No Regrets

by JoAnn Ross

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Miles called in to her, his sarcasm making a mockery of the endearment, “I don’t have all night.”

  Exhaling a frustrated sigh that ruffled the artfully tousled bangs created by the hairdresser, Tessa exited the dressing room. Miles had already set up the lights. She narrowed her eyes against the glare, but was unable to see Jason standing in the shadows behind his brother. As a primal Latin salsa beat poured out of speakers set around the room, Miles came over to stand in front of her. His long, critical look stretched her nerves almost to the breaking point.

  “Not bad,” he said finally.

  Tessa let out a breath she’d been unaware of holding. “I’m so pleased you approve.”

  “It’s not my approval you need to worry about.” That said, he began barking orders, having her move to the music, positioning her body in uncomfortable, unnatural ways.

  Thirty minutes later, he was obviously as frustrated as Tessa.

  “Christ, loosen up, will you? You’re as stiff as a sixteen-year-old virgin.”

  “Perhaps if you’d stop yelling at me and insulting me, I wouldn’t be so nervous,” she shot back.

  “Tessa’s got a point, Miles,” Jason said, coming to her defense for the first time since they’d arrived at the studio. “If you went a little easier on her, she might be able to relax. And maybe some wine might help. How would you like some champagne, sweetheart?”

  “We don’t have time for a party,” Miles ground out, his impatience shimmering around him like a force field.

  “You’ve already wasted half an hour. What could ten minutes matter?” Jason coaxed.

  “Ten minutes,” Miles snapped. “Then, if we don’t get some halfway decent shots, your girlfriend can just get her portfolio done at the portrait studio at Sears.”

  Although she welcomed the champagne, Tessa balked at the pill Jason held out to her. “I don’t do drugs.”

  “This isn’t really a drug.”

  When she arched a disbelieving brow, he shrugged. “All right. But it’s not anything I bought off the street, sweetheart.” He refrained from mentioning that he’d obtained it from the police evidence room. “One little pill isn’t going to get you hooked. It’s just going to relax you enough that you can enjoy this experience.”

  “It’d take a truckload of Valium to do that,” she muttered.

  “Take the fucking pill, Tessa,” Miles snapped. “I have a dinner engagement and I’d like to see the lady sometime before the sun rises tomorrow morning.”

  Tessa was still hesitant. But then she looked at the photographs lining the wall and realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She couldn’t allow herself to miss out just because, having a girlfriend who’d fried her brain on Ecstasy, she’d always been afraid to do drugs.

  It was just one little pill, Tessa told herself as she took the scored tablet from Jason’s outstretched palm. She swallowed it with the last of the champagne, and didn’t protest when Jason refilled her glass.

  Fifteen minutes later, as Miles positioned her on a black leather sofa in front of the camera, Tessa felt herself beginning to relax.

  “Is that better?” Jason asked from the shadows as Miles cupped her chin and tilted her face.

  “Much better.” Feeling wonderfully loose, she smiled up at the man who’d been tormenting her. “Are you happy now?”

  “Not yet.” He turned her shoulders away from the camera. “But we’re getting there.”

  “Good.” Her bones were turning to water. “When we’re finished, I want more champagne.”

  “Lord, she’s already turning into a prima donna.”

  Feeling more relaxed than she’d ever felt in her life, Tessa smiled up at him.

  “Amazing,” Miles murmured. “One pill and you’re floating.” He moved back behind the camera lens. “Lick your lips.”

  Tessa licked her lips and tasted Vaseline.

  “Good girl. Now, think of something sexy.”

  Tessa thought of Jason. Her body warmed, humming in all those hidden erogenous zones she hadn’t even known she possessed until he’d discovered them.

  “Now that’s what I was looking for,” Miles said approvingly. “Whatever you’re thinking, sweetheart, don’t stop.” Tessa heard the shutter click several times, imagined Jason watching from the shadows, pretended the lens was him, lowered her eyes and looked up at him through her thick fringe of lashes.

  “Oh, baby,” Miles crooned seductively, “you’re looking so fine. And hot.”

