TPG (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The EMTs didn’t take long, which
wasn’t unusual for Manhattan. With the number of hospitals and EMS services in
the city, the rate of response to an emergency call was about six minutes. They
arrived soon after he dropped the phone. Soon after he’d signed, sealed and
delivered his soul to Hell.

An orange and blue
ambulance sat parked by the sidewalk, its red, white and blue lights taking
turns brightening up the dark alley where the medical technicians knelt by
Allie. They were both young—a man and woman. The man had freckly white
skin and blazing red hair. The woman was Hispanic, with long braided black hair
and strikingly sculpted cheekbones. Each had on skintight latex gloves as they
examined Allie. A crowd of gawkers had already gathered, craning their necks to
see what was going on.

The female
technician asked Kyle, “Do you know her? Relative? Friend? Just passing by?”

Kyle didn’t know
what to say. Should he really lie? Say he was just passing by? But what would
happen when the police came? What if they took a statement, wanted to see his
ID? He’d be digging himself a bigger hole if he lied now. But what would be the
point of having erased all of the messages if he told them he was a friend?
They’d know why he was there. After all, why else would a forty-one-year-old
man be on the Lower East Side at one fifteen in the morning with a blazing hot
twenty-year-old?

“Friend,” Kyle
said, then awkwardly added, “who was just passing by.” He was horrible at
lying. Always had been.

The woman stared
at him for a few seconds, knotting her brow. She read right through him. She
knew he was lying.
Just passing by at
that hour?
He knew the questions that were going to come next:
Where do you live? Where did you just come
from? Why are you so far from home? How did you get down here?

But those weren’t
the questions that were asked. The woman wasn’t a cop. She didn’t care about
his intentions. She was an EMT. She cared about saving a life and had no
intention of wasting precious time by making a horny forty-one-year-old man
feel even more foolish and ashamed.

“She take any
prescription meds?” the woman asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Is she
epileptic?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any illnesses?”

“Not that I’m
aware of.”

“She take any
drugs tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“How much did she
have to drink?” the technician with the freckly skin asked as he shined a small
light into Allie’s eyes while lifting her eyelid with his other hand.

“Not sure,” Kyle
said, then decided to volunteer a bit more to short-circuit the litany of
questions that would come with similar responses. “I just got here about
fifteen minutes ago. I hadn’t seen her before then. When I got here, I saw her
step into this alley and then I found her unconscious and lying on the ground.”

Both paramedics
raised an eyebrow.

“So, she was fine
one minute,” the woman said, “and then walked into this alley and passed out?”

“Yes,” Kyle said.
He knew he should probably mention the man who’d hurried out the other end. But
Allie didn’t have any cuts, bruises or marks. Her clothes weren’t even ruffled
and she had all of her belongings. So the last thing he wanted was to
needlessly escalate things and become a witness to a crime that probably hadn’t
even happened. Besides, he hadn’t even seen the man’s face. Didn’t even know
the color of his skin. All he knew was that the guy had on a T-shirt and was
wearing a hat. So how was it going to help? It would just make an already
questionable scene more suspicious. It wasn’t necessary. And it wasn’t going to
help Allie recover.

The EMTs said
nothing and went back to the ambulance.

Kyle followed,
asking, “So what do you think it is?”

The woman
shrugged. “Could be a drug overdose. Could be a reaction to medication she’s
taking. She might’ve had a seizure.” The woman paused. “Or it could be a brain
bleed—burst aneurysm. But I’d be surprised to see that in someone so
young. Was she complaining of a headache?”

Kyle shook his
head no as the man brought the stretcher out of the ambulance. Kyle gazed at
the large crowd that had gathered. He looked at the young faces, wondering if
any were his students. But he didn’t recognize any of them and none came
forward as a friend of Allie’s.

The technician
with the freckly skin bent down and picked up Allie’s iPhone. “This belong to
her?”

“It does,” Kyle
said, hesitantly.

The man dropped
the phone into a plastic bag and then helped the woman load Allie onto the
stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. Kyle looked down the street as
the medics prepared to leave. “Am I supposed to wait for the police now?”

The woman was
checking Allie’s vitals and didn’t look up. “You can do what you want,” she
said, “but it doesn’t look like they’re coming.”

“Don’t they have
to?”

