Angel of Mercy (2 page)

“Fuck you too,” Frankie uttered in a hoarse voice.

Martin laughed and called to the driver.

“There’s still some life in him.”

“What the hell happened? Did the son of a bitch shoot me?” Frankie asked.

“Not unless you want to call yourself the son of a bitch,” Jack said.

He completed another check of Frankie’s blood pressure, listened to his heart and. shook his head. “What?”

“Your ticker’s really kicking up, Frankie. Just relax.”

“Ticker?”

“When you have a physical last?”

“I dunno.. ú a year, maybe…”

“Maybe two?”

“Jennie,” he said thinking about his wife. She had been after him lately to get a checkup.

“She’s meeting us at the hospital, but you better worry more about Nolan,” Jack kidded.

“Shit. Where’s Rosina?”

“Right behind us.”

“And the perp?”

“Mexico by now.”

“Fuck.”

“Relax, Frankie. You’ve got other things to worry about at the moment,”

Jack said prophetically. Frankie closed his eyes. At least the pain had eased, but he imagined that was because Jack had given him some sort of shot. The wall of the ambulance continued, and the realization that he was its passenger drove him into a deep depression.

“I’m only fifty-eight,” he muttered, “only fifty-eight.”

Jennie was there the moment the doors were opened. He was groggy so her face looked cloudy, but nothing made him feel more secure than those light green eyes as she leaned over the gurney. The tears were flowing down on her cheeks. His arm felt like it had turned to lead, but he lifted it to touch her light brown hair. At fifty-two she had scarcely a gray strand.

Beth, their twenty-six-yearold daughter, attractive in her own right, still felt intimidated beside her mother, one of those women who grew into a deeper, more elegantly beautiful woman with every passing day.

“Am I in heaven?” He closed his eyes and smiled.

“Frankie…”

“I’ll be all right,” he promised. She squeezed his hand as they wheeled him through the emergency room doors. He hadn’t been in a hospital as a patient since he was a teenager and he had fallen off his bike and broken his arm, and despite his big, strong macho image, the realization put some panic in him. “Jennie,” he called.

“Right here, babe. Right beside you.”

He couldn’t keep his eyes open and the voices around him drifted in and out. He was sure he heard Nolan’s. He heard Jennie’s and he heard Rosina’s. The doctors and nurses were all around him, hooking him up to all sorts of machinery. The beeps were everywhere and everywhere he turned it seemed there were white uniforms. Whatever they did, they did quickly, or at least that was the way it seemed to him, for after what he thought were only minutes but were really closer to hours, the doctor was peering down at him with Jennie at his side.

“Was it a heart attack?” Frankie demanded. He was breathing easier and, remarkably, only felt fatigue in his legs now.

“I want to do more testing and observe you, of course,” the doctor replied, “but my preliminary diagnosis is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.”

Frankie pulled at his earlobe like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

“My medical jargon is a bit rusty, Doc.”

Jennie smiled.

The doctor, Pauling, a cardiologist at the Desert Hospital, pulled himself into a more formal stance and began as if he were lecturing to a classroom of med students.

“Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy denotes a condition in which there is a thickening of the heart muscle. This makes it more difficult for the heart to pump blood away from itself to the rest of the body. This can cause the blood to back up, creating such symptoms as shortness of breath. Have you been experiencing that, Mr. Samuels?”

Frankie shifted his eyes to Jennie, who was now smirking with irritation.

“Yes, he has,” she answered for him. “But he’s always telling me it’s nothing.”

“Well… I just thought it was because I needed to lose some weight.”

“That will certainly help.”

“How bad is this hyper… whatever?”

“Well, it won’t stop you from performing your ordinary day-to-day activities. The condition becomes dangerous, however, when you engage in strenuous physical activity. As you’ve discovered,” he added dryly.

“So I got a fat heart, huh?”

“Well, not fat as such. It’s more analogous to the stretching of a thick rubber band compared to the stretching of a thin one. Your heart has a difficult time relaxing.”

“My heart? Hell, my heart’s always relaxed, isn’t it, Jen?”

“This isn’t funny, Frankie.”

“I’m really not laughing. Okay, Doc, what do we do next?”

