Nothing Personal (5 page)

“It is,” Jules intoned, hand over heart, “the highest holy day, and this heathen forgets. Well, we’re just going to have to do something about it.”

The highest…? Kate dug around in the pile of memory chips that had been dislodged and sought some kind of calendar. It was early spring outside. She could see the faint blush of green as the afternoon sun caught it outside her window. It was…

“Oh, my God!”

A general nod met her astonishment.

“Precisely,” Jules agreed. “Saint Patrick’s Day. And where do we go on Saint Patrick’s Day?”

Kate looked around, the initial surprise melting into something far more dangerous. She wanted to cry again, damn it, and every one of them knew it.

“McGurk’s,” she admitted, finally seeing the whole plan. “But you can’t do that.”

“Can’t do that,” Jules scoffed in her worst Irish accent. “Did you hear that, lads? Can’t. Up the rebels!”

“Up the rebels!” everyone answered as McMillan rolled the cart up to the chair.

“Do you want to go along?” Jules asked Tim.

Tim’s smile was strained. “I’d rather have my toenails pulled out.”

“Tim doesn’t like Irish music,” Kate admitted as Sticks helped her out of the chair and over to the cart. “It’s our only constant source of conflict.”

Tim shrugged good-naturedly. “She has no taste.”

“Which explains why she’s living with you,” Jules countered happily.

Tim bent to give Kate a kiss good-bye. “Be home before eight. You’re grand rounds tomorrow.”

“In that case, I’m never coming back.”

They processed out of the room, Tim in the lead to intercept nosy staff and Jules bringing up the rear like the bishop on Holy Thursday.

“Where are you going?” Peggy Turner asked predictably as she rounded the desk, her hands full of two o’clock meds.

“Therapy,” Tim announced easily. “She won’t be needing her pain med this afternoon.”

“Maybe never again,” Kate admitted as she rolled by like an Egyptian queen on her barge, the sheet neatly up to her chin to hide the kelly green scrubs she’d absconded with, a paramedic on each end.

Peggy wasn’t impressed. “I think I’d better check on this.”

“Call O’Sullivan,” Jules suggested. “He’ll okay it.”

O’Sullivan was the orthopedist who’d put Kate’s tibia back together. Besides the fact that it would take Peggy until tomorrow morning to find
him, they all knew he had a healthy respect for the high holy days himself.

So away they went, in procession, right down the staff elevator to the back hall and the emergency exit, where a retired Lindbergh fire ambulance waited. And this time Kate remembered every mile of the lights and siren as they swept east toward the city and Soulard, where St. Louis’s most famous Irish pub was located.

“Up the rebels!”

Kate lifted her glass but couldn’t quite focus on it anymore. The room was packed to bursting, the noise deafening, and the immediate company wonderful. Fifteen of them, all told, both medical center personnel and Lindbergh staff, squeezed into about four square feet of space at the front of the bare brick and plank pub to give Kate the kind of support they knew she’d need. There were enough dead soldiers on the high scarred tables to start several bowling teams, and the air was thick with smoke and hops. There were green bowler hats, green ears, green pins with obscene sayings, green clothing of all kinds. The crowd was boisterous and friendly, and the band was one of the best, the music at once exhilarating and sad. Reels and jigs and hornpipes played in minor keys on pipes and fiddles and squeeze boxes and bohrans. Kate couldn’t have been happier.

“I believe I’ve discovered a breakthrough in medical research,” Parker said, leaning forward a little to toss his green plastic lei over the top of
Kate’s outstretched toes. Several other leis hung drunkenly over her cast, and she had at least four green baseball caps on her head to cover the lack of hair.

Kate looked up from her wheelchair and tried to focus on her friends. Some were on the high stools that were McGurk’s hallmark. Others had given up and plopped down on the floor right in front of the stage, snarling at anybody in the over-crowded room who tried to object.

Parker had claimed a chair just over Kate’s right shoulder and perched there like a large gnome. A paramedic/RN who had come to the ER directly from the city fire department, Parker had the build of an elf on steroids, the mind of a bookie, and the hands of a violinist. Scuttlebutt said he was dating one of the residents, a veritable flagship of a woman named Lisa Beller. Kate would have loved to have seen it, especially since Parker needed a stepstool to do CPR and stuttered whenever he saw a naked woman.

