Graveyard Shift

by Melissa Yi

  "CT head negative. Lots of bruises, including marks on the throat like near-strangling. Her urine is clear. Pregnancy negative. Stable vitals." I listed them all, belatedly.

  "If it's only a single system, she should go direct to plastics. Call back after 8 a.m." Plastics was lucky because they got to sleep in. Of course, calling them after 0800 would delay my own departure in the morning, but no one cared about that. He added, "Don’t forget the sexual assault team, if needed."

  "She denied sexual assault, and most injuries seemed to centre around her head and neck. Hang on. Did you work on Patrick, the gun shot wound to the neck?"

  He paused, not hanging up but not giving anything away, either.

  "He was the security guard at St. Joe’s, and the boyfriend of this patient, Alyssa Taylor. I’m about to go see her." My throat caught again, but I managed to keep going after one hitch. "Is there anything else you can tell me about his case? She doesn’t know what’s going on."

  "Ah...I don’t know if I’m supposed to disclose anything to the family. She’s not next of kin, right?"

  "I don’t think so." I cursed myself for taking the wrong lead after they’d already warned me that Alyssa probably wasn’t next of kin.

  "Yeah. Um, look. It sucks, but I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it. It’s a criminal case. The police were here."

  "Here, too." I closed my eyes. Going by the book meant shutting me out. Delegating me out.

  "Right. So sorry, okay?"

  "Okay. Thanks. ‘Bye." I hung up. Patient confidentiality 1, Hope zero.

  My throat convulsed. More coughing. I darted toward the kitchen/break room to gulp down some water. I couldn’t risk imitating pertussis in the middle of my history or physical exam. Someone had brought in a bag of butterscotch candies, so I popped one in my mouth, willing my vocal cords to relax.

  The break room placed me in the same corner of the ER as bed number 13, where Alyssa had returned from her CT head. I ought to give her the results of her CT, right? That was part of patient care. She’d want to know about her brain scan.

  And about Patrick, if she didn’t already know.

  I slipped behind her curtain without drawing it open. Ideally, Dr. Dupuis wouldn’t detect my shadowy form behind the drape. I left my WOW inside the break room so I could slide in and out faster. The WOW would annoy any nurses who wanted coffee, but I aimed for a quick, covert visit.

  "Alyssa," I whispered, as my eyes adjusted to the twilight colour of the room. Although they’d turned off the lights in patient rooms, the nursing station continued to emit a fair amount of wattage. "Ms. Taylor."

  I had to suppress another cough, so I rolled the candy in my mouth, urging my body to produce more saliva while I gathered my bearings. The lump of her body didn’t stir. Her breathing came deep and even, stuttering occasionally on mucous or blood.

  She was still wearing her C-collar, but she’d fallen asleep.

  Not exactly surprising around 4 a.m., especially after I'd helped knock her out with Ativan, but still disappointing.

  "Hi, Alyssa," I said, more loudly. Although no one wanted to be yelled awake, I couldn’t sneak up on a woman who’d been assaulted.

  Her bruised eyes stayed closed. Her breathing didn’t alter.

  I yearned to tap her shoulder or stomp my feet. I could use the excuse that I’d check her neuro vitals, ensuring that her pupils were equal and that she was oriented. But her nurse had already checked them half an hour ago and found them normal. She wasn’t due for a neuro check for another 30 minutes.

  No, I’d stick to informing her about her CT results.

  I whispered now, "Alyssa."

  She didn't stir.

  "Hey. I wanted to tell you that your CT head is normal, and your neck X-rays look great. So if I examine your neck now and you don't have any more pain, and your neurological exam is normal, I can take off your neck collar, which will make you more comfortable." I touched her hand. "You feel that?"

  No response.

  "Alyssa?"

  She exhaled.

  "You have multiple facial fractures. I’m sending you to plastic surgery in the morning. We should sew up your ear."

  She gave a faint snore.

  I could force her to wake up. I'd pried open patients' eyelids before. But my friend Ginger said that when they rounded at Sick Kids' Hospital, they believed in the healing power of sleep. That meant they only rounded when the patients were awake. So they disrupted their own schedules for the sake of letting the kids get some more shut eye, because they prioritized children’s health.

