'So that was a bullet wound by her ear.'
'I would say so.'
'I'll have someone over there within the hour,' Grimes said. 'And I'll be by later to speak with her.'
'Just go easy,' Matt said, wanting instead to tell him to just stay the hell away from her. 'She's got a fairly severe concussion.'
'How long do you think she'll be in the hospital?'
'I don't know for sure. A couple of days, maybe. I'm going to have the neurologist see her and maybe get an MRI if he thinks it might tell us anything more than the emergency CT scan we did.'
'Fair enough. One of the guys will be over there shortly.'
'Round the clock, okay?'
'Rutledge, how about you just do your business and let me do mine.'
'Nancy,' Matt said to the nursing supervisor, 'are you sure you can't keep Dr. Solari in the unit any longer?'
'Matt, you know I'd walk over hot coals for you,' Nancy Catlett said, 'but we have four criticals in the unit right now, and a post-op abdominal aneurysm repair due up soon. There's just no way I can justify keeping a patient who's awake and alert — even one of yours.'
'In that case, a private room.'
'That depends on her insurance.'
'Just find one for her. We're going to have a guard posted outside the door. I want only people essential to her care going in there. If she needs a specific order, I'll write it. If her plan still won't cover the private, I will.'
'Well now, I don't think we'll need to go that far,' Catlett said. 'But if that's the way you care for all your patients, I'm switching doctors to you. My HMO is terrible about paying for private rooms.'
Matt made quick rounds on the patients he had in the hospital, and then brought the chest tube insertion kit, drainage system, intravenous bags, antibiotics, and other purloined equipment to his motorcycle. Thoughts of Nikki Solari and questions surrounding the assault on her had now bivouacked in his mind, making it difficult to concentrate on much else. When he returned to the unit, the nurses reported that Nikki had been asleep since he left, drifting back out again immediately after each of the two neuro checks they had done. Still, the moment he stepped through the doorway, she moaned contentedly and opened her eyes.
'Welcome back,' she said, yawning.
'How did you know I was here?'
'Sometimes I just know things.'
'How's your headache?'
'Did you ever see Riverdance?'
'Ouch. I can have them give you some Tylenol, but I'd rather stay away from anything stronger.'
'Tylenol will be fine. I'm tough.'
'You don't have to convince me of that. The police guard is all set. You were right about Bill Grimes. He feels very protective toward you.'
'I hope he can get to the bottom of this,' she said.
'He's a pretty good cop.' When lie wants to ›e. 'Listen, I've got a house call to make, but I'm going to wait around the ICU until the guard gets here. You just go ahead and sleep. Right now that's the most therapeutic thing you could do.'
'In a minute. Right now I'm wide awake. Can you sit for a little while? I sort of feel like Dorothy when she looked out the window and discovered she wasn't in Kansas anymore.'
'I'd much rather talk with you than write progress notes.'
'Thanks. The nurses tell me you trained at Harvard.'
'I did my residency in medicine at White Memorial.'
'I'm impressed. I wasn't accepted for their surgical program.'
'Surgery?'
'I did a year of surg at Metropolitan then switched to pathology. I wanted my patients to lie really, really still when I was operating on them. Where did you live when you were there?'
'Beacon Hill. The poorer part at the bottom. I liked Boston pretty much, but my heart has always been here in the mountains. I couldn't wait to get back.'
'That's not hard to understand. It's very beautiful here.'
'When you're not being chased by a pair of crazed killers it is. Can I ask you something?'
'Sure.'
'It's about your tattoo.'
'What about it?' she asked with a slightly defensive edge to her voice.
'Oh, nothing. I just wanted you to know that I run into Gila monster tattoos on the top of doctors' feet all the time around here.'
Nikki's eyes narrowed. Are you making fun of me they asked.
Matt leapt in to save the situation.
'Uh-oh, I'm sorry,' he said. 'Sounding flip when I shouldn't is one of my less desirable talents. It gets me into more hot water than a boiled lobster. Mea culpa.' He pushed up his sleeve to reveal his own tattoo. 'I'm into hawthorn trees, myself.'
Nikki's expression softened.
'Sometime, you're going to owe me a story,' she said. 'Well, let's see. I had the tattoo put on a few years ago. Some of my musician friends were getting them and I decided I wanted one, too. I picked the dorsum of my foot so that I could see it whenever I wanted to, but I could also hide it whenever I wanted. I might have thought of some other location if I had known how much that one was going to kill. It's actually only half Gila monster. The front half is a salamander.'
'Many of our doctors choose that variation,' he commented in spite of himself.
Her eyes laughed. No problems this time.
'I once saw the combination on a clay pot at a Navajo reservation in Arizona,' she went on, 'and after the artist explained it to me, I ended up adopting the creation as sort of my totem. The salamander is shy, porous, vulnerable, weak, and secretive. The Gila is fearless, compact, warriorlike, determined, and so tenacious that when it grasps something with its thick jaws, one must often cut its head off to get it to let go.'
Matt flashed on the horrible death of the beast in his dream and shuddered. He had never been one to reject the mystical or supernatural, beginning with dreams, and this one was bothering him more every second. Was the unsettling scenario merely replaying a version of the events recently past, or was it a vision of things yet to be?
'I can see how those two men on the highway got more than they bargained for,' he said.
There was no response. Nikki's eyes were closed again, her brain muffled by exhaustion and the physiology of her concussion. The lingering effects of blunt head trauma were absolutely unpredictable and potentially devastating. Matt had seen professional athletes forced to the sidelines permanently, and others — intellectually sound initially with no visible changes on their MRIs — become significantly impaired over just a few days.
Silently, he prayed for Nikki Solari and the music that she made — with and without her violin. He stood, and before he turned away, impulsively reached out to touch her hand. At the last moment, he pulled back. The gesture would be perfectly innocent and natural with nearly all of his patients. But not, he had to admit, with this one.
CHAPTER 17
With three quick raps, Dr. Richard Steinman gaveled to order the final meeting of the select commission on Omnivax. The scene outside the closed-door session was nothing like the throng of reporters and photographers that had covered Lynette Marquand's speech. But the media was still well represented. The drama of the First Lady's promise to go back to the drawing board with Omnivax if even one member of the august panel voted against it, coupled with the political and medical implications of the project, had kept interest high.