“A breakthrough?”

He nodded, his button-black eyes a bit fuzzy. “Medicine will thank me. I’ve discovered a troubling association.”

Kate looked around to see what Parker was focusing on, and then realized he couldn’t focus on anything. “What’s that?”

He frowned importantly, which made him look like a frog. “Polyester and emphysema. I think there’s a link.”

Kate laughed.

“I’m serious.” He giggled. “Just how many
gomers have you seen come in wearing natural fibers?”

“Eyes right!” Sticks barked in her best British-field-officer voice.

Every female staff member turned right. Catching sight of the intended target, a healthy young male with great buns and an obvious sense of rhythm, Kate removed one of the hats and held it over her heart.

“Wonder if we could up his rebel.” She sighed with delight.

“You have no right to drool,” somebody accused with a soft punch in the shoulder. “You have Tim waiting at home.”

“Tim doesn’t care,” Kate assured her, utterly fascinated by the view. “He says I can look at the menu all I want as long as I come home for dinner.” Except she hadn’t had dinner since she’d moved in. She hadn’t had dinner in a very long time. Made looking at the roast across the room all the more tantalizing.

“Bend over!” Jules yelled to the young man, who was decked out in soccer shorts and little else.

“You’re all disgusting,” McMillan snarled as he watched for any kind of female equivalent.

“Amen,” the women intoned reverently.

Kate replaced her hat. “What’s she doing here?” she demanded, pointing past the multitudes between her and the front door, where Edna Reabers, the supervisor from SICU, was standing.

Several heads turned. Jules lifted a hand in greeting. “She works for us now.”

Kate almost dislocated her neck trying to look all the way up to Jules’s face. “Wrong-Way Reabers? You’re crazy. She spent all last week sponging the dust off my respirator in the unit.”

“She’s been demoted. Working nights in the ER from now on.”

“But that’s cruel and unusual punishment!”

Jules nodded. “For her too.”

“But why?”

“You kidding? She’s only two years from retirement.”

And, if Administration had its way, she would end up quitting in disgust and distress sometime short of the date when retirement benefits actually had to be paid out. Nothing was more expensive or more quickly gotten rid of than a loyal employee. The groan of distress from the ER crew sounded suspiciously like someone clearing the bellows on a bagpipe.

“Well, we’ll have the cleanest goddamn crash carts in the city,” somebody said.

“Code drugs arranged by size and color.”

“Names sewn into the collars of every lab coat down there.”

“And you guys haven’t even heard about her past lives,” Kate informed them. She had also worked with Edna Reabers.

“It could be worse,” Jules offered, draining her beer just as the waitress swung by with the next round.

“Yeah? How?”

“They could have transferred us all to the unit.”

Nobody could really argue the point. Especially Kate.

“Prepare to smile and be friendly,” Jules commanded.

Smiles were applied.

“Hi, everybody.” Edna greeted them as if she were the last white missionary in Africa.

“Hi, Edna,” they all chirped, like a dutiful class.

The band was beginning to straggle onto the stage. Kate was having trouble getting her head off the back of her wheelchair. She didn’t particularly care.

“Could you lose me on the way home?” she asked no one in particular, her gaze on the faint design of the stamped tin ceiling past all the smoke.

“Well, that’s why we brought you down,” Jules assured her. From where she was perched on one of the high stools, her puffy face seemed to hover in the air like the Wizard of Oz. “Gunn wants us to just drop you at Barnes, see if you’re any nicer to them.”

Kate snorted. “I’m nice. I even let one of those crazy nuns give me a rosary.”

“Nuns?”

“The ones in the unit praying over the Winkler kid. I don’t suppose we got a miracle.”

It was up to Edna to shake her head as she set her purse down and picked up a drink. “She died last night.”

“’Bout damn time,” Parker intoned. “I was tired of curtsying every time I saw a mink comin’ around the corner.”

“Pretty little girl,” Kate mused, by now adept at seeing past the tubes and wires.

“Smart little girl,” Jules retorted dryly. “Went out on her own terms.”

“Damn,” Kate offered with a dry smile. “I’m sure glad I came out to have you guys cheer me up.”

“Wanna hear a good one?” Sticks asked, leaning over.