  And, in truth, I didn't know exactly how to respond if she asked about Patrick. I could outline the code here and tell her he’d gone to UC. I could say we’d done everything, but it wasn’t enough. He hadn’t made it.

  Except—was it even legal for me to disclose his death? Everyone kept telling me to stay mum.

  Delegate.

  Leave it to the police.

  So I tiptoed out of the room without turning on the light or trying harder to wake her or pry any answers out of her.

  Later, I would regret this.

  In the meantime, I had to hurry through more patients, pretending to keep pace with God. I rolled my WOW out of the break room before a nurse laid a curse on my firstborn.

  As I crossed the ER toward room 1, on the ambulatory side, I scanned for Julie, Jason’s mother.

  Orderlies did a lot of work, some of it invisible to me as I buzzed from patient to patient. They kept the ER running smoothly, whether they were called health care attendants, personal support workers, or in Montreal, preposés. (They got an extra e, as in préposées, if they were female.)

  Préposés performed electrocardiograms. They could apply splints and assist with casting fractures, if they received extra training and the hospital allowed it. They wheeled patients to and from X-ray. They ran blood and urine samples and, yep, throat cultures up to the lab.

  During a Code Blue, they often pounded on the chest, doing CPR. During a Code White, they held down the Lori Goodys until we strapped them to the bed for chemical sedation. They stocked the procedure carts to prevent me hunting for the 1.5 inch 25 gauge needle every. Single. Time.

  Plus they performed a lot of work that the patients found more healing than the blood tests I ordered: they handed out lunch trays, they helped bathe, they assisted people to and from the bathroom, and they’d fix a diaper.

  So as I started my next round of patients, I didn’t raise an eyebrow over Julie’s disappearance. Maybe she was a "float," moving to different hospital wards overnight, meaning that the ER would only get her occasionally.

  However, after I finished FATIGUE and BACK PAIN with no sign of Julie, my throat dried up, and my teeth seemed to ache from the butterscotch.

  Where did she go? No break lasted that long, post cutbacks.

  Everyone seemed to evaporate tonight.

  Ryan had gone AWOL.

  Tucker had decamped after him. According to my Finding Friends App, he’d landed somewhere in Ottawa, nowhere near Ryan's apartment or his parents’ house. But for whatever reason, Tucker had stopped answering my texts.

  Patrick had left the ER and gotten shot in the throat.

  I had almost disappeared, if two guys in the parking lot had gotten their way.

  It seemed like people kept vanishing tonight. I felt like Roxy, the worried Rottweiler: if I couldn't see them, if they weren't in my immediate radius, I couldn't concentrate on sore ears and bloody bums.

  My pack might be in danger. Saint Hope must rush in to save them, barking the entire time!

  Who else would vaporize next?

  18

  "Where's Julie?" I asked Andrea, joining her at the nursing station after I finished reviewing my cases with Dr. Dupuis.

  Andrea shook her head, tucking her thick, brown hair behind one ear. "I haven’t seen her lately. Roxanne had to run up to the lab herself. We paged Julie, but—"

  "How long has she been missing?"


  Andrea frowned at me. "I wouldn’t say she’s missing. We haven’t seen her recently, and she didn’t answer her phone, but you know how the system cuts out. It wasn’t urgent enough for us to page her overhead at night. Roxanne didn’t mind running up."

  We avoided unnecessary paging over the loudspeaker at night because it would rouse the patients, but c’mon, this ain’t no ordinary night shift. I said, "She told me that her ex had a run-in with Patrick, and Patrick was shot tonight."

  Andrea clapped a hand to her mouth before she caught herself, glancing side to side to check if anyone else had noticed. "You think—you’re worried that—"

  "I don’t know anything for sure. Dr. Dupuis remembered her ex in custody two years ago. Does anyone know if he’s still in jail, or if he served his time and got free?"

  Andrea shook her head. "No one told me. You think Julie’s ex-boyfriend might have been the one...dear God."

