Nothing Personal (8 page)

To Kate’s left, Tracy was reaching over to try and get electrodes to stick to that slippery chest, and behind her the EKG tech clattered into the room.

“Did I order any of this?” Weiss demanded, not moving.

Kate did her best to focus on the hairy wrist, the feel of the catheter slipping through interstitial tissue, seeking out the elusive vessel and at least a semblance of stability. “Lisa Beller said to get started until she got here,” she lied, praying Tracy wouldn’t give her away. “I’m getting started.”

“Well, stop. I’ll reevaluate the patient. If that’s all right with you, that is.”

“Soon as I’m finished with this,” she said, shutting her eyes, letting the feel guide her. Zen nursing. Feel the vein. Coax it close. Convince it to give itself up for the betterment of the patient.

The vein didn’t give a shit about karma. It slithered away twice as Weiss chewed Tracy out for calling Kate instead of him. As he accused Kate of trying to sabotage his place on the staff. As he stood rooted behind Kate, his stethoscope swinging from his hands with a curious swishing
sound, forgetting completely that he had a patient lying there listening to the diatribe.

“IV’s in,” Kate announced, her eyes popping open again. Thick, dark red swelled into the catheter. Snapping the tourniquet loose, Kate replaced the needle with the IV line. Tracy gave her a gentle nudge toward the monitor, which was showing multifocal PVCs, damn near on top of the T wave. The arrhythmia from hell. Better and better.

“Doctor Weiss, Doctor Fleischer’s on the phone,” Paul intoned from the door, his voice trembling a little.

Kate turned just in time to see the whites of Weiss’s eyes. “You think I can just fuckin’ fly up here? You think I can fuckin’ guess what’s wrong with a patient? I’ll tell you what, I’ll take his goddamn pulse and
you
talk to his goddamn doctor.”

Oh, shit. They weren’t just in trouble. They were in Trouble. Weiss was quivering like a dog on scent. His hands shook. His skin was as pasty as his patient’s. His eyes were wide and glittery, never quite resting as he took in everybody in the room. This wasn’t a typical Weiss tantrum. This was the stuff of nasty rumors. The resident’s usually handsome features were curiously slack and stupid looking, even for the volume of his attack on the staff, and there was spittle in his beard.

“Well, what do you think?” he snarled at Kate. “Want my job? Want my fuckin’ name tag? Might as well. You do just what you want. Just like with that little kid. Serves you goddamn right. You had no right
…no right….
”

Kate thought fast. God knows, Tracy and Paul
weren’t going to help. They were both staring at Martin as if his head were spinning. And poor Mr. Peabody was getting grayer by the minute.

“Martin,” Kate suggested, trying her best to ignore the part about Billy Rashad. “Since Doctor Beller told me to go ahead and use ACLS protocol till she got here, why don’t you talk to Doctor Fleischer? Tell him we’re going to have to get Mr. Peabody back upstairs. Okay?”

He darkened noticeably. “Okay?
Okay?
Is there anything else I can do for you? Wipe your ass, maybe?”

It was Kate’s turn to feel frantic. She could hear the soft beeps of the monitor, syncopated and deadly. She could smell death like a sneaky fart, just waiting to settle in over Mr. Peabody while Martin Weiss ranted on about how everybody in the goddamn hospital was out to sabotage him and his career and his love life and his dick that every man was jealous of.

God, Kate hoped Mr. Peabody wouldn’t remember any of this—if he lived.

“Tracy,” she said evenly, giving her own nudge. “Pull me out a hundred of lidocaine. Get me a bag hung for a drip. And call Doctor Beller at the top of your lungs. Okay?”

Tracy looked over at Weiss with eyes like a cocker spaniel waiting to be kicked and nodded her head.

The cavalry this time didn’t have a bugle. It had a perfectly pressed lab coat and devastating blue eyes. “Am I missing the party?” Tim asked.

The collective sigh of relief should have
blown over the flowers on the windowsill. Weiss turned on Tim and started all over again.

“Can you find Beller for me?” Kate asked. “She’s medical on.”

Tim just nodded and guided Weiss back out the door as if it were regular rounds.

“Tim!” Kate called. “I’m—”

“Go right ahead.”

“Jee-sus Christ.” Tracy exhaled, her usually placid middle-aged features stricken.

“That boy,” Mr. Peabody managed, his face pinched and small, “is one taco shy of a combination plate.”

And then he went into cardiac arrest.

Kate didn’t get to participate in this particular roundup. As the cart carrying Mr. Peabody trundled down the hall with the IVACs bumping the wall and the respiratory therapist trying to run backward as he bagged the still-unconscious man, Kate watched from where she was holding up the wall opposite the little man’s room.

