Keeper (13 page)

Check pulse. Nothing, “Rubin, unlock the door, go unlock the door.” My free hand took the gun from my hip and handed it to him. He took the gun so fast I wasn’t sure he had taken it at all, and he got up and went for the door as I landmarked, above the xiphoid notch, yes and one hand, seal, breath, compress, over and over and over and over and over and he was back.

“Door’s open. Coming in on breathing,” and he moved to her mouth and I moved over her chest and she was so small and my hands were so big on that fucking Madonna T-shirt, a beatific smile and a bloody halo that’s not true blue.

We weren’t even checking for pulse anymore.

The paramedics came, a man and a woman, both intent and aggressive, and the man ordered Rubin away from Katie’s head and immediately set about administering oxygen with a bag-valve mask. They didn’t say anything to me, so I kept compressing while Rubin explained as best he could what had happened. Over their radios I heard others and looked up through sweat-stung lashes to see two uniforms standing just above the stairs, looking confused. One of the cops said something to the woman in front of me, who was busily setting up a line.

“Shut up,” she told him. “Ringers running,” she told her partner.

He nodded and said, “Stop compressing.”

I sat back on my haunches, feeling hot and light-headed, watching as he intubated Katie, sliding the tube down her throat like a professional magician; now you see it, now you don’t.

The woman had set up the monitor, was now looking at Katie’s absence of rhythm on the LED screen. To hook the system up she had sliced Katie’s shirt open down the middle, and the bloodstained fabric pulled back to reveal her body, and even with her natural skin color she seemed pale, dying. The monitor confirmed that, and as the woman busied herself with the IV line, pushing first one drug, then another, I bent to resume compressions.

Another ambulance crew arrived, and then they were loading Katie onto a stretcher, and I was being roughly pushed out of the way, into the arms of a cop who started to ask me something I never gave him a chance to finish. I followed the stretcher down the stairs and into the hall, Rubin right behind me. The elevator was locked open and they moved everything inside. Rubin and I took the stairs down to the lobby. One of the uniforms came after us, and Rubin was explaining the situation in broken phrases that sounded ungainly and unknowable.

From the lobby, Katie was rolled to the back of one ambulance, where both paramedics climbed inside. One of the late arrivals, an EMT, slammed the double doors shut and went around to the front of the rig, and Rubin and I followed the other to the remaining ambulance. The driver was medium-sized and white, with black curly hair and black-framed glasses, and he just nodded to us when we started to climb inside.

“Where’re they taking her?” the cop asked him.

“Bellevue.”

Buckled up, and then the rig was off with a lurch, lights and sirens down the street and swaying onto the FDR Drive, following the other rig as it sped to the hospital.

“Somebody needs to call her mother,” I said.

“Lozano said he’d do it,” Rubin said.

——

We arrived at Bellevue only thirty seconds or so after the ALS rig, in time to jump out and follow the stretcher through the double doors on the loading dock down the hall. Katie was on her back, the monitor still running. They had put a second line in her, but both bags now rested above her head on the stretcher, shut down for transport. We followed them down a hall, made a sharp right, and ended up in a crammed narrow route with stretchers stacked to one side. The paramedics barely had room to move, and we stayed well behind, keeping out of their way, but not wanting to lose them. Left and now an open space, still more stretchers, and through electric double doors into the ER, and more stretchers, now with people in them, their feet sticking out from under covers or uncovered. The room had a smell that rammed its way up my nose and made me gag, twisted with the cloying memory of maple syrup, and my stomach heaved, for a second, then retreated.

The medics turned Katie’s gurney to the left, in front of a new set of double doors, and a doctor was standing there, wearing sea-blue scrubs and gloves and goggles and barely audible, saying, “This the Romero kid?”

