by Greg Rucka
Another ambulance crew arrived, and then they were loading Katie onto a stretcher, and I was being roughly pushed out of the way, into the arms of a cop who started to ask me something I never gave him a chance to finish. I followed the stretcher down the stairs and into the hall, Rubin right behind me. The elevator was locked open and they moved everything inside. Rubin and I took the stairs down to the lobby. One of the uniforms came after us, and Rubin was explaining the situation in broken phrases that sounded ungainly and unknowable.
From the lobby, Katie was rolled to the back of one ambulance, where both paramedics climbed inside. One of the late arrivals, an EMT, slammed the double doors shut and went around to the front of the rig, and Rubin and I followed the other to the remaining ambulance. The driver was medium-sized and white, with black curly hair and black-framed glasses, and he just nodded to us when we started to climb inside.
“Where’re they taking her?” the cop asked him.
“Bellevue.”
Buckled up, and then the rig was off with a lurch, lights and sirens down the street and swaying onto the FDR Drive, following the other rig as it sped to the hospital.
“Somebody needs to call her mother,” I said.
“Lozano said he’d do it,” Rubin said.
——
We arrived at Bellevue only thirty seconds or so after the ALS rig, in time to jump out and follow the stretcher through the double doors on the loading dock down the hall. Katie was on her back, the monitor still running. They had put a second line in her, but both bags now rested above her head on the stretcher, shut down for transport. We followed them down a hall, made a sharp right, and ended up in a crammed narrow route with stretchers stacked to one side. The paramedics barely had room to move, and we stayed well behind, keeping out of their way, but not wanting to lose them. Left and now an open space, still more stretchers, and through electric double doors into the ER, and more stretchers, now with people in them, their feet sticking out from under covers or uncovered. The room had a smell that rammed its way up my nose and made me gag, twisted with the cloying memory of maple syrup, and my stomach heaved, for a second, then retreated.
The medics turned Katie’s gurney to the left, in front of a new set of double doors, and a doctor was standing there, wearing sea-blue scrubs and gloves and goggles and barely audible, saying, “This the Romero kid?”
We never heard the answer; they were already inside and it was clear we had come as far as we could. The doors snapped shut on hydraulic coils, locked with hard clicks, and Rubin and I stood side by side, looking through the small glass windows at the eight people suddenly surrounding Katie’s body. They moved her off the gurney and onto another table, the medics backing away, and a phalanx of doctors, men and women, some in scrubs, others not, all goggled, gloved, and masked, bent to work. Instruments flashed off trays in gloved milky hands and the sound of machinery, hard and strong, started up. The doctors bent to the task, and it was clear to me, right then, that Katie was dead.
Rubin was covered in blood, all over his shirt and pants, up both arms, a vampire’s ice cream sundae. I probably didn’t look any better.
Then a nurse told us to move, to get out of the way and go register the patient.
“She’s Catholic,” I told her.
“We take all kinds.”
“No,” I said. “She’s Catholic.”
“I’ll get a priest. Go register the patient.”
She gave us directions to registration, but they didn’t stick. Rubin and I started down a hallway, passing an alcove containing a bald-headed man on a bench, and dodged an orderly who glared at us, then continued on.
“Where are we going?” Rubin asked.
I shook my head, and we turned around, heading back to the nurses’ station. Another door through admitting opened as we returned, and Felice Romero rushed in, Natalie and Dale right behind her, and another doctor from the clinic, Marion Faisall. Lozano followed a second later. Dr. Romero didn’t see us, going straight to the station and exchanging quick words with the nurse there. The nurse gestured and Felice turned, moving to the Trauma Room doors, but the nurse shouted after her and Natalie moved, grabbing her arm at the elbow. The grip stopped her, and Felice turned back to Natalie, eyes wild and mouth in a silent scream.
Felice saw us, and saw it in our faces. It was as if someone had thrown a solid punch into her stomach, and she began to bend, shaking her head, as if trying to fold into herself and disappear. Natalie and Dale helped her to the alcove, setting her on one of the benches. Dale stayed by her, an arm around her shoulders, head beside hers but looking out, always looking. Natalie made straight for us. Dr. Faisall just stood beside the alcove.
