Romeo's Rules

by James Scott Bell

  I gave an extra shove with my hand, bending Stratemeyer’s head backward.

  Blood spurted out his neck. I pulled down on his hand and got the knife out of it.

  With a chair on my butt and back, I was hunched over like Quasimodo. I looked for Lucy. I thought she might have a gun. What I saw was her backside as she opened the door.

  I thrust outward with my arm, making the ropes taut, and cut them with the knife.

  My left hand was minus a finger, and blood was flowing from it, but I didn’t have time to think about that. I had to get to Lucy.

  If you are going to be a villainess, you should not wear stiletto heels to the office. I could hear her clicking away like she was sending out Morse Code.

  I followed with my bare feet making little patting noises. The corridor was dimly lit and there was a corner up ahead. I turned right and saw her now, running as fast as she was able.

  She was about ten yards ahead of me.

  There was door at the end of the corridor.

  A knife like the one in my hand does not have to cut to be an effective weapon. It was heavy, as good as a rock. I put the blade into my fingers and, after two more steps, threw it like one of those guys in a carnival. All I wanted to do was hit her on the back and stun her.

  But the knife performed like the star of the evening show. It entered her back and stuck.

  She shrieked and fell to her knees.

  When I got to her she was trying to get back up.

  I pushed her flat with my foot. Blood was soaking into her coat. I must have hit an artery.

  “Who else is here?” I said.

  Her face, one cheek to the floor, was screwed up in pain.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  She bared her teeth. And hissed.

  I sat on her, using her butt as my cushion. “You’re hurt,” I said. “Maybe I can help.”

  Lucy found her voice and issued a phrase that was unbecoming to a woman in a fawn-colored suit.

  “I’m going to bring him down, you know,” I said. “Mayne.”

  She told me what I could do to myself.

  I grabbed her hair and slammed her skull into the floor. I had things to do.

  I took the knife out of her and went back for my finger.

  Blood was everywhere now, but the little fella was sitting on the floor, waiting for me.

  With some effort I got on Stratemeyer’s coat and pants. They were wet with blood but I wasn’t exactly awash in options. There were keys and a wallet inside the pants.

  I used Stratemeyer’s shirt to wipe the knife butt, then I put the knife in Stratemeyer’s right hand. I ripped off some of his shirt and wrapped it around my left hand.

  Then I picked up my little finger. I knew from medical literature that I had about ten hours to get it reattached.

  I put it in the right coat pocket and went out to the parking garage. It was the same place I’d been before.

  There was a car there. Either Lucy’s or Stratemeyer’s.

  It was a Lexus.

  A black Lexus.

  With tinted windows.

  I DROVE THROUGH the dark streets of Los Angeles, heading for the behemoth that is County-USC Medical Center. They don’t use the old building anymore, but the newer, bigger facility next to it. I parked in the tow-away zone, walked through the doors next to the Emergency sign, and tossed the car keys into a trash container.

  There were three metal detectors inside the doors. Like I was going on a plane or into a courtroom. Three uniformed sheriff’s deputies looked on, bored.

  Another night at the office.

  I walked through the middle. The deputy at that station said nothing to me. He just waved me on in and pointed down a corridor.

  I descended into a netherworld of late-night trauma and smells that were never meant for human nostrils.

  There was a receiving area. Or maybe I should say a ringmaster and a circus of the sick, bruised, cut, diseased, and desperate. They sat in row upon row of chairs, groaning, complaining, and in one case screaming. There was an electronic sign on the wall that said: Patients are seen by severity of illness, not in order of arrival. Thank you for your patience.

  The receiving nurse was a substantial woman in a light-blue uniform. She sat at a raised podium. She did not seem phased in the least at the moans and groans and curses behind her. She was, in fact, looking at a magazine.

  Before she looked at me she turned a page. I think I saw a photograph of Angelina Jolie.

  “Yes?” the nurse said.

  “Good evening,” I said. “Somebody cut off my finger. I have it right here.” I held it up.

  “Triage,” she said, and pointed down yet another corridor.

  Triage. The French word meaning to separate out. On the battlefield, to assess conditions and decide who needed treatment the fastest.

  Me and my pinkie had made it past the first hurdle.

  The triage receiving room was a set of cubicles. They all had various sad sacks parked there, talking to nurses. Fortunately a big fat guy got up just as I came in. His face had been worked on pretty good. One eye was purple and puffy and closed. His nose had caked blood. He walked past me and out of the room.

  I took his place.

  A young Latina in blue scrubs was there, finishing up some writing.

  “What’s happened?” she said.

  “Guy cut off my finger,” I said. And I held it up to her. I was beginning to think of it as a little baton.

  “May I see your hand?”

  I showed her.

  She nodded, grabbed some rubber gloves, put them on.

  “I’ll take that,” she said.

  “I want this back,” I said.