“After a few more tests, I anticipate recommending a permanent pacemaker,” Dr. Pauling said.

“Pacemaker? Jesus.” It was as if all of his years had hit him at once.

“The procedure requires only a local anesthetic. We will implant the device under your collarbone with a wire leading to the bottom of your heart. The pacemaker will reverse the contraction wave of your heart and as a result, ease the obstruction caused by the backup of blood.”

Frankie just stared, wishing he were dreaming. Dr. Pauling turned to Jennie as if he saw that Frankie had fallen into a daze and was no longer listening.

“Usually, pacemakers are used to regulate the speed of the heart, but in this case it would simply alter the contraction pattern of the heart muscle.”

Jennie nodded and Dr. Pauling turned back to Frankie.

“After I run you through a few more tests, you can go home for a while.

We’ll schedule the procedure in a week or so. In the meantime you will have to avoid any really strenuous physical activities.”

“He will,” Jennie promised. She glared at him.

Frankie let his head drop to the pillow.

“I’ll look in on him shortly,” Dr. Pauling said as he left.

“Nolan’s going to pressure me to retire now,” Frankie moaned. “How can I be a cop with a pacemaker?”

“He doesn’t have to pressure you, Frankie. You’ll do it on your own,”

Jennie predicted. He widened his eyes and gazed up at her.

“Oh really?”

“Frankie, most people don’t get second chances, especially at…”

“At my age? Go on, say it.” He turned away. He hated feeling sorry for himself, but at the moment it seemed impossible to do otherwise. “Did you call the counselor?”

“What do you think?” Jennie replied. He turned back to her.

“Maybe he was in court.”

“No, he was in the office. He should be arriving any minute.”

Frankie pretended to be upset, but he was actually looking forward to seeing his son, Stevie. At twenty eight, he was the youngest junior partner at Klein, Clapper, and Brogen, a prestigious corporate law firm in Los Angeles. Stevie’s wife, Laurel, was a beautiful five-foot-ten-inch California blonde with a dark complexion and Wedgwood-blue eyes. She could have easily been in the movies, but instead was a production assistant for one of Hollywood’s biggest producers.

“He said he’s bringing Beth,” Jennie added after a moment. Frankie turned his head and raised his eyebrows. He and his daughter seemed always at odds with each other these days. If she wasn’t off marching and protesting with her chapter of NOW, she was carrying picket signs on Wilshire Boulevard in front of the federal buildings protesting the violation of animal rights or U.S. involvement in South America.

Whatever cause it was, Frankie believed it was simply compensation for the early failures in her life, which included a fourteen-month aborted marriage and dropping out of college to work with a holistic doctor in Santa Monica.

Frankie felt himself sink deeper into the bed as if it were made of sponge. He sighed and shook his head.

“So what am I going to do, Jen, retire and take up golf?”

“You’ll do what you have to do, Frankie. And you won’t give me a hard time about it,” she added firmly.

“I never complained much all these years when you were on stakeouts that kept you away for days on end.

I barely uttered a sound when you were shot at and when that teenager tried to carve you with a hatchet, or when that man on crack cocaine deliberately crashed his pickup truck into your car. I swallowed my fears, told myself this is what I took on when I married a policeman, and accepted. Now it’s time for you to accept, Frankie.”

“I don’t know who’s worse, you or that horse’s ass we have for a chief of detectives. Since he was appointed, the whole atmosphere’s changed at the department. He’s got everyone growling at everyone.”

“So maybe it’s a good thing you get out now,” Jennie said. She sighed, relaxing her shoulders. “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee.

Rosina’s still outside waiting to see you.”

“Send her in,” Frankie said.

Jennie leaned over to kiss him softly on the lips. For a moment she lingered, her hands gripping his shoulders.

“I thought I was going to lose you this time for sure,” she whispered tearfully.

“You’re not losing me, Jen. You might be sorry, but you’re not.”

She wiped her tears away and smiled. It rained sunshine down on him.

How had he been lucky enough to have this beautiful, gentle woman fall in love with the likes of him? He never stopped being in awe of it.

