I found the SUVs parked in front of one of the McMansions on the second cul-de-sac. It was a completely unremarkable house, exactly like its neighbors. Even the black SUVs parked in the driveway didn’t distinguish it. The house to the right of it had a black Ford F-150 on its driveway, and the one on its left had a white Yukon Denali. I had no idea what sort of off-road experience these people were expecting in the wilds of the suburbs of Sacramento, but they were definitely prepared. I wondered if they had bottled drinking water and emergency rations in the back. It’s not the cockroaches that will survive nuclear holocaust, it’s the soccer moms. They’re some tough cookies.
I cruised on past the house. No one appeared to be keeping watch, but it was better to be safe than sorry. All the shutters were closed in the front of the house, but light spilled out from between the slats. Someone was there. That was for sure.
I rounded the cul-de-sac, pulled the Buick over across the street and toward the corner leading back into the main subdivision traffic loop and cut the engine. I sat with the windows rolled down, listening. The neighborhood was impressively silent. Traffic on Elk Grove Boulevard was nothing but a background swish from here. It almost sounded like those atmosphere CDs of ocean noises that are supposed to help people sleep. The blue light of television sets flickered out of living room windows up and down the block, but I couldn’t hear anything. They probably all had their windows closed and the air-conditioning on.
I slid down in the seat again, but I didn’t bother with the baseball cap. It was already dark and I really didn’t think anyone was watching. I had about fifteen minutes that I could sit here and watch the house before I’d have to take off to maybe be on time for work at the hospital.
Nothing happened. The SUVs sat in the driveway. Light shone through the shutters. Crickets chirped in the darkness. Everything seemed normal. Too normal. It was like going to Aldo’s place. The normality of it all made it way more creepy and, I suspected, way more dangerous.
I finally started the Buick and left for the hospital, knowing that I’d found something important and still wondering what the hell I was supposed to do about it.
8
I SKIDDED INTO THE EMPLOYEE PARKING GARAGE PRACTICALLY on two wheels, which is a pretty mean driving feat in a moving sofa. I’d changed into my skirt and twinset as I’d driven up Highway 99 from Elk Grove, but even with that time-saving maneuver, I was close to half an hour late. The idea that I might slide into my little cubicle in the processing department unobserved went out of my pretty little head the second the double doors whooshed open to let me in.
The ER waiting room was total chaos. Every seat was filled. Boys of various shades of brown lined the walls, blood-soaked ice packs pressed to various body parts. I shuddered to think of what the people being treated ahead of them had looked like. Four security guards patrolled the room.
I headed to the registration area where I was supposed to have been checking in people for the past thirty minutes or so.
“Damn it, Melina, where the hell have you been?” My boss, Doreen Hughes, rolled back in her chair and glared at me. Doreen is in her late forties. She battles her weight, her teenaged children, her lazy-ass husband and the fecklessness of the night staff at Sacramento City Hospital personified largely by me. She’s not bad as far as bosses go, but she’s still a boss.
I gave an apologetic shrug. “Sorry. Car trouble.” I felt a slight twinge of guilt for maligning the Buick. It had never once given me a moment of unease or trouble, but I blamed it for everything. If it ever became real like the Velveteen Rabbit (and I damn near loved it enough to make it so), I was going to have a lot of ’splaining to do.
Doreen’s already creased mouth pursed down even smaller, threatening to disappear all together. “Just get started. We’ve all got lines about a mile long.”
The first person to sit down in front of me at my desk was Bao Nguyen. He had bloody gashes on his cheek that looked like they needed stitches even to me, a left arm that hung down at a funny angle and, bless his pea-picking heart, active health insurance. He was replaced by Enrico Torres, who had shallow knife wounds on his forearm. The parade went on through Canh Ngo, Huynh Tran, Franco Rodriguez and Jorge Ramos. Notice a trend? That’s right. All Vietnamese boys or Latinos from the ’hoods, most of them sporting gang tats.
Then Alicia Alvarez huddled down in front of my desk, her dirty gray hoodie pulled around her. She looked about nineteen. There was blood on her jacket and tears staining her cheeks. She didn’t, however, seem to be injured. I took her name, address and phone number, and then I asked what had brought her to the ER.