Lisa Beller had walked in just in time to do the honors. Kate thought that had been about an hour ago. She wasn’t sure. She was so exhausted and sore she couldn’t move, much less think. And she still had to get all the way down the hall to her own room, which was at least three doors away. Some mountains simply seemed too large to climb.

Still stuffing her Merck’s back into her pocket, Lisa stopped on her way by to bestow a wry
smile. “What, you get the bends if you can’t participate in a disaster every few days?”

Kate managed a small grin in response. “Life should never be dull.”

“You never said why Weiss was tied up.”

“Tim just said he was busy.”

Tim, at that minute, was rejoining the scene from the direction of the call rooms. Kate did her best not to drag him into it too soon.

Lisa nodded, the explanation sufficient for the tall, raw-boned young woman. “Well, I signed off on all the stuff you guys did. Good thing
you
were here, Kate. I never could have pacified Fleischer if one of those floor nurses had pulled that shit. Although he wasn’t much happier to hear your name. What did you do to him, call him after hours or something?”

“Or something,” Kate admitted. “Evidently.”

Lisa sighed and rubbed weary eyes. “Okay, then, I’m off to visit the great white massa himself. He said he’d meet us in the unit. I’ll let you know if we screwed up too bad. But don’t worry. My best subject at Johns Hopkins was sucking up to my superiors.”

Kate wished she had the energy to thank Lisa better. “At least the right resident showed up for the code,” she said.

Lisa understood perfectly. Reaching over to tweak Kate’s cap, she swung on down the hall, whistling some vague tune and waving to Tim so her lab coat flapped like a sail in high wind. If the rumors were true, Parker had great taste.

“I think there’s some morphine left in there,”
Tim suggested diffidently as he reached Kate.

Kate turned to find him smiling. That made her even more depressed. It meant she had to move. It meant she had to deal with Weiss. It meant no matter how much she would have liked it, Tim would never take her to bed to make her feel better.

“Tim, do I have any hobbies?” she asked.

That brought him to a dead stop. “You mean, besides annoying senior surgical residents? I’d think that would take up most of your time. Especially since you do it so well.”

“No, I mean it. Have you ever seen me cross-stitch or plant flowers or make Elvis pictures out of bottle caps?”

Tim joined her against the wall, hands in pockets, attitude easy. Kate could imagine the frown lines that had taken up residence between his eyes. “Is this one of those meaning-of-life questions?” he asked. “Because if it is, I still haven’t come up with an answer myself.”

Kate kept her attention on the room they’d just vacated. Equipment and sterile wrappings and yards of monitor strips littered the floor. On the wall, gaudy crayon drawings from grandchildren fluttered listlessly on a cork bulletin board. Flowers and Betadine, the images Kate would always carry of Mr. Peabody. Kate had the Betadine. She didn’t have the flowers.

She shook her head, unable to explain her distress. She’d fought the good fight in there. Not with death; that was a fight she was mostly sanguine about. With Weiss. A bigger battle, a bigger victory, a bigger enemy. One she would have
savored like a good meal only a few weeks ago. All she tasted this time was acid in her throat. And there was no way she could think of to explain it to Tim. So she lurched into motion and headed for her room.

“Where is Weiss?” she asked as Tim followed alongside.

“He’s taking a nap.”

Kate nodded. “I should report his ass.”

“Right after he reports yours. He’s not one of your biggest fans, you know.”

“Well, thank God for that. I was afraid the feeling wasn’t mutual. The word in the food line is that he’s been putting more up his nose than Neo-Synephrine.”

“He’s under a lot of pressure.”

Kate actually had to stop so she could laugh. “Goddamn you, Tim. Can’t you be bitchy once in your life?”

His eyes sparkled with mischief. “And perpetuate the stereotype? Never.”

It wasn’t until Kate was safely tucked in bed, her cap added to the collection that was growing from the orthopedic frame, that she worked up the nerve to ask the really important stuff.

“Was Weiss in the ER the night I transferred that little boy?”

Tim had been all set to head back out the door. Instead, he settled down on the edge of her bed, his forehead folded into a frown. Kate loved that frown.

“You’re not still beating yourself up about that, are you?” he asked, taking hold of her hand.

“I just can’t remember.”

He rubbed at her hands with his thumbs. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Weiss seemed to think so.”

“Weiss is an asshole.”

Kate grinned. “Well, finally. An honest opinion from Saint Timothy the Younger.”

