by Callie Hart
I don’t take her hand.
“No. Not the hospital. I’m not going there.”
I’m not gonna risk seeing Sloane again. Not until I hear the truth come out of Charlie’s mouth. Even if I have to beat it out of him.
I will learn the truth.
"Ten CCs of epinephrine. Call ahead to the O.R, let them know we're coming up."
"Yeah, I…I got it."
I look up and the skinny intern with the bad haircut is still standing there, staring at the guy bleeding out on the gurney in front of him. The guy I'm buried wrist deep inside. "What are you waiting for? RUN!"
The fresh intake of interns is always a nightmare. They're so green they’re absolutely no use to anyone, and yet in between people severing their limbs in car crashes, people getting shot, and the world falling down around our heads, we are supposed to teach them how to fix people. I'm supposed to teach them, which is insane because I've only just learned how to do all of this myself.
"He's crashing, doctor. Adrenaline?" the nurse asks. Adrenaline is the last thing this guy needs. His heart is already near spent as it is. What he needs is the gaping hole in his stomach to be repaired. God knows how many of his internal organs are shredded in there. I'm not going to know until I can open him up properly and clear out all of the blood. Right now, I can't tell a damn thing other than the fact that this guy is going to die unless we do something. And soon.
"Let's just get him in the elevator," I tell the female nurse. She nods, unlocks the gurney wheels, and is barking orders at her team without even blinking. Grace is a pro. She'd probably be able to save this guy all on her own if she had to. Half the nurses in this hospital probably could if push came to shove. They’re all massively undervalued, underpaid, and overworked.
Bodies hustle as we guide the gurney to the elevator, my hands still lodged inside the patient. I'm bouncing on the balls of my feet while we watch the numbers count down. I'm not fazed by elevators anymore; too many trips like this have desensitised me to the cramped space. The hospital's only four storeys high and yet it seems to take an eternity for the damn doors to slide open. Eventually they part and then we’re racing against time again.
"Inside, inside! Move!" The intern I sent to warn the O.R., Mikey, I think he's called, makes it just in time to catch the doors. "They know we’re coming?"
"Yeah."
"He's coding, doctor." Grace tells me this as the heart rate and BP monitors start screaming. I pull my hands out of the guy and grab hold of Mikey.
"Hold him together."
Mikey looks like a rabbit in the headlights when I gesture to the patient's wound. "Wh—what do you mean?"
I take both his hands and place them where I need them. "I mean hold this guy’s fucking intestines inside his body!”
Mikey may or may not obey the command. I don't waste any more time. I lean as far as I can over the patient and start compressing his chest.
One, two, three, four, five…
The powers that be decided a while back that you don't need to give an arresting patient any breaths. Keeping the heart pumping is the number one priority here. Grace is on it, anyway. She starts bagging him, forcing regular gusts of oxygen into his lungs, and I grunt over my work.
The doors open again.
"Okay, let's move." I can't compress and run at the same time, so I hop up onto the foot rail at the bottom of the gurney and hitch a ride to the O.R. I used to see doctors do this back when I was as green as Mikey and I could never picture myself being composed enough to be that person. A lot has changed over the past four years, though.
Lex’s disappearance, trying to find her, has changed me so dramatically that I'm not the same person I was back then. I'm exactly the kind of person I need to be to excel at this instead. I'm cold. And calculating. I don't buckle under pressure. I get things done. It all started back in that hotel room. I traded a part of myself that night, sold or flat out extinguished a part of myself that would only have prevented me from doing what had to be done.
The very first surgery I performed was on my self; I'd carved out my weakness with a rusty scalpel and revelled in the glorious void that had remained afterward.
The nursing team are already waiting by the time we reach O.R. three. I've been keeping our as yet unidentified patient alive for two hundred fifteen seconds. Time is running out. Dr Massey is scrubbed and ready to go when we reach the sterile anteroom between the corridor and the O.R. Massey's good, a gun with trauma. I'm so relieved I almost grin when I see his face.
"No ID, MVA, unknown internal injuries. BP tanked between ground floor and level two." Massey nods, face already obscured behind his mask, but his eyes are steady. They say he's got this.
