Bad Medicine (21 page)

"And—" Mr. Betelman went on. "He wouldn't. I tried everything, but I just can't make him let go."

Molly had to leave before she burst her diaphragm. What she wanted to ask was whether he'd tried offering it a cigarette.

"How long have you... uh, been... joined?"

His face crumpled a little into distress. "Almost five hours."

"What about... well, killing it?"

Mr. Betelman slammed his coat closed and opened his eyes so wide Molly thought they'd fall out on the floor. "How dare you?" he demanded. "This is my friend!"

Molly couldn't think of anything more productive to do than just spin around and get the hell out of the room.

It was Sasha who found her sitting on the floor with her head in her hands.

"What's the matter with you?" she demanded.

Molly just shook her head. She just laughed and wiped at her eyes. So Sasha stepped over her and shoved the door open. One minute and thirteen seconds later, Sasha stepped back out.

"We should just kill that thing and put it out of its misery," she announced dryly.

"The duck?"

"No. The dweeb wearing it."

* * *

An hour later, the problem of Allen and Albert was still, literally, at hand. The rest of the ER had jump-started with a house fire involving two adults and three children that was taking up a good part of the staff's effort and all the exhaust fans the hospital could provide. The hall hung heavy with the smell of burned tissue and the sound of raspy cries. Molly, positioned outside The Menagerie, as they'd labeled room four, had been left to deal with the now very depressed and uninsured Allan.

"How was I supposed to know the duck couldn't take Valium?" Lance Frost defended himself.

Molly was trying her best to peek through the blinds to see if Allan had figured out yet that his duck wasn't just very relaxed. "What are we going to do?"

On the other side of Lance stood a slick, button-down pharmaceutical salesman with a full bag of goodies. Molly had caught the two of them in conference when she'd pulled Lance in to address the duck issue. She'd conveniently ignored the brand-new otoscope Lance was playing with and the preprinted prescription pads the salesman had been slipping in Lance's pocket in return. She'd already gotten the call on the burns and figured that the least harm Lance could do on the hall that day was to deal with a recalcitrant duck. Go figure he'd kill the damn thing.

"Actually," the drug salesman said in his most velvet tones of persuasion, "this would be the perfect application for the new personality enhancer we're testing right now. Transcend. It's showing great results in obsessive-compulsive disorders."

"I don't know if I'd call this obsessive-compulsive," Lance answered.

"Then what?"

Molly was still watching as Allan, seated in a chair, stroked a very flaccid Albert. "Creatively deranged?"

"I think we should give it to the duck," Lorenzo said in passing, obviously not having been informed that the duck didn't need anything anymore but a nice orange sauce. "Think how depressed
he
must be."

"I think you guys are close-minded," Betty Wheatlon offered from farther down the hall, where she was struggling with an IV line. "It's nobody's business what goes on in a consensual relationship between a man and his waterfowl."

"How do you know it was consensual?" Lorenzo demanded. "That duck hasn't answered a single question."

Nor was he likely to.

"Allan said that he's been severely depressed," Molly offered. "His mother died recently, and he has no other family to speak of. I think there's a high risk of self-abuse here."

"You don't call that self-abuse in there?" Lance demanded.

"Nah," Lorenzo retorted, his arms full of equipment to distribute among the burn rooms. "A duck is bad taste. A lawyer would be self-abuse."

"Transcend is the newest generation of serotonin-uptake inhibitors," the salesman went on, pulling out readily available literature. "It seems to target problem areas even better than Prozac."

"Speaking of lawyers," Lance threw in. "Aren't there five now?"

"Five?" Betty demanded. "No shit? You heard about the Jew, the Hindu, and the lawyer who stopped overnight at the farmhouse, didn't you?"

"Maybe we should call one for the duck."

"A lawyer or a Hindu?" a surgical resident quipped.

"Well, that's the point," Betty insisted. "See, one of them had to sleep in the barn, and so the Jew offers..."

The salesman didn't even draw breath. "Amazing, really. Depressed? It gives you hope. Frightened? Cojones. Unsure? A will of iron. I've seen it work miracles."

"It's still in testing," Molly reminded him, automatically pocketing the brochure as she tried to hear the rest of the lawyer joke. "And we need to get Allan some immediate help. Which we can't since he doesn't have insurance and can't be admitted anyplace but State San, which won't take you unless you get caught on eyewitness news mass-murdering a bus full of nuns."

"But that's another benefit of Transcend," the salesman insisted. "It is the quickest-acting drug available today. ER applications are going to be one of its greatest benefits. It's fast, safe, and easily controlled. I'm telling you, this drug takes us so far beyond Prozac that it will define psychiatry in the twenty-first century."

"Let's just deal with today," Molly suggested, even as she was paged back to triage and one of the other nurses dropped off a request to check on transferring the burn patients.

"Easy," the salesman offered enthusiastically. "Since you're testing it here, we could simply call the clinic and have them do a quick evaluation. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am, and Allan can leave Albert behind."

"...So the doorbell rings, and there standing on the doorstep are the pig and the cow."

Laughter drifted up from that end of the hall. Molly was thinking that she wished she'd heard the rest. Lance, meanwhile, was still watching for signs of life from Albert. "Fuckin' gold mine." He chortled.

Molly looked over at him. "The duck, the Hindu, or the cow?"

"Transcend.
That's
the drug I've been telling you about, Molly. The one I invested in. I'm tellin' you, that Argon stock is gonna make me a millionaire within the first year."

Molly nodded, understanding perfectly. "Good thing it's such a benefit for mankind."

