New York Dead (Stone Barrington 1)

“Is that the same ambulance?” Dino asked.

“It’s the same service.” Stone stuck a flashing light on the dashboard. “Stand on it, Fittipaldi.”

Fangio stood on it.

The emergency room at Bellevue was usually a zoo, but this was incredible. People were lying on carts everywhere, overflowing into the hallways, screaming, crying, while harried medical personnel moved among them, expediting the more serious cases.

“What the hell happened?” Dino asked a sweating nurse.

“Subway fire in the Twenty-third Street Station,” she replied, “not to mention half a dozen firemen and a couple of ambulance drivers. We caught it all.”

“There’s nobody at the desk,” Stone said. “How can we find out if somebody’s been admitted?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, wheeling a cart containing a screaming woman down the hallway. “Paperwork’s out the window.”

“Come on,” Stone said, “let’s start looking.”

Fifteen minutes later, they hadn’t found her. Dino was looking unwell.

“I gotta get outta here, Stone,” he said, mopping his brow. “I’m not cut out for this blood-and-guts stuff.”

“Wait a minute,” Stone said, pointing across the room at a man on a stretcher. “A white coat.”

They made their way across the room to the stretcher. The man’s eyes were closed, but he was conscious; he was holding a bloody handful of gauze to an ear.

“Are you an ambulance driver?” Stone asked. “The one the fire truck hit?”

The man nodded, then grimaced at the pain the motion brought.

“What happened to your patient?” Stone asked.

“I don’t know,” the man whimpered. “My partner’s dead; I don’t know what happened to her.”

Stone straightened up. “Then she’s got to be here,” he said.

“But she’s not,” Dino replied. “We’ve looked at every human being, alive or dead, in this place. She is definitely not here.”

They looked again, anyway, even though Dino wasn’t very happy about it. Dino was right. Sasha Nijinsky wasn’t there.

“Downstairs,” Stone said.

“Do we have to?”

“You sit this one out.”

Stone walked down to the basement and checked with the Bellevue morgue. There had been two admissions that evening, both of them from the subway fire, both men. Stone looked at them to be sure.

He trudged back up the stairs and went to the main admissions desk. “Have you admitted an emergency patient, a woman, named Nijinsky?” he asked. “Probably a private room.”

“We don’t have a private room available tonight,” the nurse said. “In fact, we don’t have a bed. If she came into the emergency room, she’s on a gurney in a hallway somewhere.”

Stone walked the halls on the way back to the ER, where he found Dino in conversation with a pretty nurse. “Say good night, Dino,” Stone said.

“Good night, Dino,” Dino replied, doing a perfect Dick Martin.

The nurse laughed.

“She’s not here,” Stone said.