Nerves of Steel (6 page)

"Must be the A-Team on tonight, Tony," he said to his partner.

"What's the story?" Cassie asked.

"Name's Brian Winston.  Nineteen years old.  Found at a rave over by the West End Bridge," he told Cassie amidst the tangle of arms involved in transferring the patient, monitor and lines to the ER personnel.  "Tried high dose Narcan, but no change."

Cassie bent over her patient.  His eyes were open, but he was unresponsive, his pupils pinpoint.  "Any idea what he took?"

"Nope.  The cops are right behind us with his friends."

"Get me a tox screen, blood gas and set of lytes." The heart rate and blood pressure alarms shrieked.  She glanced up, absorbing the overall picture in one quick look.  It wasn't good.  None of the FX overdoses had presented like this.  She needed to figure out what Brian took and come up with a plan to counteract it. 

A third alarm added its strident voice to the chorus.  She didn't have much time--neither did her patient. 

She stepped out into the hallway, and spotted an uniformed police officer towering over two teenaged girls sitting on the plastic chairs arranged along the wall.

"I'm Dr. Hart.   I'm taking care of your friend."  Both girls had streaks of fluorescent color in their hair and body makeup to match.  One of them had been crying.

"Is Brian gonna be all right?"

Cassie squatted and met the girl's eyes.  "I don't know.  I'm trying to help him, but I really need to know what he took."  The girls exchanged glances. 

"Don't tell them anything," the second one said.

Cassie glanced up at the police officer.  "I think there's fresh coffee, Officer Rankin."  He hesitated, then nodded and moved down the hall.  "What's your name?" she asked the first one.

"Linda."

"I need to know what Brian took," she insisted, locking her gaze on the girl.  "Don't you want to help save his life?"

The girl sniffed, then reached into her designer jeans and pulled out a single square shaped pill.  She handed it to Cassie.

"Hey, where'd you get that?" her friend asked.  "Brian said he didn't have enough dough to buy more than one.  Not at fifty a pop."

"Well, he bought me one.  Said it was an early birthday present."

"What is it?"  Cassie examined the pill.  The only markings on it were two large X's.

"It's Double Cross." 

"What's in it?  Is it a new form of Ecstasy?"  But Ecstasy alone didn't explain her patient's symptoms. 

"It's FX times X, double crossed.  Don't you get it?"

Cassie did, all too well.  She returned to the trauma room just in time for all hell to break loose.

CHAPTER 9

Drake leaned against his mop handle, eavesdropping.  He beckoned to Rankin, the uniformed officer, who joined him in an empty suture room. 

"What's up?" Drake indicated the trio across the hall with a terse nod of his head.

"Kid overdosed at a rave.  Those two were with him.  Wouldn't tell me nothing."

"They gave it up to the doc.  Said he was doing a new combo of FX and Ecstasy."

Hart finished talking with the two girls and shook their hands before returning to the resuscitation room.

"Get their particulars for me," he asked Rankin.  "Miller will send someone from the task force to interview them."

"Sure thing."

With the help of the ER's director, Dr. Castro, it had been easy to infiltrate the department and hide amidst the shadows and chaos—the guy cleaning the trash was always a non-entity.  A bit harder to stay out of Hart's sight all night.  But thankfully the ER provided plenty of hiding places and Hart was too focused on her patients to pay attention to anyone else.

Drake pushed his mop over the linoleum until he stood at the door of the trauma room.  Hart's patient had taken a turn for the worse.  She barked out commands, somehow managing to be everywhere at once.  She shoved a plastic tube down the kid's throat, then started a special IV up near his collar bone.  Every few seconds she would whip her hair back and glance up at the monitor, her eyes blazing with fury at the bad news she found there.

 It wasn't compassion that drove this physician, Drake realized, but passion pure and simple.  Her expression forced a smile from him, despite the grim circumstances.  She didn't look like someone who would accept failure gracefully.

He stood, riveted by the battle raging in the small room.  At least six people crowded around the boy's still form, moving in a choreography of controlled chaos.  He gripped the mop handle, his fingers growing sweaty, frustrated by his inability to do anything but watch.

"Some idiot got out his chemistry set and combined FX with Ecstasy," Cassie told her team.  "As if one alone wasn't lethal enough." 

