Urgent Care (3 page)

She knocked on the door, opening it without waiting for his response. He was bent over the sink in the corner, heaving up his breakfast. His body shook violently even after he stopped vomiting.

Nora grabbed a towel from the shelves, ran cool water over it, and wiped his face clean. She let the water run, rinsing the acrid smell away. She didn’t look him in the eyes, but gave him some semblance of privacy as she kept one hand always on his body, ready, waiting.

Finally he inhaled, straightening as the air filled his body. He pressed his hand against his eyes for a long moment. Then he exhaled, a plaintive
whoosh
that echoed above the sound of running water. He opened his eyes, met her gaze.

“Are you all right?” She gave his arm a quick squeeze.

She immediately let him go, realizing the familiarity was no longer her prerogative. An awkward silence passed between them. She’d never felt awkward around Seth before—furious, sad, irritated, yes, but never this blind, stumbling, knowing-too-much feeling.

“I’m so sorry,” she tried again, but her words sounded hollow and meaningless.

She wanted to comfort him, to help, but she didn’t know how. All she could do was stand there, staring, hanging on to a dirty, wet towel instead of reaching for him. He wasn’t tall, only five-ten, but compared to her five-three he’d always felt tall enough. Just right for tiptoe kisses or for him to lift her in his arms. Once upon a time.

Nora focused all her attention on wringing out the towel. Suddenly the room felt too small for the two of them and everything that lay between them.

His hand reached out for her, then dropped back to his side, empty. “You said you’d been drinking that night,” he started, then faltered to a stop. “New Year’s. Two years ago.”

She nodded, concentrating on hanging the towel from the sink’s edge. She turned the water off. Silence fell. She tugged on the hem of the towel, making it line up, perfectly even. “I had a few drinks.”

“I thought you meant you were both drunk, things went too far—”

“That I said no, and he heard yes? Just another date rape, nothing too disturbing, right?” Fury colored her words. “And so you didn’t ask any more questions, didn’t need the details since they’d put the blame on me, too drunk to keep a guy’s filthy hands off me. I made it easy for you, didn’t I, Seth? Maybe too easy.”

He backed away, banging into a metal shelving unit, sending a stack of suture trays to the floor. “I didn’t—I couldn’t—” His Adam’s apple bobbed as if something sharp and painful were caught in his throat. “Tell me. Tell me what really happened.”

She was tempted to. But even after everything that had happened between them, she couldn’t. It was bad enough he’d seen Karen’s body, seen the outward evidence. No way would she burden him with more details. Or the fact that Karen had obviously suffered even more than Nora had. The rapist had terrorized Nora with his knife but had never cut her, not like he had Karen.

“You don’t really need to know all that. What you really need to know is that it’s my fault Karen was killed.” She licked her lips, but it didn’t help; her tongue grated against them like sandpaper. “It’s my fault. Because I never told anyone. Not until I told you.”

“The police?”

“No, Seth. I never went to the police. And now I have to face the consequences.” Her vision wavered, but she didn’t sway or fall. She stayed in control, finished her confession.

“Karen is dead because of me.”

Thursday, 7:32 A.M.

THE SAVORY AROMA OF COFFEE DRIFTED FROM THE front of the ambulance, inviting Dr. Gina Freeman to abandon the oppressive gray of the Pittsburgh winter and fly away to exotic lands populated by wandering bands of baristas toting portable espresso machines. She turned sideways in her seat in the rear of the ambulance, the better to keep an eye on the two paramedics up front—and the coffee they’d just picked up from Eat ’n’ Park.

Trey Garrison, the EMS district chief, was riding with Gina and paramedic Scott “Gecko” Dellano. The two men couldn’t appear more different from the outside—Trey was a little over six feet, dark skinned and intense, while Gecko was wiry, tattooed, laid back and never without his signature Oakley shades—but when they worked together it was like watching a symphony in action.

A symphony so well rehearsed that Gina sometimes felt like a kazoo player thrown into the mix. Working with the medics was part of her duties as a third-year emergency medicine resident, but she’d missed some shifts and was now making up for lost time.