  No use asking her Jesse’s last name, then. Poor Andrea, so innocent. I scanned the ER, wondering who might spill. Not Amber, the new hire fresh out of nursing school. I needed someone who’d signed up for St. Joe’s at least two years ago, and who cared about the staff enough to ask about their families. I still wanted to follow up on Jason and make sure that he was okay too.

  I’d text Tucker yet again. I might have to resort to Roxanne, but there were other nurses. Linda was the right age, although we’d hardly spoken apart from the "not my first rodeo" debacle. If Dr. Chia woke up, she might help me too.

  In the meantime, I turned back to Andrea. "Look. I don’t want to worry anyone, but I’m concerned because Julie gave me that information and went poof on the same night that Patrick was killed. If we knew where she was, I could ask her myself. It’s a two-fer, making sure that she’s okay and checking whether or not her ex is a suspect in shooting Patrick."

  Andrea’s hands knotted. She forced herself to relax them. "Julie has to be okay."

  "Can you help me find her?"

  Andrea nodded. "I’m going on break in the next ten minutes. I’ll find her." Dr. Dupuis had glanced over his shoulder at the two of us. She said, "You have to get back to work. Leave this with me."

  She, too, wanted me to delegate.

  I gnashed my teeth for a second, but Tucker had joked about Buffy the Vampire Slayers and her "Scoobies," which meant her investigative team. It also sort of meant her underlings, but anyway. Andrea wanted to take on this piece, and I couldn’t press pause on work for more than two minutes without attracting the evil eye.

  "I’ve known Julie for three years. I’ll find her," said Andrea. "Go."

  I fielded a UTI (yes, a urinary tract infection with frequency, dysuria, and no hematuria, oh my) with Macrobid, one of my personal favourites because it killed 98 percent of E. Coli on the antibiogram. Then I managed a COUGH and an ASTHMA before I snuck in a quick Google.

  I couldn’t find anything solid on Jesse. They withheld perpetrators’ names in child abuse cases in order to protect the children’s identity, and unfortunately, beating a three-year-old wasn’t a scandalous enough case to create headlines two years later.

  Was the guy still in jail or not?

  This was when I could use a buddy on the police force, like the private eyes in any good detective novel. Unfortunately, only one, Officer Visser, had seemed friendly, but never so cozy as to pass on her cell phone number. Even if she had, I couldn’t risk waking her up to inquire about a child beating two years ago.

  I decided to reverse-engineer the problem and take a gander at Patrick instead. What if the good guard had made some headlines himself?

  Reader, I Googled him.

  A search for Patrick Warren yielded all sorts of false results because it was two first names. Even deliberate quotes around "Patrick Warren" brought up the wrong people, including a famous musician-producer and a truly sad case of a "milk carton kid" who'd disappeared in 1996.

  I tried to filter results by geographic area before I gave up and pulled out my phone to check social media. I mostly only used Insta, Messenger, and WhatsApp to communicate with a few friends who’d semi-abandoned their e-mails, but I kept up a nominal social media presence. Patrick and I might have friends of friends in common.

  The first thing I noticed was that Patrick had abandoned his personal Twitter account five years ago after Tweeting a few articles on police safety and gun control. He seemed more active on Instagram, where his handle was @policeur.

  I frowned. Policeur was a play on police, and he'd used an "eur" ending because it was French-sounding. Patrick had mostly liked #police photos, including pictures of a curvy brunette in uniform, a K-9 staring out of a barred police car window, and a movie-worthy shot of five men in front of an explosion, hashtags #operacoesespeciais #bombsquad.

  In other words, Patrick idolized police officers.

  So why did he join the security guards instead of the police force?

  Maybe the guard work was a preamble, padding his résumé before he applied. But when I searched, the path to policehood in Quebec seemed pretty simple: he'd go to CÉGEP, which was a sort of pre-university or technical college for all Quebecers, and choose three years of police technology. Then it was 15 weeks at l'École nationale de police du Québec. He'd pass their exams, apply to a police force, and boom.

  One reporter mentioned how few people of colour joined the police: out of 250 new cadets, only 7 described themselves as visible minorities.

  "We don't have control over the people who apply," an officer said. Another added that immigrant parents discouraged their kids from joining their force.

