heaved.
“Here, I got it. Move aside, please.”
Silently they piled in. Gurney, guards, paramedics, Clara.
“Jesus. Who’s that?” a white-suited aide said.
“Oh, my God. It’s Dr. Dickey.” A fat nurse cradling her take-out coffee and doughnuts started to cry, dribbling coffee down her pink angora sweater. “Oh, no, is he dead?”
“Shut up.”
“Who said that? Who told me to shut up?”
The paramedic with a ponytail and two earrings that Clara hadn’t noticed before shot the sobbing nurse a furious look, then went on with his work.
“Shit, don’t stop,” Clara cried as the doors slid open on the wrong floor.
“Sorry, Doctor.”
The doors closed on the appalling stink. Everyone was panting, sweating. Someone swore softly. The patient wasn’t responding. They couldn’t shock him with the paddles again in this tiny, crowded space with no electricity. Clara’s head pounded.
Finally they were at the front doors, rolling down a ramp out on the street. Then they were running with the gurney and the IV dripping an anti-arrhythmia drug, the breathing bag pumped by a paramedic. It was a block and a half to the emergency room. Traffic clogged the street around the ER entrance. None of it was going well. Everyone knew it. Harold wasn’t coming around. They were silent, running, gasping.
Suddenly a car careened through the changing light at the corner and the gurney tipped off the curb as they frantically tried to stop it from rolling onto the street into the oncoming car.
“Oh, Christ, hang on.”
Two paramedics held the patient as two pedestrians ran up to help the third right the gurney and get it going again. “Oh, man. Did you see that? Guy just kept going.”
Through ER, they moved into a back treatment room and continued working. Clara silently watched procedures she’d seen a hundred times. The airway removed, Hal’s mouth opened again, illuminated by a laryngoscope, a clear plastic tube was slid down into his trachea, then attached to a black ambu bag so that oxygen could be pumped into his lungs. Six, seven people were working on him now. He was hooked up to a respirator, an electrocardiogram. Adrenalin was shot directly into his heart. Clara stood back as they worked for the full required hour, trying desperately to resuscitate a man she knew had been dead almost from the moment he hit the floor.
Hal’s internist finally strode in. He’d been called from a tennis game and was wearing a black warm-up suit. He was tall and young and fit, and seemed surprised to be there.
“Jesus, smells like someone’s been hitting the bottle pretty bad,” he said, even before he looked at the flat line on the EKG or picked up the chart.
“Yeah, the patient.”
Dr. Chatman turned to Clara. “You’re Dr. Treadwell?”
“Yes.” She put out her hand and he shook it.
“Ivan Chatman. You were with him?”
She nodded.
“What happened?”
“He was in his office, pretty upset, I guess. He’d been drinking. He called me at home. I came over to check on him and almost the moment I arrived, he keeled over.”
The young internist frowned. “I checked him out only a few weeks ago. He was in excellent condition—”
“A man over sixty, you never know,” Clara said.
“I was fond of him.” The internist shook his head and pronounced Harold Dickey dead. The machines were turned off.
The ER cardiologist turned to Dr. Chatman. “Ivan, we’d like permission to do an autopsy.”
Chatman nodded. “Sure, I’ll call his wife. I don’t think it’ll be a problem. She’s a former nurse.”
The oxygen mask was off the dead man’s face now. The EKG and other machines were unhooked. The IV bag was detached, but the needle was still stuck in his hand with some tubing hanging from it. They had left it in him because they wouldn’t be using it again. He was blue, his hands already slightly clawed. All the efforts to save him made him look as if he had been beaten to death.
“Problem?” The cardiologist watched Chatman.
Chatman moved to stand by the dead man’s head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “This doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara said.
“I knew him pretty well. He didn’t take narcotics or any medication that I know of. He was fit as a horse.… ” He frowned, then turned away from the body. “Oh, well.”
“You want to run the toxes?” the ER cardiologist asked. “You never know. If there’s a question later, I don’t want any problems on this end.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll speak to his wife. If she gives the okay, then go for it,” Chatman said.
“Any ideas what we might be looking for?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Clara muttered again. “The man had a heart attack. This is absurd.”
Chatman looked at the cardiologist, then shook his head. “I can’t imagine him taking anything.” He reached out and pulled a sheet over the dead man’s face.
Clara stalked out. They were going to run toxes on Hal. She didn’t want to hear Chatman’s side of the conversation with Sally Ann, Harold’s wax-museum figure of a wife. Or anything else, for that matter. Suddenly she was uneasy, deeply uneasy. Her mouth was dry and had a sour taste. Her whole body ached, smelled of sweat, vomit, and Hal’s Johnnie Walker.
She remembered Hal’s door had been left open. She had to go back to the Centre and secure his office. She didn’t want to go through the front doors and answer a lot of questions. She thought about the questions and how she would answer them. Her head was down; her eyes were on her feet. She felt numb, queasy, didn’t want to go back to the Centre. Had to. When she lifted her head, she was horrified to see the man Harold had mentioned in his message. Bobbie Boudreau was leaning against a tree across the street, smoking a cigarette, looking the other way. Clara had seen him many times on the locked ward, where he had been a nurse. She recognized him immediately.
thirty-four
“Aeiiiiii!” Sai Woo stood in the doorway of her daughter’s apartment, screaming. The sound was shrill and piercing like the radio signal for disaster.
Startled, April swung around to face her, the dangerous new Glock 9mm automatic that could fire off sixteen rounds without reloading still level in her hand.
Skinny Dragon Mother clapped both hands to her head. “I mother,” she shrieked. “No kirr me.”
Disgusted, April lowered the gun. “Maaa, haven’t you ever heard of knocking? I could have shot you.”
“Go ahead, shoot me. I dead awleady.” Sai’s screams brought Dim Sum scampering up the stairs. When the dog saw her mistress, she crouched like a panther and jumped several feet straight up into Sai’s arms, trembling all over.
“Oh, come on, Ma, give me a break.”
“Rook,” Sai said accusingly, “you scare
“Ma, I hate to tell you this. That thing is not a baby, it’s a dog.”
“Onny baby I eva see,” Sai muttered angrily, hugging the puppy to her chest. “You no have baby.
“Oh, come on, Ma, don’t start that.” April swung around and put the gun on the table beside the couch in her living room, then hunkered down to unstrap the weights on her ankles.
She’d been exercising with the gun and the weights, trying to keep her forearms strong and develop some perceivable curvature in her butt. The last thing she needed at the moment was Chinese torture. Skinny Dragon Mother seemed to have other ideas.