Trey always seemed to arrange things so that he worked with Gina when she did her EMS ride-alongs. Gina wasn’t sure if it was because Trey felt protective of her after she’d almost died in a drive-by shooting during her first ride-along last summer or if he was keeping tabs on her and reporting back to her boss in the ER, Lydia Fiore. Whom he also happened to be living with.

After Trey pulled a cup of heavenly brewed caffeine from the cup holder and handed it to her, Gina decided she honestly didn’t care.

She gulped her first sip. It was still hot enough to scald, but too good to resist. “Thanks, Trey. You’re a lifesaver.”

Gina was exhausted. Squeezing in the ride-alongs in addition to her regularly scheduled shifts in the ER had put a definite crimp in her free time—including time to sleep. And personal grooming time. She patted her mass of braids, which she’d pulled back with a scrunchie. Antonio, her stylist, was going to shriek when he saw her.

She prayed the jolt of caffeine would keep her eyes open through her shift. Her medical student roommate, Amanda, hadn’t helped—flouncing around the house at an ungodly hour as if a stint in the pediatric ICU were more fun than sex (something Gina had about given up on these last two weeks) and grinning like the twenty-five-year-old in love she was. Amanda was engaged and looked the part.

Gina was engaged and looked like a hag.

Jerry, her fiancé—just thinking the word made her panic—was being patient with her request to keep their engagement a secret. But even his patience had an end. He wanted her to announce their engagement at the big Angels of Mercy gala on Saturday night, where Gina was receiving a Carnegie Medal for heroism.

That plan had a few problems. First, Gina was no hero—she felt like a fraud accepting the medal. It was actually another doctor, Ken Rosen, who had been the real hero back in July, during the riots. Unfortunately a reporter had caught
her
on film. The media and public—not to mention her father’s lobbying with his influential friends—had done the rest. And despite Gina’s urging, Ken refused to step up and take the credit that was rightfully his.

Second, her parents were expecting her to announce that she was leaving her emergency medicine residency to join her mother at the Freeman Foundation, raising money for causes deemed worthy and spending a lot of time in designer gowns associating with the “right” kind of people—a group that most definitely did not include Jerry Boyle, a detective with the Major Crimes squad.

Suddenly working double shifts to avoid thinking about the mess she’d got herself into felt like a blessing.

“Heard you were late in the ER last night.” Trey’s tone had a faint ring of disapproval, but she ignored it.

“Was supposed to get off at twelve, but a drug OD kept me there until two.” Which meant home and to bed around three and back up again to ride in the ambulance by seven.

“You okay to work? I’d rather have you take a day off than compromise patient care.”

“I’m fine.” She took another sip of coffee, mainly to hide her yawn. She craved a smoke, but Jerry had finally persuaded her to quit, so instead she jammed a piece of nicotine gum into her mouth.

A call came through, interrupting Trey’s interrogation. Gecko, who was driving, glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. “How come no bulletproof vest today? You must have a good feeling about riding with us.”

Gina glanced down at the navy polo she’d tucked into her cargo pants. “I forgot it,” she admitted. As long as they didn’t run into Jerry, who was overprotective even for a cop, it wouldn’t matter.

“Surprised you’re talking to us peons, what with being given the key to the city on Saturday. You know Ollie and I have to be there, full dress uniform and everything.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“Well, least you can do is introduce me to a few cute nurses when the dancing starts.”

Gina wasn’t sure she’d even make it through to the dancing—half the time she found herself fantasizing ways to escape Saturday’s gala all together. “No problem.”

Trey hung up the radio. “Make a U-turn, we’re heading to Heinz Prep,” he instructed Gecko. “Code Two.”

“What’s up?”

“School nurse thinks a kid might have meningococcemia. He came in with a fever, and she sees a rash. Kid’s acting fine otherwise.”

“Shit.” Meningococcemia was a highly contagious bacterial disease that could quickly go from no symptoms to near death. “Any other kids with the same symptoms?”

“They’re going to check. Might be nothing—you never know with school nurses—but she got verbal permission from the mom for us to transport him for a full eval. In fact, the mother insisted on it, has her personal physician on his way to meet us at Angels’ ER.”

“Personal physician? Who are these folks, the Rockefellers?” Gecko asked.