A moment after Jennie left, Rosina Flores stepped into his room. She was a striking woman with olivebrown skin and hazel eyes. She kept her ebony hair cut just beneath her ears. Hardened by the difficulties she had endured struggling against prejudice and poverty, the twenty-five-yearold Mexican-born woman had excelled in public school and graduated as her class valedictorian. Like a star running back in football eluding tackles, she had held off the suitors who would confine her to a home and children, and went on to study law enforcement. Her initial goal had been to become a California highway patrolwoman, but her superior mental abilities found more challenge first in forensics and then in detective work. “Coma est, stupido ?”

“Terrific.”

“I told you to get back into the car and we’d cut him off at the pass.

But no, not Palm Springs’s Charlie gronson.”

“Not you, too, Flores. Per favor. What happened to the perp?,”

“Cathedral City police picked him up walking along Highway One-eleven.”

“G re at.”

“Nolan wants a full report by oh eight hundred.”

“He just loves that military shit, doesn’t he? Oh eight hundred. Did you salute?”

“He’s on your case, Frankie.”

“I expect so.”

“He spoke to your doctor at length out in the corridor. How bad is it?”

Frankie described hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, using the rubber-band analogy.

“And just when you were supposed to teach me how to be a real detective, street smart.” She smiled. “I’m just glad you’ll be okay.”

“Thanks.”

“I’d better get to that report,” she said as she started to leave.

“Hey, Flores.”

“Yea?”

“I still think you ought to marry that accountant and raise a flock of chicks.”

She laughed and left the room. Frankie turned toward the wall. Alone for the moment, he permitted a small tear to emerge out of the corner of his eye, his way of saying goodbye to the young, determined, and dedicated policeman who had once inhabited his body.

All the time he’d been in law enforcement, he’d worried about taking a bullet from the gun of some street punk, but now the bullet had come from within himself instead.

Where does our youth go when it evaporates, he wondered as he lay back, waiting for his doctor’s return.

The heart monitor beeped weakly and then suddenly went into a flat line.

Faye Sullivan ran to the door of the hospital room and screamed:

“Stat.”

The unlucky intern on the floor, Dr. Brad Hoffman, looked up from the chart he was casually perusing and mouthed, “Oh, no.” It was, after all, his first emergency, his first time all alone. He dropped the chart and turned from the elderly man who had been staring at him with liquid, dark eyes and hurried down the floor to the private room in which Sylvia Livingston had been recuperating. Faye was performing CPR, but stepped back respectfully as soon as Hoffman appeared.

The young intern looked at the monitor and at the patient and screamed for the defibrillator. Before he could request it, Faye Sullivan handed him a hypodermic of adrenaline. She smiled at him warmly and he gazed at her for a moment. Later, he would recall that smile. It was almost as if they were in the cafeteria and she had just handed him a cup for his coffee. There was also something very sexual about the way she focused on him and pursed her lips. It had made him hesitate a moment to gather his thoughts. Then he pulled back the sheet and injected the medicine directly into Sylvia Livingston’s heart muscle.

The defibrillator was quickly wheeled in. He stared up at the heart monitor, hoping for a miracle before he began, but there was none visible. The line was deadly flat. He turned the defibrillator up to two hundred and placed one pad over Sylvia Livingston’s right breast and one just under her left.

“Clear,” he cried. The jolt lifted the fifty-five-yearold woman off the bed, but the line on the monitor remained flat. He glanced frantically at Faye. Again she wore a soft expression, her eyes gentle, but this time her smile calmed him. He knew she was an experienced nurse, and he thought she was attractive, even beautiful in an angelic way. At that moment she looked just like a competent special-duty nurse should look, he thought: no panic in her face, no flood of emotion in one direction or another, just a quiet efficiency. It filled him with renewed purpose and he attempted to revive his patient again, turning the defibrillator up to four hundred. Once again, nothing changed. He tried again, and again it was in vain.

When he looked at Faye this time, she shook her head softly. Just to go through the motions and convince himself and her he was doing all that he had to, he made one final attempt. The flat line didn’t change a split second. Hoffman stepped back. “We lost her,” he announced.

“She looks peaceful,” Faye said, gazing down at the dead woman. No matter how many times she confronted it, Death was still fascinating.