Now she was the one who took donor blood and ran it through her machine, removing platelets and plasma and returning the red cells to the donor. One plateletpheresis pack was equivalent to ten or twelve single platelet packs removed from single units of blood. She was basically doing the same thing to me, removing my blood, taking away the plasma containing the Lovenox, and replacing it with albumin and fresh frozen plasma, and returning the red cells to me. No doubt I’d have to receive more platelets too, since they got removed along with the plasma.
“I’ve never forgotten what you did for me,” she continued. “Now I have a chance to do something for you.”
I tried to smile, but it was hard to manage it around the ET tube. I lay back on my pillows and tried to relax. If I could keep my O2 up like a good little girl, I could lose the dratted thing.
“Don’t stop breathing,” Jeff advised with a grin. “You don’t want to piss Jack off.”
He left.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief, ribs permitting. No alarms went off, and I lay there smiling right out loud. So to speak.
Chapter 37
Talk of your science! After all is said,
There is nothing like a bare and shiny head.
Age lends the graces that are sure to please,
Folks want their doctors mouldy, like their cheese.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Torture Toni Club returned right around six. At least that’s what they said; I couldn’t see a clock from where I was, and I had not a friggin’ clue where my watch might have gotten to. Sherry and her machine were still there, pumping my blood round and round as before.
A change of shift had occurred at three o’clock, and this time my nurse was Julie. She bustled in right after the doctors and informed them that my pO2 had remained above ninety percent on room air and that Respiratory Therapy hadn’t had to put bypass oxygen on my ET tube.
“Right you are, then,” said Jack, “out it comes. Ready, Toni?”
I was born ready. I nodded.
Without further ado, Jack ripped away the tape and hauled that sucker right up out of my throat. I gagged and retched and then began to cough. Oh, God, that hurt. Christ on a friggin’ crutch. I would have wrapped my arms around myself if it hadn’t been for the goddamn restraints. Bloody mucus came up. The nurse held an emesis basin under my chin to catch it and wiped my mouth. Jack beamed at me. “There. How does that feel?”
“How the hell do you think it feels?” I whispered rustily. Thank God Hal and Mum hadn’t had to witness that performance.
“Check another blood gas in an hour and call me,” he said to Julie, and then he was gone.
She put some more ointment on my lips and around my nostrils and then put an oxygen mask on me, since a nasal cannula would fight with the NG tube, and then checked the pulse oximeter on my finger. “Ninety-five, good,” she said, writing something on the clipboard, and then she was gone.
Jeff and George came in and noted happily that the volume of bloody drainage from their respective tubes was significantly decreased and that sometime in the foreseeable future I could look forward to losing them as well.
“Well,” Sherry said, “it looks like this is working, Doctor. Just one more hour should do it, and then I’ll be getting back to Boise.”
“Tonight?” I whispered. “On these roads?”
“Shouldn’t be too bad,” she said. “It hasn’t snowed in two days, and the interstate is plowed and sanded.”
Mum and Hal appeared. Hal said, “Hi, sweetie, how are you doing?” before he got a good look at me.
“On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” I rasped.
Hal jumped and gasped. “Fiona! Her tube’s out! She can talk!”
“Yes, dear,” Mum said placidly. “I was wondering when you’d notice.” She kissed my cheek. “It feels better, doesn’t it, kitten?”
No shit, Sherlock. “Sure does,” I whispered.
Hal took the hand without the pulse oximeter and squeezed it. “Thank God. How do you feel, sweetie?”
How the hell did he think I felt, all tied down and full of tubes? He’d been there; he should know. “Fine,” I said huskily.
“We almost lost you,” he said.
“So I hear.”
He leaned over and kissed my forehead. “I love you,” he said and left.
Mum took over. “Antoinette, my darling, you scared us all to death! Don’t you ever do anything like that again, do you hear me?”
“Sorry,” I whispered.
“Your Hal was a right basket case,” she went on. “We all thought we were going to lose you.”
“He didn’t stay long,” I complained.
“Well, there’s a man for you,” she said briskly. “He didn’t want you to see him cry.”
“Oh.”
She indicated the plasmapheresis unit and Sherry. “What’s all this, kitten?”
“Plasmapheresis,” I said huskily. “Sherry is washing out my blood.”
“Oh, is this the machine from the Red Cross? I’m surprised it got here so quickly.”
“We don’t normally do this,” Sherry said, “especially on weekends, but when I heard it was Dr. Day, I came right away. She got me out of a lot of trouble once. This is my way of repaying her.”
“How wonderful. Hal, dear, did you hear that?”
Hal came back to my bedside. “I sure did. So this is Sherry? I remember that autopsy,” he said. “I’m glad to finally meet you. I can’t thank you enough.”
“My pleasure,” Sherry said. “I think it worked. The doctors were saying there’s less drainage now.”
Julie poked her head around the curtain. “Doctor, there’s a couple of policemen out here to see you.”
“Send them in,” I said.