We never heard the answer; they were already inside and it was clear we had come as far as we could. The doors snapped shut on hydraulic coils, locked with hard clicks, and Rubin and I stood side by side, looking through the small glass windows at the eight people suddenly surrounding Katie’s body. They moved her off the gurney and onto another table, the medics backing away, and a phalanx of doctors, men and women, some in scrubs, others not, all goggled, gloved, and masked, bent to work. Instruments flashed off trays in gloved milky hands and the sound of machinery, hard and strong, started up. The doctors bent to the task, and it was clear to me, right then, that Katie was dead.

Rubin was covered in blood, all over his shirt and pants, up both arms, a vampire’s ice cream sundae. I probably didn’t look any better.

Then a nurse told us to move, to get out of the way and go register the patient.

“She’s Catholic,” I told her.

“We take all kinds.”

“No,” I said. “She’s Catholic.”

“I’ll get a priest. Go register the patient.”

She gave us directions to registration, but they didn’t stick. Rubin and I started down a hallway, passing an alcove containing a bald-headed man on a bench, and dodged an orderly who glared at us, then continued on.

“Where are we going?” Rubin asked.

I shook my head, and we turned around, heading back to the nurses’ station. Another door through admitting opened as we returned, and Felice Romero rushed in, Natalie and Dale right behind her, and another doctor from the clinic, Marion Faisall. Lozano followed a second later. Dr. Romero didn’t see us, going straight to the station and exchanging quick words with the nurse there. The nurse gestured and Felice turned, moving to the Trauma Room doors, but the nurse shouted after her and Natalie moved, grabbing her arm at the elbow. The grip stopped her, and Felice turned back to Natalie, eyes wild and mouth in a silent scream.

Felice saw us, and saw it in our faces. It was as if someone had thrown a solid punch into her stomach, and she began to bend, shaking her head, as if trying to fold into herself and disappear. Natalie and Dale helped her to the alcove, setting her on one of the benches. Dale stayed by her, an arm around her shoulders, head beside hers but looking out, always looking. Natalie made straight for us. Dr. Faisall just stood beside the alcove.

“How?” Natalie asked. Her eyes were terribly cold.

“Sniper,” I said. “We did everything we could.” My words sounded whispered, and for a moment I doubted that I had indeed spoken at all. But Natalie nodded, looking us both over, then reached for Rubin.

Lozano was looking at me. I left Rubin and Natalie and walked to him. Behind the counter a phone rang, and one of the staff moved to answer it. Fowler had entered, leading another two police officers, and they all stood idly by the ER doors. We were filling the place up. Beyond the doors, somewhere outside the room, people were shouting, and Lozano turned his head to listen, then said, “Press.”

“Fast.”

“They were at the clinic, saw Romero and company leave with us. How’s the kid?”

“She’s not going to make it,” I told him.

“Don’t talk like that, you don’t know that.”

Lozano didn’t know what he was talking about, but there was no fire in me to argue the point.

“You see anything?” he asked me.

“No.”

“I’m not handling it; it’s not my precinct.”

“Fine.”

“Maybe your friend did?” Lozano asked. “See something?”

“Maybe.”

He pushed off the counter, saying, “I’ll ask,” and headed for Rubin. He walked carefully, as if disturbing the air in the ER meant the difference between life and death. Rubin and Natalie were against a wall, heads bent toward each other, and Rubin was speaking to her, softly. Dr. Faisall said something to Natalie, and after a moment Natalie nodded, said something in return. The doctor headed toward one of the pay phones on the wall.

The shouting outside died, and an orderly stuck her head around the door. “Can you give me a hand, here?” she asked one of the uniforms. “They won’t take no for an answer.”

Fowler snapped, “Keep them out of here.” The uniforms clutched, but Lozano nodded and they went out the door. As it shut a rumble of voices started, then snapped off as the latch clicked. Lozano resumed questioning Rubin, but he cast a sidelong glance at Fowler as the officers left the room. An Asian priest arrived, entered the Trauma Room without ceremony.

After a while, someone told me to take a seat.

I didn’t.

