Bad Medicine (12 page)

One look in the room was enough for Molly to know what was going on. She just couldn't believe that in this day and age in the neighborhood where Bone T and his mama lived, that she hadn't figured it out right.

So the first thing she did was ask ma to have a seat outside while she examined the skinny, wired, wary boy. What she did instead was pull out an opaque plastic bag with the hospital logo on it.

"Okay, Bone T," she said quietly. No attitude. No condescension or control. "These are the rules. What you do on the street is your own business—although if you were a man, you'd tell your mama what's goin' on." She didn't wait for the glare, the uncomfortable shifting that answered her. Instead, she gestured to his clothes, all blue, from his shirt to his jeans to his cap and socks and shoes and bandanna. "This is a no-colors zone. I need your clothes off so I can check you out for your mama, and I need your colors put inside so we don't have an incident in the hall. If we have an incident in the hall, your mother could be the one shot, and I don't think you want that."

"I don' take my colors off for nobody," he insisted, trying with at least three broken ribs to look threatening.

As well he might. He'd just been initiated. Into which gang, Molly wasn't sure. There were dozens aligned with the Crips, whose colors he was wearing. All of them used what they called being "jumped in" as their initiation. The entire gang would batter at the new kid until he couldn't walk. Then they all hugged and shared, as if they'd just finished EST. The kids said it made them feel like they belonged. One had even explained that parents beat their kids when they loved them, and so did the gang. The Boy Scouts for dysfunctional lives.

"That's why I have this bag," Molly said, as if she didn't hear the sneer. "You keep 'em with you, just like you do at school. You just don't show them and start something."

"You dissin' my family," he retorted, trying so hard to be mean. Molly saw the residual spark of childhood in those old eyes and wondered how long he'd last.

"I got no reason to dis you, Bone T, or your family. I'm the one that helps when your homes are in trouble. If you respect my turf. Neutral ground, man. You don't like it, I'll go out and tell your ma I can't take care of you, and I'll tell her why."

It might have been different if every gang-banger on the street didn't know the rules at Grace. If every one of them hadn't benefited from them at one time or another. A sage and savvy medical director had parleyed with the gangs for rules everybody could agree on in his ER. It didn't mean it was safe. It meant the truce was holding. So far, they'd only had half a dozen incidents in the halls since June. Not bad, considering what was going on out in the streets and the fact that the gangsters they were making deals with were as young as fourteen.

"You want me to help?" Molly asked, dropping her voice into the definite no-challenge zone.

Bone managed to work his way off the cart. Molly gave brief thought to the fact that he could be carrying a weapon, and then dropped the bag on the cart. "I'll be back. Okay?"

She never would have left one of the older ones alone. Not till he was naked and she found out whether he'd socked away insurance against surprises. Not when his rivals might be hunting to finish their task. Not once the humanity in his eyes winked out.

Even so, Molly didn't feel the tension ease across her shoulders until she was out in the work lane with everybody else.

"Hey, Molly," Lance Frost called from where he was playing with a new cardiac stethoscope at one of the work stations. "I need to dismiss one and six." Lance handed the charts off to a tech who walked them the next five feet to Molly.

"I hear the lawyer tote board's up to four now," the tech said. "You know what that is, don't you?"

Lance didn't bother to look up. "You'd think my divorce lawyer would have the grace to add himself to that list. Especially considering what he let my wife get away with."

"We all paid him to do it," Betty Wheaton, one of the other nurses, offered on the way by.

"I figured as much."

"I'm going on my fifteen minutes now," Sasha told Molly. "You triage for me?"

Molly nodded, her attention on the charts in her hand. Reacquainting herself with who belonged to what room number. "As soon as I send these two home and check in on Mary Mother of God...." Grabbing a prescription from the top chart, she waved it at Lance. "What the hell's this?"

When she didn't get an immediate answer, Molly walked as close as she dared to the periphery of Lance's body odor and leveled a glare on her ER physician of record.

"What does it look like?" Lance asked, still not looking up.

"Do you recognize this medication, Betty?" Molly asked, already knowing the answer.

Shifting the load of IV fluids in her arms so she could lift her glasses, the very round, very dark, very quick Betty glanced down at the prescription before her. "Why, no, Molly. I don't. I've never seen that drug before in my life."

"Neither have I," Molly answered, her suspicions high. The only reason Lance would take the trouble even to learn how to spell a new drug name was that a drug salesman had been by to pronounce it for him. The one thing the drug salesman wouldn't say was that this breakthrough, all-wonderful, ever-safe drug cost at least three dollars a pill. And the doctors, wavering beneath the spell of handouts, flattery, and free gifts, usually forgot to ask.

"This little old lady has been on the same meds for fifteen years," Molly told Lance. "What's so important about changing them now?"

"She had to come to the ER," Lance offered laconically.

"She had to come to the ER because she was lonely. Just like she does every other month. You know that."

Betty was smiling like a cat in the canary patch. "What do you suppose it means, especially since the drug salesman for Parker was just here to donate that bright, shiny new stethoscope to our physician yonder?"

"I don't suppose this medicine is a Parker product," Molly offered.

"It has a longer half-life than the latest bronchodilators," Lance said.

"It also costs eight times more than the other bronchodilators," Molly retorted.

Lance raised eyes that were the soul of innocence. "Don't you want that nice little old lady to breathe better?"

"Not only is she not going to breathe any better,"

Molly retorted. "She's gonna have a stroke when she sees the price tag on this. And then she's not going to be able to eat when she has to pay for it. Give her the generic, Lance."

"I can't do that, Molly. It wouldn't be right."

