Mercy 6 (6 page)

“Blood.”

“Then forget ER. Verdasco died here.” She pointed to the floor mark she and Silva had calibrated. “Dozier died on his ladder.

Fleming died on her roommate's bed. See, Thorpe's going to use the paper one. But I don't care about some nurse's hopeful fingers taking a pulse that isn't there, about shoving eyelids closed, about some tired ER doctor pronouncing time of death because some other doctor ran away.”

Mullich, as Silva had done, recorded information in his pad as Mendenhall spoke, focused on accuracy. She let him finish his entries.

Mullich stared at his pad. “And Peterson?”

“My guess is she died in that ventilation room. Right where they found her. But we couldn't get to Peterson because she's not mine.

Not without pissing off . . .” With the heel of her palm, she pushed Mullich's forehead, forcing his gaze to her. “You. You can get me to Peterson. With that key of yours.”

“That depends, Dr. Mendenhall.”

“On what?”

“On what fight you're fighting.”

She narrowed her look.

“Blood or paper.”

She gave him an honest answer. There probably was no other kind for him. “I'm still deciding. I'll decide when I return to Claiborne. So give me Peterson. And that witness Thorpe has up there. That's your next stop, right? Dozier on Seven, Fleming on Four, Verdasco on Three.”

“Not quite. I visit the roof in between each.”

She retracted.

“For perspective.” He raised his scope.

“I gave
you
an honest answer.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I do go up there in between—to maintain and record perspective. But I'm also watching the containment. The shape of the containment. Its growth. I'll take you. I'll show you.

But you have to agree to my conditions.”

“You sound like Thorpe.”

“No. I'm not like Thorpe. I've designed buildings—redesigned them—for people like Thorpe. But not this place. Not this hospital.

Not this time around. Not anymore.”

Stepping onto the roof meant everything to her. She could still smell it on Mullich, imagine its air trapped in the creases of his lab coat. Visitors approached the waiting area, then veered away when they neared Mendenhall and Mullich.

“What are your conditions?”

Mullich held up his card key. “Every time this is used, it's recorded. Yours, too. Thorpe's as well, and any like it. Anyone can see. That's how it is. That's how it must be. Transparent action.”

She shrugged.

“No,” he said. “You don't understand. You have to enter your key, too. Even though it won't open the doors. It will be recorded.

Anyone, including Thorpe, gets to see where you go, where you tried to go.”

“Thorpe won't play that way.”

“I don't care. And I'm not playing.”

The roof door rejected her key. A tiny red light above the slot blinked twice. Mullich inserted his key, the light went green, a beep sounded, and the door opened, bypassing containment.

“Who gets to push the button?” Mendenhall asked. “The one that suddenly changes all the doors? Thorpe? You?”

“There is a chain of agreement. Thorpe is one link. My office just does the resetting because we know how. There is no single button.”

Mullich led her up the short flight of stairs and out to the roof.

They headed to the telescope relic.

She paused to eye the stars. “Are you comfortable with all that?

That chain of agreement? With policy, with Men Who Know Best?

Containing things to keep the public calm.”

“It might be the best first course of action.”

She shook her head, continued to skim the stars. “First course of action becomes the
only
course of action. With policy and its makers and enforcers. Our nerves are built for power. They feed on it.”

One step short of the low wall, Mendenhall closed her eyes and drew a full breath of night air. Cool and damp, it opened her lungs.

She took the final step blind. She opened her eyes in exhalation, her look aimed toward the dark running trails below.

“Still,” she said, “it all comes down to someone pressing
enter
.

No?”

“You watch too much television.”

They stood side by side, she tracing the trail run she craved, he aiming his scope over the parking lot.

“What will Thorpe think?” she asked. “If he notices I tried to come out here with you?”

Mullich was aiming his scope at a white truck blocking the parking-lot gate. “That I'm out here explaining things to you.

I've already brought him out here. I told him I would bring other doctors involved.”

She followed his aim as he glided it to other targets. The red dot spotted three more white trucks that she hadn't noticed: one parked in the center of the lot, one at the ambulance-only turn, another far down the hill road. The last truck was just a pale smudge in the darkness. The dot of his aim made a tiny red star.

“What is that thing?”

“A range finder.” He continued measuring targets.

“How accurate is it?”

“Inside, at those distances, within two millimeters. Out here, within centimeters.”

She pointed to the moon, a gray crescent. “Can you hit that?”

He took the scope from his eyes, which was all she wanted him to do. “Theoretically. But you would have to account for the refraction in the atmosphere, the bend of gravity from both moon and Earth, the time, and the scatter.”

“The scatter?”

“Of light. By the time this reaches the moon, assuming we calculate all those factors, the light would dissipate into a large field several hundred meters wide.”

“Circle or square?” Her thoughts were dissipating, what she had hoped for on this roof.

“A kind of X, actually,” he replied. “Not quite axes, not quite perpendicular.” He was making entries on his tablet, its blue illuminating his face, paling the angles.

“What did you see out there?”

“On the moon?” he asked. “Or here?”

“Here. Where I want to be. Not the moon—where I should want to be.”

“Containment is increasing,” he said.

She quit looking at the moon, the lot, the dark trails, and turned to Mullich. She parted her lips to speak but remained silent.

“It's to be expected,” he told her. “When they brought me here, design for containment was a priority. This made sense. They showed me their patterns, and I showed them the patterns of my research from other hospitals around the world. The evolution of infections outpaces the hospital. That's no secret. Even something as common as staph trumps the Mayo. MRSA becomes VRSA. The infection grows increasingly resistant to control, though it remains the same contagion.”

“You've spent too much time with Thorpe,” she said.

“You deny those facts?”