A new alarm on the monitor clamored for attention.  "Temp's 105 and climbing, oxygen level dropping."

"He's getting the worst from both drugs.  The FX made his chest muscles too rigid for him to breathe, and the Ecstasy is giving him heat stroke.  We need to cool him down and intubate."  Cassie prepared her equipment, thinking rapidly.   Use the wrong medication, and she could make things worse.  "Valium--should sedate him and help any seizures."

She wiped the sweat from her forehead and bent over her patient.  Had to get this right the first time.  She tried to pry open her patient's mouth, but his jaw muscles were still in spasm.  Cassie forced herself to take a deep breath and wait for the Valium to work.

"Damn, that's not doing it.  Give me pentobarbital," she ordered.  The oxygen alarm sounded, adding to the cacophony bouncing off the tile walls.  It was now or never.  She forced her patient's mouth open and slid the lighted blade past his tongue until she could see the vocal cords.  Like his chest and jaw muscles, they were clenched tight.

God, damn it, cut this kid a break.
  She gingerly threaded the endotracheal tube to the level of the cords and waited for the opportunity to pass it all the way through them.

"Pulse ox is down to sixty-eight."

Cassie nodded, her eyes never leaving the stubborn, slender cords of muscle.  She saw them part. 
Now
.  She pushed the tube past them.  Hanging onto the tube as if it were made of gold, she whipped the stylet out and straightened up.  "Bag him."

"Pulse ox coming up, eighty, ninety, ninety-eight."

Cassie let her breath out and wiped her sweaty palms on the back of her scrubs.  Brian Winston was not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.  But he was alive.

CHAPTER 10

It was after three in the morning before Drake had a chance to check in with Janet Kwon,  assigned to the surgical floor upstairs.  He stepped into the medication room, the closest thing the ER had to privacy, unless you counted the padded lock-down room reserved for psych patients.

"How's bedpan duty going?" he asked after Kwon answered her cell phone.  "Get any chance to do some real police work?"

"Nothing on our actor, but there's an orderly up here who's creeping me out.  Keeps wandering into the female patients' rooms while they're asleep."

"Don't blow your cover, he's not going anywhere."

"Tell that to those women."

Drake leaned against the window in the door.  He could see Hart over at the X-ray view box, the bright lights gleaming in her hair.  He'd been watching her all night, staying out of sight, following Miller's orders, but he couldn't complain about the duty.  Hart was explaining something to a resident, her face animated. 

He closed his eyes.  Suddenly she was looking at him like that, her lips brushing his, warm, promising more.  His head knocked against the window, and he jerked awake. 

"Sorry, what was that?" he said.  Kwon clicked her tongue in exasperation.  Drake stifled a yawn.  "Haven't gotten much sleep in the past few days."

"Thought Miller gave you the afternoon off so you could catch some z's," she said.

Drake smiled as he remembered how he had spent the afternoon.  After Oscar's, he'd gone home and relaxed in his studio, playing around with some charcoal studies, the first real work he'd done in months. 

"I don't think that doctor, Hart, has anything to do with the FX," he told Kwon.  "You should've seen her with the Winston kid.  I don't think he would've made it if it wasn't for her fighting so hard to save him."

"Careful, big boy--starting to sound like you're getting personally involved."  Kwon, always the voice of caution and logic.  "And we both know that can't happen.  Right?"

He sighed.  Six months was a hell of a long time.  "Yeah, I guess." 

"Besides, turns out Hart's ex is a doc here too.  Some surgeon.  And he was mixed up in drugs awhile back.  I'm figuring you were right this morning, they're in it together."  She paused and Drake could almost hear the pieces of the puzzle dropping into place for her.  "Think about it.  Winston is in a coma, so is Jane Doe, our one possible lead.  Both treated by Hart.  Ever think that a smart doctor could put a patient in a coma while making it look like she was trying to save them?  I'm going to get Miller to run Hart's financials and a full background check on her and the ex."

Before he could reply, Drake heard footsteps behind him and saw Hart watching him.  Shit.  How much had she heard?  "Gotta go." 

"Hey," Cassie called to the strange man in scrubs who came out of the med room.

He looked over his shoulder.  It
was
the vagrant she'd met at the police station.  Her stomach did a quick flip-flop.  Had he been following her?