Molly counted to ten, the script still in her hand. This wasn't just enthusiasm for a newer, shinier model then. This went deeper. "You found your money-maker after all, didn't you?"

Lance didn't bother to answer. He just smiled and stroked his new toy. Molly didn't say anything either. She simply headed over to Mrs. Wilner's room, where she made a quick
X
in the box that would allow a generic substitution to be made by the pharmacy.

That was if the pharmacy wasn't also benefiting from the pharmaceutical's largesse by filling a prescription that would cost the patient three to six times what the generic did, and then getting a discreet kickback from the drug company in thanks. The things the consumer didn't know, Molly thought with a disparaging shake of the head.

"Tommy," she said to the tech, "get me Mrs. Wilner's wheelchair and get the kid's family in twelve. Then push the peds doc in to see Bone T before he runs out on us, okay? After I dismiss Mrs. Wilner, I think I deserve a blessing from Mary Mother of God."

By the time Molly finally did make it in to see her, Mary Mother of God was seated cross-legged on the cart in a short leather skirt and strategically ripped tube top. Mary came in every so often to deliver the second savior. Not that she was ever pregnant. She just figured that God was more mysterious than any of them thought. She had also decided, on or about her third visit, that childbirth as it stood was best left to the beasts of the field. Which meant that she kept waiting for Molly to notify her that the big guy had come up with something more suitable.

Mary didn't act much like the mother of you-know-who. She dressed more like the Queen of the Night than the Queen of Heaven, and had a mouth on her that had the staff wondering just which Madonna she professed to be. She also smelled as if she hadn't bathed since the last time she'd been struck by the hand of God.

"Mary?"

The patient looked up. "You don't believe me."

Mary's favorite accusation. Molly figured it was because most people would hope that a benevolent supreme being would pick someone with more teeth, less hair, and better hygiene to bear his son.

"Did I say that, Mary?"

Molly checked the chart, which betrayed no signs of a doctor's visit. She did, however, catch the lingering whiff of chicken soup in the air, which meant that Lance just wasn't charting again. There was also a slip of paper that said that Dr. Stavrakos was held up in clinic. It figured that he'd get this. Gene did so love the fun stuff.

"You should be fuckin' glad that I chose to come back here," Mary growled, finger pointing. "Especially after the treatment you all gave me the last time."

"It was a busy night."

"You wouldn't have put Herod in a cave."

"As a matter of fact, we did." The cave actually being room three. Herod came in periodically looking for the child Mary was supposed to have delivered. Molly was just glad that they usually missed each other. Also that Herod only came armed with a spear.

"What am I waiting for?" Mary demanded, scratching in places Molly didn't want to see.

Molly smiled. "Archangel Gabriel," she said. "He's held up in traffic."

Mary Mother of God stopped scratching. "Oh, good. I need to talk to him."

"I bet."

* * *

The area around the triage desk was stacked like the stage at a heavy metal concert. As she approached, Molly heard the computers, saw the three secretaries bobbing their heads in search of their organizer, and smelled the alcohol that hung in the air like a toxic cloud. Beer and Mad Dog. Eau de City Drunks. Out in the county they would at least have had the decency to swill Jack Daniels, or even Chivas. Down here it was Rosie O'Grady, Malt anything, and, occasionally, gold spray paint.

"Okay, what's the game plan?" she asked the senior secretary, a nervous, prim little thing who would have been much better suited to the administrative suites. Triage was tough duty to pull, the place where patients were first seen and assessed, their information obtained without too much screaming and shouting, and their treatment directed. Traffic control with Greek street signs, basically. And at Grace, it was always rush hour.

"Um, well, this woman here... you know... uh, she has a..."

Molly took a peek through the metroplex-like window that separated them from the unwashed sea of injured and diseased. There were people draped over every chair within a mile radius and others holding up the faded green walls. There were kids yelling and drunks wobbling and at least one complete family huddled in the corner watching the rest of the crowd as if they were aliens.

For a change, though, no one appeared to be actively bleeding or blue, so it was first come first served. And standing first in line was an overweight blondish white woman in jeans and a Travis Tritt muscle shirt who had a definite look of discomfort on her doughy features and a posture that belied big trouble in her center of gravity area.

"She has a what?" Molly asked, desperately trying not to grab the chart from the secretary, who clutched it as if it were porn.

"Growth," the little woman whispered with a dip of her eyes and a twitch of her nose that reminded Molly of nothing so much as a mouse catching scent of a cat. "Down there."

"I see."

Bartholin cyst, probably. They hit women where it hurt, right in the vaginal area, and were preferable to childbirth only in that they lasted less than nine months.

Losing patience, Molly made a grab for the chart. Truth be told, she couldn't wait to see how the secretary had described the problem. This was, after all, the woman who had fainted dead away when finally convinced that a person could, indeed, contract syphilis in the throat. And why. Her attempts to gentrify descriptions of bodily functions regularly ended up in the book of fame in the back.

Molly read this one and burst out laughing.

The secretary blanched. The patient sighed. Molly apologized.

"It's not you," she said to the woman, who was certainly not happy to be there in the first place.

It was the line on the chart that said,
Chief complaint.
The place where the secretary was supposed to transcribe the complaint as the patient gave it. Molly was sure the now-blushing secretary had meant to write "Patient has a swelling in her vagina." What it came out as, though, was,
Patient states she has a swell vagina.

Molly couldn't wait to get back to the back and show this one off.

"Yo, bitch! You dissin' me?"

A woman screamed. Half a dozen people started running. Molly looked up just in time to see a tall black youth in a blue bandanna and Raiders jacket level a MAC-10 at her head. The truce hadn't lasted as long as they'd hoped. Molly dropped like a stone, taking two of the secretaries with her just as the gun went off.