” Shank walked out into the hall.

The orderlies put Joe’s straitjacket back on him. He appeared amazingly docile now, not fighting them at all. When the orderlies finished, they exited his room, glancing at Sara as if she’d lost her mind. Glimpsing Joe huddled in the far corner of the room, she pulled the door closed.

When it clicked shut, she rested her shoulder against the wall and then collapsed back against it, ordering her breathing to steady. What had triggered the attack? He could have killed her. He could have snapped her neck like a twig. So why hadn’t he? Why had he only dominated her and threatened to kill her? Let her know he was in control?

The obvious answer was that he wasn’t a killer, and he intensely needed to feel he was in control. That in itself wasn’t uncommon. But—

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Shank frowned at her.

Sara frowned back, clammy, her nerves still shattered, her mind reeling with questions and damn few answers. “I was checking on my patient.”

Rolling her eyes back in her head, Shank perched a hand on her generous hip. “Wearing a white lab coat?”

“Yes, wearing a white lab coat.” Every word uttered brought pain. Sara’s frown turned to confusion. She stuffed a hand into her pocket. “When on the premises, aren’t we supposed to wear them at all times?”

“What idiot told you that?” Shank’s face went red, and her freckles grew more pronounced. “Where did you even get the damn thing?”

The idea that she’d been suckered crept into Sara’s mind and took root. But reluctant to falsely accuse anyone, she held off believing it. “Martha brought it to my office when she dropped by the keys to my quarters.”

Shank clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “And she said you had to wear it all the time?”

“Yes, she did.” Sara rubbed at her throat. It was so tender. Scraped and raw. “I figured it was just one more of Fontaine’s rules.”

“Damn him.” Shank fisted her hand at her side and stared off down the hallway, as if battling with her conscience and seeing far more in this than Sara could see. “I guess this is his sorry-ass idea of humor.”

Finally getting a grip on her shaking, Sara straightened and shoved away from the wall. Her thoughts whirled, and she had to struggle to keep up. She lifted a staying hand. God, but it hurt to talk. Her entire neck throbbed, and her throat felt scalded. “Wait,” she said, knowing innately what was coming but wanting it verified. “What are you talking about?”

Shank slid her a disgusted look. “You
never
wear white around the PTSD patients.
Never.
Their condition disintegrates into episodic rage every time.”

None of her patients had disintegrated into episodic rage, and wearing white lab coats was her norm. “Shank, I deal exclusively with PTSD patients, and I routinely wear white lab coats. I’ve never had a patient react violently as a result. So if it’s a known fact that
these
PTSD patients react violently to white lab coats, then why did Martha—” Sara stopped dead in her tracks.

Shank pursed her lips and looked up at Sara over the frames of her glasses. “Do I really need to answer that?”

Dr. Fontaine. Well, hell. Why deny it? The man deliberately and willfully had set her up. Sara gave Shank a negative nod. Nothing more needed to be said. Fabulous Fontaine hadn’t forgotten that tidbit of trivia. He resented his shoestring budget, her getting his research money, and her being in his facility.

The sick part of all this was that Sara understood his position. But deliberately putting her life in danger? He’d gone too far. The question was, what did she do about it? Did she take exception directly with him? Or did she take exception with Foster and let him have the pleasure of coming down on Fontaine like the wrath of God?

No, Foster wouldn’t get directly involved. He’d dumped her here on her own. No support, and if she blew it, no knowledge.

Her first instinct was to march down to Fontaine’s office and show him the real meaning of fury. But even through her anger, she couldn’t deny that that would be gratifying but shortsighted. Letting her temper think for her was stupid. She had to tread easy. Lives were at stake. “You know, Shank,” Sara said, “I’m developing a real attitude about that man.”

“I’d say that makes you normal. But blow it off for now. Your time will come. Dirty deeds always come back to people who pull them, and they bite them on the ass at the worst possible time. It’s universal law. Flat out, inescapable.”

Shank patted Sara on the shoulder and led her down the hallway. “I’ll get you fitted out with some flowered lab coats. Then, when you’re ready, we’ll take another run at”—she hesitated, scanning her memory—“Michael? Or was it Joe?”

