The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

“To one,” he said. “Imaging. But they already told me on the way back I got to go through the basement. Can you believe that? Got to go the long way. They brought a shooting victim to the ER and they’re going to close off the first floor in a few minutes. ‘Security concerns,’ they say. What they mean is they don’t want black folks coming down to see what happened.” He gesticulated fiercely. “This man in ER was shot by the cops. Man was unarmed. What is it? Fifteen black men shot by the police the past five years? Nights I go home I think I could be next, know what I’m saying? They disrespect the whole black community. Last month, police pointed guns at my neighbor right in front of his kids.”

He shook his head in disgust, then stared at Cheryl Beth. “Now everybody’s going nuts, afraid his friends and family are gonna come down and start trouble.” He looked around the elevator, up at the ceiling, then back at Cheryl Beth. “Some day this town’s just gonna blow, you know? Down there on Main Street, all them white yuppies coming to the new nightclubs, coming in from the suburbs. A block away you got six kids living in a room of a tenement, no heat, and a black man can’t walk on the street without a beatdown from five-oh. How long before those black folks look over on Main Street and see how goddamned poor they really is? Then what’s gonna happen, huh?”

Cheryl Beth looked at the patient on the gurney. He was a big man with wavy dark hair and a handsome face, even with the nasty blister on one lip. He must have been through a long surgery. He briefly looked at her, smiled, then closed his eyes. His eyes were tired and afraid. She had seen the look thousands of times. When the elevator opened at the first floor, she held the door while the patient was wheeled out. The transport guy was moving fast. He probably had a dozen more transports waiting for him, even at this time of night. Then she rode down another floor alone.

In a few moments she stepped out into a dim corridor. The floor was a uniform checkerboard, aged and scuffed. It was narrower than in the more modern parts of the hospital, and most of the lights were off to save money. This had been a main part of the original hospital, when the twenty-story, art deco tower had been a proud civic monument and Cincinnati Memorial had been one of the top hospitals in the Midwest. Generations of docs had trained here. Now the hospital was struggling and the basement was mostly forgotten. It still had a black-and-white tile floor that seemed right out of the 1930s. The wall was plaster, fading white with an institutional green stripe running horizontally. Cheryl Beth liked to imagine the medicine that had been practiced here once, when nurses had worn white uniforms and neat caps, when pain management had been, if someone was lucky, morphine.

It was better than thinking about Christine. Why was she even coming down here? What more was there to say?

The darkness of the corridor seemed to swallow sound. Other hallways, narrow alleys, and double doors led off at regular intervals. The doors had small, darkened windows. Old beds and laundry carts were lined along the walls and tucked into intersecting hallways. Then a metallic crash, muffled, short-lived, somewhere behind her. She jumped and looked back. Had the sound come through those two dark doors off to the left? She stood for a moment in the gathering silence. It was silly. Cheryl Beth was not the jumpy type. She liked walking the old corridors, taking shortcuts. The old building made its own sounds, never mind the reality that the basement also attracted horny staff members and the occasional transient. And for some reason, Christine had moved her office down here. In the distance, she heard an elevator bell sound, heard anonymous hums of large electric machines.

She could see warm, golden light breaking out of Christine’s office door, which was partly opened onto the corridor. Christine hated the overhead lights and often worked with only her desk lamp lit.

“Hey, it’s me.” Cheryl Beth knocked as she opened the door.

For an instant, the world seemed out of phase, not right, almost comically not right. Red spatter on the floor. Christine on the floor, undressed. Among the tide of emotions washing in was almost a millisecond of laughter: this was a practical joke. Then heavy breathing. Cheryl Beth’s own.

“Christine?” It took Cheryl Beth a moment to recognize her own voice.

Dr. Christine Lustig lay on her side, completely naked, her pale skin luminous except for the blood. Everywhere. Cuts lashed her arms, legs, side, face; in places, the skin had been viciously avulsed, like work a butcher might do. Cheryl Beth’s training effortlessly overcame the hysterical instinct boiling up in her and in two strides she was at the doctor’s side, reaching for a carotid pulse. Her fingers sank into gore. The knife had found its fatal target in Christine’s neck. Around the other side of her neck the skin was unbroken and pulseless. Her finger felt her thigh, the femoral artery; again, no pulse. She felt a ballerina’s spinning light-headedness. She felt disembodied but no, connected to another body, one that would take barely a breeze to float away. So much blood—maybe there were other victims. The average human contained 5.6 liters of blood. Then she realized how much blood she was standing in. It betrayed the unevenness of the floor, pooling here, flowing like scarlet canals between the aged tiles. It inundated her red patent leather Danskos. Suddenly she felt a touch slither against her neck.

