The Pain Nurse (Will Borders: Cincinnati Casebook 1)

“But you don’t seem like one of those Cincinnatians whose families have been here for one hundred and fifty years and nobody else can really be accepted.”

“No,” he laughed. “They revoked my membership to the Queen City Club, and great-great-granddad didn’t come from Germany.” It was almost that simple among the establishment: the old English stock that settled after the American Revolution and the Germans that came in huge numbers in the nineteenth century. And the blacks. Will was working class. His father had been a cop. His mother had been a striver of sorts, or at least a dreamer for him, and she wanted him to go to college and not follow in the family business.

They drove and talked. She learned that he had gone to college, a rarity among Cincinnati cops of his generation and one that didn’t exactly endear him to the old guard. He talked about that stereotype: the fat blond boys who grew up in Price Hill and went to Elder High School. There was always some truth to stereotypes. And what about her? She recited the thumbnail bio she reserved for first dates—thinking about it that way seemed strange. She had grown up in little Corbin, in the hills of southern Kentucky, where her father had worked for the L&N Railroad. She had been a fish out of water, couldn’t wait to get out. Even so, she had married her high school sweetheart and he came with her when she took the scholarship to nursing school. But he had never liked Cincinnati, never felt accepted. They had divorced and he went back to Corbin.

“Any kids?”

“No.” She was conscious of how her voice changed. “What about you?”

“A grown son.”

“Really? Does he live here?”

“No.”

The way he said the word told her she had scratched something raw. Family was usually a safe topic for conversation. But not always—she of all people should know that.

Will stayed quiet for several blocks. When he spoke, he was looking away. “He’s not really part of my life now. He was a baby when I met Cindy, and I adopted him. We decided…well, she decided that she didn’t want more children. But he had a rough time as a teenager. Drugs. The wrong crowd. And I was the bad guy, just from the job I do every day. Anyway, he was in Portland, the last I heard. I just wish he would call his mother once in a while.”

“I’m sorry.”

They turned from Clifton Avenue onto Ludlow, past the Esquire Theater, the restaurants and bars and chili parlors. Then Cheryl Beth turned north into the neighborhood, with its old trees and substantial houses, where the tenured professors and old families lived decade after decade. The rolling ground was golden and copper with the fallen leaves.

“Where is your wife?”

“She left me. I don’t blame her.” He said it so simply she almost asked him to repeat it.

“Well, I sure as hell do. That’s horrible!” She blurted it out and was instantly sorry. This was none of her business. She was already getting closer to this patient than she should. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “God, this is a beautiful city. You almost forget it, just being in it every day.”

“Especially doing the job you do.”

“You learn to cope, or you go nuts and hurt yourself or other people,” Will said.

Cheryl Beth thought that sounded a lot like nursing.

She had intended to stop at his apartment to get a coat. Will had other ideas and was very insistent about them. Knowing the way most of Cincinnati was built—old buildings erected long before there was an Americans with Disabilities Act—she thought it would be impossible. But Will had a loft downtown, on Fourth Avenue, and it had an elevator. They repeated the routine with the transfer board, traveled down the cold sidewalk and into the warm lobby of his building. It had been built in 1889 and rehabbed in the 1990s. They rode the elevator to the fourth floor and stepped into an airy, light-filled room. The wheelchair fit through the door with no problem. Will silently looked over his home.

It had potential, especially thanks to the tall, wide windows, but the loft wasn’t much more than a large room filled with some boxes. The main room had two chairs and a desk. The upper level had a bed. The white walls were blank. Cheryl Beth smiled at the bachelor image. He probably had six-month-old takeout in the refrigerator. She didn’t know how long Will had been separated from his wife, but this was obviously just a place to sleep and change clothes.

The problem was that the closet and bed were located on a platform two steps above the rest of the loft. He wanted to change clothes, put on a suit—“it’ll help us get what we want.” So he stayed down on the main level and called out to her what he needed: the charcoal suit, white dress shirt, blue striped tie, black leather dress belt, and black wingtips. “The collar stays are in the shot glass on the closet shelf,” he said. Will had nice clothes and his shoes were highly polished. She brought them down, along with a shoehorn. He might need that.

“I’ll sit up here on the bed,” she said.

“I’m sure you’ve seen half-naked men before.”

Even out of sight, she could tell it was an ordeal. He made breath sounds like a weightlifter and slightly moaned a couple of times. She tried to make conversation, but realized it would be better if she just talked. So she told him about her career, about pain management. He would respond as he could. She never saw patients after they left the hospital. Ones like Will would have lengthy recoveries and burdens to carry long after they were discharged. She knew this, of course. And working in the hospice was different—those patients had only one destination. Will still had a life ahead, but it would be totally different from what he had left behind when he walked in the doors of Memorial. Being here made it especially tactile. She looked around at the remnants of his old life and tears started to fill her eyes. She shook her head and they went away. Dressing took thirty minutes, but when she walked back down he looked quite sharp. He looked dashing.

“You clean up good,” she said. He gathered up a pile of file folders and slipped them into a battered briefcase, then asked her to drape a dark topcoat over his shoulders.

He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a bulky black object. Cheryl Beth was suddenly afraid.

“Will, I don’t think…”

“Somebody’s trying to kill you,” he said quietly. He unholstered the pistol, hit a button, and a long object dropped from the handle of the gun into his hand. Was that the clip? Her father had only taught her to shoot a .22 rifle; she didn’t know more about guns than that. Satisfied that it was loaded, Will slid the magazine back into the grip of the gun with a sharp metal snap. It was a sound that gave her a shiver of dread, but she said nothing. Then he slipped the gun and holster over his belt. He covered it with his suit coat flap and raised himself higher in the wheelchair. He read the concern in her eyes.

“Do you trust me?”