Tim actually blushed. “If you repeat it, I’ll deny everything. You know how tough a time he has with anybody challenging his authority. Cut him a little slack for a while, Kate. Okay?”

Kate closed her eyes, wishing she could explain to Tim why it was so important to know whether she’d pushed for that baby’s transfer out of altruism or obstinacy. It wasn’t something Tim would understand, though. So she nodded and pretended to be mollified.

“Okay. Thanks for pulling my butt out of the fire tonight, Tim.”

Only Kate and maybe Tim’s brother could ever see the shadow beneath that gleaming, sweet smile. “My pleasure. But try and stay out of trouble till I’m back on again. Weiss’ll come through, Kate, I promise. I’m working on him.”

If anybody else had said that, Kate would have laughed. But Saint Timothy the Younger could, indeed, work miracles.

Nestled back on pillows that smelled like bacteriocidal disinfectant, Kate still felt as warm and comforted as she ever had. She kissed Tim good night, thinking that she was really a lucky girl. All she had to do was figure out what to do with her life. How to avoid the hospital’s clutches and
reawaken her joy in her job and last another thirty years or so until she could retire and decide just what to do with herself. Until then, though, she was looking forward to getting a little sleep.

Which was, of course, why she had the nightmare.

IT WAS AUTUMN
. She knew because the leaves had fallen across the sidewalk, leaving the yard cluttered and dingy. There were clouds in the sky, a sheet of dirty gray that took all the light out of the world. Kate saw the yard, saw the bare trees, saw the house that always needed paint and fixing. She saw her hesitant approach as if watching from a third eye.

Quiet. The neighborhood usually ricocheted with the play of kids, the revving of teen engines, the arguments of middle-aged parents.

But this time there was a kind of sullen silence over the street. A pall, her teacher would have called it. All Kate knew was it made her heart beat faster. Louder. Louder than the scrape of her old saddle shoes across the concrete walk. Louder than the rasp of the screen door that seemed to shift in the wind, even though Kate couldn’t hear the wind, couldn’t see the trees moving.

Only Kate moved, even though she didn’t want to, dressed in her green plaid uniform, the white blouse a little grimy, the sweater already a size too small, the shoes ugly and chafing.

The door was open, gaping like a missing tooth into the darkness. Into the living room. Into the place she always tried everything she could think of to avoid.

Open. Silent. And Kate was afraid.

The front steps were uneven, listing off the old wooden porch. A dog should have barked. Kate should have heard the TV on in the living room. She heard nothing. She didn’t see anything but a shadow.

A shadow, moving.

She screamed.

And bolted upright in bed to have John McWilliams grab her.

“You better now, little girl?”

Kate was still shaking. It made her so mad. She hadn’t had the nightmare in so long. At least a year, when she’d finally told Michael to take the big hike. Always the same dream, the same afternoon, the same slow walk up to the porch, the same frustrating end.

Nothing. No pictures, no sound, no answers why she would dream it and why she wouldn’t dream all of it.

“I’m okay,” she assured the frowning policeman, knowing she wasn’t. “It’s just a stress dream I get. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Took five years off my young life when I hear you screamin’ like dat.”

It was morning. Kate could hear the rush-hour traffic outside, the rumble of breakfast carts down
the hallway. She still felt tired and sore and shaky. Her heart rate didn’t seem to want to climb back down from the stratosphere. And John was bringing her more trouble. She could see it in his nonchalant manner.

“Got a few minutes?” he asked, his soft brown eyes wary.

Kate just snorted. “I guess this means I’ll have to cancel that bike trip I’d planned along the Katy Trail. What’s up?”

“Thought we’d have a little coffee.”

John shared certain inalienable rights with B.J. One was that he refused to socialize when he didn’t have to. This was not small talk.

Kate grabbed the cap with the pink flamingo sticking out in front and plopped it on her head. “Good. That means we can blow this pop stand.”

John’s smile brightened carefully. “You gettin’ tired of de accommodations?”

Kate was busy swinging her legs over the side. “My butt has a permanent dent from this damn bed.”

“Jus’ a second,” he demurred, not moving.

The caution in his voice brought Kate to a halt. “Do I need to be Mirandized again?”

The second shrug said it all.

All she could see was the panic in little Mr. Peabody’s eyes as he’d caught sight of a bald woman with hooker’s earrings come to save him. “Damn. I was hoping we’d pulled it off.”

“What?”

“Who’s blaming me, Weiss? Fleischer, who
couldn’t be bothered to answer the goddamn phone when his patient infarcted?”

“Girl,” John retorted evenly, “what the hell you talkin’ ’bout?”