“How?” Natalie asked. Her eyes were terribly cold.
“Sniper,” I said. “We did everything we could.” My words sounded whispered, and for a moment I doubted that I had indeed spoken at all. But Natalie nodded, looking us both over, then reached for Rubin.
Lozano was looking at me. I left Rubin and Natalie and walked to him. Behind the counter a phone rang, and one of the staff moved to answer it. Fowler had entered, leading another two police officers, and they all stood idly by the ER doors. We were filling the place up. Beyond the doors, somewhere outside the room, people were shouting, and Lozano turned his head to listen, then said, “Press.”
“Fast.”
“They were at the clinic, saw Romero and company leave with us. How’s the kid?”
“She’s not going to make it,” I told him.
“Don’t talk like that, you don’t know that.”
Lozano didn’t know what he was talking about, but there was no fire in me to argue the point.
“You see anything?” he asked me.
“No.”
“I’m not handling it; it’s not my precinct.”
“Fine.”
“Maybe your friend did?” Lozano asked. “See something?”
“Maybe.”
He pushed off the counter, saying, “I’ll ask,” and headed for Rubin. He walked carefully, as if disturbing the air in the ER meant the difference between life and death. Rubin and Natalie were against a wall, heads bent toward each other, and Rubin was speaking to her, softly. Dr. Faisall said something to Natalie, and after a moment Natalie nodded, said something in return. The doctor headed toward one of the pay phones on the wall.
The shouting outside died, and an orderly stuck her head around the door. “Can you give me a hand, here?” she asked one of the uniforms. “They won’t take no for an answer.”
Fowler snapped, “Keep them out of here.” The uniforms clutched, but Lozano nodded and they went out the door. As it shut a rumble of voices started, then snapped off as the latch clicked. Lozano resumed questioning Rubin, but he cast a sidelong glance at Fowler as the officers left the room. An Asian priest arrived, entered the Trauma Room without ceremony.
After a while, someone told me to take a seat.
I didn’t.
Thirty-two minutes after we arrived at Bellevue the Trauma Room doors opened and from where I was standing I could see inside, and I knew what the doctor was going to say. He was a black man, well over six feet tall and very skinny, with his scrubs hanging off his shoulders and hips, barely held on by his bones. His hair was covered in a surgical cap, but his goggles, gloves, and mask were off, and as he came out he ran his hand across his forehead, smearing the beaded sweat there. He looked around and then said, “Felice?” '
She came out of the alcove, Dale beside her. “Say it, Remy,” Dr. Romero said.
“I’m sorry. We pronounced her at eight forty-eight. We did everything we could.”
“I want to see her.”
He nodded.
I went into the room after them.
She had been covered on the table, and the overhead lights cast harsh shadows in the folds of the sheet, shaped to Katie’s body underneath. The floor under the table was littered with discarded wrappings, papers, gauze, tape, some bloody, some
not. The rolling carts of shiny instruments weren’t shiny, and the dishes the tools had sat in were dark at the bottom, surgical steel coated with body fluids. Clamps, forceps, scalpels, catheters, needles, saws, equipment now dirty with blood and bone stacked on other instruments in more carts. The room had become suddenly empty, and as the doctor and Felice looked at Katie’s body, two people came in the other side of the room and began cleaning up. There was a second table, just like this one, but gleaming clean, with instruments ready to go.
Katie’s hand jutted from under the sheet on my side. Not really her hand, just her fingers. She had been wearing pink nail polish, the color of bubble gum. A tube disappeared under the sheet by her hand.
Dr. Romero pulled the sheet back to look at her daughter’s face. Someone had closed Katie’s eyes. Felice put her hand on Katie’s forehead, brushing hair back from where it had fallen across the girl’s cheek. For a moment her fingers traced the bones in her daughter’s face, touching the chubby cheeks and chin. She made a small noise, the sound of a caught animal, shook her head once as if to clear it, and now, stroking Katie’s hair, kissed her forehead.