Thirty-two minutes after we arrived at Bellevue the Trauma Room doors opened and from where I was standing I could see inside, and I knew what the doctor was going to say. He was a black man, well over six feet tall and very skinny, with his scrubs hanging off his shoulders and hips, barely held on by his bones. His hair was covered in a surgical cap, but his goggles, gloves, and mask were off, and as he came out he ran his hand across his forehead, smearing the beaded sweat there. He looked around and then said, “Felice?” '

She came out of the alcove, Dale beside her. “Say it, Remy,” Dr. Romero said.

“I’m sorry. We pronounced her at eight forty-eight. We did everything we could.”

“I want to see her.”

He nodded.

I went into the room after them.

She had been covered on the table, and the overhead lights cast harsh shadows in the folds of the sheet, shaped to Katie’s body underneath. The floor under the table was littered with discarded wrappings, papers, gauze, tape, some bloody, some not. The rolling carts of shiny instruments weren’t shiny, and the dishes the tools had sat in were dark at the bottom, surgical steel coated with body fluids. Clamps, forceps, scalpels, catheters, needles, saws, equipment now dirty with blood and bone stacked on other instruments in more carts. The room had become suddenly empty, and as the doctor and Felice looked at Katie’s body, two people came in the other side of the room and began cleaning up. There was a second table, just like this one, but gleaming clean, with instruments ready to go.

Katie’s hand jutted from under the sheet on my side. Not really her hand, just her fingers. She had been wearing pink nail polish, the color of bubble gum. A tube disappeared under the sheet by her hand.

Dr. Romero pulled the sheet back to look at her daughter’s face. Someone had closed Katie’s eyes. Felice put her hand on Katie’s forehead, brushing hair back from where it had fallen across the girl’s cheek. For a moment her fingers traced the bones in her daughter’s face, touching the chubby cheeks and chin. She made a small noise, the sound of a caught animal, shook her head once as if to clear it, and now, stroking Katie’s hair, kissed her forehead.

“I love you, sweetheart,” she said. “I love you very much.”

Then she replaced the sheet over Katie and turned to look at the doctor, who had remained silent and immobile during all of this. She started to say thank you, but couldn’t. She took one step, then another.

We caught her before she hit the deck, and the doctor shouted for someone to bring in a stretcher. Together we lifted Dr. Romero onto it, sliding the gurney out into the hallway. As we came out another orderly was coming in, preparing to move Katie to the morgue. The ER speakers blared an impending arrival, traumatic arrest, ETA sixty seconds, and Remy let me go, turning back into the room, heading for the clean table, the next victim.

The doors shut behind him as he entered, and before they closed completely, I caught a glimpse of Katie being wheeled out of the room. Her hand had been tucked back under the sheet and with it the last evidence of her was gone, and all that remained was a cover for the dead and a stack of bloody surgical instruments needing to be sterilized.

Dr. Romero was out for only three or four minutes, and for her sake, I was sorry it didn’t last longer. She was regaining consciousness within a minute of the stretcher being placed against a wall.

Her glasses were off, safe in my hand, and without them to protect her eyes I could read everything in them when she began looking around. Confusion transforming into comprehension and then despair, all as she sat up, Dale helping her, and carefully swung her legs off the side of the stretcher.

“Don’t get up yet,” I said.

But I needn’t have said anything. The sobs tore at her fiercely, muscle spasms that rocked the stretcher and made me fear she’d fall. The casters on the stretcher clicked with her tremors. She reached a hand toward me and for some reason I thought she wanted her glasses, but as I extended them to her she grabbed my wrist and pulled me in, using me as a support to pull herself to her feet, and then she was crying against me. Her shudders shifted into me, her wailing sobs and the pain in my chest getting stronger and stronger, fighting to be let out. No tears for me; I fought that back with everything I had left. No tears yet. Not now and not here, and not when Felice needed to hold on to something, when the something was me.