Kincaid and the Commander appeared and greeted Hal and Mum. Hal appeared to be less upset by the presence of Bernie Kincaid than he had been before. They ignored me; maybe they thought I was still intubated. So I spoke up. “Hey, you two. Over here. Patient talking here.”
“Toni!” Kincaid said. “You look …” He obviously didn’t know what to say. I probably didn’t look especially good, and he probably didn’t want to say I looked awful, so I helped him out.
“Extubated?”
“Well …”
“Doc, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” the Commander said. “We just wanted to bring you up to date on things. We caught Ruthie, by the way. We got her trying to dispose of her bloody clothes in the Dumpster behind the Blue Lakes Inn. Her neighbor, Mrs. Sorensen, was the one who called them. She saw the flames out of her living room window.”
“Who called you?” I asked.
“Your husband. He heard the whole thing on the phone.”
“I turned the answering machine on as soon as I heard you and Ruthie talking,” Hal said.
“So we basically have her whole confession on tape,” the Commander said. “How did you manage that anyway, Doc?”
“I had my cell phone in my coat pocket, and my coat was all bunched up so I could reach it when it rang,” I said. “I had it on vibrate, so Ruthie didn’t hear it when Hal called me, and she didn’t see me trying to open it, either. That was just plain lucky.”
“My buddy Roy Cobb said that when they investigated the crawl space they found forty or fifty glass syringes, or parts of them,” Kincaid said. “Did she inject all of that into you?”
“There were five boxes of ten syringes,” I said. “She shot them all into me. And she didn’t care about giving me hematomas, either. You should see my belly.”
The Commander raised a hand. “That’s okay. We’ll pass.”
“Who found me?” I asked.
“One of the firemen,” Kincaid said. “They didn’t know who you were, but I
did. So I swung by and picked up Hal on the way to the hospital, since I couldn’t call him, on account of his line was busy.”
Yeah, right. All my fault.
“Not to mention that her fingerprints,” the Commander said, trying not to smile, “were on the duct tape she used on you.”
“So where is she now?” I asked.
“In jail, of course,” the Commander said. “On two counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder. She’s not going anywhere.”
Not getting out on a technicality, for instance, to creep into my hospital room in the dead of night with a few syringes of Lovenox to squirt into my IV.
Not that killing me would help her now. Too many people knew about her; she couldn’t possibly get rid of all of them.
“You should have seen Jeff’s face when I told him you’d been shot full of Lovenox,” Hal said.
“Did he tell you to go pee up a rope?” I asked. That was one of Jeff’s more colorful expressions.
“Not with two cops there to back him up,” the Commander said, “and tell him that the person responsible had killed two people that way and had tried to kill seven others.”
“What about Tiffany and Emily?” I asked.
“Tiffany’s been discharged,” Kincaid said, “and she’s in jail. Emily’s still here.”
“She has pneumonia,” Mum said. “Poor little thing. Jodi’s been here checking on her every day.”
Julie put her head around the curtain again. “I’m sorry, but you folks are going to have to leave now,” she said. “You’re disturbing the other patients, and I’m sure Dr. Day is tired. And Dr. Sorensen’s here.”
They all said good-night and left, Mum and Hal kissing me good-bye. “See you in the morning, kitten,” Mum said.
I heard a brief conversation in the hall, and then Jeff came in, accompanied by Julie, who carried a sterile tray.
“What is this, Grand Central Patient?” I grumbled.
Apparently Jeff didn’t hear me. Preoccupied, he checked the clipboard and put the head of the bed down so that I lay flat. He pulled up my gown.
“Hey,” I reminded him. “I’m over here. You know, the patient?”
He stopped what he was doing and stared at me, uncomprehending.
“I’m not just a belly,” I said.
“Oh. Sorry. Hi, Toni. I’m just checking your dressing. Okay?”
Surgeons. What are you gonna do? “Yes, Jeff. Thank you.”
He palpated my belly. I raised my head and looked. It was now a really ugly mixture of purple, green, and yellow and was not nearly as tender as before. Gently he removed my dressing, and he and Julie changed it. “This is healing nicely. Not much drainage. No sign of infection. Your anti-Xa is down in the therapeutic range, and I think we’ll keep it there for now. Don’t want you to have DVTs or throw an embolus.”
I glanced around. Somehow, with all the commotion around my bed earlier, Sherry and her machine had vanished. I mentally said a brief prayer that she’d get back to Boise safely.
“I think, if nothing else happens,” Jeff said, “we can take these tubes out tomorrow and let you go home on Wednesday. How about that?”
Epilogue
I celebrated New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in my own home, tucked up on the couch by the fire with a book and my loved ones around me.
Killer lay on the floor by the couch. Geraldine didn’t much like being banished from my lap, but she grumpily made do with forcing herself in between me and the back of the couch and digging her pointy little feet into my thigh.
Everyone reacted with horror to my description of the ordeal in Ruthie’s basement, particularly being beaten to a bloody pulp with a golf club by a madwoman.
“You were lucky,” Hal said, “that you didn’t also have a ruptured spleen.”
He was right. I wouldn’t have survived that, even without the Lovenox.
