The Pain Nurse - страница 54

“Keys? I don’t have any keys.”

“Could you get into that morgue? Maybe after you killed the doctor, you ran down here and opened these doors and took the old elevator up and out? It would be a clever way to avoid being seen. Now you don’t have to talk because you have a right to remain silent.”

“Are you crazy?” Cheryl Beth heard her accent become more pronounced. It happened when she was mad. She thrust her keychain out to him. “See this? Car, house, desk, bicycle lock!”

Dodds reached out and delicately took her lanyard. “Tylenol, huh?” He pulled it out from her lab coat and examined it. “Partners Against Pain…NAPI scale…” He let it go and it draped back against her. “That card looks pretty ratty on the edges. Like you used it to pick a lock. Mind if I keep it?”

Cheryl Beth looked at him coldly. In a soft voice she said, “As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Get the hell out of here, both of you.” Dodds turned and walked back toward the morgue. Cheryl Beth wheeled Will toward the elevators in silence. Only when the doors closed and the car began to move did she speak.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but what did he mean back there, about him firing you?”

Will was staring straight ahead and didn’t answer. It took a moment before she realized he was asleep.

Will was so exhausted that he slept deeply for three hours. It was the longest uninterrupted sleep he had enjoyed since coming to the neuro-rehab unit. At five-thirty, a nurse woke him for his meds. Then he dozed fitfully as his roommate, Steve, received a breathing treatment, the technician working hard to get the poor man to cough. His muscle control for even this simple act of living was gone with the spinal cord injury. Will had learned about the “quad cough,” where the nurse or technician used his hand to thrust up in the patient’s abdomen, all the while coaching: “cough…cough…cough.” It sounded like torture. In Will’s mind the thought of “that could have been me” was ever present, yet the sessions behind the curtain a few feet away had also just become part of the background noise. The man never seemed to have visitors. Will didn’t have visitors. Brother officers always deluged cops in the hospital with visits. Not Internal Investigations cops, not the rat squad. Were we all just abandoned here? Will wondered in hazy half sleep, and then he lost the thought, his mind orbiting between the noisy morning coming to life of the hospital and his body’s desperate hunger for sleep.

He dreamed of old arguments with Cindy. Not really dreamed: he wasn’t that far under. His mind, half asleep, reprocessed the same disagreements. They always said the same lines, like veteran actors in a long-running play. Then he fell under enough for dreams and she was there that spring day when the rain came down hard and straight. She was telling him her decision, a decision she had made on her own. It wasn’t fair or right but she had done it. He had been on a big case, working nights, not there. It was done. He was pleading with her and crying, in his dreams at least. It was too late, too late.

His next vision: Cheryl Beth Wilson was sitting in the chair beside his bed. She was in her usual white lab coat and green scrubs, just watching him. The small-boned features of her face were beautiful when it was watchful. It was a warm dream. No, he was awake. He was aware of a wetness at the edges of his eyes. There was so much suffering around him, and he had been so fortunate, so spared, that he couldn’t dwell on old griefs. That would be yet another sin.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. “How are you sleeping?”

“Barely. At least they took the sutures out last night. I got back in the middle of the night, and one of the night nurses took them out. I felt like I was an old suit being let out.”

Cheryl Beth gave her musical laugh. “That’s good.”

“What time is it? How long have you been sitting there?” He felt oddly shy around her, pulling the sheet over his flimsy patient gown. He thought he had grown accustomed to the hospital’s relentless lack of privacy.