She shook her head. “But another fact is that Thorpe fantasizes a world where everyone is contagious. The whole world his ID ward.”

“As opposed to one big ER?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Which is what it really is.”

She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, looked to the trails below. “I'm not going to Peterson with you. I don't care about Peterson. She's dead. She was dead when she got to me. She's Thorpe's specimen. Claiborne and I can approximate her time of collapse using Thorpe's requests.”

Mullich raised a brow.

“It's simple,” she explained. “His questions for the others will show what he knows about Peterson.”

“But there is something, then,” he said. “Something you want me to get. For you. Without letting Thorpe know.”

“Just ask one question for me. When you're in there with your key. Ask that witness how many times she looked at Verdasco. How many times she looked before his eyes turned to glass. Beautiful glass.”

Mullich made no reply, just stared at her.

“You can tell Thorpe exactly what you tell me. Tell him how many times she looked at Verdasco before she noticed something wrong. Would that satisfy you? Is that transparent enough?”

“If you'll come to one more place with me.”

He took her to a file room on the first floor. It was the room she had gone to after her very first shift in the ER. She had gone there to cry. She had gone there to hide. Her mentor had found her right away, two stale coffees in hand. The room's window faced east.

Beyond the delivery trucks one could see blurry mountains rising from the city haze.

Mullich did not switch on the light and stopped her from doing so. The room was filled with the orange glow of the delivery bay outside, some pale reflections off the shipping trucks, too.

Styrofoam cups littered the tops of the steel file cabinets. The room smelled of ashes, burned filters, and rancid coffee.

At first she was frightened; of what, she wasn't sure. Mullich, yes, but of what he could predict or of what he intended? Then, from the way he surveyed the room, she could see that it was his first time here. He went to the window, and she followed.

“Why here?” she asked. It was an ER question, one that suggested understanding, opened to possibilities.

“I want to help you decide. Blood or paper. I want to make sure you see.”

With a very small flashlight, a key-chain thing, he illuminated the window. The light was icy, almost blue. It turned the window opaque. On the glass near the edge he focused on a cluster of smudges, angling the light.

“Someone tried to slide it open,” she said. “So?”

“Not someone. Two people together. Very recently.” He angled the light to sweep the broad plane of the window. Four handprints were clearly visible in the middle of the pane. “They shoved at it.

From where we stand now.”

“How did you know?”

“You can see by the handprints that they stood together. One shorter than the other, the taller one more desperate, his prints more smeared.”

“Not that,” she said. “I can see that. How did you know to come here? You've never been in here.”

“Not physically, no.”

She gazed at a single handprint, the highest one. The fingers were fully splayed, the thumb smeared along in a series of adjustments, a stop-motion effect. Mullich enhanced the effect by angling the light.

“In about an hour,” he said, “there will be a few more.”

“Or it will just be open.”

“That would be impossible. All lower-floor windows were replaced. We don't use glass anymore. These windows don't slide anymore. They don't break.”

“Are the blueprints in your head, or do you have to check?” She motioned to the tablet in his lab-coat pocket. “With that.”

“I don't have to check.” He evened himself to her, dousing the flashlight. The room became amber. “It's not that difficult, Doctor.

Much less than what you have memorized. In your fingertips. How quickly do you go to the throat of a patient? Or the right kidney, a certain spot beneath the ribs, beneath an arm, into the ear? Without thinking, your hands moving on their own, two fingers ready?”

He illuminated the handprint again, singling out the highest one.

“I'll go in and get that answer for you.” He lifted his face closer to the print, seeing something new. “If you make the fight about blood.”

“It's never that simple. Sometimes you have to use paper. When paper trumps blood. And I'm good at faking when I need to get something from a patient. But I'm not good at fooling myself.”

In the dimness, she could still see his gaze. He was looking at her face, her eyes, her mouth, back to her eyes. She was being honest. He remained silent.

“When you go in there,” she told him, “she'll be scared. You'll be another doctor. You can't approach her like this. Like this, with me. She'll swear she didn't even touch Verdasco. She won't listen to your question. She'll want answers first. She'll want to know why things are attached to her.” Mendenhall wiggled her index finger at Mullich. “Why this?”

She pointed to the range finder hanging from his neck. “And take that off before you go in.”

Mullich left the file room, pausing to offer the window to her, the space, kept the light off, softly closed the door. She watched the door eclipse his long shadow on the linoleum. The outside light from the loading bay reminded her of hard candy. Now that she knew where to look, she could see the four handprints on the window, the cluster of smudges where they tried to slide the pane.

She could see them only with averted vision, her focus the supply truck beyond.

She was testing the effect, letting the handprints vanish and reappear, when a message pinged. Anything from outside her hospital life chimed that particular way. It was her aunt.

Cortez

?

He misses you.

Not fair.

Take him back.

You see why I cant.

Then when this is over.

Then no.

Are you ok in there?

Yep.

Safe?

And sound.

She slung the cell in its holster and pressed her wrists to her temples, rolled her jaw. She leaned against the wall and was about to let herself slide into a sitting position, stare at the window, when Pao Pao buzzed her. The zap on her hip made her clench her thigh, trailed the sciatic path. She let Pao Pao record her message. The nurse worked best that way, uninterrupted, no questions, no false assurances.

Mendenhall picked up when she saw that Pao Pao had finished.

They had four new arrivals, all high fevers and pain. Mendenhall counted three even breaths in the resinous light before she left the file room.

Pao Pao had the four gurneys arranged in order of arrival, the EMTs kept at bay. Only one other nurse was working with Pao Pao, like her dressed in gloves, mask, and glasses. Patients in the beds lining the ER walls watched Mendenhall's approach. An EMT offered her a fresh protection kit. She took the gloves and waved off the rest as she headed to the arrivals.