The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

She edged him toward the door, afraid of all the raging things she might say. “I don’t need an alibi. And you need to call the police, talk to them. I can’t even believe you were alone tonight, spying. What about Amy, that child physical therapist you were fucking.”

“Oh, I love to hear you talk dirty, Cheryl Beth. Gets me so horny.” He smirked. “But your mother would disapprove of that language.”

She knew he was pushing buttons. He was so good at that. But the words still lashed her. Why had she ever let him into her life, especially into the deeper parts that could wound?

“Please go.”

“Maybe I was with Amy tonight. You don’t know. And she’s hardly a child. She’s twenty-two.” He looked around the familiar room.

“I need you to go now.”

“I ho

pe you close those curtains after I leave. Those big windows. You should really be more careful.”

“Gary, you’re really…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She just held out her hands defensively and he slipped out the door. When she had locked it, she spoke to the door. “Gary, you’re really creeping me out tonight.”

Chapter Four

“You’re a hard man to find.”

Will Borders sat in the wheelchair, against the wall in a hallway behind a cart with red drawers, an EKG machine and menacing-looking defibrillator paddles, and there was Scaly Mueller walking toward him. Captain Steve Mueller was the commander of the Internal Investigations unit.

“But good men are hard to find.”

He talked that way, lapsing into motivational clichés. It was just another Scaly Mueller joke. All the cops made fun of him behind his back. Will said hello, but the unspoken answer to Mueller’s question was that Will’s only peace was anywhere but inside his room. After a week in the neuro-rehab unit, he had barely slept. Moving meant pain. Even raising his arm to dial his cell phone meant excruciating torture. Immobility meant pain to come. Once he was down for the night, he was strapped into what looked like vibrating socks—prevent blood clots, they said. They also killed his ability to sleep. But the biggest problem was three feet away from his bed.

His roommate was a quadriplegic from a car crash. He was trussed up in a contraption of wires and tubes. Every few minutes a nurse or technician would come in with a different, invariably noisy treatment. The commotion and stench made rest impossible. Hospitals were noisy places. When the poor man was conscious, he only wanted to watch back-to-back episodes of Judge Judy, with the volume on high. The room itself offered no view. The neuro-rehab unit was located in a first-floor addition that shot off the main part of the hospital. But Will’s window looked back into the old blond-brick building, across a small stretch of hibernating grass. The heliport was located on top of the neuro-rehab wing, and late at night medevac choppers would land, causing the windows to shake as if an earthquake were happening. The night-shift nurses joked darkly with him about the likelihood that one day a helicopter would crash on them. “The first thing you’ll see is the aviation fuel running down the walls, before it ignites and we’re all toast,” one said merrily.

At least he was off the morphine. It had masked the pain but it had brought dreams. Morphine took him to an old amusement park in Newport, Kentucky, right across the river from downtown. He had no memory of such a place ever existing—but it must have, the drug told him so. It was fenced off and deserted, but Will had walked through the gate. It was twilight, the sky on the verge of rain. He was alone, surrounded by rusting kiddie rides. All around was a quadrangle of old wooden buildings, their reddish paint flaking off. He walked inside one and saw straw on the ground, as if it had once been a stable. The morphine told him that children had been killed here, many children, murdered horribly. His dreaming self fought to find a way out, a way to wake up. The souls of the innocent dead followed him until he had crashed back into his broken body, staring at the harsh light over his bed. After that, he was happier to have the pain than the morphine dreams.

As he slowly got better, Will would dress in the bed and call a nurse first thing in the morning to transfer him from the bed into a wheelchair. The wheelchair was comfortable and moved easily. It had the brand name Quickie, which seemed like a sick joke. He might never be able to have a quickie again.

He stayed out as long as they would let him. With difficulty, he began to slide himself from the bed to the wheelchair, wheelchair to toilet and back. He needed a nurse there to help, of course. His right leg seemed unable to bear any weight, although he could move it easily. Will had quickly realized that he was one of the better-off patients. When the nurses weren’t taking care of what everyone called “the quads,” they were writing endless paperwork, as bad as cops, worse even. He called the nurses less often, did things for himself.

“You look good.”

Will knew it was a lie. Mueller started to clap him on the shoulder, then seemed to think better of it. His hand hung between them awkwardly. They awkwardly shook hands. Steve Mueller was around forty, wearing chinos, tie, and wool sport coat. He had a close-cropped halo of blond hair ringing his baldness and the look of a faded high school football player. He had a bristly peach-colored mustache. Growing up on the west side, he had played football for Elder, and had never been farther than Chicago. In other words, he had the resumé of nearly everyone who rose to command in the Cincinnati Police Department. It was one more reason Will would never move ahead. He was Scots-Irish Protestant in a German Catholic town.

“Can I wheel you somewhere, so we can talk? Where’s that pretty wife of yours?”

“She’s working. I can wheel myself.” And Will could, until he started hurting too badly. “There’s a Starbucks down by the lobby.”

“How are you two doing? You and Cindy.”

“We’re okay. We’re good.”

“That’s good.” Mueller sounded skeptical. Then: “Love conquers all, huh?”

After a few minutes, they had navigated the crowded hallways, out of neuro-rehab, down the corridor behind the emergency room and into the bright, glassy expanse of the main concourse.

“So Dodds is working this homicide?” Will asked after they had coffees. He clutched his cup in both hands.

“How you doing?” Mueller countered.

This innocuous question had assumed the complexity of quantum physics. Before the tumor, Will could give the expected answer without a thought. Nobody really wanted more. Doin’ fine. Now everything about his life was contained in the unstated. No matter how hard he worked, he could barely move his left leg, his most violent command from the brain translating into a murmur in his toes, like a broken clock pendulum. Vast tracts of his belly, buttocks, and right leg were dead to the touch, as if a deranged dentist armed with Novocain had repeatedly attacked him. He was put in the shower so rarely, and getting in was so painful, that he could smell himself like some street person he used to roust. He was constipated. He hurt for hours. Every movement was difficult. Nobody wanted to hear all that.

He said, “I’m okay. The docs seem pleased. The tumor was not malignant. They think they got it all. I need to get into rehab.” He knew he was lucky or blessed to be alive, that he could have been killed or put into a wheelchair permanently. Yet he felt exhausted. He was working hard to keep it from showing.