“They’re pretty
busy people,” she said. “Unless it’s an EDP or there’s some other reason for
them to jump the call, they don’t usually show up. Especially not for a kid who
passed out after leaving a bar at one in the morning.”

EDP—emotionally
disturbed person. Kyle remembered the term from his externship days during
graduate school. He also remembered how reluctant the police were to even
respond to those calls. So the woman was probably right, it was unlikely the
police were going to show up for a girl who passed out after leaving a bar. Why
would they?

“Which hospital are
you taking her to?” he asked.

“NYU.”

The doors shut and
the ambulance sped off, its rotating lights ricocheting off the buildings
lining the street.

And that was it.

No one asked for
his name, or a statement, or anything of the kind. But the acid churning in the
pit of his stomach told him he wasn’t getting off that easy. There’d be more.
He was sure of it.

As the ambulance disappeared from
view and the gawkers left, Kyle made his way to the nearest avenue to grab a
taxi. He raised his hand as soon as he spotted one.

The EMTs said they
were taking Allie to NYU, a hospital he was intimately familiar with having
worked there some fifteen years ago. He didn’t keep in touch with many from his
time there, but was still kind of close with one, Tom Jenkins. They didn’t
speak much anymore, an email here or there, random run-ins with brief cordial
chats. Nothing substantive, but enough that Kyle should be able to count on him
to discreetly find out about Allie’s condition.

After telling the
cab driver where to take him, he scrolled through the address book on his
BlackBerry and found Tom’s cell number, then wondered if he should wait for a
more decent hour to call. After all, Tom was a bit on the surly side. But he
was also a decent guy. And if the roles had been reversed, Kyle would’ve gladly
helped the man out, regardless of the time. And Kyle needed help. He needed to
know what happened and didn’t want to wait until the morning to find out.

So he pressed the
number.

Tom picked up on
the third ring. “Kyle?” His voice was groggy and confused, the call clearly
having pulled him from a deep sleep. “What’s wrong? You okay?”

“Yes,” Kyle
answered. “I’m fine. And I’m real sorry to call at this hour, but … I just
received a call from a good friend. She said her daughter collapsed outside a
bar on the Lower East Side. She’s being rushed to NYU right now. I thought
maybe you could put in a call or two and find out what happened.”

There was a pause.
Kyle wondered if he’d been wrong to call, if he’d pushed their collegial
relationship too far. Or maybe Tom was simply going to ask why Kyle didn’t just
head down to the hospital himself.

But he apparently
wasn’t giving the man enough credit. “She’s there now?”

“She’s on her way,”
Kyle said. “Her name’s Allison Shelton. She’s twenty years old.”

“Sheldon?”

“Shel
ton
. With a ‘T’”

Kyle heard a yawn.
“Okay,” Tom said. “I’ll make a few calls. Let you know what I find out.”

“Thanks, Tom. I
appreciate it.”

“Sure. Let’s just
hope she’s okay.”

Yes,
Kyle thought,
let’s hope.

CHAPTER FOUR

The cab ride from the Lower East
Side back to his apartment at West 116
^th
Street took forever and
cost a small fortune, the distance feeling like the equivalent of a
cross-country trip.

After putting a
decent-size dent in the cash he was carrying, Kyle stepped out of the taxi and
unlocked the lobby door of his walk-up. He still missed the doorman and
elevator he’d taken for granted for so many years. When he’d been married to
Sheila, her Wall Street salary had afforded them the comfort of living in a
high-rise luxury building at the heart of the Upper West Side. But he wasn’t
married to a Wall Street executive anymore. And although he could’ve gotten so
much more in the divorce and afforded a much nicer place of his own, the
emasculation of her cheating on him had been bad enough; he didn’t need the
pile on of having to take her money, too. So he rented what he could afford,
and even though it wasn’t fancy (hell, it wasn’t even on speaking terms with fancy)
it was good enough. More importantly, it was only a few subway stops away from
his thirteen-year-old daughter, Bree.

He pushed open the
door to the vestibule and stepped over the takeout menus that had piled up,
then trudged up the five flights to his one-bedroom apartment, repeating to
himself the same thing he always did as he made the hike—
Think of the money you’re saving on a gym
membership.

He unlocked the
door to his apartment, flicked on the lights and tossed his keys on the dining
room table, then let out a yawn as he looked around his sparsely decorated
place. Not that there was that much
to
decorate. The bedroom was barely big enough for his queen-size bed and computer
desk, and the dining room was simply a small alcove with an IKEA table only slightly
larger than a card table.