“It’s not me. It’s Maricela. My baby girl.”
“How old is Maricela?” I asked.
“She’ll be six months next week.” Alicia’s voice faltered.
I looked up from my computer. The way she hunched forward cradling her stomach, I wondered if she was pregnant again already. She barely looked old enough to be out of high school. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Jaime, my brother, he got shot.”
Okayyyy. That wasn’t good, but it didn’t get me any closer to hearing why Alicia thought Maricela needed to be seen or even where the baby was now.
“They just shot right into the apartment, right through the window.” Her voice caught. She swallowed hard and went on. “I drove him here, but I didn’t have no one to leave the baby with, so I brought her, too. She fussed the whole way here. Wouldn’t stop screaming. I figured I’d feed her when I got here.”
“And?” I leaned forward.
“She wouldn’t eat. They took Jaime in, and I tried to nurse her, but she wouldn’t eat. She stopped screaming then, too.”
“Okay. Why do you think she needs to be seen by a doctor?”
Alicia leaned back and opened her hoodie. A perfectly beautiful baby girl with skin the color of caramel and jet black curls against her cheek, lay in her lap. “I think she needs to be seen ’cause I can’t get her to wake up no more.”
I froze. Something was not right with that baby. Now that Alicia had opened her hoodie, I could smell it. A fetid rotten smell came off the perfect little angel baby in Alicia’s lap. “Alicia, is there any blood on her? Did she get hit by the bullet? Or by, I don’t know, a piece of glass or something?”
She lifted Maricela’s shirt and showed me a tiny pinprick of blood on her smooth, round little tummy. “Just this.”
I leaned forward and sniffed. The smell was even stronger. It was hard to detect over the disinfectant smell of the hospital that tended to scorch my nostrils with its harshness. Now that I was seeking it out, though, I could smell it and it did not smell good. Something was seriously wrong with that baby.
The tears welled up in Alicia’s eyes. “She was just sleeping in her crib.” Alicia wrapped her arms around herself and her baby and began to rock. “I shouldn’t have put the crib by the window. I shouldn’t have. It was so hot in the apartment. I thought she’d get some air. Oh God, what did I do? Why did I put her there?”
“Wait right here,” I said. I shoved my chair back, hit the button to go into the emergency room through the back door and ran.
I found Alex in one of the bays, assessing a knife wound. “Dr. Bledsoe, there’s a baby at my window. Someone’s got to see her now.”
Alex didn’t even look up. “If triage sent the baby to be seen by you first, then she doesn’t need to be seen right away. Just because it’s a baby, doesn’t mean that she hops the line. You know the drill, Melina.”
I dropped my voice low and tried to speak slowly. If I panicked, he’d blow me off entirely, but I had to get him to listen. Why the hell didn’t I have a vampire command voice? “There’s something wrong, Alex. Something really wrong. Someone’s got to see her now.”
The tone in my voice must have gotten through to him because he looked up at me. “Are you sure? Because I’m not exactly playing Hungry Hungry Hippos here,” he said, stepping back so I could see the nasty gash across the young man’s arm.
I sniffed. I didn’t smell the horrid combination of blood and bowel that I’d smelled from Maricela. I bit my lip and nodded my head up and down. “I’m sure.”
He stood. “All right, then. Show me.”
I ran back to my desk with Alex striding behind me. Alicia had pulled her hoodie back around Maricela. Alex looked at me quizzically.
“Show him, Alicia,” I said. “Show him the baby and the mark on her tummy.”
Alicia unveiled the baby again, and I saw Alex come to attention. He knew it, too. Something wasn’t right. Alicia lifted Maricela’s shirt. Alex’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the tiny dot of blood. He pressed against the baby’s stomach. Maricela’s eyes flew open and she screamed.
In two seconds, Alex had snatched Maricela from Alicia’s arms and had taken off at a run into the ER. “Take care of the mother, Melina. Phone upstairs. We need an OR stat.”
