The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [43]
“Thank you, Dr. Armstrong.” He swallowed the last of his coffee. “Thank you for everything.”
With a nod to Edgerly and Gold, and a longer look at Christine, David headed off toward the emergency ward.
Christine sat silently behind the nurses’ station as the others dispersed to go about their business. There was a puzzled, ironic expression on her face. She slipped her right hand into the pocket of her sweater and, for a minute or two, fingered the syringe and ampule of morphine that she had wrapped in a handkerchief and stuffed inside. Then she rose and walked with forced nonchalance down the hall toward Room 412.
CHAPTER IX
“Do you do hands, Dr. Shelton?” Harry Weiss, the hawk-nosed resident who had called David to the emergency ward, could easily have won the role of Ichabod Crane in a production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
“Show me what you have,” David said.
The emergency ward was in its usual state of mid-evening chaos. Two dozen patients in various stages of discomfort and anger at the hospital sat in the crowded waiting room. Litters glided past like freighters in a busy port, bearing their human cargo to X ray or the short-term observation ward or an in-patient room. Telephones jangled. A dozen different conversations competed with one another. David caught snatches of several of them as the resident led him to Trauma Room 8. “What do you mean you can’t have the results for an hour? This man is bleeding out. We need them now …” “Mrs. Ramirez, I understand how you feel, but I can’t help you. There is simply no Juan Ramirez on the emergency ward at this time …” “Now, you’re going to feel a little pinprick …”
The patient David had been called about was a forty- year-old laborer who had lost a brief but unmistakably furious encounter with his power saw. The top halves of two fingers were gone completely, and a third was held together at the first knuckle by a sliver of tendon. Another no-win situation, David thought to himself as he evaluated the damaged hand. He spoke briefly with the man, who had stopped his profuse sweating but was still the color of sun-bleached bone. Then he guided the overwrought young resident into the hallway. It was David’s decision whether to do the repair himself or to spend the extra time to take the resident through it. He chose to take the time, remembering the many late nights when other surgeons had made the extra effort to teach him. It was nearly half an hour before he felt confident that Weiss could complete the repair on his own.
Four South was unusually quiet as David stepped off the elevator and started down the corridor toward Room 412. A burst of laughter from the nurses’ lounge suggested that it was coffee break time—at least for some of the staff. He thought about Christine Beall, half hoping that she might step out of one of the rooms as he was passing.
Just the image was enough to rekindle an uneasy warmth. So, she’s interesting looking and has strange eyes, David thought. Lauren is beautiful and has incredible eyes. You’re reacting like this because she’s away, that’s all. Face it, with Lauren you have everything you’ve ever wanted in a woman—beauty, brains, independence. Right? Right. The logic was all there, black and white and irrefutable. But somewhere in the back of his mind a small voice was saying, “Think again … think again …”
The lights in Charlotte Thomas’s room were off. David stood at the doorway, staring across the darkness toward her bed. The gastrointestinal drainage machine, set for intermittent suction, whirred, stopped, then reassuringly whirred again. Bubbles of oxygen tinkled through the water of the safety bottle on the wall. He debated whether or not to disrupt her sleep in order to check findings he knew would be unchanged at best. Finally he stepped across the room and turned on the fluorescent light over her bed.
Charlotte was lying on her back, a tranquil half-smile on her face. It took David several seconds to realize that she was not breathing.
Instinctively, he reached across her neck and checked for a carotid pulse.