Kate realized that at least her priorities hadn’t eroded any. John hadn’t come about Mr. Peabody, at all, which meant the relief Kate felt at knowing the little man was still okay was quickly tempered by new unease.

“I got into another…disagreement over policy yesterday,” she explained. “I just figured no good deed would go unpunished.”

“It wouldn’t be ’bout somet’in’ called an MAO inhibitor, would it?”

It was Kate’s turn to look confused. “John, what the hell are
you
talking about?”

“Why I’m here, girl. Mrs. Warner. Don’t tell me you forgot all ’bout dat poor ol’ lady now, did you?”

Actually, she almost had. Cardiac arrests had a way of doing that to her, even if they weren’t her own. “Of course not. But what does she have to do with MAO inhibitors?”

“You know what dey are?”

“Sure. Antidepressants. Testy little devils that require very strict dietary and medicinal restrictions….” The light dawned. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, John, of course. I should have remembered. They got her with the carbamazepine, didn’t they?”

John was looking less pleased by the minute. “I gotta talk to B.J. ’bout sharin’ information wid’ you, don’ I?”

Kate didn’t pay any attention. “So she really
was murdered. I should have figured it out the minute B.J. mentioned the carbamazepine. Nobody with two working brain cells would give a patient on MAO inhibitors carbamazepine unless they were looking to reconstruct Mount Saint Helens. There are warnings about mixing those two in everything but
The New York Times
.”

“What do you mean you should have figured it out?”

Her back protesting almost as much as her backside, Kate retrieved her crutches and the earrings with the big rhinestone palm trees to go with the pink flamingo on her head. “I didn’t kill Mrs. Warner. Now can we walk around, John?”

“Only if you promise to ’splain ’bout dis figured-out stuff, and maybe ’bout why I should Mirandize you for somet’in’ I didn’ even know you did.”

The floor nurse caught them coming around the corner.

“Where are you going?” she demanded over her half glasses.

Kate never slowed down. “Anywhere.”

“You have PT at ten, Martinson wants another tidal volume on you, and the lawyer wants to see you again.”

Kate was doing all right until that last part.

“The lawyer?” she countered, slowing to a halt right in front of the elevator banks.

The nurse, one of the vets who made floor work look easy, just smiled, charts clutched to ample middle-aged chest like schoolbooks. “I got the message from one of the Administration secre
taries. He needs to see you this morning. Something about Mr. Peabody.”

Kate’s stomach plummeted. The chickens had come home to roost after all. “I’ll go quietly, officer,” she all but begged of John. “Just take me quickly.”

John’s gaze was measured. “You a bad girl again, huh?”

“She’s always a bad girl,” the nurse assured him brightly. “It’s what makes her our hero.”

Kate just snorted. “Never again. In fact, I’m thinking of going back for a degree in hospital administration and making everybody else’s lives miserable for a change.”

The elevators dinged, doors slid open, and a couple of lab techs stepped off, their hands full of equipment to draw blood. Before they had a chance to realize it was Kate they were after, she stepped on and punched the button for second sublevel: emergency, surgery, X ray, and all points between. Kate headed for it like a rabbit going to ground.

“Come on, John,” she urged. “You’re the one who wanted to talk.”

John just made it on board before the doors closed.

The doors opened again to the cool echo of tiled hallway, the purposeful shuffle of feet, and the steady whine of wheels. The bracing aromas of disinfectant and fresh wax, real hospital smells, were barricaded behind doors decorated in diagnostic jargon. Kate didn’t even wait for John as she turned for the back door to the ER.

Morning was usually a quiet time here: clean
ing and stocking and organization, long breakfasts and in-service training sessions. Most people didn’t really begin noticing their discomforts until they were up and moving around. Even with the notoriously short-staffed shifts at St. Simon’s, day shift eased into the chaos. Evenings jumped in up to their armpits the minute they stepped through the automatic doors.

For some reason, this morning the night shift had never stopped. Debris littered the floors and laundry carts spilled over. Lights blinked, alarms buzzed, and radios stuttered and squawked. The nurses working the day shift, so used to being able to stoke their fires before needing them, sputtered about like bumper cars, their orders just a little harsher, their faces tight.

Within a minute of stepping in the back door, Kate spotted the signs of a multivehicle accident with injuries, two asthmatics, a croup, and a possible stroke. And that simply by the equipment she saw in the halls, the ancillary personnel popping unexpectedly from rooms, the sounds and smells and orders.

Just a week ago, she would have instinctively made for one of the rooms, if only to check what was going on, to be a part of it. This morning she turned purposefully for the lounge.

