The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [128]
“Well,” said Dr. Armstrong, leading him out of the room, “I’ll examine her more carefully as soon as the crowd in there has finished. My initial impressions add little to yours. She has a definite skull fracture and some blood behind that drum, but so far she seems neurologically stable. I have both a neurosurgeon and an orthopedic man waiting in the house, but I think we’ll hold off on the wrist until we’ve had a chance to watch her. Ivan Rudnick is the neurosurgeon. Do you know him?” David nodded. Rudnick was the best on the staff, if not in the city. “Well, Ivan will see her and do a CAT scan as soon as possible. If there’s no evidence of active bleeding, we’ll wait and hope.”
“What about her chest trauma?” David asked.
“No problem as far as I can see. EKG shows no cardiac injury pattern. My more extensive exam should help confirm it.”
“Dr. Armstrong, I’m really grateful to you for handling this.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “I can’t tell you how flattered—and pleased—I am that you would ask me. By the way,” she added, “there is one small problem.”
“Oh?” David’s eyes narrowed.
“Nothing critical, David, but there are no ICU beds. Not a one. We’re checking on one postop patient now, but he’s been very unstable and I doubt we’ll be able to move him. I’ve decided we’ll be all right putting Christine on a floor. There’s a private room available on Four South. I know the girls up there will give hier closer attention than she would ever get anywhere else, including the ICU. She’ll be moved up there as soon as possible.”
“That sounds fine,” David said. “If the nurses don’t mind, I’ll hang around and do what I can to help monitor her. That is, after you and I have had our discussion.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Armstrong distantly.
“Well, you go ahead and finish. I’ll wait in the doctors’ lounge until you’re free to talk. By the way, which room will she be going to?”
“Excuse me?”
“The room,” David said. “What room is she going to?”
“Oh, ah, I have it right here. It’s Four twelve. Four South Room Four twelve.” The cardiologist smiled, then disappeared into Trauma 1.
Four twelve! David swallowed against the sudden fullness in his throat. Charlotte Thomas’s room! Step one on the bloody brick road that had led through one land of madness after another. He fought his sense of superstition and tried instead to focus on the irony. Room 412 would serve as the first command post in their battle to bring The Sisterhood of Life to an end. The exercise worked well enough, at least, to keep him from racing back to Dr. Armstrong to demand a room change. He wandered across the triage area to the doctors’ lounge and stretched out with a copy of the monthly periodical Medical Economics. The lead article was entitled “Ten Tax Shelters Even Your Accountant May Not Know.” Before he had settled into shelter number one, David was asleep.
An hour later, the phone above his head jangled him free of a frightening series of dreams—Charlotte’s cardiac arrest and the bizarre events that followed, replayed with all of the characters interchanged—all, that is, except Christine, who died again and again in one grisly manner after another.
His clothes were uncomfortably damp and the sandpaper in his mouth made it difficult to speak.
“On-call room. Shelton here,” he said thickly.
“David? It’s Margaret Armstrong. Did I wake you?”
“No, I mean yes. I mean I wasn’t exactly …”
“Well,” she cut in, “our Christine is safely in her room. Nothing new for me to add to what we already know. I think she’ll be all right.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yes … it is.” Armstrong paused. “You said you wanted to talk with me?”
“Oh, yes, I certainly do. That is, if you …”
“This would be an excellent time,” she interrupted again. “I’m in my office—not the one in the office tower, the one on North Two.”
“I know where it is,” said David, at last fully awake. “I can be there in five minutes.”
The cardiac exercise laboratory doubled as Margaret Armstrong’s “in house” office.
David knocked once on the door marked STRESS AND EXERCISE TESTING, then walked in. The small, comfortable waiting room