Who was he? Monroe looked at the slumped form and decided that he could extricate the wallet. The officer switched the first-aid kit to his left hand and reached in for the wallet pocket with his right. Unsurprisingly, it was empty, but his touch had elicited a reaction. The body moved a little, and that wasn’t good. He moved his hand to steady it, but then the head moved, too, and he knew that the head had better stay still, and so his hand automatically and wrongly touched it. Something rubbed against something else, and a cry of pain echoed across the dark, wet street before the body went slack again.
“Shit!” Monroe looked at the blood on his fingertips and unconsciously rubbed it off on his blue uniform trousers. Just then he heard the banshee-wail of a Fire Department ambulance approaching from the east, and the officer whispered a quiet prayer of thanks that people who knew what they were doing would shortly relieve him of this problem.
The ambulance turned the corner a few seconds later. The large, boxy, red-and-white vehicle halted just past the radio car, and its two occupants came at once to the officer.
“What d’we got.” Strangely, it didn’t come out like a question. The senior fireman-paramedic hardly needed to ask in any case. In this part of town at this time of night, it wouldn’t be a traffic accident. It would be “penetrating trauma,” in the dry lexicon of his profession. “Jesus!”
The other crewman was already moving back to the ambulance when another police car arrived on the scene.
“What gives?” the watch supervisor asked.
“Shotgun, close range, and the guy’s still alive!” Monroe reported.
“I don’t like the neck hits,” the first ambulance guy observed tersely.
“Collar?” the other paramedic called from an equipment bay.
“Yeah, if he moves his head ... damn.” The senior firefighter placed his hands on the victim’s head to secure it in place.
“ID?” the sergeant asked.
“No wallet. I haven’t had a chance to look around yet.”
“Did you run the tags?”
Monroe nodded. “Called ’em in; it takes a little while.”
The sergeant played his flashlight on the inside of the car to help the firemen. A lot of blood, otherwise empty. Some kind of cooler in the backseat. “What else?” he asked Monroe.
“The block was empty when I got here.” Monroe checked his watch. “Eleven minutes ago.” Both officers stood back to give the paramedics room to work.
“You ever seen him before?”
“No, Sarge.”
“Check the sidewalks.”
“Right.” Monroe started quartering the area around the car.
“I wonder what this was all about,” the sergeant asked nobody in particular. Looking at the body and all the blood, his next thought was that they might never find out. So many crimes committed in this area were never really solved. That was not something pleasing to the sergeant. He looked at the paramedics. “How is he, Mike?”
“Damned near bled out, Bert. Definite shotgun,” the man answered, affixing the cervical collar. “A bunch of pellets in the neck, some near the spine. I don’t like this at all.”
“Where you taking him?” the police sergeant asked.
“University’s full up,” the junior paramedic advised. “Bus accident on the Beltway. We have to take him to Hopkins.”
“That’s an extra ten minutes.” Mike swore. “You drive, Phil, tell them we have a major trauma and we need a neurosurgeon standing by.”
“You got it.” Both men lifted him onto the gurney. The body reacted to the movement, and the two police officers—three more radio cars had just arrived—helped hold him in place while the firefighters applied restraints.
“You’re a real sick puppy, my friend, but we’ll have you in the hospital real quick now,” Phil told the body, which might or might not still be alive enough to hear the words. “Time to roll, Mike.”
They loaded the body in the back of the ambulance. Mike Eaton, the senior paramedic, was already setting up an IV bottle of blood-expanders. Getting the intravenous line was difficult with the man facedown, but he managed it just as the ambulance started moving. The sixteen-minute trip to Johns Hopkins Hospital was occupied with taking vital signs—the blood pressure was perilously low—and doing some preliminary paperwork.
Who are you? Eaton asked silently. Good physical shape, he noted, twenty-six or -seven. Odd for a probable drug user. This guy would have looked pretty tough standing up, but not now. Now he was more like a large, sleeping child, mouth open, drawing oxygen from the clear plastic mask, breathing shallowly and too slowly for Eaton’s comfort.
“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. “Overalt condition of the patient looks good, good muscle tone. Let’s get that blood volume back up.” Rosen saw two units being started even as he spoke. The ER nurses were especially good and he nodded approval at them.
“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 1 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 Babinski. 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.”