“What was it you remembered?” John asked as he preceded her.

But Kate was still distracted by what was going on out in the hallway.

“What do you mean, you don’t have a bed?” Parker was asking, evidently on the phone.
“Where do you want me to put this little girl, the cafeteria?”

“No, ma’am,” somebody else was saying farther down the hall. “We don’t take reservations. That would be in violation of medical statute number seven-twenty-four B.”

“Katie?” John nudged.

She looked up, startled and a little chagrined to find that for a minute there she’d gotten lost.

“Somebody killed dat poor woman,” John said quietly. “I need some answers.”

It took Kate a moment to shift gears, her cogs a little sticky. She wanted to be out in the lane. Instead, she walked on over and poured herself a cup of coffee.

“That poor woman was a tyrant,” Kate retorted evenly. “She hassled staff and harassed patients. She had the heart of a stone and the sense of a chicken.”

Folding his oversized frame into a chair, John observed her quietly. “And?”

Kate sighed and stood where she was, still too unsettled to sit. “And you won’t hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth…. She really was murdered?”

“She really was murdered.”

Kate shook her head, sipped her coffee, and did her best to dredge up an emotion that didn’t want to come. She should at least have pitied the woman. After all, she’d worked with her for almost four years. They’d crossed paths, shared auras. Once Mrs. Warner had even gotten Security for Kate when she’d locked her keys in her car.

It didn’t seem to matter. All Kate could feel was the frustration that welled up every time she thought of the pencil pushers who seemed to confine her life lately.

Mrs. Warner had just been doing her job. She’d been making her numbers match. She’d conveniently forgotten that each number corresponded with a person. It had been up to people like Kate to deal with the consequences.

Edna Reabers scuttled by the lounge door trailing paperwork. She looked like a woman tired of treading water who’d just spotted a dorsal fin. Kate didn’t want to work with Edna. She didn’t need the additional hassle of handling an anal-retentive ex-supervisor with minimal trauma skills. But Kate felt for Edna. She hurt for this poor thin woman who was struggling so desperately to stay afloat without getting chewed alive. Who cared in her own way. Kate did not feel for Mrs. Warner.

“What do you want me to tell you, John?” Kate finally asked. “That she didn’t have an enemy in the world? That only a monster would do something this horrible?”

“I want you to tell me who could do it.”

Kate swung on him, her mouth open, her brain stalled. She couldn’t even come up with a good
What?

“What the hell are you doing standing up? Sit down. Better yet, lie down.”

Desperately glad for the interruption, Kate turned to find a hairy oversized troll standing in the doorway in rumpled scrubs and OR cap.
Looking as if he’d be much more comfortable forging magic gold deep in a mountain than storming the halls of a hospital, Dr. Stan Begelman was nonetheless one of the best neurosurgeons in town, as testified to by Kate’s condition.

“Hey there.” She greeted him with a big grin that belied the turmoil John had just incited. “Been picking somebody’s brain again?”

Begelman just shook his head as he walked in. “I should have hit that vocal shutoff switch while I was in there, shouldn’t I?”

“Too late now. I’m not planning on giving you another chance.”

Another sad shake, as if Kate were simply more than he could take. All the while his eyes were twinkling beneath the gray and black hedge he referred to as eyebrows. It would be so easy to get ugly in his business. A lot of neuro guys did, God complexes with no patience and less personality. After all, the best you usually got was damaged goods, even after all the hard work. But Begelman had defied the odds. Kate was glad she’d been lucky enough to get him.

“Sit down, damn it,” he insisted. “You make me nervous. I keep seeing you toppling over on those damn things and ruining all my hard work.” She made a face at him, but she sat. He nodded. “And, by the way, you still don’t have full hand strength back on the left. Don’t miss your PT.”

“Yes, Mom.”

This time she got a classic wave-off as he headed for the always-brewing coffeepot. He
didn’t even get the pot lifted when contestant number two checked in.

“Doctor Begelman…. Hey, Kate. Nice hat.”

“Thanks, Jules. What are you doing on days?”

“Waiting to get a chance to go home from nights.”

“You getting overtime?”

“Don’t be silly. I’m finishing paperwork. That doesn’t rate money, and you know it.”

Kate shook her head, all too familiar with the tune and lyrics. “Tell ’em to get screwed.”

Jules shook her head back. “Before or after my kid’s surgery?”

There was nothing more to say and they both knew it, so Jules turned on her original target.

“Suzie Walsh has your lady in MRI, okay?”

Begelman did everything but spit out his coffee. “Suzie? That idiot? How the hell did she end up taking care of my patient?”