The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

“My wife told me she’s leaving me.”

“Oh, my god! Oh, Will, I’m so sorry.” She took his hands. He kept his head down.

“I’m not surprised. I can’t really say I blame her.”

“Don’t say that!” Amy started sobbing. “That’s not true. I’m sure you’re a wonderful man. You’ve got…you’re going to come back. How could anybody do that to another human being…”

“She deserves someone who’s not crippled.”

“Don’t say that! She’s a fool…”

He held her hands and let her cry. Back in the old days, this is when Dodds would have given him the look known only to the two of them; it said, you manipulative bastard.

“She’s a fool,” she repeated. “You seem like a nice man.”

“Why don’t you pull over a chair.” She did.

She sat next to him and he put an arm around her slender shoulders as she sobbed. “This is so unprofessional,” she softly wailed but didn’t stop crying. Nobody else was around.

“The first bad call I ever went on when I got out of the academy was a multiple shooting. It was really bad, but we didn’t know what it was. Just an unknown trouble call. I’d been on the job for maybe two months. I knocked on the door and a woman throws the door open. She’s got a little girl in her arms and her expression is…I’d never seen anything like it. She knew she was dying but she’s staring intensely at me. And then she falls forward into my arms and it’s me and her and the little girl in between us. I eased them both down and when I take the girl, I see the woman’s been shot. It’s like she has on a red blouse it’s so bad. The little girl is alive, not a scratch, but she’s completely silent. You’d better believe I cried after all that.” It was true. His training officer had berated him for months as “Weepy Borders.”

This only made Amy’s shoulders heave more until she said, in a very clear voice, “Why are people so cruel to each other?”

“I don’t know.” That they were was the policeman’s paycheck.

“I bet you’ve seen some pretty bad things,” she said.

Will said he had.

“Did you ever play around on your wife?”

“No,” he lied. The dynamic was going his way and he didn’t dare any diversions that might keep him from the chance to find out why she had been talking to the doctor about police and Cheryl Beth. He gently moved his arm from her shoulders, resting his hand on her arm.

“I didn’t think so. You’re a good man. I always fall for the bad boys.” She gave a teary sniffle-laugh.

“Well, he’s a fool if he doesn’t appreciate you. You’ve got way too much going for you to put up with that.”

“He’s married.”

“I figured that,” Will said. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. Stuff happens.”

“He said he’d leave his wife. God, I sound like such a dummy.”

Will didn’t say anything. He could hear a siren in the far distance, through the very quiet hum contained in the hospital walls.

“He was having an affair with someone else, too. He didn’t leave his wife for her, but I thought it would be different with me. He probably told her the same lines. He’s a doctor, of course. They think they’re gods. Such a sense of entitlement.”

“You deserve better,” Will said.

“Oh, god, I don’t know what I deserve. This has gone so bad.”

“So kick him to the curb. If I wasn’t crippled, I’d be chasing you around the room.”

She laughed and put her hand on top of his. “It’s really bad. I’m really afraid.”

After she fell silent for several minutes, he coaxed her. Why was she afraid?

“You’re a cop, right? Police officer, I mean.”