Sleight of Hand (25 page)

She fidgeted as Ed kept poking and prodding at her various injuries, checking for fractures or other occult trauma that could come back to haunt her later.  "Would you hurry up?" she snapped.  "I want to see how Muriel's doing."

"Almost done," Ed said, applying a vaseline-gauze dressing to her forearm. 

"Get me a pair of scrubs, I'm going up there."  She started to get up, but he placed a restraining hand on her arm.  

"You can go up when I'm done," he told her.  "But Park's just gonna toss you out on your butt and you know it, so hold still."  He spoke as if to a recalcitrant child, but Cassie saw the fear in his eyes.

He was afraid–for her.  Funny, she wasn't scared at all, not for herself.  Not yet.  Although that would come sooner or later.  Instead all she felt was a growing fury that was flaring to uncontrollable proportions.

"Ed, she was almost killed because of me."

"You don't know that," he snapped.  "Isn't that right, Spanos?"

"We don't know who the intended target was," the policeman said.  "But all witness accounts confirm that it appeared deliberate.  The van followed Hart onto the curb."

Ed shot him a look that shut him up.

"You know it was Virginia Ulrich," Cassie said.

"No, I don't and neither do you.  Maybe it was Morris or one of his associates," Ed suggested.  "It's not like you've been making a lot of friends around here lately."

She ignored him.  Virginia Ulrich.  Or her powerful lawyer husband or his powerful senator father.  Out to get her–why?  Had they heard about her trip to Wheeling?  What she'd found supported her theory that Virginia was deliberately hurting her child, but it was hardly proof.

Jason, the ward clerk, opened the door.  "Call for you, Cassie," he said.  "Line two."

"Thanks."  She hopped off the table, holding the loose flutter of gauze that Ed had been about to tape, and grabbed the receiver.  "Dr. Hart here."  She kept her fingers crossed, hoping it was the OR with good news.

"Dr. Hart?  It's Virginia Ulrich.  I just heard about your tragic accident and I wanted to call–"

"You've got some nerve!"  The fury that had been building in Cassie exploded.  "Where are you?  Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Ed and Spanos joined her at the phone.  

"I'm up in the ICU with my son," Virginia continued in that same calm voice.  "Where I've been all evening.  Really, Cassandra, I know how upsetting this must be for you–"

"You don't know shit!  I'm going to make certain that you can never hurt anyone again, do you hear me?"  Cassie was shouting now, but she couldn't help herself.  "Say goodbye to Charlie.  If I have anything to do with it, you're never going to be allowed near him again!"  She hung up the phone so hard it bounced off the hook and flew to the floor.

"Who was it?" Ed asked.

"Virginia Ulrich," Cassie spat the name as if it were a curse.  "Calling to gloat."

"Did she confess to any involvement?" Spanos asked eagerly.

She shook her head, anger pounding through her head, knotting her gut.  "No, she said she was in the ICU with Charlie all night."

"That's easy enough to check." 

"Good, then go do it."  She opened the door and started down the hall toward the women's locker room.  Her gown flew open behind her as her legs carried her in a furious stride, but she didn't care.

"Cassie, remember the court order," Ed's voice followed her.  "You can't go anywhere near Charlie Ulrich."

"Maybe not," she flung over her shoulder, startling an old man clenching a container full of urine.  "But I can call CYS and convince them to put him in protective custody.  At least I can keep one person safe around here."

Too bad it was too late for Muriel Drake, a small voice whispered.  The voice that would keep her up tonight with repeated recriminations.  

She pushed open the door to the locker room and grabbed a pair of scrubs.  Time to get back to work.

Cassie stripped free of the gown and slipped into scrubs and a spare pair of Reeboks from  her locker. She looked in the mirror.  The dressings on her arms were already slipping, making her look like a poorly costumed extra from
The Mummy
.  She stripped off the bandages Ed had so carefully applied.  There, at least she could move.  But the angry red skin was no more appealing.  She grabbed her white lab coat from her locker and tried again.  Better, at least she looked like she belonged in the hospital.  If only she could do something with her hair.  But that was a losing battle.  She quit while she was ahead.