  He continued to encourage her, his voice deep and husky, like a lover. Aided by the pill and the champagne, Tessa found her inhibitions disappearing like a sand castle at high tide. She flirted with the camera, determined to break through Miles’s sardonic reserve.

  As his voice grew progressively deeper and rougher, she knew she was getting to him. Tessa couldn’t remember ever feeling sexier. Or more powerful. Knowing that she could arouse a man who’d photographed the sexiest women of this Hollywood era went straight to her head. And that hot, dampening place between her legs.

  “Okay,” Miles said, his abrupt tone shattering her forbidden fantasy of making love to both twin brothers at the same time, “that should do it.”

  Brought back to earth with a painful thud, Tessa blinked. “What?”

  “I’ve got enough.” He began turning off the photographic lights. “They’re going to be dynamite.”

  “If you do say so yourself.”

  He laughed at her sarcasm. “You shouldn’t try hauteur, sweetheart. It doesn’t suit you.” He moved closer, brushed the crest of one breast with his fingertips and made her tremble. “Looks as if you’re going to get lucky tonight,” he said over his shoulder to Jason. “You owe me for warming your girlfriend up for you.”

  “The day I need your help to bed a woman is the day I throw myself off the Santa Monica pier with my wrists and ankles handcuffed,” Jason shot back. He moved out of the shadows and put his arm around Tessa’s shoulders. “Get your clothes on, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ve got some plans for this evening I think you’re going to really get a kick out of.”

  Molly was not surprised when three weeks after her attack, there were still no leads on her rapist. The area was home to countless transients; he’d undoubtedly moved on. As Thomas seemed to have done. She was disappointed not to be able to thank the former priest for saving her life.

  The part of her that had locked that horrific night away in some dark box in her mind was grateful her attacker hadn’t been captured. Molly couldn’t bear the thought of ever having to encounter the monster again. On the other hand, she was terribly concerned for the other helpless women he would undoubtedly attack.

  She was relieved to be back to work. Although she hated the sideways glances and whispers that ceased whenever she passed by, at least when things got hectic in the ER, she was too busy to think about her own problems. Which were looming larger with each passing day.

  She was standing at the desk charting medications, when an orderly approached. “The lab sent up these results, Molly.” The young man handed her a manila folder. “I’m supposed to give them to you personally.”

  “Thank you, Peter.” Molly put the folder under the metal charts.

  “Is that the diabetic mother’s test results?” Yolanda asked. “Because Reece was waiting—”

  “No, it’s not Mrs. Gannon’s.” She felt uncomfortable keeping secrets from her friend. But then again, Molly reminded herself, she’d always been an expert at keeping secrets.

  “It can’t be the junkie in treatment room B, because there’s no way the lab could get the blood work up this fast,” Yolanda said.

  Molly didn’t answer.

  “So, you gonna tell me?”

  Molly turned toward her. “Of course. But not just now.” She finished her charting, then picked up the file. “I’ll be in the nurses’ lounge if anyone needs me.” That said, she took the folder and walked away.

  Yolanda watched
her go, wrinkles marring her broad brown forehead. “Aw, hell,” she muttered as a possible answer occurred to her.

  Molly briefly closed her eyes—Dear Lord, have mercy on me—then opened the file. The words swam on the page, but she’d just managed to bring them into focus when the loudspeaker overhead clicked on.

  “Trauma,” the disembodied voice announced. “ETA four minutes.”

  Her own concerns forgotten, Molly dropped the folder and rushed back to the emergency room that had immediately sprung to life.

  “A police car was broadsided by an unknown vehicle and went over a cliff in Laurel Canyon,” the clerk who’d been monitoring the emergency band radio announced. “It took emergency crews two hours to reach the car. Another forty-five minutes to cut the driver out of the wreckage. He’s arriving here by copter. Emergent, with multiple trauma to his lower extremities.”

  “Page Dr. Wagner, stat,” Reece instructed. “Then get the rest of the team up here. We’ll probably need a microsurgeon, so call Dr. Goldberg. He should be home. And notify the lab, X ray and Ortho—tell them to stand by.”