“You 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 reflected the bright overhead fluorescents. He felt needles in his eyes, and only then did he realize that the real stabs were in his arms.
I’m alive.
Why does that surprise me?
He could hear the sound of people moving around, muted conversations, distant chimes. The sound of rushing air was explained by air-conditioning vents, one of which had to be nearby, since he could feel the moving chill on the skin of his back. Something told him that he ought to move, that being still made him vulnerable, but even after he managed a command to his limbs to do something, nothing happened. That’s when the pain announced its presence. Like the ripple on a pond from the fall of an insect, it started somewhere on his shoulder and expanded. It took a moment to classify. The nearest approximation was a bad sunburn, because everything from the left side of his neck on down to his left elbow felt scorched. He knew he was forgetting something, probably something important.
Where the fuck am I?
Kelly thought he felt the distant vibration of—what? Ship’s engines? No, that wasn’t right somehow, and after a few more seconds he realized it was the faraway sound of a city bus pulling away from a stop. Not a ship. A city. Why am I in a city?
A shadow crossed his face. He opened his eyes to see the bottom half of a figure dressed all over in light-green cotton. The hands held a clipboard of some sort. Kelly couldn’t even focus his eyes well enough to tell if the figure was male or female before it went away, and it didn’t occur to him to say anything before he drifted back to sleep.
“The shoulder wound was extensive but superficial,” Rosen told the neurosurgical resident, thirty feet away.
“Bloody enough. Four units,” she noted.
“Shotgun wounds are like that. There was only one real threat to the spine. Took me a little while to figure how to remove it without endangering anything.”
“Two hundred thirty-seven pellets, but”—she held the X ray up to the light—“looks like you got them all. This fellow just got a nice collection of freckles, though.”
“Took long enough,” Sam said tiredly, knowing that he ought to have let someone else handle it, but he’d volunteered, after all.
“You know this patient, don’t you?” Sandy O’Toole said, arriving from the recovery room.
“Yeah.”
“He’s coming out. but it’ll be a while.” She handed over the chart which showed his current vitals. “Looking good, doctor.”
Professor Rosen nodded and explained further to the resident, “Great physical shape. The firemen did a nice job holding up his BP. He did almost bleed out, but the wounds looked worse than they really were. Sandy?”
She turned back. “Yes, doctor?”
“This one is a friend of mine. Would you mind terribly if I asked you to take—”
“A special interest?”
“You’re our best, Sandy.”
“Anything I need to know?” she asked, appreciating the compliment.
“He’s a good man, Sandy.” Sam said it in a way that c
arried real meaning. “Sarah likes him, too.”
“Then he must be all right.” She headed back into recovery, wondering if the professor was playing match-maker again.
“What do I tell the police?”
“Four hours, minimum. I want to be there.” Rosen looked over at the coffeepot and decided against it. Any more and his stomach might rupture from all the acid.
“So who is he?”
“I don’t know all that much, but I ran into trouble on the Bay in my boat and he helped me out. We ended up staying at his place for the weekend.” Sam didn’t go any further. He didn’t really know that much, but he had inferred a lot, and that scared him very much indeed. He’d done his part. While he hadn’t saved Kelly’s life—luck and the firemen had probably done that—he had performed an exceedingly skillful procedure, though he had also annoyed the resident, Dr. Ann Pretlow, by not allowing her to do much of anything except watch. “I need a little sleep. I don’t have much scheduled for today. Can you do the follow-up on Mrs. Baker?”
“Certainly.”
“Have someone wake me up in three hours,” Rosen said on the way to his office, where a nice comfortable couch awaited.
“Nice tan,” Billy observed with a smirk. “I wonder where she got it.” There was general amusement. “What do we do with her?”
He thought about that. He’d just discovered a fine way to deal with bodies, much cleaner, in its way, and far safer than what they’d been doing. But it also involved a lengthy boat trip, and he just didn’t have the time to be bothered. He also didn’t want to have anyone else use that particular method. It was too good to share with anyone. He knew that one of them would talk. That was one of his problems.
“Find a spot,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “If she’s found, it doesn’t matter much.” Then he looked around the room, cataloging the expressions he saw. The lesson had been learned. Nobody else would try this again, not anytime soon. He didn’t even have to say anything.