His face perfectly sincere, the drug salesman nodded.

"Albert?" they heard from inside the room. "Albert, are you all right?"

"We're running out of time," Molly offered.

"I'll call the psych clinic," Lance told her. "Bartender, make it a round of Transcend for the house on me."

Which was how Gene ended up arriving back in the ER again, along with half the house staff, psychiatric or otherwise, to witness the latest in ER Follies.

"What are you still doing here at this hour?" Molly asked him.

"It's summer, Molly. I have new residents who still don't know a psychopath from a garden path."

"You also have staff to handle them. Haven't you figured out yet that the whole point of being the Chief of Division is that nobody can find you when there are problems? Call's for the guys practicing to get your job."

His smile was almost as tired as hers. "Not since HMOs and controlled care. Between that and Prozac, it's a whole different world now for us high and mighty."

So they all stood in a clump at one end of the hall, as far away from the smells and sights in the trauma rooms as they could, eyes and attitudes avid. All except Gene, who was nodding in response to Lance's request.

"Not my study," he said, taking a quick peek in himself to judge the increasingly distraught Allan, "but I think it's a good call, Frost. The figures are excellent. They're in final stages of trials now. There's a good chance it could help."

"Not as good a chance as a few days in a controlled environment would make it," Molly groused.

Gene just shook his head. "Don't bet on it. Even if he did have insurance, the managed health would only allow him three meals and a couple electroshock treatments before kicking him out again."

Molly caught the tension in his voice she hadn't heard before. When she looked over, Gene noticed and offered her a wry grin. "Psychiatry just isn't as much fun as it used to be."

"Somebody should go in and tell Allan that Albert's a dead duck," one of the residents said.

"Good idea," Gene agreed. "Go right in."

That wasn't what the young Kildare had in mind, but one look at the boss changed his mind. Exchanging his smirk for an air of concern, he pushed the door open and made his introductions. The last thing Molly heard as the door swished shut was Allan's quiet voice.

"He was my friend..."

"Molly!" the secretary yelled. "Two-sixty-five just went out on an accident with multiples!"

Just a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

* * *

Gene was still standing by the room, unlit pipe in his mouth as he watched through the window, when Molly stopped by on her way back from seeing to the second of the five burn transfers. Most of the rest of the residents had long since returned to Wonderland East. The ER had received its multiple victims in from the auto accident: six kids and three adults from one car, and a belligerent cab driver and his even more belligerent fare, who now wasn't going to make his flight home. All were complaining of the smell and the wait to be seen for their necks, backs, and hyperventilations. All were making more noise than the burn victims.

Given the choice between that, the gathering throng at triage, and a duck, Molly chose the duck. So she stopped by to check on Allan.

Watching her for a minute, Gene pulled out the pipe. "What's wrong?"

They were the only two left at that end of the hall. Molly saw the triage secretary searching for her, but she didn't look desperate. Molly ignored her. She thought of that quiet, sad little man sitting in there cradling the only unconditional love he'd ever known.

"He's a lonely little man," she said, her attention on his bowed head and the aggressively empathetic posture of the resident, who was still interviewing him.

"That's one of the reasons you shouldn't keep working here," Gene said softly. "You never get to see the progress. I promise you, given a couple of weeks and a clinic visit or two, he'll be a changed man."

"Either that or he'll work his way up to ponies."

"Nah," he said. "Ponies have teeth."

Just then, the third burn transfer patient was wheeled by, a tiny girl, unconscious and intubated, with oxygen being forced into her ruined lungs with an ambubag and the raw red of her burned chest and arms covered in sterile sheets. Three years old, and already human wreckage because her mother had fallen asleep smoking after a long double shift trying to scrape together a living for her family. The mother who was now completely sedated so she wouldn't have to deal just yet with what had become of her babies in those few minutes.

"No," Molly said without looking away. "It's exactly why I work here. I don't have to know that most of the Allans don't get better. I much prefer just to leave 'em at that door and go home alone."

"You think maybe you might need some of this magic stuff, too?" Gene asked quietly.

"Nah," she said. "It's just summer. This year I've had to investigate a lot of suicides, and you know how I love that."

"And?"

"And one victim's brother is insisting that something is fishy. He's after me like a dog on rabbits." Not really, but close enough. "So I think I have to look back into all those goddamn suicides just to shut him up."

"And there's nobody else to do it?"

"Have you seen our homicide stats this year?"

"Point taken."

"Besides, I also just found out that the O.K. Corral incident the other day wasn't random. Guy had my name in his pocket. The FBI wants to know why."

Gene stared at her as if her hair was on fire. "What do you mean he had your name?"

"I mean either somebody was really pissed at the way I triage, or I seem to possess some knowledge that makes somebody out there nervous. The Feds think it's Pearl's suicide note."

The door to Allan's room opened and the resident appeared with the duck in his arms. Gene didn't seem to notice.

"What should I do with this?" the frustrated resident demanded.

"Pearl's note?" Gene asked Molly. "What do you mean?"

"The gambling situation. There seems to be a heavy-breather who might not like his name mentioned in public. I did that."

"And now?"

"Sir," the resident tried again.

Molly shrugged. "Now, they try and find some other way to nail this guy before he nails me. I guess."

That got the resident's attention. "You don't seem to be very upset," he said.

Molly just loved the way psychiatry guys felt it their inborn right to horn in on somebody else's conversation. "Gimme a couple of days. I have other things on my mind." She turned back to Gene. "We also got in our fifth lawyer. Ain't that something?"