Without remorse - Tom Clancy [56]
'Speed it up,' he called to the driver, Phil Marconi.
'Roads are pretty wet, Mike, doing my best.'
'Come on, Phil, you wops are supposed to drive crazy!'
'But we don't drink like you guys,' came the laughing reply. 'I just called ahead, they got a neck-cutter standing by. Quiet night at Hopkins, they're all ready for us.'
'Good,' Eaton responded quietly. He looked at his shooting victim. It often got lonely and a little spooky in the back of an ambulance, and that made him glad for the otherwise nerve-grating wail of the electronic siren. Blood dripped off the gurney down to the floor of the vehicle; the drops traveled around on the metal floor, as though they had a life entirely of their own. It was something you never got used to.
'Two minutes,' Marconi said over his shoulder. Eaton moved to the back of the compartment, ready to open the door. Presently he felt the ambulance turn, stop, then back up quickly before stopping again. The rear doors were yanked open before Eaton could reach for them.
'Yeow!' the ER resident observed. 'Okay, folks, we're taking him into Three.' Two burly orderlies pulled the gurney out while Eaton disconnected the IV bottle from the overhead hook and carried it beside the moving cart.
'Trouble at University?' the resident asked.
'Bus accident,' Marconi reported, arriving at his side.
'Better off here anyway. Jesus, what did he back into?' The doctor bent down to inspect the wound as they moved. 'Must be a hundred pellets in there!'
'Wait till you see the neck,' Eaton told him.
'Shit...' the resident breathed.
They wheeled him into the capacious emergency room, selecting a cubicle in the corner. The five men moved the victim from the gurney to a treatment table, and the medical team went to work. Another physician was standing by, along with a pair of nurses.
The resident, Cliff Severn, reached around delicately to remove the cervical collar after making sure the head was secured by sandbags. It took only one look.
'Possible spine,' he announced at once. 'But first we have to replace blood volume.' He rattled off a series of orders. While the nurses got two more IVs started, Severn took the patient's shoes off and ran a sharp metal instrument across the sole of his left foot. The foot moved. Okay, there was no immediate nerve damage. Good news. A few more sticks on the legs also got reactions. Remarkable. While that was happening, a nurse took blood for the usual battery of tests. Severn scarcely had to look as his well-trained crew did their separate jobs. What appeared to be a flurry of activity was more like the movement of a football backfield, the end product of months of diligent practice.
'Where the hell's neuro?' Severn asked the ceiling.
'Right here!' a voice answered.
Severn looked up. 'Oh - Professor Rosen.'
The greeting stopped there. Sam Rosen was not in a good mood, as the resident saw at once. It had been a twenty-hour day for the professor already. What ought to have been a six-hour procedure had only begun a marathon effort to save the life of an elderly woman who'd fallen down a flight of stairs, an effort that had ended unsuccessfully less than an hour before. He ought to have saved her, Sam was telling himself, still not sure what had gone wrong. He was grateful rather than angry about this extension to a hellish day. Maybe he could win this one.
'Tell me what we have,' the professor ordered curtly.
'Shotgun wound, several pellets very close to the cord, sir.'
'Okay.' Rosen bent down, his hands behind his back. 'What's with the glass?'
'He was in a car,' Eaton called from the other side of the cubicle.
'We need to get rid of that, need to shave the head, too,' Rosen said, surveying the damage. 'What's his pressure?'
'BP fifty over thirty,' a nurse-practitioner reported. 'Pulse is one-forty and thready.'
'We're going to be busy,' Rosen observed. 'This guy is very shocky. Hmm.' He paused. 'Overall