“I love you, sweetheart,” she said. “I love you very much.”
Then she replaced the sheet over Katie and turned to look at the doctor, who had remained silent and immobile during all of this. She started to say thank you, but couldn’t. She took one step, then another.
We caught her before she hit the deck, and the doctor shouted for someone to bring in a stretcher. Together we lifted Dr. Romero onto it, sliding the gurney out into the hallway. As we came out another orderly was coming in, preparing to move Katie to the morgue. The ER speakers blared an impending arrival, traumatic arrest, ETA sixty seconds, and Remy let me go, turning back into the room, heading for the clean table, the next victim.
The doors shut behind him as he entered, and before they closed completely, I caught a glimpse of Katie being wheeled out of the room. Her hand had been tucked back under the sheet and with it the last evidence of her was gone, and all that remained was a cover for the dead and a stack of bloody surgical instruments needing to be sterilized.
Dr. Romero was out for only three or four minutes, and for her sake, I was sorry it didn’t last longer. She was regaining consciousness within a minute of the stretcher being placed against a wall.
Her glasses were off, safe in my hand, and without them to protect her eyes I could read everything in them when she began looking around. Confusion transforming into comprehension and then despair, all as she sat up, Dale helping her, and carefully swung her legs off the side of the stretcher.
“Don’t get up yet,” I said.
But I needn’t have said anything. The sobs tore at her fiercely, muscle spasms that rocked the stretcher and made me fear she’d fall. The casters on the stretcher clicked with her tremors. She reached a hand toward me and for some reason I thought she wanted her glasses, but as I extended them to her she grabbed my wrist and pulled me in, using me as a support to pull herself to her feet, and then she was crying against me. Her shudders shifted into me, her wailing sobs and the pain in my chest getting stronger and stronger, fighting to be let out. No tears for me; I fought that back with everything I had left. No tears yet. Not now and not here, and not when Felice needed to hold on to something, when the something was me.
I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Amidst this and the noise of the ER came another sound, a mob of cameras and flashbulbs, and the sounds of the press being restrained. A door had opened, then closed again.
Natalie spoke in my ear. “We need to move her.”
I nodded, not wanting to say anything.
Natalie spoke softly to Dale, telling him to find a route out and get a cab, have it waiting by the loading dock. He moved out of my periphery, and as he did so more movement caught my eye, Rubin coming in closer and something more.
“Sir, I want you to leave,” I heard Fowler say. “Leave, now, or I’ll have you brought in for harassment.”
“I came to express my condolences,” said Crowell.
My first instinct was to go for my gun, and my hand was halfway back before I remembered Rubin had it. Felice was turning, looking up at the sound of the voice, and I let her go to see him, standing inside the doors from the Walk-In Clinic, the eyes of the media pressed against the glass staring in. Crowell was wearing a light suit similar to the one I’d first seen him in, drab linen pants and a white shirt with a tan tie, holding his jacket over his arm like a butler waiting to dress his master. Fowler was approaching, Lozano and another officer with him, and as they did so the blond man beside Crowell took two steps forward. He did it with the air and posture of a bully.
It felt like I moved forward easily, as if I stepped on the air and not the ground, and as I moved I told Crowell what I was going to do to him, and why I was going to do it, but to recall the exact words is more than I can honestly do now. I wanted his blood and was going to get it, until Fowler grabbed me and Rubin grabbed me and Lozano grabbed me and everyone told me to calm down, to calm the fuck down.
Not that I didn’t feel calm. I didn’t feel anything but an almost arousing thrill at the terror in Jonathan Crowell’s face as he backed up, slipping behind the other man.
“Atticus, stop it,” said Rubin. “Stop it.” He slipped in front of me, put both hands on my chest, and pushed back hard, and I stopped resisting but he didn’t move me back.
“Scared?” I asked Crowell. “Terrified?”
“Stop it.”