  He turned toward Molly. “You up to this?”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

  He gave her a deep, probing look, then made his decision. “Let’s go, then.”

  A familiar rush of adrenaline shot through her as they ran up the stairs together. When they opened the door leading out onto the roof, they were hit with a blast of chilly night air.

  “Look at that,” he said, pointing up into the night sky at the blinking lights of the helicopter heading toward them. On that copter was a man who, through an inexplicable twist of fate, was about to have his life placed in their hands. “Call me insane, but I freaking love this job!”

  Although the noise from the rotors prevented her from answering, Molly silently agreed as she watched the helicopter touch down.

  Before the pilot had cut the engines, the door burst open. Molly took one end of the gurney, Reece the other. Then they ran toward the helicopter, ducking their heads to avoid the still-rotating blades.

  The patient had been wrapped in blankets and strapped onto the stretcher with nylon restraints. “We’ve got a fifty-two-year-old male suffering multiple trauma to his lower extremities,” the medic shouted to be heard over the noise of the rotors.

  He and the flight nurse helped Molly and Reece lift the patient down onto the gurney and they began running back toward the door.

  “Driver’s license lists him as Captain Alexander Kovaleski, LAPD.”

  “Kovaleski?” It couldn’t be! Without missing a step Molly took a look at the patient. Heaven help her, it was!

  “The patient has been unconscious and unresponsive since we cut him out of the car,” the paramedic continued as they rushed the gurney into the rooftop elevator. “Bilateral femur fractures to both legs, along with copious bleeding from the femoral arteries. No known medical history.

  “We applied tourniquet, Mast trousers and started Ringers lactate for replacement of lost blood,” he continued. “BP is catastrophic—fifty over ten.”

  “No burns?” Reece asked.

  “No. The guy lucked out. The gas tank didn’t blow.”

  Not many people would consider anyone with such grave injuries lucky. But Molly had witnessed her share of gas-tank-explosion victims and knew, that as bad as things sounded, they could have been a great deal worse.

  Even so, if they didn’t get Alex’s pressure up quickly, not only would he be at risk of kidney failure, his heart and brain would be in critical danger.

  The team was waiting at trauma room A, known as the Doom Room. The X-ray and lab technicians formed an outer ring, just outside the door, allowing them to be out of the way, but instantly available.

  Nurses and residents formed the inner core, with Dr. Wagner on one side of the steel table, Reece on the other and Dr. Paul Fong, the anesthesiologist, at the head. Overhead video cameras and microphones began recording the action for any interns and junior residents who’d gathered in the adjoining staff lounge. The cameras also allowed the team to view their actions afterward, much like a football team watching game films on Monday morning.

  Despite the need to hurry, Reece looked at her over the gurney. “Are you going to have trouble with this?”

  “No.” When her usually self-assured voice proved little more than a whisper, Molly took a deep breath and tried again. “No. I’m fine.”

  Reece nodded, satisfied.

  While Yolanda began cutting away Alex’s shirt, Molly set the automatic blood-pressure machine to take readings every thirty seconds.

  “BP sixty-five over twenty,” she announced as Reece placed the EKG leads. On some distant level she noted that the hairs covering Alex’s broad chest were gray. It was difficult to think of the man who’d always been there for her getting old; impossible to think of him dying.

  Thy will be done. The familiar words of absolute faith tolled in her head, but Molly couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept them. Not when they were talking about someone she loved so dearly.

  “Looks like the IV raised it some,” Reece said. “Let’s get the blood started.”

  Molly waited with a bag of highly concentrated O-negative cells while Reece deftly inserted the large bore intravenous line.

  Alex’s eyes fluttered when Reece drew an arterial blood sample, but he failed to rouse. “Unresponsive to painful stimuli,” Molly reported to a floater RN who’d been assigned to the ER from the medical floor. The young man logged the information on a flow chart.

  “There’s no internal bleeding,” Dr. Wagner, the senior ER resident decided after a cursory examination.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Reece argued.

