by Rada Jones
“What if he talks?” Ben asked.
“He won’t. Why would he?”
“To sink us. If they find out, we’re toast. Our jobs are over. My marriage’s down the drain.”
“Your marriage was down the drain already.”
“Common, Faith! What was I supposed to tell you? My wife’s busy with the twins and I feel horny? I want a bit on the side? You know better!”
“So, your marriage…”
“It’s fine. As long as he doesn’t talk.”
Faith laughed. A chill ran down Carlos’s spine.
“Make sure he doesn’t talk, then.”
“How?”
“Find a way.”
“I will. One way or another, I will.” Their voices faded.
Weak again, Carlos lay on the floor.
Faith. And Ben.
Together. Against him.
44
Emma forgot her wine. Breed: Any. Size: Any. Area: Northeast. Age: Any. Color: Color?! What’s wrong with people? What does color have to do with anything? It’s not a wig.
Taylor isn’t excited about the dog. Too bad.
Emma loved dogs. From the mutt she’d had as a kid, to Thelma and Louise, the two Bichons. Victor took them when he left and left her Taylor.
What a deal.
She was getting a dog. Her own. Somebody to share her life with. I’d like somebody to miss me. It’s selfish, I know. Still, it would be nice to have somebody missing me, for once. Somebody to miss me, not the things I can do for them.
She found puppies. Her heart swelled.
I should get a dog from the pound. They sit there like second-hand merchandise, hoping for someone to take them home. They need a second chance. Don’t we all?
But…... she’d always wanted a German Shepherd. They were the kings of dogs. Smart, loyal, strong, beautiful. She loved that in a dog. She’d love that in a man too, but they didn’t have those at the pound. Nor anywhere else, apparently.
How about rescuing a German Shepherd? She typed in “GSD rescue.”
Puppies. Heart-melting, thick-legged, floppy-eared, black and tan German Shepherd puppies.
She had no time for a puppy. She barely had time to brush her teeth. A puppy needs time, love, and commitment. Two out of three isn’t good enough. She typed “shepherd rescue.”
Amber eyes looked at her from a Facebook post. Long face. Long hair. Dark. “Her owner died. She needs a home without other dogs. No cats. No young children. She needs a knowledgeable owner, a fenced yard, and a commitment to training.”
The post was three months old. The dog was hundreds of miles away. A beautiful dog in a wire cage. The pictures were taken through the wire. Long dark coat. Ferocious white teeth. Haunting eyes.
Not a happy dog.
Emma called.
“Yes, she’s still available.” The voice was bored. They’d been through this before. “You’ll have to sign that you take responsibility for any damages, injuries, or deaths.”
Deaths?
They didn’t want money or references. She was four. Her owner left some money for her care. It was running out. They’d been looking for months now. They may have to put her down. Yes, tomorrow morning was OK.
Emma had a day off. If she left now, she’d get there in the morning, and be back tomorrow for dinner. She opened the fridge. Empty. Taylor had eaten it. She tried the freezer. Bread. Frozen broccoli. Spaghetti sauce, heavy on the garlic. Nothing else. It will have to do.
She drove for hours in the rain. The glare burned her eyes. She missed a turn. That added another hour. By the time she got there, the sky was blushing pink. She pulled on the side of the road and curled up in the back seat.
She woke up late. She guzzled her cold coffee. She needed to pee. She wanted to brush her teeth. No time, no place.
Oh well. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke!
She grabbed the spaghetti sauce and scrambled out of the car. She tried to unbend. Slow going. I’m too old for this. If only I had some Motrin.
She straightened up all the way and rang the doorbell.
“You’re late,” the fat man said. His small pig eyes matched his pink Hawaiian shirt.
“Sorry. I fell asleep.”
He appraised her. “You know dogs?”
“Somewhat.”
“Police dogs?”
“No.”
“This is no ordinary dog.”
“How so?”
“She’s a police dog. She took a bullet in a drug raid. In the lung. She never got back to normal. They say she has PTSD. They retired her.”
“How did you end up with her?”
“My brother wanted a protection dog. He got her when the police got rid of her.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died.”
“How?”
“A business partner shot him.”
“She couldn’t protect him?”
“She’s fast, but bullets are faster. But the guy will never walk again.”
Emma shuddered.
“You still want to see her?”
“Yes.”
He pointed to the door at the end of the hallway. “In there.”
“What’s her name?”
“Guinness.”
Emma looked at the closed door. She’d driven the whole night to get here. She could just turn around and go home, or she could open the door. The absence of fear is not courage. That’s stupidity. Courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyhow. Or maybe that’s stupidity. She opened the door. The morning sun poured in her eyes, making the room dark. She shielded her eyes with her hand.
“Guinness?”
Unblinking yellow eyes in the far corner.
“Hi, Guinness.”
Emma stepped in. She sat on the stool by the door. The eyes watched.
“How’re you doing?”
Nothing.
She doesn’t feel like chatting.
Emma looked for something to say. Nothing came. She was stiff and hungry. She needed to pee. She had driven forever to get here, and she had to drive back. The dog didn’t seem to care.