“Could be,” Gina said as a stately white-brick mansion surrounded by several other large buildings came into sight. A wrought-iron gate announced their arrival at Heinz Prep, her alma mater. “Rockefellers, Kennedys, Carnegies, they’ve all attended.”

“Are those dormitories?” Trey asked as they parked between two colonial-style brick houses.

“Yes. Students come from all over the world.”

“If it is meningococcemia—” Trey began.

“Then we might have a disaster on our hands,” Gina finished for him.

 

 

D
R.
L
YDIA
F
IORE TOOK ADVANTAGE OF A FEW moments of calm and sat at the ER nurses’ station, completing Karen Chisholm’s death certificate.

She filled in the tiny spaces on the crowded form, writing as neatly as possible, worrying the fingers of her free hand through the uneven layers of her dark hair. She hated paperwork. Especially the way it diminished a person to a few sterile facts. She hadn’t known Karen, but that didn’t matter. Karen had been one of their own. She deserved more than meaningless words on a smudged form destined for a dusty drawer in some bureaucrat’s office.

To Lydia, every patient she lost deserved more. But she didn’t have the luxury of investing in that emotion. She had to focus on her other patients, give them the best she could.

“Hell of a way to start a shift,” she muttered, scanning the nurses’ notes for the exact time of death.

“How do you think she ended up in the cemetery?” a nurse asked as she pretended to straighten the stacks of paperwork at the desk.

“Did you see the stuff they spray-painted on her?” another said with a shudder. “Like a horror movie.”

Lydia watched, on alert. She’d called in a crisis counselor, but he hadn’t arrived yet. A few of the staff had broken down, sobbing after Karen’s failed resuscitation. Most swallowed their emotions, their movements now stiff, angry, guarded. And then there were the ones whose curiosity outweighed their grief. As if arming themselves with details about Karen’s death would keep them safe.

“We need more security around here,” one of the older nurses put in, banging a chart down on to the shelf beside Jason, the desk clerk.

“What do you want?” Jason asked. “Armed guards patrolling the hallways? This isn’t Baghdad.”

“You’re not a woman. You don’t understand. I’m afraid to walk to my car. They make us park so far away, and that parking garage is always dark and deserted.”

Lydia turned to Jason. “Speaking of security, did you send the guys across the street to guard the place where Nora found Karen?”

“Yeah, they’re waiting for the cops to take over. Here comes Glen now,” Jason said.

“Morning.” Glen Bakker, the head of security, was a man whose posture screamed military. His shoulders were squared, jaw jutting forward, as he extended his hand and shook Lydia’s. He insisted on shaking hands every time they met—she wasn’t sure if it was a measure of respect or if Glen used the handshake the same way Lydia’s mother had taught her to use it: as a way to get close enough to gauge a person’s real intentions, to get inside their guard. “Rough day all around, isn’t it?”

“Did the police find anything at the cemetery?”

“Didn’t look like it. They’re combing the place now, will probably be there for hours.” Glen looked around the ER, his eyes moving back and forth. Cop’s eyes, Lydia recognized. “Is Nora okay? I heard she was the one who found the victim.”

“She’s fine,” Lydia said, even though she wasn’t sure if that was the truth. She made a mental note to check on Nora as soon as she could. “What about security cameras? Did they show anything?”

Glen was shaking his head. “The only outside cameras are at the hospital’s main entrance, the ER”—he jerked his chin toward the ambulance bay doors—“the clinics, and the parking garage exits. None of them would have been aimed in the right direction.”

“Maybe you should think of getting some more,” one of the nurses said.

“They’ve been in my capital budget for two years, but keep getting the ax. As it is, Tillman and the administration are going to balk about paying for the extra manpower I’ll be asking for.”

“Even if they approve the money, it will take weeks for you to hire anyone,” Lydia said.

“Yes’m. I’ll be pulling some overtime myself, hang around down here, keep an eye on things. If anyone feels uncomfortable walking to their car, you make sure they call us. We’ll get them an escort as fast as we can.”

“I’m sure everyone will appreciate that,” Lydia said, wondering if Glen would make good on his promise. The nurses huffed and walked away. They’d heard it all before.