  Molly glanced up just in time to see Wagner glare across the supine body. “Are you challenging my diagnosis, Doctor?”

  “Of course not,” Reece responded mildly. “But it wouldn’t hurt to do an abdominal tap. After all, it’d be a real bitch if the guy codes on the surgery table for something we’ve missed down here. Especially since he’s a cop. You know how the TV guys love showing the pomp and circumstance of cop funerals on the six o’clock news.”

  There was a slight hesitation as the senior surgical resident considered how such an event could sidetrack his career. The room became unnaturally silent, the only sound the steady beep beep beep of the heart monitor. When Wagner shrugged, Molly knew Reece had won this professional skirmish.

  She handed Wagner a scalpel, which he used to make an incision just below the navel. Without looking at her, he held out his hand. Molly immediately placed the small catheter into it.

  Then Reece took over. He let a liter of fluid flow slowly into the abdomen. While everyone watched, he gently rocked it, then siphoned the fluid out again. It came out as clear as it had gone in, a sign there was no internal bleeding. Wagner’s smirk suggested he’d never expected any other outcome.

  “Satisfied, Doctor?” he snapped at Reece.

  “Actually, I am,” Reece responded mildly.

  The monitor sounded a shrill alarm. Molly looked up at the screen and saw the lines—like worms wiggling every which way—revealing a heart that had lost its rhythmic memory. She forced the green plastic airway into Alex’s mouth, applied the mask, tilted his head back and began forcing oxygen into his lungs.

  At the same time Reece began chest compressions in sync with the forced respirations, while Yolanda applied electrolyte gel to prevent burning from the defibrillator paddles.

  “We’ll start at two-fifty,” Wagner barked.

  “Charging,” Yolanda called out as she turned on the machine. The seconds it took to charge to two hundred and fifty watts seemed an eternity.

  Wagner placed one paddle under and to the left of Alex’s left nipple and the other to the right of the sternum. “Clear!” He squeezed the trigger for the asynchronous shock.

  The body lifted off the table. Nothing.

  “Three-hundred.”

  This time the
line snaked violently, then settled to a weak, but steady rhythm. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  “The injuries to lower extremities must explain the blood loss and shock,” Wagner said. The heart problem settled, at least for now, he withdrew the catheter and sutured the wound closed. “Let’s get these MAST trousers off the guy and see what we’ve got.”

  The antishock trousers were designed to help stabilize patients with massive blood loss in the abdomen, pelvis or lower extremities. Once inflated, they maintained blood pressure by keeping blood in the more vital central parts of the body. The debate over whether the trousers were helpful or dangerous continued to rage in medical circles. However, since this emergency rescue crew had protocol orders to use them, the ER team had to be prepared to deal with any possible negative consequences.

  Alex’s left foot looked gray and felt cold to Molly’s touch. That could either be a result of the trousers keeping blood from it, or a sign that the sharp edges of the broken femur had torn the large artery. If that were the case, deflating them could result in hemorrhaging.

  “Both IV lines are in place and working, Doctor,” she said after checking them one more time. The scary part about deflating MAST trousers was at the beginning.

  Reece took a deep breath. In no way did he reveal his personal dislike of the trousers. “Okay, boys and girls. Here goes nothing.” He undid the valve on the left leg, released the pressure slightly, then closed the valve again.

  Molly grasped the left foot. “The pulse seems stronger.”

  At that moment, Alex’s blood pressure, which had risen to a weak, but life-supporting eighty, dived to seventy-two.

  “Shit,” Wagner muttered.

  Reece remained silent, his eyes, like everyone else’s in the room, on the blood-pressure monitor.

  “Reading stabilized,” he said as the numbers crept back up to eighty.

  He opened the valve again. There was another pause as they all watched the blood pressure dip, then slowly rise.

  Reece repeated the technique a third time. The team relaxed a bit. He finished deflating the trousers, then unfastened them.

  Molly had to bite her lip to restrain an involuntary gasp. Both legs were hanging by shreds of skin and small strands of tendons. The left leg was clearly too crushed to be saved. And the right was horribly mangled.