Mercy 6 (20 page)

She tapped the hatch, one-two, one-two. Metal snapped and sprang; sunlight and wind fell over her, the scent of brush, warm. Ben-Curtis appeared in silhouette across the circle, then dropped beside her, pressed to her within the tube. She had two impressions: hovering above her, his body appeared small against the light, sheared, slivered, able to soar; cleaved to her in the narrow vent, chin over her shoulder, he was forced to hug her. His body felt wiry, jittery. She couldn't help but take his pulse, which was slow despite the effort and pace of things, indicating athleticism and confidence. But there was something insubstantial about him, or unwrought, his body too inside itself. She couldn't really hug back.

To speak, he tried to draw his face away, but this made things even more intimate, nose to cheek. He relaxed over her shoulder.

He wore a ball cap and smelled of whiskey and cocaine.

“In two minutes,” he whispered, “it should be clear.”

“You're high.”

“You're not my doctor.”

“But I'm relying on you.”

“Have I ever let you down?” He drew back, looked at her face, their breath mixing. He returned to the over-the-shoulder position.

“What can I say? I function like this.”

“You have enough on you?”

“I think I'm in love.”

“I don't care about your health. I care about you blending in.”

“It's what I do.”

“Okay,” she said. “So?”

He removed his cap and put it on her, pulled it low over her eyes.

“When I say, go.” He wrapped his arm around her neck to look at his watch.

She tapped the bill of the ball cap. “Is this supposed to make me look like
you
?”

“We're dealing with blips and impressions. Too much and you're noticed. That hat and its colors, the wrong team for this city, has been registered.”

She started to say more.

“A few more seconds,” he whispered into the side of her neck.

He crouched and fashioned a stirrup with his hands, lacing his fingers together. The side of his face was pressed to her stomach, his breath beneath her waistband.

“Good luck, Anna.”

She fitted her shoe into his hand stirrup, and he flung her into the warm light. She did one shoulder roll into a crouch and peered into the vent. He was looking up, but she could tell he could only see her outline. His eyes were blue and glassy, coked-up with empty sympathy. She flipped shut the lid.

It was easy for her to run.

One of her most common and gruesome cases, right up there with motorcycles and the DTs, was fishhook removal. Impaled in simple flesh, nothing deeper than epidural, the approach was to continue the puncture, to curl the hook along its natural curve until the barb came clear, then snip off the barb and point and reverse the curl, minimizing damage. But when more was involved—tendons, eye sockets, ear cartilage, scrotal sacs, lips, cheeks—the approach became counterintuitive. She would go in to get out. “Like a funhouse maze,” her mentor had said. “In, then back; in, then back.”

Some fishhooks were as big as silverware. But the tiny ones that came in clusters were the most stressful extractions, required intricacy, patience, willingness to hurt. She sometimes just wanted to yank these out.

She felt the same way as she began her run, her far aim to the canyon bottom, her near aim Mercy General. Five strides up the slope, through scrub, she was on the running trail. Two white vans were visible, one at each end of the building. Against all desire, she circled nearer the hospital, pacing a hard five, eyes on the track, with outward glances from beneath her lowered bill. Her ponytail struck an even rhythm on her nape.

Something atop the nearest van slowly spun, a kind of metal cup or ladle. In case they had sound, she began a song under her breath, a drinking tune, the refrain “I'm a man/you don't meet/

every day.”

The van appeared to rock, though it may have been sunlight tricks on the white surface. She curved toward it. It was clearly pitching with inside movement. She smiled and waved her arms, still keeping her bill low as possible.

“Hey,” she called, “can you tell me? Do you know?” She pointed toward the path ahead as she jogged in place, just a fighter's dance.

“Does this loop around, or should I turn back?”

The driver's-side window, black, slid down, revealing a guy in a plain black cap. He raised his chin for a better look. Somebody from the back of the van got his attention for a moment, said something Mendenhall could not discern. The soldier glanced into the back, then returned to her.

“You're gonna have to turn around and head back.” He waved toward the hospital. “It's restricted up there.”