It took ten minutes before she reached a caseworker at CYS.  Cassie quickly explained what she'd found in Wheeling and what happened tonight.

"Do you have any proof that the child in is imminent danger?"

"No.  But there's no way to protect him with his mother at his bedside.  I think temporary custody and close monitoring is warranted."

The worker was silent, obviously hesitant about yanking the grandchild of a US Senator into protective custody.  "I'll talk with my supervisor," she finally promised.

"Tonight?" Cassie pressed.

"Tonight."

She hung up.  It was the best she could do for now.  She climbed the steps to radiology and reviewed Muriel Drake's head CT for herself.  Ed had been right, serious injuries, but nothing that was necessarily life threatening with prompt intervention.  She went up to the fourth floor where the operating rooms and ICUs were located.  Passed the PICU where Charlie Ulrich was hopefully resting comfortably and sent a prayer in his direction.  Thought about her other patient, Antwan Washington, and said another prayer for him and his mother, Tammy.

She sped past the family room, avoiding an encounter with Drake.  She couldn't face him.  Not yet.  Not until she had some good news to offer him.  Shedding her lab coat once inside the OR area, she donned a mask, hat and shoe covers and entered Nathan Park's operating room.

Cassie was silent, nodding to the circulating nurse who dutifully recorded her name on the log, and sidled behind Park at the head of the bed.  David Allman, the anesthesiologist, looked up at her, and she could see the smile crinkle his eyes above his mask.

"Out!" Park barked without looking away from his work.  "Now," the diminutive Korean-American continued, his hands moving swiftly under the operating microscope that he buried his head in.

"I just wanted–" Cassie started.

"Don't make me throw something!"  The surgeon never glanced up from the eyepieces that offered him an up close and personal view of Muriel's brain.

Cassie took a step back and remained silent.  She could see the vitals flashed on David's monitoring equipment: everything looked good.  David gave her a thumbs up and an encouraging wink.

"Are you still here?"  Park sighed dramatically.  "All right then, you can look through the teaching head.  I'm about done anyway."

Cassie moved closer, swiveling the non-sterile arm attached to a monocular lens. Through it she could see everything Park did, although not with the same depth of field.  She watched as the surgeon's graceful hands deftly repaired a lacerated vein, using thread thinner than human hair. 

"The clot wasn't too bad," he commented as he sewed.  "But I'm a bit worried about the contrecoup injury–bit of a contusion and swelling there.  Not much I can do about it, only time will tell."  He finished tying the last suture and patted the field dry, watching to be sure that his work held.  When he was satisfied, he stepped back from the microscope and folded his arms around his chest, keeping them sterile.  

"All right, we're ready to close here.  Tell the ICU we'll be there in about twenty."  He turned and glowered at Cassie.  "I suppose you could go hold hands with the family–give them a heads up so they won't have so many questions for me."

"Thanks, Nathan."  Although the neurosurgeon was short on people skills, he had talent and knew his business.  Cassie respected that.  She knew Park felt the same way about her.  She'd salvaged some pretty tenuous patients, kept them alive long enough so that he could use those finely honed skills on them.

"Yeah, yeah.  C'mon people, I've got dinner waiting."

<><><>

Drake had paced and made his phone calls and snapped at the hospital minister who stopped by to comfort him and paced some more.  Finally he came to rest in the chair by the window, looking out over the cemetery with its marble angel shrouded in misty rain.

What a stupid place to put a cemetery.  His fingers found a pharmaceutical company pen and a discarded reprint from the
British Medical Journal
with the backs of the pages blank.  Without conscious thought his hands began to sketch.  Slowly the angel came to life as his pen scratched across the paper.

It was all his fault, the words echoed through his mind accompanied by a pang of guilt and anger. 

He remembered grabbing the wine and roses, taking a whiff of their heady fragrance as he stood and waved at Hart.  She'd turned, and he'd been captured by that three-quarter profile.  

Then Hart had smiled.  Her face lit up, eyes sparkling, the corners of her mouth crinkled.  God, he loved that smile–saw it too rarely.  Once he'd thought he'd give anything, do anything to make her look at him like that.

