Without remorse - Tom Clancy [57]
'How's your son doing, Margaret?' he asked the senior one.
'Starting at Carnegie in September,' she answered, adjusting the drip-rate on the blood bottle.
'Let's get the neck cleaned off next, Margaret. I need to take a look.'
'Yes, doctor.'
The nurse selected a pair of forceps, grabbed a large cotton ball, which she dipped in distilled water, then wiped across the patient's neck with care, clearing away the blood and exposing the actual wounds. It looked worse than it might really be, she saw at once. While she swabbed the patient off, Rosen looked for and got sterile garb. By the time he got back to the bedside, Margaret Wilson had a sterile kit in place and uncovered. Eaton and Marconi stayed in the corner, watching it all.
'Nice job, Margaret,' Rosen said, putting his glasses on. 'What's he going to major in?'
'Engineering.'
"That's good.' Rosen held his hand up. 'Tweezers.' Nurse Wilson set a pair in his hand. 'Always room for a bright young engineer.'
Rosen picked a small, round hole on the patient's shoulder, well away from anything really vital. With a delicacy that his large hands made almost comical to watch, he probed for and retrieved a single lead ball which he held up to the light. 'Number seven shot, I believe. Somebody mistook this guy for a pigeon. That's good news,' he told the paramedics. Now that he knew the shot size and probable penetration, he bent down low over the neck. 'Hmm ... what's the BP now?'
'Checking,' another nurse said from the far side of the table. 'Fifty-five over forty. Coming up.'
'Thank you,' Rosen said, still bent over the patient. 'Who started the first IV?'
'I did,' Eaton replied.
'Good work, fireman.' Rosen looked up and winked. 'Sometimes I think you people save more lives than we do. You saved this one, that's for damned sure.'
'Thank you, doctor.' Eaton didn't know Rosen well, but he made a note that the man's reputation was deserved. It wasn't every day that a fireman-paramedic got that sort of praise from a full professor. 'How's he going to - I mean, the neck injury?'
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