BY THE TIME ALL THE PAPERWORK HAD BEEN FILED AND MOST of the young men had been ushered into various parts of the ER, I was numb. I felt as though I were hallucinating, I’d seen so much pain and heartache. Through it all, over the smell of sweat and blood and the sour tang of fear, I kept thinking I smelled cinnamon coffee cake, too. I was clearly losing it. Yet I knew that I had seen the least of it. The boys that had been really hurt didn’t come through my area. They got checked in by the nurses as best as they could. The unending parade of damaged young men that had trampled through my office was only the tip of the iceberg.
Alex came in through the door that connects our area with the treatment area. “Hey.” He looked tired. His skin was even whiter than usual and there were circles under his eyes.
“How is she?” I didn’t bother with formalities. He knew who I was asking about.
“She’s still in surgery.” He leaned one hip against my desk. I pushed my chair back. My cubicle isn’t that big, and for a guy who didn’t need to breathe, he seemed to be taking up more than his fair share of oxygen.
I glanced up at the clock. It had been hours since Alex had raced out of the ER with the baby tucked under his arm like Larry Fitzgerald running for the end zone. “Is she going to be all right?”
He rubbed his hand across his face and nodded. “Thanks to your nose, yeah, she is.”
“What was wrong with her?” I scooted my chair closer. I felt so cold. I wanted to be close to someone, something to warm me. Unfortunately, Alex doesn’t give off any body heat.
“A piece of shrapnel nicked her colon. She was bleeding to death in her mother’s arms.” His voice was flat, his words matter-of-fact. I looked up into his face. If he felt anything, he wasn’t showing it to me.
A baby. Caught in the crossfire. This had to stop. Someone had to make this end. It was bad enough to see all these young men ruined, but a baby? What could a baby have done to deserve being shot while she slept in her crib by an open window on a warm summer night? I didn’t trust myself to speak.
Alex patted me on the back. “She’ll be fine. We caught it in time. I’d give Celeste a wide berth for a while, though. I think she’s taking it personally.” Celeste was the triage nurse who’d sent Maricela out to the waiting room to bleed to death while someone stitched up her uncle. She wasn’t exactly my favorite person under the best of circumstances anyway. I found I didn’t much care if she was pissed at me or not. I was so numb right now, though, that Norah could have stopped speaking to me and I probably wouldn’t have cared.
Alex stood up and started to walk away. He stopped after two steps and turned back to me. He cupped my chin in his hand and ran a chilly finger down my cheek. My breath caught in my lungs. I looked up at him, directly into his eyes.
“You did a good thing tonight, Melina. Try to hold onto that.”
Then he was gone.
When the supply of maimed and damaged boys slowed from a roaring stream to a trickle, I pushed my rolling chair back from my desk. The line of us on my side of the glass didn’t look a whole lot better than what I’d seen come through the ER. Oh, we weren’t bloody. No one was going to need surgery. But my coworkers all had the same shell-shocked look that I supposed was on my frozen-feeling face. Even Doreen, who had been through more than a few battle-fields in her day, looked like hell.
“I need a break,” I declared to anyone who might be listening.
Doreen waved her hand in permission. I headed to the ambulance bay. The smell of cinnamon got stronger. “Hey, Melina,” a voice said from the shadows.
I turned in time to catch the flash of white teeth as he grinned in the darkness.
Officer Goodnight. No wonder I’d been smelling baked goods. I wondered if it was his cologne. Maybe Calvin Klein actually made “Cookies on a Winter Day” scent. If he doesn’t, he should. Forget Gwyneth Paltrow playing with puppies on green grass. The cookie thing would sell like crazy.
“You’re not stalking me, are you? Because that could get old.” I leaned against the cement wall. It still held some warmth from the heat of the day, and the scratchiness against my back reminded me that I probably would be able to feel something again some day.
He walked over and leaned next to me. “No stalking. I’m here to take statements. Pretty much everyone is here taking statements. It’s going to take all night.” His voice broke a little. “There are so many of them.” His hand brushed mine as are our arms dangled between us. His fingers were warm. It made me even more aware of how cold mine were.
“I work here.” I felt I needed to explain my presence, too.