She put her hand to her mouth and ducked. “It's
that
hospital?”

He rubbed his nose. “It's safe out here. But no closer.”

She offered a salute with sweep to it. The broad gestures seemed to work. She thought of the purple dinosaur of her youth. The driver's attention again went toward the back of the van, then he looked at her anew. The van pitched, weight shifting to the rear. The driver's door clicked. His shoulders braced for an outward shove, his jaw clenching, eyes lulling.

She looked to the hospital roof. No Mullich. He couldn't risk that. To show any inkling of interest in her would be stupid. Still, she couldn't accept that it was over this soon. She hadn't even warmed up in her run. She was about to ask for at least that. Before they took her.

But something changed within the van. The overhead sound ladle redirected its aim. The driver relaxed his shoulders and turned swiftly toward the wheel. The van's weight shifted again, and Mendenhall stumbled back as the van sped away, the driver still craning his neck toward the other side, over the shoulder, arms rolling the wheel.

She felt abandoned, took a breath, turned, and ran along the trail to begin her descent. To look back, to show any interest, would have been fatal to this diagnosis. But this was not coincidence.

Coincidence has no place in the ER. When her mentor had told her this they had been examining an X-ray, a .22-caliber bullet inside a lung tumor.

Maybe Mullich had provided distraction. Others were trying what she was trying, had been almost from the start. But that would be coincidence, someone breaking through just now. Mendenhall increased her pace, gauging the downward slope. The sting of sunlight on her nape pushed her into the canyon while tire scuffs and dull shouts slowed her, lured her, almost spun her, just to look and see.

Near the base of the canyon the asphalt trail became dust.

Mendenhall picked up a follower, heard the pop of running shoes behind her shift from hard to soft. Maybe it was just another runner using her for pace, getting set for a kick. They were on a lower ridge overlooking a housing tract. She risked one over-the-shoulder glance, a racer's peek. Her trailer was smooth, swift, elusive, tracking her blind spot, sliding behind as though part of her shadow.

They dropped into the alluvial fan marking the trailhead. The switchbacks allowed her more glimpses, but she gathered nothing further. She didn't turn and stop because she wanted this run to last as long as it possibly could, again feeling caught, finished. Would they use a net?

She took no rest and loped across the cul-de-sac. The tract was old enough to have grown trees, but its roads were wide and bowed and smooth, the roofs all black, the corners crisp, sidewalks fitted and even. The follower vanished. Immersed in this neighborhood, Mendenhall ran alone. But felt no relief.

In the ER, though predawn always brought the worst cases, each time of day held its own particular dread. Midafternoon was the most tragic, young deaths and self-inflictions from after-school malaise, the sorrowful domestic wounds, when those who don't live alone feel most alone.

She rarely saw this light, only ran it on the hospital trails. The quiet houses and empty streets seemed to move while she ran in place, all coming to her. God, she thought. How have I become so crazy?

The homes, they could be tombs. She imagined a counterpart for herself in Reykjavik running toward a midnight sun. But that didn't work. She was still the last person on Earth.

The bus proved a bad idea. Mendenhall realized this after the third stop. She could see downtown, the gray haze of the ocean beyond. The distant foothills opposite appeared to hover in the smog. Somewhere in that vague gray-and-white triangle the university nestled. After more than ten years, she knew the city only in relation to County and Mercy. The university sprawled behind County. The bus rumbled and stopped in increments, seemed to gain no distance, nothing more than walking speed. She had never ridden the bus. Her patients rode the bus.

Only five passengers rode with her. The driver's elbows were locked, his head angled, jaw chewing nothing. Mendenhall figured his next dose of meth would have to be in less than one hour. She noted his sunglasses case clipped above the side window—his stash.

The passenger across from her was passed out, his head against the window, lips squished open and drooling. His ear was yellow, and a tremor quivered the lobe. He would be dead within the year. She might see him die.