At least the
living room was a decent size with an exposed brick wall giving it a nice
rustic feel. But most of the room was taken up by the new sectional couch he’d
purchased, which converted into a bed for Bree when she slept over. It was just
like the one he’d slept on when he visited his grandmother as a child, which
only served as a reminder that he’d become a secondary parent and shifted back
a tier in Bree’s life, no longer with her every day.

He kicked off his
shoes and was sitting down on the couch when he heard the electronic tunes of
his BlackBerry break the silence of the empty apartment. He knew it was Tom
without even having to look at the caller ID.

“What did you find
out?”

“Looks like the
leading candidate is a ruptured aneurysm. A brain hemorrhage,” Tom said,
completely alert now. “She’s still unconscious.”

Kyle sunk back
into the cushions and squeezed the bridge of his nose. “How?” he asked. “What
caused it?”

“They’re not sure.
But there’re no signs of trauma. Could’ve been something in her system. Maybe
drugs. Or it could be she was taking blood thinners, or it might’ve been
alcohol related. Or maybe it runs in her family. They’ll have to do the usual
checks.”

“Is she going to
make it? Did they get it in time?”

“Too early to
tell. But she’s still breathing. Vitals seem to be okay.”

“But they have no
idea what kind of damage it might have caused?”

“Not at this
stage, no.”

“Her parents,”
Kyle asked. “Do you know if they’ve been contacted?”

There was a pause.
Kyle realized the mistake as soon as he finished the sentence. He hadn’t been
thinking.

“Didn’t you say
her mother was the one who called you?”

“I did.”

“So why ask if her
parents have been notified?”

Kyle could’ve lied
again. He could’ve said he was mistaken, or that he was just tired. But the
lies were already spiraling out of control. He needed to put on the brakes.

“What’s really
going on here, Ky?”

Kyle sighed.
“Probably just what you’re thinking.”

“Shit—she’s
a student, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

“You were there
with her?”

“I was meeting
her, yes.”

“At one in the
morning? Christ. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,”
Kyle said. “But whatever was going to happen, never did.”

“Because she
collapsed?”

“Yes.”

There was silence.
Tom was still close enough to Kyle to know the tough times he was going
through. Or at least most of it. He knew about the divorce. He knew that Kyle
had shut down his practice, and he probably knew why. He probably knew about
the patient who died, and the lawsuit that followed.

So maybe the
indiscretion wasn’t that much of a surprise. Maybe Tom expected it.

“Yeah,” Tom said,
breaking the silence, the disappointment evident in his voice. “The parents
were notified. The mother’s already there.”

“I appreciate the
help, Tom. I really do.”

Tom gave a
halfhearted “any time,” and to Kyle’s relief didn’t follow up with a lecture or
warning. They weren’t that close anymore.

After hanging up,
Kyle turned to his laptop, focusing on what had happened to Allie. Tom said
alcohol could’ve caused the hemorrhage, but Allie hadn’t appeared drunk. Not
that drunk, anyway. Her texts were clear and her gait steady. She might’ve been
tipsy, but not wasted. And he didn’t think she was on drugs. But he could’ve
been wrong about that. You never knew. Maybe she was taking Ecstasy or
something. Possible, but his gut told him no.

He did a Google
search for burst aneurysms and found a site called brainaneurysms.com, where he
saw just what he’d expected to see. An aneurysm, which was essentially
a blood vessel in the brain that
balloons and bulges out, wasn’t that rare. But a
ruptured
one was.
Very rare, even more so in someone so
young. Almost all ruptured aneurysms happened to people north of thirty-five.

He stared at the
laptop, realizing that there could’ve been other reasons for the aneurysm to
burst. Maybe she had a hereditary disease. Or maybe the man in the alley had
done something.

But what?

Allie couldn’t
have been there for more than a minute. Probably even less. So what could he
have really done? There was no sign of an assault or trauma. Maybe there was a
needle prick somewhere? Perhaps he injected her with something then ran away?
But what would work so fast?

Kyle closed his
laptop and began to crack each one of his knuckles as he leaned back on the couch,
just like he always did when things weren’t sitting right with him. And things
definitely weren’t sitting right. His gut was telling him there was something
more going on, something else that had happened.

But what that
something was, he wondered as he cracked his last knuckle, he had absolutely no
idea.