Dead Ringer

button for the lobby floor. Carrier hurried inside after Bennie, who nodded to Murphy.

“Murph, you stay with my girl Mrs. DiNunzio. Make sure she gets home okay.”

“Sure,” Murphy said, biting her lip. “See you later, Marshall!” she called out as she slipped an arm around the little woman and the doors slid closed.

It was scary-quiet in the elevator, and Bennie eyed the deep furrow of David’s forehead. She flashed on the newspaper article, back on her desk. Had he been here before? Trying to save a life? Failing? The elevator doors slid open onto two jumpsuited building employees, who cleared an aisle. The paramedics rushed the stretcher to the back of a waiting red truck that read PHILADELPHIA FIRE RESCUE, its backdoors wide open, and on another “one, two, three” count, the paramedics slid the stretcher inside the back of the truck.

One paramedic jumped in after Marshall’s stretcher, the other paramedic took off to drive, and Bennie tried to board until he blocked her. “No riders! Not on my bus, lady.”

“But I’m family!”

“Sorry. Liability issues.”

Marshall cried out, “Let her come! I want her here!”

“I’ll write you a release,” Bennie said, jumping in anyway as the paramedic scrambled past her to the backdoors, slammed them closed, and twisted the inside lever to lock them, and the truck lurched off.

“Hang on, Marshall,” Bennie said, squeezing Marshall’s damp hand. There was a padded jump seat behind her but she didn’t sit down. “Hang on, honey, we’re going to the hospital.”

Marshall thrashed on the gurney, trying not to scream, and Bennie held fast to her hand, appalled. Clotty bleeding soaked her sunny yellow dress, bathing her knees and calves. The paramedic rolled up a hand towel, set it between her legs to absorb the blood, and wrapped a blood pressure cuff on her arm, his dark eyes fixed on her trembling form. He appeared to be counting her breaths.

“What’s the matter with her?” Bennie asked, panicky.

“We don’t do the diagnosis, lady. We’re the swoop and scoop crew, me and Derek.” The paramedic frowned at the blood pressure gauge, then placed two fingers at the pulse on Marshall’s wrist. “Everything’s fine, Marshall. So how do you take your pizza? Double cheese?”

“Please!” Marshall cried out, in torment, and the sound went right through Bennie. “Is the baby okay! How’s my baby?”

“The baby’s going to be fine, Marshall,” the paramedic answered, but the rescue truck bucked and stalled in rush-hour traffic. Sirens screamed in Bennie’s head. She kept telling Marshall everything was going to be okay, though she knew the person she was trying most to convince was herself.

“Let’s move it, Derek!” the paramedic called out to the driver. “BP is sixty over forty! Respiration is thirty! Pulse is a hundred ten! She’s diaphoretic!”

“Goddamn it!” the driver cursed in the front seat, and the truck slowed almost to a full stop. “This Lexus is trying to turn the corner!” Suddenly there was a crackling over the radio in the front seat, near a computer keyboard and small blue screen, and the driver called back, “Change of plans. We’re going to Memorial. Tractor-trailer overturned on 95, and they got the ticket to Penn. Traffic to Memorial will be lighter too.” The driver hit the horn, hard, honk honk, and the truck finally broke free and, with a few stutter steps, took off, veering around the corner.

“Memorial Hospital?” Bennie asked. “Her husband will be going to Penn.”

“So call and tell him.”

“Right,” Bennie said, then remembered she didn’t have a cell phone. She’d left it somewhere on the floor of her office. Carrier and David would go to Penn to find Marshall. Damn. She’d have to find a pay phone at the hospital.

Honk honk honk, the horn blared. The siren screamed. The truck accelerated, then began to fly. Everything on the shelves rattled, even behind smoked plastic windows. Boxes read VIONEX WIPES and a container labeled GLUCOSE TUBES. Marshall’s head bobbled, and Bennie leapt to hold it still. It was something she could do as they raced through the city. They were on the way to the hospital. They were going to save Marshall and the baby. They were going. They were moving. They were flying.

“Go, go, gophers, watch ’em go, go, go,” the paramedic sang under his breath. But the tune stopped abruptly when he slipped a stethoscope into his ears and placed its bulb on Marshall’s huge belly.

Bennie held her breath. She wanted to ask how the baby was, but in the next second the paramedic looked up and met her gaze. His face had gone completely white.

And something in his eye told Bennie to start praying.

34

I’m sorry, but you have to go,” one of the nurses told Bennie. They’d rushed Marshall to Memorial’s Labor and Delivery floor, and a group of nurses were hurrying to prepare her for an emergency C-section. A nurse grabbed the checked curtain that hung around Marshall’s bed and whisked it along its metal J-shaped track with a zzzipp, blocking Marshall from Bennie.

“I hate to leave her alone,” Bennie said, her throat thick with emotion. “Her husband’s not here. He’s at the wrong hospital.”

“Husbands can stay, but you can’t.” The nurse’s brown eyes softened. “We’ll take good care of her and the baby. She’s getting blood now. The baby’s on the monitor. The doctor will be right here. He’s dealing with another emergency.”

“What’s the matter with her? She’s in so much pain.”

“We think it’s placenta abruptio,” she said, and Bennie looked puzzled. “An abruption. The placenta peels away from the uterine wall. It’s terribly painful.”

Oh my God. “How did she get that? She was fine.”

“No one knows why it happens, but it does.”

“Is there a phone, so I can call her husband? I left my cell phone.”

“You couldn’t use a cell here anyway. Use our L and D phone.” The nurse pointed to the station behind them, covered with baby photos and thank-you notes, but another nurse in a puffy scrub hat was already on the phone. “There’s a pay phone, but it’s quite a ways, because the new labor wing is under construction. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but take the shortcut.”

“Where?”

The nurse pointed down the hall and to her right, at a makeshift plywood door with a handmade sign that read NO ADMITTANCE! CONTRACTION SITE. “Take that door, go through the double doors, take a right at the sign for the elevators, and you’ll see the pay phones. I think they’re still there. But tell Dad to get here quick. We go in five minutes.”

“Five minutes?” Bennie took off. She hustled down the hallway to the door, flung it open, and found herself in a construction site, with temporary drywall where corridors evidently used to be. Her house had looked like this for two years, while she’d rehabbed it. The air was warm here-the air-conditioning hadn’t been put in yet. She ran down the hall of exposed drywall and raw concrete subfloor, but it ended in another corridor of drywall, which she also ran down, then stopped.

Shit! There were no double doors. Just another makeshift corridor. A trash bag against one wall overflowed with empty Mountain Dew cans, Tastykake wrappers, and bunched-up paper bags. There were no workmen around to ask for directions. It was after five, and they would have cut out by four.

Bennie spun around. Two glass doors lay on their side, resting on a pile of two-by-fours, and next to them hung a bright blue tarp, duct-taped over a hallway entrance to keep the dust out, which everybody knew never worked. On the tarp hung another sign that read DANGER-KEEP OUT. Maybe the tarp had become the double doors, or vice versa. The phones must be on the other side of the tarp. Bennie didn’t have time to be law-abiding.

She ducked under the tarp and came out the other side, into another drywall corridor, almost finished and painted with white prime coat. The floor was bare cement, spotted with drips of paint. What had the nurse said?