The thickset woman with the housecleaner's basket was pregnant, maybe knew this, probably didn't. Mendenhall thought to go sit next to her and tell her, ask her how it felt. The woman's black hair was luxurious, curling with life. Her set jaw and swallow reflex fought tears. Maybe she was sitting there realizing her condition for the first time.

Nearby, an ambulance siren blared and drew closer. The bus lurched to the right and halted. From someplace farther, another ambulance siren began. This one sounded from all directions. Its blue and red reflections caught against a high glass building. The first ambulance passed the bus. Its speed indicated urgency, not a drunk with the DTs, not an invalid with low BP, not anything precautionary. The engine had that high grind of overdrive, chassis in full tilt. She wanted to go with it, to quit what she was trying to do and relieve herself with work.

Another siren called, far ahead, along the bus route, maybe coming from County. One of the three reached its destination, the siren making that final whoop. She always heard it as a question.

Mendenhall hurried to the front of the bus.

“Not a stop,” said the driver. “Go back.” He started spinning the wheel, ready to swing the bus into traffic.

She nodded to his stash, eyed it, eyed him.

He cranked open the door. She exited with the sound of the brake release, the driver's stare hard between her shoulders. She jogged to the center of the sidewalk, avoided looking back when she heard the driver yell, “Hey!”

Only seconds later did she think his call could be meant for someone else, someone dismounting after her, someone following her. She turned and scanned the sidewalk for anyone who could've been one of the other passengers, one in back she hadn't seen or recorded. The people seemed oddly static, not pedestrians, a mix of loitering and exchange. It all felt pooled, as in a marketplace.

Swaths of the city proper were like this, she knew, where most of the population waited. For nothing possible, really, except death. Not for someone, not a lottery ticket, not opportunity, not life. Sunny parts shown in movies and TV, stuck in the minds of travelers and cynics, were insignificant slivers within the morass.

She got the morass. That was what came to her. That was what she found without trying, jumping on a bus with a certain number and location on it. She hated most movies, most TV, most books.

She hated what she'd become—a person who loved an awful job, a hideous job. A person who worked as a voyeur, who was paid to peer and invade, see the undignified ways people die. Mendenhall never cured them or even really treated them. The doctors—and nurses—beyond her did that, the noble stuff.

Even now, she thought, look what I'm doing.

The ambulances went silent. The mingling crowd along the sidewalks gave no sense of event, no direction toward any of the emergencies. Mendenhall felt aimless, useless; she longed for the ER. People sang so many bad songs about this city, so many misconceptions and preconceptions. But she knew one good song about it. One that measured the hardness of dreams, dead grass, and concrete spaces, cut the ideals, and then gave the refrain “Don't you wish you could be here, too? Don't you wish you could be here, too?”

She regained focus and decided to use Mullich's money for cabs.

The boulevard was jammed. She grew heated just looking at the traffic, saw no cabs. Did this city even have cabs? No one around her had ever hailed a taxi. That she could see.

Mendenhall counted her money on the elevator to the fifth floor of Physical Sciences. She didn't have nearly enough to make it back to Mercy General. One professor and two lab techs rode up with her. The techs wore lab coats. The prof wore a tracksuit, not unlike Mendenhall's. He looked at Mendenhall, his eyes lingering on her ball cap.

“I'm going to see Dr. Covey,” she explained.

“Are you one of Covey's collectors?”

“Yes.” She lied for strength and conviction. She needed both in order to continue.

“Which post?”

Mendenhall blushed, then understood what he was asking.

From Covey's website, she recalled the different collecting stations from around the world. “Molokai,” she replied.

“You look so pale. I would have guessed the Oslo one.”

The elevator stopped at the fifth floor.

“I'm indoors all day.” Mendenhall held the door so that she could finish her lie. “I only go out at night.”

She could tell from the anxious bend in his brow, his tender fist gripping, that he was about to ask her out for a coffee. Had he been better-looking, not dressed in a tracksuit, a bit more clever, maybe she would have held the door longer, upped the proposal to a drink, seduced the professor to the very brink of this lie.