Rosen was down again, examining it. 'Responses, doctor?' he asked the senior resident.
'Positive. Good Babinsky. No gross indications of peripheral impairment,' Severn replied. This was like an exam, which always made the young resident nervous.
'This may not be as bad as it looks, but we're going to have to clean it up in a hurry before these pellets migrate. Two hours?' he asked Severn. Rosen knew the ER resident was better on trauma than he was.
'Maybe three.'
'I'll get a nap out of it anyway,' Rosen checked his watch. 'I'll take him at, oh, six.'
'Yon want to handle this one personally?'
'Why not? I'm here. This one is straightforward, just takes a little touch.' Rosen figured he was entitled to an easy case, maybe once a month. As a full professor, he drew a lot of the hard ones.
'Fine with me, sir.'
'Do we have an ID on the patient?'
'No, sir,' Marconi replied. 'The police ought to be here in a few.'
'Good.' Rosen stood and stretched. 'You know, Margaret, people like us shouldn't work these kind of hours.'
'I need the shift-differential,' Nurse Wilson replied. Besides which, she was the nursing-team leader for this shift. 'What's this, I wonder?' she said after a moment.
'Hmph?' Rosen walked around to her side of the table while the rest of the team did its work.
'A tattoo on his arm,' she reported. Nurse Wilson was surprised by the reaction it drew from Professor Rosen.
The transition from sleep to wakefulness was usually easy for Kelly, but not this time. His first coherent thought was to be surprised, but he didn't know why. Next came pain, but not so much pain as the distant warning that there would be pain, and lots of it. When he realized that he could open his eyes, he did, only to find himself staring at a gray linoleum floor. A few scattered drops of liquid reflected the bright overhead fluorescents. He felt needles in his eyes, and only then did he realize that the real stabs were in his arms.
I'm alive.
Why does that surprise me?
He could hear the sound of people moving around, muted conversations, distant chimes. The sound of rushing air was explained by air-conditioning vents, one of which had to be nearby, since he could feel the moving chill on the skin of his back. Something told him that he ought to move, that being still made him vulnerable, but even after he managed a command to his limbs to do something, nothing happened. That's when the pain announced its presence. Like the ripple on a pond from the fall of an insect, it started somewhere on his shoulder and expanded. It took a moment to classify. The nearest approximation was a bad sunburn, because everything from the left side of his neck on down to his left elbow felt scorched. He knew he was forgetting something, probably something important.
Where the fuck am I?
Kelly thought he felt the distant vibration of - what? Ship's engines? No, that wasn't right somehow, and after a few more seconds he realized it was the faraway sound of a city bus pulling away from a stop. Not a ship. A city. Why am I in a city?
A shadow crossed his face. He opened his eyes to see the bottom half of a figure dressed all over in light-green cotton. The hands held a clipboard of some sort. Kelly couldn't even focus his eyes well enough to tell if the figure was male or female before it went away, and it didn't occur to him to say anything before he drifted back to sleep.
'The shoulder wound was extensive but superficial,' Rosen told the neurosurgical resident, thirty feet away.
'Bloody enough. Four units', she noted. 'Shotgun wounds are like that. There was only one real threat to the spine. Took me a little while to figure how to remove it without endangering anything.'
'Two hundred thirty-seven pellets, but' - she held the X ray up to the light- 'looks like you got them all. This fellow just got a nice collection of freckles, though.'
'Took long enough,' Sam said tiredly, knowing that he ought to have let someone else handle it, but he'd volunteered, after all.
'You know this patient, don't you?' Sandy O'Toole said, arriving from the recovery room.
'Yeah.'
'He's coming out, but it'll be a while.' She handed over the chart which showed his current vitals. 'Looking good, doctor.'
Professor Rosen nodded and explained further to the resident, 'Great physical shape. The firemen did a nice job holding up his BP. He did almost bleed out, but the wounds looked worse than they really were. Sandy?'
She turned back. 'Yes, doctor?'
'This one is a friend of mine. Would you mind terribly if I asked you to take -'
'A special interest?'
'You're our best, Sandy.'
'Anything I need to know?' she asked, appreciating the compliment.
'He's a good man. Sandy.' Sam said it in a way that carried real meaning. 'Sarah likes him, too.'
'Then he must be all right.' She headed back into recovery, wondering if the professor was playing matchmaker again.
'What do I tell the police?'
'Four hours, minimum. I want to be there.' Rosen looked over at the coffeepot and decided against it. Any more and his stomach might rupture from all the acid.
'So who is he?'
'I don't know all that much, but I ran into trouble on the Bay in my boat and he helped me out. We ended up staying at his place for the weekend.' Sam didn't go any further. He didn't really know that much, but he had inferred a lot, and that scared him very much indeed. He'd done his part. While he hadn't saved Kelly's life - luck and the firemen had probably done that - he had performed an exceedingly skillful procedure, though he had also annoyed the resident, Dr Ann Pretlow, by not allowing her to do much of anything except watch. 'I need a little sleep. I don't have much scheduled for today. Can you do the follow-up on Mrs Baker?'
'Certainly.'
'Have someone wake me up in three hours,' Rosen said on the way to his office, where a nice comfortable couch awaited.
'Nice tan,' Billy observed with a smirk. 'I wonder where she got it.' There was general amusement. 'What do we do with her?'
He thought about that. He'd just discovered a fine way to deal with bodies, much cleaner, in its way, and far safer than what they'd been doing. But it also involved a lengthy boat trip, and he just didn't have the time to be bothered. He also didn't want to have anyone else use that particular method. It was too good to share with anyone. He knew that one of them would talk. That was one of his problems.
'Find a spot,' he said after a moment's consideration. 'If she's found, it doesn't matter much.' Then he looked around the room, cataloging the expressions he saw. The lesson had been learned. Nobody else would try this again, not anytime soon. He didn't even have to say anything.
'Tonight? Better at night.'
'That's fine. No hurry.' Everyone else could learn even more from looking at her for the rest of the day, lying there in the middle of the floor. He took only a little pleasure from it, and people had to learn their lessons, and even when it was too late for one of them, others could learn from that one's mistakes. Especially when the lessons were clear and hard. Even the drugs wouldn't block this one out.
'What about the guy?' he asked Billy.
Billy smirked again. It was his favorite expression. 'Blew him away. Both barrels, ten feet. We won't be seeing him no more.'
'Okay.' He left. There was work to be done and money to collect. This little problem was behind him. It was a pity, he thought on the way to his car, that they couldn't all be solved this easily.
The body remained in place. Doris and the others sat in the same room, unable to look away from what had once been a friend, learning their lesson as Henry wished.
