“Look at this.”
Sara looked up. It was a natural thing to do. The woman held a faded Polaroid picture in her hand. The shot was a close-up of a child’s mouth. A small silver ruler was beside a laceration running the width of the philtrum, the midline groove between the top of the lip and nose. The injury wasn’t from a tumble or bump. The impact had been significant enough to rend the flesh in two, revealing the teeth. Thick black sutures pulled together the wound. The skin was puffy and irritated. Sara was more accustomed to seeing this kind of baseball stitching in a morgue, not on a child’s face.
“I bet he was in that poly-what’s-it study,” the woman said. She showed the photo to her friend.
“Polyglycolic acid.” She explained to Sara, “Grady piloted a study on different types of absorbable sutures they were working on at Tech. Looks like he’s one of the kids that had an allergic reaction. Poor little thing.” She went back to her typing. “I guess it was better than sticking a bunch of leeches on him.”
The other woman asked Sara, “You all right, hon?”
Sara felt as if she was going to be sick. She straightened up and left the room. She didn’t stop walking until she had bolted up two flights of stairs and was outside, breathing fresh air.
She paced in front of the closed door. Her emotions pinballed back and forth between anger and shame. He was just a child. He’d been admitted for treatment and they had experimented on him like an animal. To this day, he probably had no idea what they had done. Sara wished to God she didn’t know herself, though it served her right for prying. She should’ve never asked for his chart. But she had, and now Sara couldn’t get that picture out of her head—his beautiful mouth crudely pulled together with a suture that couldn’t meet the basic standards for government approval.
The faded Polaroid would be burned into her memory until she died. She had gotten exactly what she deserved.
“Hey, you.”
She spun around. A young woman was standing behind her. She was painfully thin. Her greasy blonde hair hung to her waist. She scratched at the fresh needle tracks on her arms. “Are you a doctor?”
Sara felt her guard go up. Junkies lurked around the hospital. Some of them could be violent. “You should go inside if you need treatment.”
“It’s not me. There’s a guy over there.” She pointed to the Dumpster in a corner behind the hospital. Even in full daylight, the area was shadowed by the looming façade of the building. “He’s been there all night. I think he’s dead.”
Sara moderated her tone. “Let’s go inside and talk about this.”
Anger flashed in the girl’s eyes. “Lookit, I’m just trying to do the right thing. You don’t gotta go all high and mighty on me.”
“I’m not—”
“I hope he gives you AIDS, bitch.” She limped off, mumbling more insults.
“Christ,” Sara breathed, wondering how her day could get any worse. How she missed the manners of good country people, when even the junkies called her “ma’am.” She started back toward the hospital, then stopped. The girl could’ve been telling the truth.
Sara walked back toward the Dumpster, not getting too close in case the girl’s accomplice was hiding inside. The trash wasn’t collected over the weekend. Boxes and plastic bags spilled out of the metal container and littered the ground. Sara took a step closer. There was someone lying underneath a blue plastic bag. She saw a hand. A deep gash splayed open the palm. Sara took another step closer, then stopped. Working at Grady had made her hyper-cautious. This could still be a trap. Instead of going to the body, she turned around and jogged toward the ambulance bay so that she could get help.
Three EMTs were standing around talking. She directed them toward the back and they followed her with a gurney. Sara pulled away the trash. The man was breathing but unconscious. His eyes were closed. His brown skin had a yellow, waxy look. His T-shirt was soaked in blood, obviously from a penetrating wound in his lower abdomen. Sara pressed her fingers to his carotid and saw a familiar tattoo on his neck: a Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it.
Will’s missing Type B-negative.
“Let’s move it,” one of the EMTs said.
Sara ran beside the gurney as they rolled the man into the hospital. She listened to the medics run down vitals as she pulled back the gauze over his belly. The entrance to the wound was thin, probably from a kitchen knife. The edge was rough from the serration. There was very little fresh blood, indicating a closed bleed. The gut was distended, and the telltale odor of rotting flesh told her that there was not much that she would be able to do for him in the ER.
A tall man in a dark suit jogged alongside her. He asked, “Is he going to make it?”
Sara looked for George. The security guard was nowhere to be found. “You need to stay out of the way.”
“Doctor—” He held up his wallet. She saw the flash of gold shield. “I’m a cop. Is he going to make it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, pressing the gauze back in place. Then, because the patient might hear, she said, “Maybe.”
The cop dropped back. She glanced up the hall, but he was gone.
The trauma team set up immediately, cutting off the man’s clothes, drawing blood, connecting lines to hook him up to various machines. A cut-down tray was laid out. Surgical packs were opened. The crash cart appeared.
Sara called for two large-bore IVs to force fluids. She checked the ABCs: airway clear, breathing okay, circulation as good as could be expected. She noticed the pace slow considerably as people began to realize what they were dealing with. The team thinned. Eventually, she was down to just one nurse.
“No wallet,” the nurse said. “Nothing in his pockets but lint.”
“Sir?” Sara tried, opening the man’s eyes. His pupils were fixed and dilated. She checked for a head injury, gently pressing her fingers in a clockwise pattern around his skull. At the occipital bone, she felt a fracture that splintered into the brainpan. She looked at her gloved hand. There was no fresh blood from the wound.
The nurse pulled the curtain closed to give the man some privacy. “X-ray? CT the belly?”
Sara was technically doing the regular attending’s job. She asked, “Can you get Krakauer?”
The nurse left, and Sara did a more thorough exam, though she was sure Krakauer would take one look at the man’s vitals and agree with her. There was no emergency here. The patient could not survive general anesthesia and he likely would not survive his injuries. They could only load him up with antibiotics and wait for time to decide the patient’s fate.
The privacy curtain pulled back. A young man peered in. He was clean-shaven, wearing a black warm-up jacket and a black baseball hat pulled down low on his head.
“You can’t be back here,” she told him. “If you’re looking for—”
He punched Sara in the chest so hard that she fell back onto the floor. Her shoulder slammed against one of the trays. Metal instruments clattered around her—scalpels, hemostats, scissors. The young man pointed a gun at the patient’s head and shot him twice at pointblank range.
Sara heard screaming. It was her. The sound was coming out of her own mouth. The man pointed the gun at her head and she stopped. He moved toward her. She groped blindly for something to protect herself. Her hand wrapped around one of the scalpels.