“Next thing?” Rob asked, meaning What else can I do?
“Find some epi in that junk that flew around, or get it out of my bag. I had a good pulse for awhile there, but it’s gone thready again. Then fire this monkey up. With the injuries she’s sustained, it’s a miracle she’s alive at all.”
Rob found an ampoule of epinephrine under a tumbled box of bandages and handed it over. Then he slammed the back doors, dropped into the driver’s seat, and got cranking. First to the scene at an MCI meant first to the hospital. That would improve this lady’s slim chances just a little bit. Still, it was a fifteen-minute run even in light morning traffic, and he expected her to be dead by the time they got to Ralph M. Kiner Memorial Hospital. Given the extent of her injuries, that might be the best outcome.
But she wasn’t.
? ? ?
At three o’clock that afternoon, long after their shift was over but too wired to even think about going home, Rob and Jason sat in the ready-room of Firehouse 3, watching ESPN on mute. They had made eight runs in all, but the woman had been the worst.
“Martine Stover, that was her name,” Jason said at last. “She’s still in surgery. I called while you were in the can.”
“Any idea what her chances are?”
“No, but they didn’t just let her crater, and that means something. Pretty sure she was there looking for an executive secretary’s position. I went in her purse for ID—got a blood type from her driver’s license—and found a whole sheaf of references. Looks like she was good at her job. Last position was at the Bank of America. Got downsized.”
“And if she lives? What do you think? Just the legs?”
Jason stared at the TV, where basketball players were running fleetly up the court, and said nothing for a long while. Then: “If she lives, she’s gonna be a quad.”
“For sure?”
“Ninety-five percent.”
A beer ad came on. Young people dancing up a storm in a bar. Everyone having fun. For Martine Stover, the fun was over. Rob tried to imagine what she would be facing if she pulled through. Life in a motorized wheelchair that she moved by puffing into a tube. Being fed either pureed gluck or through IV tubes. Respirator--assisted breathing. Shitting into a bag. Life in a medical twilight zone.
“Christopher Reeve didn’t do so bad,” Jason said, as if reading his thoughts. “Good attitude. Good role model. Kept his chin up. Even directed a movie, I think.”
“Sure he kept his chin up,” Rob said. “Thanks to a cervical collar that never came off. And he’s dead.”
“She was wearing her best clothes,” Jason said. “Good slacks, expensive sweater, nice coat. Trying to get back on her feet. And some bastard comes along and takes it all.”
“Did they get him yet?”
“Not the last I heard. When they do, I hope they string him up by the nutsack.”
? ? ?
The following night, while delivering a stroke victim to Kiner Memorial, the partners checked on Martine Stover. She was in the ICU, and showing those signs of increasing brain function that signal the imminent recovery of consciousness. When she did come back, someone would have to give her the bad news: she was paralyzed from the chest down.
Rob Martin was just glad it wouldn’t have to be him.
And the man the press was calling the Mercedes Killer still hadn’t been caught.
Z
January 2016
1
A pane of glass breaks in Bill Hodges’s pants pocket. This is followed by a jubilant chorus of boys, shouting “That’s a HOME RUN!”
Hodges winces and jumps in his seat. Dr. Stamos is part of a four-doctor cabal, and the waiting room is full this Monday morning. Everyone turns to look at him. Hodges feels his face grow warm. “Sorry,” he says to the room at large. “Text message.”
“And a very loud one,” remarks an old lady with thinning white hair and beagle dewlaps. She makes Hodges feel like a kid, and he’s pushing seventy. She’s hip to cell phone etiquette, though. “You should lower the volume in public places like this, or mute your phone entirely.”
“Absolutely, absolutely.”
The old lady goes back to her paperback (it’s Fifty Shades of Grey, and not her first trip through it, from the battered look of the thing). Hodges drags his iPhone out of his pocket. The text is from Pete Huntley, his old partner when Hodges was on the cops. Pete is now on the verge of pulling the pin himself, hard to believe but true. End of watch is what they call it, but Hodges himself has found it impossible to give up watching. He now runs a little two-person firm called Finders Keepers. He calls himself an independent skip-tracer, because he got into a little trouble a few years back and can’t qualify for a private investigator’s license. In this city you have to be bonded. But a PI is what he is, at least some of the time.
Call me, Kermit. ASAP. Important.