"Wait!"  She glanced around.  No security guards or even any burly paramedics nearby.  Cassie rushed after him, skidding around the corner to see where he went.   He was gone, probably out the ambulance bay doors. 

She slowed to a walk and started toward the security office.   Maybe the security cameras had gotten a picture of him or where he was headed. 

As she passed Trauma One, a hand reached out and pulled her inside the dark room. After a panicked breath, Cassie's Kempo training took over.   She grabbed her attacker's forearm, twisted inside his embrace, then rammed a knee up.  She missed his groin when he sidestepped.  A roaring filled her head--it was her pulse pounding.

Cassie didn't let her fear slow her as she twisted under his arm and wrenched his wrist up against his back.  His free hand flailed behind him, grasping at her scrub top.  She bent his wrist into an almost impossible angle, leveraging all her weight against the fragile collection of bones.

"I'm a cop!"  His words penetrated her adrenalin haze just before she pushed his wrist past the breaking point.

"Prove it."  Her voice emerged higher pitched than usual, tight with fear.   

She tightened her grip, propelling him forward until he lay face down on the floor with her knee on the small of his back.  The sound of their breathing rushed through the dark room.

"My badge," he gasped.  "In my back pocket."

She kept her weight pinned on his wrist.  He exhaled and his body relaxed, signaling his lack of threat.  She skimmed her free hand up the back of his leg, felt his muscles twitch through the thin cotton scrub pants he wore.

"Find what you want yet?  I don't usually get this physical on a first date."   His voice was too loud, too bright.  She wondered if he was as scared as she was.

Her fingers found his waistband and slid down to the pocket, retrieving a slim wallet.  She rolled onto her feet, scrambling to the shelter of the gurney in the center of the dark room.  Keeping the gurney between them, she re-oriented herself in blackness broken only by a small amber light glowing on top of the blanket warmer across from her.

"I really am a cop," the man said. 

Where was he?  Still on the floor, or had he followed her?  She kept silent, trying to conceal her position.

"Why do you think I was at the station this morning?  Why do you think I'm here?  Commander Miller sent me."  His earnest words were delivered in a calm, friendly voice that almost convinced her.  But Cassie remembered the eager gleam in his eyes when he'd held the FX.  Besides, he could have seen her and Miller together.

She edged along the wall, searching for the door or the light switch, hoping he wasn't waiting there to ambush her.  Realized she was holding her breath—not good, especially if she needed to fight—and inhaled through her nose, slowly, quietly.  Her fingers found the light switch and she flipped it on.

She blinked in surprise as the stark overhead lights gleamed from the metal and glass cabinets.  The man was still in the center of the room, although he had gotten to his feet.

"See for yourself," he said, leaning forward and pressing his hands against his knees as if recuperating from a marathon.  Sweat stained his rumbled scrub top.  He heaved in several deep breaths, his eyes never leaving hers.

Cassie tried hard to slow her own adrenalin-jazzed breathing but failed.  She opened the thin wallet and scrutinized his identification.  Detective R. Michael Drake, she read.  The photo was him.  She stared at him, unable to speak, her nerves still buzzing.

Since yesterday Drake had shaved and cut his thick, black hair so that it now merely grazed his collar, but the flashing blue eyes were the same, still filled with mischief. "Nice technique.  Where'd you learn it?"

Remnants of fear, adrenalin, and anger choked Cassie's throat.  Of course he'd let her take him down—as a cop, he wouldn't want to hurt her by drawing his gun or fighting back.  Disappointment surged through her as she watched Drake edge across the room, keeping a wary gaze locked onto her.  As if she were a threat.

"Why didn't you tell me you were a cop yesterday?" she asked, still comparing the photo in her hand with the man before her, ignoring the trembling in her fingers.

"You never asked."

"R. Michael Drake.  What does the R stand for?"  She returned his ID.

"Ready, willing and able," he replied with a wink. 

Obviously their little scuffle hadn't upset him like it had her.  She had honestly, for a few brief moments, thought that all that hard work with her Kempo training had paid off, that she didn't need to fear being a victim again. 

"Or if you prefer, remarkable, resourceful and really, really good."  He braced his foot against the gurney and re-tied one red hightop that had come undone in their struggle.  She couldn't help but notice the gun strapped to his ankle—he could have drawn it at any time.