Without remorse - Tom Clancy [151]
Luck smiled on Kelly. There was an opening on the traffic loop at the hospital's main entrance, and he walked in to see a large statue of Christ in the lobby, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet high, staring down at him with a benign expression more fitting to a hospital than to what Kelly had been doing only twelve hours earlier. He walked around it, his back to the statue's back because he didn't need that sort of question on his conscience - not now.
Sandy O'Toole appeared at three-twelve, and when he saw her come through the oak doors Kelly smiled until he saw the look on her face. A moment later he understood why. A surgeon was right behind her, a short, swarthy man in greens, walking as rapidly as his short legs permitted and talking loudly at her. Kelly hesitated, looking on with curiosity as Sandy stopped and turned, perhaps tired of running away or merely bending to the necessity of the moment. The doctor was of her height, perhaps a little less, speaking so rapidly that Kelly didn't catch all the words while Sandy looked in his eyes with a blank expression.
'The incident report is filed, doctor,' she said during a brief pause in his tirade.
'You have no right to do that!' The eyes blazed angrily in his dark, pudgy face, causing Kelly to draw a little closer.
'Yes, I do, doctor. Your medication order was incorrect. I am the team leader, and I am required to report medication errors.'
'I am ordering you to withdraw that report! Nurses do not give orders to doctors!' What followed was language that Kelly didn't like, especially in the presence of God's image. As he watched, the doctor's dark face grew darker, and he leaned into the nurse's space, his voice growing louder. For her part, Sandy didn't flinch, refusing to allow herself to be intimidated, which goaded the doctor further.
'Excuse me.' Kelly intruded on the dispute, not too close, just to let everyone know that someone was here, and momentarily drawing an angry look from Sandra O'Toole. 'I don't know what you two are arguing about, but if you're a doctor and the lady here is a nurse, maybe you two can disagree in a more professional way,' he suggested in a quiet voice.
It was as though the physician hadn't heard a thing. Not since he was sixteen years old had anyone ignored Kelly so blatantly. He drew back, wanting Sandy to handle this herself, but the doctor's voice merely grew louder, switching now to a language he didn't understand, mixing English vituperation with Farsi. Through it all Sandy stood her ground, and Kelly was proud of her, though her face was growing wooden and her impassive mien had to be masking some real fear now. Her impassive resistance only goaded the doctor into raising his hand and then his voice even more. It was when he called her a 'fucking cunt,' doubtless something learned from a local citizen, that he stopped. The fist that he'd been waving an inch from Sandy's nose had disappeared, encased, he saw with surprise, in the hairy forepaw of a very large man.
'Excuse me,' Kelly said in his gentlest voice. 'Is there somebody upstairs who knows how to fix a broken hand?' Kelly had wrapped his fingers around the surgeon's smaller, more delicate hand, and was pressing the fingers inward, just a little.
A security guard came through the door just then, drawn by the noise of the argument. The doctor's eyes went that way at once.
'He won't get here fast enough to help you, doctor. How many bones in the human hand, sir?' Kelly asked.
'Twenty-eight,' the doctor replied automatically.
'Want to go for fifty-six?' Kelly tightened his pressure.
The doctor's eyes closed on Kelly's, and the smaller man saw a face whose expression was neither angry nor pleased, merely there, looking at him as though he were an object, whose polite voice was a mocking expression of superiority. Most of all, he knew that the man would do it.
'Apologize to the lady,'