He'd been caught, off guard, helpless against the feeling that had made his heart skip a few beats as his joy turned to terror.  Hart in the middle of the street, rain making her skin glisten.  Her house looming behind her, its front door open like a goddamned monster's maw ready to devour anyone foolish enough to enter.  The smell of roses and the sound of an engine roared through his mind.

He'd dropped the bottle, never noticing its crash on the pavement. His head was engulfed in a roar as loud as a thirty-eight caliber revolver being fired in the close confines of a cellar.  His mouth filled with the taste of blood.  

Suddenly he was simultaneously standing on Gettysburg Street and lying on a cold, hard floor, waiting to die.  He froze, trapped in time and memory.  The fist that gripped his chest did not allow him to breathe or move or call out a warning.  He was drowning in blood and the smell of copper salt.  Down to his last breath.

And Hart had stood there, smiling at him.

It only lasted a moment, less than a second, but it was a moment too long before he could call out a warning to his mother and Hart.  In that time the van had rushed toward the women with the ferocity of a charging bull.  

He took a step forward, watching as Hart did his job for him, turning, pulling his mother out of danger.

His hand reached for his off duty Glock at the small of his back, but found–nothing.  Nothing but air.

The van closed in.  The black bull snickered as it obscured his view, blocking him from the place he needed to be, concealing the fate it had rendered.  Then it was gone, its brakes squealing in laughter as it rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill.

All he could see through the red haze and pounding that filled his brain were two women laying sprawled on the sidewalk.

The pen slipped from Drake's numb fingers.  He buried his face in his hands.  He couldn't feel anything except the steel bands that encircled his chest.  Each breath was a fight as he tried to suck in enough air to sustain him.

What had Hart called it?  A panic attack?  Good name.  Because Drake sure as hell was panicked.  He was scared to fucking death by this ambush of emotion that hijacked his body and mind.

He finally got his breathing under control.  The feeling that he was about to die receded.  Only to return–when? 

He opened his eyes.  An angel stared up at him from the paper.  An angel with Hart's face, Hart's smile.

Drake reached for the paper and shredded it until all that remained was a small mountain of ash-sized flakes.

"Mickey?" Hart's voice startled him.  She was the only one who called him Mickey, and usually only when her emotions ran high.  

The frisson of fear clamped its cold fingers around his chest once more.   Had something gone wrong?  Was she here to tell him Muriel had died?

She moved into the room, dressed in surgical scrubs, a ridiculous paper cap struggling to contain her hair.  

"Everything's going to be all right," she assured him.  The cap surrendered, slid to the ground, and her hair flew free.  She perched on the coffee table in front of him, scattering the ashes of his creation.  "Dr. Park is just finishing.  Your mother is doing fine.  You'll be able to see her soon."

Drake stared at her.  Her face was out of focus and her voice came from a very far distance.  His gaze wandered over her, then halted when he noticed the gleam of metal in her scalp.  There was a small area of shorn hair at her right temple, the skin stained burnt umber.  Seven shiny staples surrounded by dried blood sat there.  His hand reached out to touch the wound.  It was boggy, swollen.  

Hart took his hand in hers. She shook her head and the wound was immediately covered by falling locks of thick, chestnut curls.

"You can see her soon," she continued, squeezing his hand and suddenly everything was back in focus, as if he'd awakened from a nightmare.

"When?" he asked, jerking his hand away from hers.  Her touch brought too many memories.  He shook away the sudden vision of his hand reaching desperately for hers, sliding across a cellar floor covered in his own blood.

Hart looked down at her empty hand for a moment, then folded it into her other hand, closing them both into a tight grip.  "It will be awhile.  Dr. Park has to finish, then he'll take her to the ICU.  He'll be by to talk to you soon.  But everything went well.  They evacuated the blood clot.  That relieved most of the pressure on her brain."

Drake rose to his feet and turned toward the window.  It was too difficult to look at her, to sit so close to her, smell her scent of April showers and apple blossoms.

The pounding of the blood haze began to sneak up on him, but he took a deep breath and clenched his fists.  Not now, you bastard.  

He forced himself to breathe deeply, to prove to himself that he could.  That he was in control.

"Most of the pressure?" he echoed her words, a not-so-instant play back.