“Life sucks.” Emma rested her back on the wall. “I have a long drive back. I’d better find a toilet and something to eat first.”
Curled up, her dark nose resting on bronze paws, the dog listened. She gets it.
“I’m sorry your life sucks. Mine sucks too, you know. My daughter hates my guts. My ex-husband got bored with his pretty wife. I think somebody’s killing my patients. You think you have it rough?” Emma looked at her watch.
“I have another shift tomorrow. My daughter is more trouble than any puppy.” She looked the dog in the eye.
“Ever had puppies, Guinness?”
The dog didn’t blink. Emma shrugged.
“You didn’t miss much. They’re a pain in the ass. Once you have them, life’s never the same. Trust me.”
The dog seemed doubtful.
“You’re right. Why should you trust me? I’m just a stranger. You must miss your human. Your owner, they said. Like you can own somebody! You don’t even own your kids. There’s this joke. A woman gets fed up with her kids and decides to sell them on eBay. She tells her friend. He laughs. ‘eBay? Are you crazy? You made them yourself! Sell them on Etsy!’”
The dog didn’t laugh.
She’s got a German sense of humor.
Emma crossed her legs. I need a bathroom. She could ask pig man, but she didn’t want to use his bathroom.
It’s getting late. The dog isn’t interested. She doesn’t even have a sense of humor.
Emma stood up. She rolled her shoulders.
“I’ll go now… Sorry it didn’t work out. You’ll be all right. They won’t put you to sleep, you have money … unless pig man gets to keep it… that sucks.”
The yellow eyes didn’t blink.
She’s beautiful. All dark but for the tan legs. Wise, golden eyes.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.” She picked up
her bag. It was heavy. She remembered the Bolognese.
“You like Italian? It has lots of basil and garlic. Garlic is a vermicide, you know. It kills worms. Not saying you have them, just telling you what it’s good for.”
She moved closer. The dog watched. Emma opened the Bolognese and sat it by the water dish.
“Good luck, old girl.”
Emma wanted to pet the dog, but the dog didn’t look like she wanted petting. Emma respected that. She walked out without looking back. She climbed in her car. Her eyes burned. So much for gut feelings. Crying is for sissies, Mother said. She set the navigator to “Home,” then remembered she needed a toilet. She changed it to the nearest McDonald’s.
She glanced back.
The dog. Staring at her, one inch from the window.
She opened the back door. The dog jumped in. She curled up in the back seat. She sighed. She wiggled to make herself comfortable. She sighed again. She looked at Emma. Her tail thumped.
“What are we waiting for?”
“Really?”
Guinness wagged her tail.
“McDonald’s?”
Guinness smiled.
“OK.”
45
Back in the ER for her next shift, Emma struggled to keep up. It was not a good day. Five psychiatric patients on hold, waiting for a place to go. No beds upstairs, so the ER had to hold admitted patients. Two nurses called in sick, making them short-staffed. The shit was pouring like rain. Emma hoped it wouldn’t drown her.
Then Mike called her for a meeting.
“What’s it about?”
“Quality.”
She was in the middle of a crisis. The drunk in Room 6 had pushed the stretcher across the door, taking himself hostage. There was no ambulance to transfer the brain bleed to neurosurgery.
Now this. Whatever it is, it’s not good news. He’s not calling to congratulate me. It’s got to be about the woman in 15 whose daughter complained. I still don’t know what happened.
She talked to the charge nurse about getting a helicopter to fly out the brain bleed, hoped the drunk would fall asleep, and went to the conference room. She found them waiting. Mike, Sal, the Risk Manager, the Quality Control director, George, Carlos, the lawyer, and Gus.
“Thank you for joining us, Dr. Steele,” Mike said.
You’d be late too if you had to work with patients. All of you, in fact. Sitting in your office all day makes you feel superior. You’re complacent and out of touch.
“We met to discuss a few issues that occurred in our ED lately. Over the last few weeks, our mortality has increased. We have also encountered a number of sentinel events.”
The quality director, a thin man with a skimpy white beard, started a PowerPoint presentation. He lusted over graphs and pie charts. Patients seen in the last thirty days. Left without being seen. AMA. Deaths. Near-deaths.
I wonder if I ordered the labs for Room 10.
“Emma!” They stared at her. “What’s your take on this?”
“We have a number of separate incidents. They involve unrelated patients. The patients were here for different reasons. All, with one exception, were old and impaired. These incidents happened on different days, in different rooms, on different shifts. The patients had different doctors and nurses. We have no clear explanation of why these people died.”
“And?” Gus asked.
“I thought the first one was a medication error, but there’ve been too many. There’s only one possible explanation. I think we have a mercy killer.”
If she was looking to impress them, she succeeded. They started talking all over each other.
“Preposterous idea! This couldn’t happen in this hospital. This is a nice place. A quiet place, with good people. Saying something like that was an insult. She’s lost her mind. Inconceivable.”
Emma waited for the ruckus to calm down. She looked them in the eye, one by one. “Remember February?”
Silence. Only months before, a slew of deaths had hit their community and their hospital. The culprit had been a shocker.
“Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place,” Mike said.
“Maybe it’s the same lightning.”
