The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

“You know I studied here when I was a medical student? This was back in the Stone Age, when they had real wards, just long rows of beds separated by curtains. But it was great training. Young docs today, most of them don’t really know how to listen to heart sounds. They don’t get a chance. Hearts get fixed. People don’t get rheumatic fever. Back then, we’d get lots of public health cases, lots of people with heart murmurs. It was great to be a student. The old basement, that’s where the morgue was. It’s so isolated. Why they would put offices down there, much less even put a woman alone in an office there…?” He shook his head. “It was just a horrible, random act.”

That didn’t make her feel better. She said, “So what about the footprints in my flower bed?”

He smiled, half to himself, staring at the floor. At first Cheryl Beth thought he was patronizing her and she grew angry. Then he spoke in a different voice. “The irony of the whole thing is that Christine was quite the sexual predator. She had cheated on Gary for years, and not with just one person. She was hardly the victim, however much I am baffled by your taste in men. I’ll just leave it at that.”

For a moment, Cheryl Beth was conscious of her every swallow and breath. She made herself smile and gently punch Dr. Carpenter in the arm. She said, “Don’t tell me you and Christine…?”

“Not my taste,” he said. “And my conquests are vastly over-imagined by some of my coworkers, not that I’m complaining… Cheryl Beth?”

She realized she had just been standing there silently staring at the wall.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “The way Christine was cut. It was done with such rage. I’ve never seen anything…not in the ER…not anywhere. It could have been…”

He spoke quickly. “I probably said too much.”

“It could have been a spurned lover.”

“Cheryl Beth…”

“It could. My God, it could have been a lover’s angry wife. A woman could be strong enough to do that…”

She stopped instinctively when his name came over the paging system.

“You.” He put his arm around her. She didn’t feel intimidated. It felt good, just to be touched. “You, my intense friend, need to go home and get some rest. But first, come with me to the party, get something in your stomach.”

“Doctor’s orders?”

“Absolutely.” He took her arm and they walked.

Chapter Eleven

Gravity was his enemy. Anything dropped to the floor was lost. A pen, a book, a pill. A towel, a water cup, a dollar bill. He couldn’t pick it up because he couldn’t stand, much less bend down. His only recourse was to ask a nurse to retrieve it, or ask Cindy. But she wouldn’t be coming back. He had lost her just as surely as if she had fallen out of his hands to earth, his useless legs unable to let him follow her. The morning had been slow and difficult, as he had pulled on his T-shirt and sweatpants, then, in greater agony, socks and shoes. Cindy had bought him workout shoes with Velcro snaps, to avoid the near impossibility of holding his legs in place long enough to tie shoes. Then he had angled the wheelchair close to the bed and locked each wheel in place, while he carefully pushed himself into a sitting position and maneuvered to the edge of the mattress.

Like so much, getting up had gone from an unthinking move of a normal human being to an act of significant physical effort. Using one hand to grip the bed railing, he would roll to his side. Then he could rise to his elbow and, again grabbing the bed, swing his body into a sitting position. He used his strong right leg, hooking his right foot into his left ankle to pull the weak leg along. It all took planning and care. He couldn’t feel his bottom, so he had to be sure that he was actually sitting on the bed and not sliding to the floor. Then, relying on upper-body strength, he would lift himself across to the chair. It wasn’t exactly kosher: he was supposed to wait for a nurse, but they were always busy. And no one seemed to notice or care when he just wheeled himself out of the room and down to the nurses’ station.

There he would be given a multivitamin, stool softener, Vicodin for pain control. He was profoundly aware of the med times. He didn’t need a watch. His body had betrayed him with the tumor, but its clockworks for pain were precise and as unforgiving as the enemy gravity. If he missed the pills by even

a few minutes, the pain would break through again. It was a creature living inside him, pinned up in the fragile pharmaceutical cage. The pain frightened him.