Her disembodied hearing heard a sharp breath, a small “oh!” Her own.

Cheryl Beth pulled the stethoscope off her neck and stuffed it into her lab coat. The white coat was now streaked with Christine’s blood. Behind her was the doorway, with the empty black hallway beyond. The entire world seemed monstrously soundless, even the distant electric hum gone. Cheryl Beth sprang up, crossed the room, and closed the door, locking it. She carefully walked to the desk, h

er shoes now hopelessly hydroplaning on the bloody floor, and grabbed the phone receiver. Even before her ear registered the dead device she could see the cord ripped from the wall. Her own cell showed no signal.

Panic finally threatened to overwhelm her. Her breath came harder and she reached into her pocket for the small inhaler, shook it, and took a puff. She made herself breathe slowly. Buried beneath the vast hospital, the cell phone stubbornly refused to find a signal.

“Oh, shit.” She leaned against the wall and looked back at Christine. That’s when she saw the strange shape of the woman’s left hand. Christine’s ring finger was gone, leaving a dark red tangle of tissue.

Cheryl Beth walked quickly to the door, unlocked it, and ran down the hallway toward the elevator, but not before finding a disposable scalpel in the cabinets of Christine’s office, unwrapping it, and brandishing it before her like life itself.

Chapter Two

He was alive.

Later he would learn that the surgery had lasted more than ten hours, but to him it was one lost instant that began after the anesthesiologist had opened his leather case and said, “Bar’s open. What’s your pleasure, Detective Borders?” Will had laughed and called for good Kentucky bourbon and a Christian Moerlein chaser. Next he was awake on his back, looking at a lighted ceiling, and at Cindy’s face, telling her how much he loved her, how grateful he was to be alive. They could start fresh. They would have Christmas. He would live to see another Christmas. He had just been babbling, a long series of moans, but these words are what his brain so clearly heard him say.

Can you wiggle your toes? Can you feel this? Yes, yes!

He was alive. This elation kept him going through the hours in the ICU, when he sweet-talked the nurse into giving him more ice than she probably should have. His thirst was primal. The ice was salvation. He could feel his feet and toes, kept wiggling them anxiously. Then he had been wheeled up to a patient floor, a good sign surely, and Cindy had sat with him for a while. Then she had poured him water and left. The persistent sleep that had annihilated the past few days again took him. Everything else could wait. He was alive.

Suddenly this madman had appeared, vowing to take him for an MRI. It was midnight. Will had protested ineffectually as they slid him to a gurney and wheeled him like tardy cargo through the empty halls of the hospital. For the first time since waking from the surgery, Will was afraid. The nurses hadn’t heard about this trip to the imaging department. He overheard a hushed conversation. And the attendant seemed so careless, so quick to take a fast turn with the gurney that might have sent Will sprawling onto the floor. The corridors were empty. Could the MRI even be operating this late? Yet he was a prisoner, flat on his back, barely able to move below the waist.

He felt profoundly vulnerable: part of his vertebrae was missing and a long, fresh wound was cut down his back, held together by sutures that could easily rip apart. The drugs and exhaustion had made him feel oddly disembodied. From the safety of his bed, he had studied the assorted tubes coming out of his arms and chest with an abstract disregard. Now they looked like menace, like death attached.

He felt utterly alone.

It didn’t help Will’s apprehension that he was at the mercy of a young black man who hated cops. The man had made that tendency clear to everyone he encountered. There had been another shooting of a black by a police officer, no doubt a white officer. Will Borders was a white police officer. He feigned sleep and hoped that his tormenter didn’t know his occupation.

After an hour of being banged inside the futuristic coffin of the MRI—thank God, he wasn’t claustrophobic—he was again loaded on the gurney and wheeled to the elevator. This time they took a long, circuitous route, through bleak corridors that looked as if they hadn’t been used in years. Will was growing sleepy until the gurney jerked to a halt and he looked ahead to see a hallway blocked with yellow tape. It was crime-scene tape.

“Can’t go this way.”

“What? I can’t use the A-Main corridor. The cops blocked that, too. I got a man who needs to get back to his room.”

It was the first time the orderly had shown any more concern for Will than for a cart of someone else’s groceries.