“Joe.” Sara sidestepped a scale resting against the wall.
The one.
She
had
to be mistaken. “It was Joe.”

Nodding, Shank stepped around the station desk to a small room. A coded alarm was affixed to its door just below the doorknob. She pressed in four digits. Four distinct beeps sounded, and then the door opened.

Inside, shelves of supplies lined the wall. She snagged a couple of lab coats, came out and shut the door behind her, then twisted the knob to double-check the lock.

“These should make your next visit with Joe less confrontational. Though, to tell you the truth, he’s never overly friendly. Actually, I’m surprised he spoke to you. He doesn’t talk much to anyone.” She passed the items over, including Sara’s name badge. “Need something to drink to soothe that throat?”

A double shot of Grand Marnier sounded tempting. It would numb the pain. But considering how seldom she drank alcohol, it’d knock her on her butt, and she had the distinct feeling that she’d better stay firmly on her toes to avoid any more of Fontaine’s land mines. “No, thanks.” She clipped the badge back to her collar. It must have come off during the scuffle.

Shank examined Sara’s neck. “It’s gonna bruise.”

“Yeah, it is. From the way it feels, I’m lucky not to be spitting up shards of cartilage.” Sara frowned thoughtfully down at the lab coats. “Shank, when Joe was choking me, he kept screaming ‘I wept.’ Do you know what he meant by that?”

Shank deliberately avoided Sara’s eyes. “Sorry, I don’t.”

She was lying to Sara. Not willingly; her body language proved she felt bad doing it. But she had lied. The question was, why?

Knowing she wouldn’t get an answer, Sara didn’t ask the question. It just hung there between them as thick as fog. “Too bad,” she said, breaking the silence. “I appreciate the save.”

Regret burned in her eyes. “Any time, Doc.”

Clutching the flowered lab coats, Sara went back to her office to take another look at her patients’ charts. Maybe she had missed the warning about wearing white. Either way, she wanted to know for fact. If she had missed it, fine. But if it wasn’t there, then she could resent Fontaine’s antics guilt-free and with conviction, and she could report them to Foster with a clean conscience and a generous helping of indignant outrage.

By four o’clock, she had reviewed all of the charts a second time. Nothing in any of them warned her about the color white being an episodic-rage trigger. But, scanning Joe’s file, something niggled at her. She stopped fanning the pages, went through them one by one, and figured out what. A block of Fontaine’s notes had been written in peacock-blue ink. Odd. He generally used only black ink.

She skimmed through the other files. All of them had a similar block of peacock-blue notes, though the dates and times written on them varied, and the content seemed deliberately ambiguous.

They weren’t authentic. Couldn’t be. So what did they mean?

Unable to answer that, she pulled the pages from each of the files, walked down to the nurses’ station, and copied each of the pages.

Beth spared her a sidelong glance from her seat at the computer terminal. Well, she spared Sara’s waist a glance. No one except Shank, Joe, Koloski, and Fontaine looked her in the eye.

“I can copy those for you,” Beth said, obviously curious.

“No problem. You’re busy, and I’ve got the time.” Sara finished quickly and then returned to her office. She substituted the copies in the charts, stuffed the folded originals into an envelope, and then addressed it to Lisa. Sara didn’t dare mail it from here; the envelope would never leave the facility. When she went to call Foster, then she’d mail it. Unless she missed her guess, when the time came, these notes could be her ticket out of Braxton. Her patients’ tickets, too. The notes proved the facility existed, Fontaine directed it, and patients were present and treated here.

She left the office and made a sweep by her patients’ rooms. Room 222 was empty, but the sheets on the bed were rumpled, and the head of the bed had been elevated whereas before it’d been flat. Odd, as ADR-22—Fred—was supposedly a vegetable. If true, not much question of salvageability there.

She spoke briefly with Michael—totally unproductive—and then with Ray, who was exhausted and mildly confused. Normal, considering the wild swing in his sugar levels. Keep him stable, and in a few days, they’d know what they were dealing with there. But she wouldn’t wait to file the incident report on him being given the 70/30 insulin medication. Fontaine might be the director, and filing it might antagonize him, but regardless of consequences, it was the right thing to do. Legally, ethically, and morally.