“That’s for sure,” I remarked. “If she’d hit me from the left side instead of the right, I’d be sitting here dead.”
Jodi shook her head. “I’ve known Ruthie for twenty years,” she said. “I never would have guessed she could go off the deep end like that. What’s going to happen to her?”
“Life without parole,” Elliott said, “in the state penitentiary.”
“What about Tiffany?” Bambi asked.
Elliott shrugged. “Probably the same, depending on what kind of a deal her lawyers work out with the State of Minnesota. Don’t forget, she killed three people there.”
“And Emily should be out of the hospital next week,” Jodi said happily.
“Then she gets to come home with us,” Cody said.
“She’ll come here first,” Hal said. “Until your house is livable again.”
“Are you sure?” Jodi asked doubtfully. “We could go to a motel.”
I looked at Hal and shook my head. “No way. Once everybody’s back to work and the kids are back to school, it won’t seem nearly so crowded here.”
“Mike never did get the rest of his Christmas vacation, did he?” Hal asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” I replied. “He’ll have to take a week off some other time. But next year I’ll let him have the first week off, and I’ll take the second.”
“When do you think you’ll go back to work, dear?” Mum asked me.
“I’m thinking the nineteenth,” I said. “That’s when Hal has to go back to work, and Bambi goes back to school.”
“But that’s only three weeks away,” Mum objected. “Isn’t that going to be too soon?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “The Great Deductible Race will be over, and things should have calmed down considerably. I should be okay.”
“How long do you want me to stay, kitten?”
Mum’s question took me by surprise. I’d assumed she’d stay until I was back on my feet, or until I went back to work. “Mum, I want you to stay as long as you want to stay,” I said—I hoped—tactfully. “How long do you want to stay?”
“I’ll stay as long as you need me to, darling. But I am getting rather anxious to get back home. I’ve been here much longer than I planned to be.”
Odd. I’d never known my mother to be anxious to leave before. She’d always gotten a little teary-eyed when she left me. Now she was anxious to go home?
I looked at her narrowly. Did I see what I thought I saw?
Omigod. My mother was blushing!
“Mum. What are you not telling me?”
“Why, whatever do you mean, dear?” Mum looked me straight in the eye without flinching.
I started to laugh—carefully, as it still hurt. “Now I know where I get it,” I told her. “Mum, you’re a worse liar than I am!”
“Antoinette, really!”
“It’s a man, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Come on, Mother,” I teased.
But she wouldn’t tell me, no matter how much I hinted and badgered her about it. “All in good time,” she kept saying. I knew my Mum; she wouldn’t tell me anything until she was good and ready.
She was a lousy liar, but she was really, really good at keeping secrets. The only problem was that when she had one, everybody knew it.
“I’ve got a secret too,” Bambi said, “but I’m going to tell you what it is. Pete and I are engaged.”
“Engaged!” Hal said. “How the hell can you be engaged? You just met!”
“We love each other,” Bambi said. “I knew it the minute I saw him, and he did too.”
“But this is preposterous,” Hal insisted. “You’ve only known each other a week.”
“Two,” Bambi said. She pulled the silver chain around her neck up out of her shirt and showed us the ring hanging on it.
&n
bsp; “Darling!” Mum said. “It’s absolutely perfect.”
I looked at it next. It was a simple solitaire in white gold and must have been nearly a full carat. “Can Pete afford this?” I asked.
“He paid cash,” Bambi said, “so I guess so.”
I reached out and tried to hug her without ripping my stitches. “Congratulations.”
“When do you plan to break the news to Shawna?” Hal asked.
“We thought we’d go down and spend the rest of Christmas break in Newport Beach,” Bambi said. “Pete has a week’s vacation coming up.”
“Boy, I’d like to be a mouse in the wall when she hears that news,” Hal went on. “You’ll never convince her that Pete’s a nice Jewish boy.” Then he started to laugh. “And that’s nothing compared to what my mother will say. She doesn’t even know that she has a granddaughter yet, let alone one who’s marrying a goy!”
She’d say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I thought. “Hal. You haven’t told your parents yet?” I pretended outrage, but I had a hard time not laughing too. For once Ida Shapiro would have somebody else to kvetch at besides me.
“We thought we’d have the wedding in July,” Bambi went on. “That way we can have it in the backyard, if that’s okay.”
“Not if you want a Jewish wedding,” Hal said. “There’s no synagogue here and no rabbi, either. You’d better have it at your mother’s, don’t you think?”
“Why not have two?” I asked. “One here, one there. That way everyone can come.”
“Are you two going to be able to make it on a policeman’s salary?” Hal asked, ever practical.
“Pete is a detective sergeant,” Bambi said, “and he’s up for promotion. He’s passed the lieutenant exam already. And I’ll be working too, don’t forget. I’ve already enrolled in my forensic science classes for the spring semester.”
“Good girl,” I said.
“Just think, Toni,” she enthused, “next time you get involved in a case, I can really help you!”
I hated to discourage her, but I really hoped there wouldn’t be another case. This one had involved way too much blood for my taste—and way too much of it mine.
Too Much Blood Page 30