"Go scrub, then get your ass in here. This looks like a job for two pairs of hands." The O.R. nurses take charge of the gurney and disappear through the double doors with my patient. My patient. When you've had your hands inside a person, whether they live or die, they become your responsibility.
"Hot damn." Mikey is standing next to me, blood mottling the latex of his gloves and soaking his scrubs. It looks like he just went on a killing spree. "That was intense."
"That was sloppy," I correct him. "You can't freeze like that, Mikey. Your hesitancy could cost someone their life." I feel like I've just kicked a puppy. Mikey’s probably only three years younger than me but in our reality, three years’ worth of experience is a lifetime. Him giving me the sad eye treatment isn’t going to earn him an easy ride with me, though. We aren’t allowed feelings like remorse. Remorse means we did something wrong, or we didn’t do enough. There’s no room for wrong or not enough in this hospital.
"Are you going to save him?” Mikey asks.
Can I do it? Can I do for this patient what I couldn’t do for my own sister? I tell Mikey the same thing I tell myself each morning before I even step foot inside the hospital.
"I'm gonna try. I’m gonna do my best."
******
We lose him.
Sometimes, no matter how much blood, sweat and tears you pour into someone, your best just isn't good enough. Gary Saunders, twenty-seven, bleeds out on the table, while Dr Massey and I battle to save him. His internal organs were minced, though, and sometimes that's all there is to it. I've learned to accept outcomes like this; I feel no guilt. I'm a human being, capable of only so much. People forget when they walk through these doors that they're putting their trust in mere mortals. I'm not God. I'm not even close to a miracle worker. Some days there are people you can save and those are the lucky days. The good days that make it feel like the sun is shining that little bit brighter. But then there are shitty days, too. Days like today.
I'm in charge of telling Gary's pregnant wife that he’s dead. I get landed with this job a lot; my colleagues think I have a skill for breaking terrible news, when really I’m just the same as any of them. It still hurts like hell. The difference between me and them is that I can distance myself from the pain. I'm an expert at distancing myself from pain. If it were an Olympic sport, I'd be a gold medallist. I head to the family room and knock quietly at the door. Inside a brunette woman with a swollen belly twists in her seat, and my stomach bottoms out. The chart I’ve been carrying crashes on the floor.
"Lex? Alexis?" I realize it's not her a split-second after the name tumbles out of my mouth. Confusion flickers across the woman's face. "I'm sorry, I—“
This woman is older than Lex would be now. Her eyes aren't the same shade of brown—slightly lighter, almost hazel. She frowns at me. "Do I know you?"
"No, no. Sorry. For a moment I thought you were someone else."
“That's okay. I'm just glad to see another member of the human race. I've been waiting here for hours. No one’ll tell me anything. Can I go see Gary now? He's going to be so mad if he has to miss work. He’s never taken a sick day in his life." She's rambling. The smile makes a lot of sense—she's plastered it on to keep from crying alone in an unfamiliar, strange room. She can act as easy b
reezy as she wants, though. She knows. Or she at least suspects.
“I'm sorry, Mrs Saunders, could I sit with you for a moment?" Her smile disintegrates. When she slumps back into her seat, she's already entered the first stages of grief: denial.
"No. No, they said he was going to be fine. There must have been a mistake. Please can you go and make sure you're supposed to be here?"
I'm the Grim Reaper. I may as well be the embodiment of death to these people. My face is one they will forever associate with the worst news they are ever likely to receive. "I'm so sorry, Mrs Saunders. I’m sorry but it’s true. I am supposed to be here. Gary…he didn't make it."
Charlie left England back in the eighties but thirty years hasn't dampened his cockney accent. It took me a long time to figure out what the hell he was saying when I first met him but now I understand him perfectly.
"D'you need me to clear out your ears for you, boy? I ‘ate ‘avin’ to repeat myself. My import, export business ain’t none of your concern.”