“Fucking coward,” I said. “Your goon there can’t protect you, Jonathan,” I said. “You’re a marked man. Your time is running out. You’re going to die, and nothing you can do will stop that. You happy? You like what you’ve created? You took a life today, a young woman who could never hurt anyone. Are you proud? How can you fucking sleep at night?”
“Atticus, that’s enough.” Rubin pushed harder, once, sending me back off his hands until we separated, and I caught my balance, straightened.
“Yeah, that’s enough,” I said.
Crowell was behind his man, looking out from around the other’s blond hair. The blond looked like a beaten pit bull, ready to put the bite on someone, and although I knew it wouldn’t happen here, I desperately wanted it to be me. Crowell wasn’t saying anything, and Lozano was approaching him, speaking softly, saying that he had some questions that Crowell and Mr. Rich should answer.
“This is not what I have ever been about,” Crowell told Lozano. “I am for life and have always been opposed to murder. This is a tragedy.
“I wanted to express my condolences,” he said again.
Dr. Romero said: “You wanted to do nothing of the sort. You’re here for the reporters, trying to make yourself look big.” She walked toward him, Natalie right on her, and for a moment the division seemed perfect, everybody else incidental. Crowell and Rich on one side, Romero and Natalie on the other.
“You’re not big. You’re nothing,” Felice said softly. “You killed my daughter, and you claim to work in the name of God. You did all of this to be big, and all you are is small and narrow and scared. So don’t pretend you care what happened to me today, and don’t pretend to care about my daughter. Because I hold you responsible. Kodiak is right, you’re a murderer and you’re scared. Hide behind your speeches, lie as best you can, but you know the truth, and you know this is your work.
“Tiny little man, nothing little man. You call me a butcher and you took a true life today. How can you even compare the two? Go away, little man. Go away and try to make yourself big again.”
She stopped in his face, looking up at him, tear tracks shimmering on her and power roaring in her, and nobody could say anything. Crowell’s mouth was open as he looked at her, but he didn’t even seem to be breathing. Then Natalie took Dr. Romero’s arm and turned her, coming eye to eye with Rich, brushing him with an elbow, and the two women walked out of the room.
Rubin and I followed, heading out the
door and back to the loading dock.
She was standing in the hall, just beyond the door, facing us. She had raven black hair about her shoulders, almost blue where the light caught it, accentuating the paleness of her skin. She was at least as tall as I, and slim, with strength in her shoulders and a beautiful oval face, strong-jawed with a narrow chin and a small mouth with full lips, and very blue eyes. Both her ears were pierced several times, small hoops and studs, with one hoop high in the cartilage on her left ear. Another hoop, thinner than the rest, was through her left nostril.
Not a reporter, I thought.
Her leather biker jacket was open, and she had a white tank top on beneath it, tucked into faded blue jeans. Her feet were in a pair of well-worn Doc Martens.
Definitely not a reporter, I thought.
The blue eyes flicked over each of us, then settled on me, and she said, “Kodiak?”
“Not now,” I said, and continued down the hall.
“Natalie, tell him who I am,” she said.
Natalie said, “This is a bad time, Bridgett.”
Bridgett said, “This won’t sit.”
“Later.”
“I’ll come with you,” Bridgett said.
“Like hell,” I said.
She fell into step with us, on my right. “I’m a PI,” Bridgett said to me. “I’ve been hired to help you, to investigate the threats.”
“By who?” I asked.
Natalie answered that one. “Dr. Faisall wanted an investigator, asked me for a recommendation.”
“And I appreciate it,” Bridgett said, moving up in front of me and neatly cutting my peripheral vision. “I need to talk to you about Crowell.”
“If you don’t stop blocking my vision, I’ll break your arm,” I said.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I assume somebody was blocking your vision this morning, too?”
On my left, Natalie visibly flinched.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I said.
“Bridgett Logan,” she said, pulling her wallet and holding it out in front of me. “I’m with Agra and Donnovan Investigations. My PI license, see? Want to know what’s on my driver’s license, too? It says I’m twenty-eight, six feet one, my birthday’s November ninth, and my eyes are blue.”