After the morning physical therapy and lunch, he was on his own. No one told him how long he might be in the rehab unit. It was the way he imagined jail time. If he hadn’t been free to roam the hospital he was sure he would go mad. But he could come and go as he pleased from the neuro-rehab ward and now, after so many days, had just become part of the landscape. Some people said hello. Most ignored him. So he wheeled himself through the halls, watching people, trying to keep dark thoughts outside. He ended up in the corridor leading to the old entrance to the hospital. It was a quiet place because the outside doors were sealed now, the main entrance moved. But the grand arched ceiling remained, along with a display of historic photographs from the hospital’s history. The entrance to the hospital chapel was nearby, the chapel itself empty. Outside, the light was somber and wintry. A woman walked by, her hair bouncing on her shoulders at every step, reminding him of Cindy when he had first met her. He put the thought in a box, put the box on an imaginary shelf holding thoughts about his wife. He wouldn’t be the first cop with a busted marriage.

He played a game of thinking about all the women he had crushes on or had lusted after while he had been married. One was a pretty young yellow-haired cadet with flawless fair skin. She had followed him around with a doe-eyed interest that was both innocent and knowing, and once, when he had seen her in a skirt, he had realized how attracted he was to her. Karen was his partner before Dodds, a woman going through a divorce, who said Will was her best friend. One night in the car they had started kissing, until he had stopped it. There was the assistant DA with the violet eyes, the writer who was working on a profile of the homicide detectives—in all those cases, he had felt the attraction, known it was mutual, and each time he had pushed it away. Only once did he slip, nothing compared with Cindy’s serial infidelities. He pushed that thought away. He thought of the others. Maybe now he would look up one of those women. And do what? He hadn’t had an erection since the surgery.

He had always known Cindy would leave him for good. He was such a fool. Last night he had cried for her, for what they briefly had, for what he briefly hoped they might have again, when she had flown to his side after the tumor had been diagnosed. One last time he had melted into his ideal of Cindy, rather than the frozen reality. When they had first met, she was a vulnerable young woman who had been left adrift by the father of her child, and Will had vowed that he would never abandon her. That vow, and the time when they had seemed to glow together, those fleeting, joyful moments early on, had kept him going so long. It was like an addiction.

But after the cry, he had returned to the odd mental box he had been in since surgery. One side of the box was his gratitude at being alive. Things had looked so grim when the tumor had first been diagnosed: it might be malignant; there might be more; he might never walk again. Another side was oddly calm, where he was a good, self-sufficient patient, working hard in rehab, foiling the dark expectations of Lauren the shrink. The third side was his periodic bouts of claustrophobia—he had to get out of this hospital, just to sleep for one night—this one he concealed, and then it receded. And the fourth was the doctor’s murder, which brought it all back. That side was unfinished business, and, sure, he was also probably using it to distract himself from his life ahead: disabled, handicapped, crippled, dreading every new pain or change of feeling. Did the box hold anything?

“Pig.”

The voice behind him made him start, but his adrenaline, didn’t go down once the surprise was gone. He wheeled around, forcing himself to be calm. The man who stood before him was taller than Will; in fact, he knew that the man was exactly six feet five and, at one time, had weighed 250 pounds. Now he looked heavier, with a pronounced gut straining at his leather jacket. His face had always seemed ordinary except for the dramatic thick brown eyebrows that nearly met and the slight dimple in his chin that broke the monotony. Now, it looked puffy and his features seemed too small for that face. He had taken to shaving his head, which had long made Will imagine a malevolent Pillsbury doughboy.

“You’re the only police officer I’d call pig,” Bud Chambers said. “Or should I just say rat?”

Will said nothing. He had never felt more vulnerable. He vainly glanced at his lap for any weapon, seeing only the small fanny pack that held a few dollars, Kleenex, and his wallet.

“I’ve seen you look better, Borders,” the man continued, pacing around him in a small arc. “Like when you got my badge.”

“You did that to yourself,” Will said. “You lied on your logs.”