  I shook my head at these typical Quebec comments: there might be some truth to them, but they never recognized their own instinct to blame the people who didn’t apply instead of considering ways to make their program more hospitable.

  I glanced at a few more articles about how, at the moment, the police aggressively recruited every race and gender.

  Even more reason for @policeur to join their ranks. Surely the income, the job security, and the benefits would galvanize a security guard. I couldn't come up with any good reason to stick to the hospital except that Patrick and Alyssa rented an apartment next door. You could always find another apartment in Montreal.

  Who could spill the beans (dark roast!) on Patrick Warren? Charles Packard hadn’t seemed chatty, but maybe he’d thaw at end of shift. I’d wake up Alyssa before 8 a.m. And I'd keep inquiring around the ER if God didn’t notice. Or maybe, best of all...

  Yes! After I handled a VIRAL ILLNESS and another COUGH, I caught sight of two men in uniform, wearing blue shirts and navy pants.

  The remaining two guards patrolling the hospital had finally made it to the ER, cutting through the nursing station.

  I rushed toward a 20-something blond guy with freckles and longish hair who looked more like he should be playing air guitar than defending the hospital. Well, I hurried as fast as my WOW would allow. If Dr. Dupuis spotted us, I could pretend our convo was medicine-related or start tapping on my keyboard.

  "Hey," I said to the guard.

  "Hey." His hospital badge named him Michel Raynaud. He glanced at his partner behind him, a fiftyish, six foot tall, stocky white guy who nodded at me, and whose name seemed to be David Miller. I'd glimpsed David guarding the front doors earlier tonight.

  "My name is Hope Sze. I'm one of the emergency doctors. So sorry to hear about Patrick."

  "Yeah," said Michel. He checked David Miller, who nodded at me, but didn't speak. Clearly a strong, silent type.

  I focused on Michel. Of the two, he’d actually spoken to me. A better omen. "Did you see Patrick tonight, before he was...attacked?"

  Michel opened his mouth, but David replied first. "We were doing rounds."

  "Yes, I heard Patrick was doing rounds too. That's why he was in the parking lot. How many guards are usually working at the same time?"

  "We got three right now," said David.

  "But normally you’d have four? If Patrick hadn
’t been—" My cheeks flushed. Everyone told me I was too blunt when I questioned people, but my minimal reserves of tact deserted me in the wee hours of the morning. "I mean, your normal team is four?"

  Michel shifted from foot to foot and glanced at Roxanne, who stood at stretcher 6, but whose gaze pierced us through the Plexiglass window. Dr. Dupuis wasn’t the only one watching me.

  "It’s supposed to be the two of you, Patrick, and Charles Packard tonight?" I asked.

  At long last, Michel nodded.

  Phew. A tiny breakthrough. "Are you calling someone in to replace Patrick?" If so, I had one more potential interview candidate.

  "The boss is taking care of it." David laid his hand on the steel baton clipped to his belt.

  "The boss" must mean Charles, but my eyes rested on the collapsible baton. I bet it extended as long as a light sabre. Brute force and a longer arc would make it a formidable weapon.

  Beside it hung a second weapon. I was surprised that security guards wore tasers as well as batons on their belts. Weren't those for police officers?

  "I didn't know you had tasers." I couldn’t remember if guards carried tasers at the hospitals in London, Ontario, where I'd gone to medical school. I never used to pay attention to that sort of thing, but ever since 14/11, I'd studied up on guns, ammo, and weapons in general as a forewarned/forearmed mechanism. "Did you always have them?"

  David nodded. "For the past two months."

  I sucked the breath between my teeth. Two months ago was November. After the hostage taking, St. Joe's had made a big to-do about installing a metal detector at the main entrance and at the ER entrance, as well as increasing the number of security guards. They’d obviously added to the guards’ weaponry as well. That was good, but I hated any reference to 14/11 that caught me unawares.

  Michel read my expression and glanced uncertainly at David, who waved farewell at me. Michel nodded, and they swivelled toward the doors beside the old light boxes.

  "Hang on." I scrambled to pick one last and most important question. "Did you know anyone who had a grudge against Patrick? Who might have wanted to hurt him?"