Sticks was another of the staff anomalies. A pockmarked, whey-faced kid with a mouth like a sewer, the young tech had what Kate called Appalachian blond hair, interchangeable bead-and-feather-earrings, and a butterfly tattoo on her butt from when she’d played drums with a rock band in LA; hence the moniker. Sticks was the ER root system for the grapevine, a natural gossip diviner.

“Yes,” Kate assured her, “I want to hear a good one.”

“Attila’s husband and boyfriend both attended her funeral.”

Kate had to admit it was good.

“Oh, my God,” somebody yelped right by Kate’s left ear. “What’s
he
doing here?”

All eyes turned. It took Kate a minute longer than the rest to find out what the new ruckus was about, probably because she was about at waist level with most of the crowd. It made visibility a little tough—unless she could talk another of those soccer players her way.

“What the hell’s he got under his arm?” one of the newer members of the group demanded before Kate could answer the first question.

Kate was already grinning. “His pipes.”

B.J. wouldn’t be happy. He hated being unmasked like this.

“He plays this stuff?”

“Quite well. It got him kicked out of his room more than once in his halcyon days as a resident. Some people just have no ear for music.”

It was B.J. who had introduced Kate to Irish music in the first place. Bent over the odd contraption called the uileann pipes, he produced notes that could have scared a banshee. Intense, fierce, as if he were personally strangling every one of those notes from the ethereal plane, betraying a passion he’d firmly deny if anybody caught him. Which they just had.

“How do you know him so well?” Sticks asked, puffing on an unfiltered Marlboro.

“We did time together down at Saint Louis U when he was a house staff and I was a puppy nurse.”

Two driven people wary of involvement who’d recognized each other instantly and kept in contact no matter where they were.

“Is he good in bed?”

Kate laughed. “Beats me. I’ve never known him to let anybody close enough to find out.”

Sticks nodded to herself, two fingers wrapped around a lock of hair as if curling it on the spot. “I bet he’s
real
good in bed.”

Kate didn’t bother to answer. She bet he was too. It wasn’t that she’d never considered it. B.J. had the fierce dark looks Kate preferred, and Kate always felt he would handle a woman just about
the way he did those pipes, as if he could lose his soul in her. In fact, there had been a couple of times when they’d come close, usually after imbibing more than was intelligent. But in the end, it seemed the stakes were too high for mistakes. Kate needed B.J.’s sense more than his pheromones.

“Don’t let him know you’re here,” she advised the group.

“Hey, B.J.!” Jules immediately yelled in her best truck-stop voice. “Can you play ‘Hunka Burnin’ Love’ on that thing?”

B.J.’s frown was mighty, but his surprise didn’t match Jules’s when he did just that. It was one of the most unique sounds Kate had ever heard. Then he spotted Kate and scowled all over again.

“Do you have a note from your mother?” he demanded of her, leaning over the railing that had been erected just for the holiday to keep the rowdier celebrants from toppling into the band.

Kate figured her grin was pretty silly by now. “Occupational therapy,” she informed him, lifting her glass. “See? I can care for myself.”

She was probably the only one who saw the humor way back in those deep-set eyes. “Tim should put you on a leash.”

“He does,” she assured him with a wicked grin. “But only when I ask.”

B.J. just shook his head. “I can’t leave town for a minute.”

“Six years in Philadelphia is not a minute, you asshole,” Kate retorted equably. “How’s your mother? I keep forgetting to ask.”

His mother, whom he’d ostensibly come home
from the big city to keep an eye on after her third heart attack. “That’s okay, pogue. You keep forgetting
your
name. She’s fine.” Giving Kate a sudden squint, he tucked his pipes under his arm as the rest of the band tuned up behind him. “You didn’t tell me.”

“I know I didn’t,” she answered, knowing perfectly well they weren’t talking about B.J.’s mother anymore.

“You will.”

Kate would have felt a lot better if he’d smiled about it. Or if he were still safely separated by the thousand or so miles to Philadelphia. B.J. was much too insightful to have nearby if you wanted to keep secrets, and Kate was a person who gave away her secrets with the greatest reluctance. She’d actually been relieved when he’d informed her of his decision to accept a job on the East Coast as an assistant medical examiner. It had meant they could still stay close, but as neatly separate as they’d always been.