  She didn’t smile. I placed my digit on her rubbery, outstretched palm. She acted quickly, as if she’d done this many times before and it was no big deal. She placed my finger in a Ziploc bag. She put a white sticker on the bag.

  Then she turned in her seat and got some gauze and a bottle of something and started cleaning my wound. She finished with a fresh patch of gauze and taped it.

  “I need some medical information,” she said.

  “Can we make it snappy?” I said.

  “Are you in pain?” she said, placing a form on a clipboard and picking up a pen.

  “Nothing I can’t live with.”

  “Your name?”

  “Phil.”

  “Last name?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  She shrugged then asked me about allergies, recent medical history, that sort of thing. I answered quick and crisp. Then she took my blood pressure. It was 120/70.

  She picked up a phone and pressed a button. “We have someone here who needs to go to resuscitation. Uh-huh.” She hung up. “It will only be a moment.”

  She wrote something on the white label on the bag with my finger in it.

  Another nurse, this one male, dressed in military-style cargo pants and a green scrub top, came to the cubicle pushing a wheelchair. The female nurse handed him my finger.

  “Let’s go,” the male nurse said.

  I stood up and we were about the same height. He looked like he could handle himself.

  “My name’s Stephen,” he said.

  “I’m Phil.”

  “Have a seat, Phil.”

  “Stop at the market on the way,” I said. “I need milk.”

  He smiled. He pushed me into the hallway. We passed two gurneys. On one was an old man in ratty clothes, looking at the ceiling. His left leg was exposed. There was an ugly, wet wound on the leg and some living things moving inside the wound.

  Next to him was a shirtless man of about twenty with jail tats all over his chest and neck. The left side of his mouth was swollen to three times its size. He was handcuffed to a railing on the wall.

  Stephen wheeled me into the triage area and set me up on a bed in an examination room. He placed my bagged pinkie on a table then hooked up an IV to my left arm and told me it was antibiotics. I aske
d him to bring me a cigar and he said no and left.

  There were curtains on either side of me but it was open in front. Which gave me a good look at a slice of the triage area.

  It was a never-ending source of movement, chatter and cries of pain. Nurses of all shapes and uniforms—one had a pink scrub top with Tweety Bird emblazoned on the back—crisscrossed the floor with the occasional paramedic thrown in. Two uniformed LAPD patrol officers made appearances at different times.

  And I waited.

  At one point I lay back on the bed and lolled my head to the side and stared at the piece of me in the clear plastic bag. My inner Keats kicked in and I heard myself saying, out loud, “Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, lead’st thou that finger wagging at the skies?”

  “Excuse me?”

  A smallish man with rich, dark skin and a turban and white smock had come into my chamber. He had a clipboard with some papers on it.

  “Just some light verse,” I said.

  “I am Dr. Saluja.”

  “Hi, Doc.”

  “Let me have a look at that hand.” He took off the gauze, looked at my wound, nodded a few times then said, “This happened when?”

  “About two hours ago.”

  “How?”

  “A man with a knife.”

  There was a slight fluttering of the doctor’s eyelids. He looked at my hand again. “Was your finger smashed or broken, other than this cut?”

  “No,” I said. “It was a clean slice.”

  He turned my hand over and slid a wheeled tray over and placed my hand on top of the tray, which was covered with white paper. He told me not to move it.

  Dr. Saluja folded his arms. “Single finger replantation often causes more problems,” he said. “This is especially true if the severed finger is the index or little finger.”

  “I can live with those problems, Doc.”

  He shook his head like a schoolteacher. “The goal of reattaching fingers is to restore hand function. A single finger that is reattached can get in the way of grasping with the remaining digits. Also, your finger is cut off near the base. Nerve function is much harder to restore.”

  “I don’t mind a less nervous little finger,” I said.

  “I think you will need to accept the amputation,” he said.

  I don’t care how hard or cold you are, what kind of soldier or sailor, warrior or wild man. When you get that kind of news it’s a gut punch.

  I said, “You are Sikh.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yours is not a hot-headed religion. You recognize the equality of all people. You desire to do good through your work. That’s the reason you became a doctor. True?”

  “You are educated.”

  “Doc, I’m asking you to do me this good. I will take my chances. I want my finger. I like him. We’ve been through a lot.”

  “Mr. … Phil, I have to—”

  “Is it not said in your religion that where mercy is freely given, there can be no want or shortage?”

  “That’s remarkable. How do you know—”

  “I plead for your mercy, Dr. Saluja.”

  He looked at me a long time, and his deep almond eyes reflected plenty of thought going on behind them. He reminded me, in a way, of Ira. Same kind of bearing in his face.

  “I will have to talk to someone about this,” the doctor said. “Do not move your hand.”

  AS I WAS sitting there wondering if I was going to be whole again, something crashed outside the curtain. Voices cried out and one voice, a man’s, rose above it all.

  He started with a few choice curse words, then went on to an insistence that he be looked at right now.

  Then another man’s voice said, “Put down the syringe.”