“He’s in jail,” Gus said. “He’ll be there for a long time.”
“Maybe he has friends. Or maybe we’re just unlucky.”
“You may have a point.” George shuddered. February had been rough on him.
“Impossible,” Mike said. “We need to look at our practices. We need to stop giving verbal orders. We need to improve monitoring. We should round on the patients more often—in every case the patient appeared stable. They were left unattended, and then found dead. If we monitored them correctly, we may be able to detect changes before it’s too late.”
“We need to improve the pharmacy security,” Sal said. “Right now, it’s easy for anybody to take meds arriving by tube for somebody else. They can just grab and use them. People can even take medications out of the locked drawers without signing for them.”
“Who can do that?” the quality director asked.
“Anyone passing by the tube system,” Sal said. “Especially the nurses. They can get into the med room. The pharmacists too. The pharmacy techs, who refill the meds.”
“So, then what happens to the meds? They get given to the wrong patients or in the wrong amount. You’re getting back to the idea of a killer,” Carlos said.
“That’s impossible. Nobody in my ED would do something of the kind.” Mike turned red, his jaw muscle twitching.
He’s about to blow up. Why is he so angry? Because it’s his ED. His ED has to be perfect. Nothing bad can happen in it.
“What do we do?” Gus, the VPM, asked.
“How about speaking to the police?” the quality director said.
“NO!” Mike, Gus, and the lawyer chorused.
“Absolutely not!” the lawyer said. “That would be a disaster. Everybody who ever died here would sue us. Their families, I mean. Our reputation would be destroyed. People would be afraid to come here. They’d say we’re crawling with serial killers. We’d go bankrupt!”
Gus agreed.
“We’ll investigate. We’ll create a special committee to research these cases and evaluate the systems. It has to be somebody who’s not involved with any of the cases, of course. That excludes you, Emma; also Sal, George, and Carlos. Mike, Lola, and I will look at it.”
“Who’s Lola?” Emma asked.
“I am.” The lawyer’s mouth was a thin line. She didn’t look pleased.
She doesn’t know how anything works. She knows nothing about medicine. That’s going to be a hit.
Emma shrugged. Not like she needed any more work, but she was going to investigate herself. She had already started. She hadn’t found much, except that both Carlos and George were involved with two of the cases. A coincidence, but they were both a little off, lately. George mourned Mary and Carlos missed Faith. Still… she had to start somewhere. She’d check the schedule to see if they were working during any of the other cases. It would be nice to rule them out. And then? She had no idea. She’d make it up, as usual. The good news: her month was almost over.
One way or another, I’ll be done soon.
46
Taylor woke up early that morning. Something felt odd. Somebody’s watching me. She looked around. Nothing. Just her old bedroom, with the grass lamp, the starfish comforter, and the orange rocker in the corner. She rolled on her other side and went back to sleep.
Somebody’s watching me.
She was in her room, alone. She was losing it. She sat up and rubbed her eyes, looking for her Crocs with her feet.
Something touched her. She jumped. A dog. A big dark dog. Staring at her.
Really?
Yep. Really. He lay there at the foot of the bed, staring at her. She stared back.
The dog didn’t blink. This was a serious dog. A police dog? How did it get in the house? What was it doing there?
M
other said she was getting a dog. She did.
She’d been gone the whole day. She had a shift today—she kept a copy of her godforsaken schedule on the fridge. Somehow, in between, she had acquired this animal. Then she’d gone to work and left the dog for Taylor to deal with.
Taylor loved Thelma and Louise. She’d grown up with them. They were cute and cuddly, even though they yapped a lot. But this dog was different. It acted like a person.
Oh well. It’s Mother’s problem.
Taylor found her Crocs. She went to get something to eat. Now that her morning sickness was over, she was always starved. Thankfully, she was slim and burned calories like crazy. Still, she felt like a hippopotamus. She was getting slower and thicker, but she was still always hungry.
She opened the fridge. Mustard, ketchup, mayo, milk. Like really? Not even eggs? How’s a growing woman supposed to handle this?
She found a box of Cheerios. That would have to do. Lunch looked like a losing proposition unless she got her ass out to do some shopping.
Where’s the new you? The new you who’ll get a job, grow up, and become responsible?
Taylor flipped the bird to that thought. She grabbed the Cheerios and a box of Oreos. She poured Cheerios, lots of sugar, and milk in a bowl and grabbed a spoon. She dropped on the sofa and turned on the TV.
The dog sat in front of her, staring. His head obstructed the screen.
“What?” Taylor said.
The dog gurgled. It wasn’t a bark and it wasn’t a growl.
“What do you want?”
The dog gurgled again, staring at her bowl.
He’s hungry. We have no dog food. We have no food, period. Thanks, Mom!
“We have no dog food,” she informed him. She took a spoon of Cheerios.
The dog gurgled again. Staring her in the face, the dog clearly demanded to eat.
“Don’t you get it? We have no…” The dog looked at her bowl like Taylor would look at a fudge Sunday.
He wants my Cheerios. Dogs don’t eat people food!
She lifted the spoon to her mouth. The dog drooled, watching its progression like it was the Olympics. Taylor opened her mouth. She closed it.