  The Right Now guy said, “You get over here and look at me!”

  “Sir, we look at everyone in order of need.”

  “I been waiting three hours!”

  He was right outside my domain. I could just see it, my case put off because they had to call in security and lock the place down and too much time goes by.

  I got off the bed. I was attached to an IV bag hanging on one of those rolling poles. I grabbed it and rolled it outside.

  A man with a beard, about six feet tall and carrying maybe 250 pounds, dressed in a leather vest, black jeans and boots, was holding a syringe, waving it like a knife.

  He shot a look at me and said, “Get back or I’ll stick you!”

  I took one step and raised the pole with my good hand, holding it up like a javelin. The guy watched me like he couldn’t believe what I was doing. I jammed the bottom of the pole into his face. His head snapped back. He dropped the syringe. I put the pole down. He put his hand over his nose, then looked at his hand. It had blood on it.

  I socked him in the nose. He went straight down and cracked his head on the floor.

  The two nurses who’d been talking to him stared at me.

  I wheeled the pole back into my room and sat on the bed again.

  Five minutes later Dr. Saluja came back in. Behind him were five or six young medical doctor types, male and female.

  “What happened here?” Dr. Saluja said.

  “Did something happen?” I said.

  “Did you strike another patient?”

  “Good thing I was here, isn’t it?”

  The young doctors smiled.

  Dr. Saluja closed his eyes and shook his head, like he was reconsidering not just this evening, but maybe his whole career. “It’s against my better judgment,” he said. “But I’m going to do it. You have to understand this is the first time I will have attempted this, and that you are a learning experience. We’re going to have observers.”

  “I’m all for advanced education. Put my finger back on, Doc. And thanks.”

  They brought another wheelchair and took me to an upper floor, to an OR. I got the treatment, including a knockout anesthesia. Just before going under I said, “Will I be able to play the violin after this?”

  Nobody knew the joke, and then I was gone.

  I CAME TO in a recovery room. A female nurse kept prodding me to wake up. I wanted to sleep. I finally got my eyes open and remembered why I was there. I looked at my left hand. It was wrapped up like an oven mitt. That was a good sign. It wouldn’t have been like that unless the good doctor had pinned the tail on the donkey.

  The grogginess started to melt away and my thoughts turned to getting out of there. I’d need clothes. I’d need transport. I’d need Ira.

  I hate needing anybody.

  The nurse came back. She wasn’t alone. There was a uniformed cop with her.

  “Can you talk?” he said.

  I blinked more fog out of my eyes. “Maybe.”

  “My name is Officer Valenzuela.”

  “Why?”

  “Why is my name Valenzuela?”

  “Why are you here?”

  Officer Valenzuela, through the fuzzy wiring of my optic nerves, looked like he stiffened. He opened a leather notebook and poised a pen over the pages. “I need to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  “Can’t this wait?”

  “I understand you had your finger severed in some kind of altercation?”

  “One way to put it.”

  “Do you know the name of the man who did it?”

  I didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was in Cincinnati.

  “Where did the altercation take place?” Officer Valenzuela asked.

  “In Los Angeles,” I said.

  I opened my eyes in time to see him give me a tired look. “Are you going to make this hard?”

  “I’m tired of answering questions, officer. I’ve been asked questions all over the place. The guy who did this to me, I don’t need you to do anything about him. I’m not reporting this as a crime against my person. I just want to move on. I want to get out of here as fast as I can and that’s it.”

  “It says here you call yourse
lf Phil.”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you have a last name?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Valenzuela scribbled. “Phil, while you were waiting to have your operation, you hit a man in the face and knocked him out.”

  “He was threatening the staff with a hypodermic needle.”

  “You know how to handle yourself.”

  “In a pinch.”

  “Would you mind if I took a swab?”

  “You want my DNA?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  “Yes, there’s a reason.”

  Valenzuela waited.

  I sighed. “The Fourth Amendment. The right to be secure in my person, house, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. I happen to take that seriously. I don’t like governmental intrusion. And every flatfoot in the country better feel the same way, or we’re a police state, Officer Valenzuela.”

  “Where do you live, Phil?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “All right,” he said, with a kind of fake resignation. He closed his leather notebook.

  “All right,” I said.

  “But just between you and me, Phil, I think you’re dirty.”

  “You better be able to prove that, Officer Valenzuela, or you could be looking at a review panel.”

  “You an ex-cop? From another city maybe?”

  “I could use a sandwich.”

  Valenzuela clicked his pen and put it in his shirt pocket. “Phil, I’m going to make it a special project to remember you.”

  He smiled the way cops do when they want you to think they have the jump on you. I let him enjoy his illusion.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Stephen the Nurse came in.

  “How you feeling?” he said.

  “I’m ready to get out,” I said. “I need some clothes.”

  “I can get some for you.”

  “I’m a forty-six long. I prefer Italian cut.”

  “We have some T-shirts.”