Sitting behind his imposing monstrosity of a desk, it's easy to see how he scares the crap out of the younger guys. Even the older guys. He looks like a pumped-up Robert De Niro, except his presence is far more intense. He’s in his late sixties but the guy still fucks anything that moves, still snorts anything vaguely white and powdery, and still kills anybody who looks at him sideways. He brought me into this world of violence, though, so it's not in me to be intimidated by him.
It's been three weeks since Frankie. Three weeks since I had a slug tweezered out of my shoulder by some bumbling moron who was too scared to even look me in the eye. Three weeks that I’ve had to recover and do a little snooping.
"I didn't even know you had an import, export business, Charlie. Thought you bought your product from the Russians. Mexicans when you had to?"
He opens the drawer to his desk and pulls out a small wooden box with a fleur-de-lis engraved into the lid. That box is a childhood relic to me. Charlie used to sit me on his knee and teach me how to roll smokes for him; he's always kept his stash in that box. He hasn’t asked me to roll for him since I was ten, though, twenty-three whole years ago.
"I'm sure there's plenty of things about my business you are not privy to, Zeth. That's not your fault, I know. When I took you under my wing, I watched you for years thinking to myself, where will this small boy fit best into my organisation when he sprouts hairs on his balls? I watched and I took note.
"If you’d displayed even the slightest scrap of business sense, I would’a had you involved in that side of things and you'd know all about my side projects. Everything else pertainin’ therein. But that's not what I saw in you, Zeth, is it? I saw that you were a savage little shit wiv a nasty temper and I found other uses for you. Other uses that have funded your escapades for quite some time now."
The message is more than clear—don't bite the hand that feeds you. Charlie’s always liked messages. Don't shit where you eat. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. You get the picture. "I appreciate everything you've done for me, Charlie. You know that's not what this is about."
He finishes rolling his smoke. He pops it into his mouth and then purses his lips, drawing it out and sealing the handmade. When he lights it, I can smell the sickly sweet stink of the Mary Jane he laces his tobacco with. He holds the smoke in his lungs before exhaling, fixing me with razor sharp, ice blue eyes. "Then what exactly is this about?"
"It's about girls. Kidnapping and selling girls, taking them from their homes."
"I never had you pegged as the sentimental type, Zeth.”
"Not sentimental. Just not a monster."
That puts a shit-eating grin on his face. "We both know you are, in fact, a monster."
Maybe that's true, but even I have boundaries. Selling girls for sex is most definitely crossing the line in my book. "Just tell me the truth. Was Frankie for real when he said you had a fucking shipping container of dead girls roll into harbour?"
Charlie plucks a flake of tobacco from his time. Flicks it away. "If you insist on knowing the truth, then yes, okay. Seventeen dead Mexicans. I had to pay off the port authority to make them disappear. Very messy business."
Even though I'd known it was true before he'd confirmed it, a small part of me had hoped otherwise. I explode out of my chair; it kicks back and falls to the floor with a clatter. Charlie watches my reaction with a blank expression.
"You fucking lied to me."
"Am I beholden to you, Zeth?” He asks me so calmly.
I clench my jaw. "No."
"Do I owe you anything at all?"
"No."
"Then why do you presume that I would bow and scrape to your crazy questioning? You weren’t right in the ‘ead when you asked me 'bout the girls last time. You had that fucked up…” he waves his hand in my general direction, grimacing, "…bloodlust in your eyes that you only get when you've got something stuck up your ass."
"You had a girl kidnapped. A girl from Seattle, two and a half years ago. Where is she now?" I brace myself by my fingertips against Charlie's desk. I'm doing everything in my power to hold back the wild creature that’s just begging to mess him up. Charlie smiles a benevolent smile, like my anger is endearing. Like I'm a puppy simply baring his teeth. Fucker.
"I don't take Americans. And I don't shit where I eat, you know that."
See.
“I thought I knew a lot of things about you, but looks like I was wrong.”
“What d’you care ‘bout some fuckin’ kid that got snatched two and a half years ago, anyway?” He flicks his cigarette into the crystal ashtray, so big it’s almost the centrepiece of his desk.
“She doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“But she means something to someone else, right? That little slut you been shacked up wiv the past little while?”
He knows about Lacey but he’s never mentioned her before. She’s too far below him to be even on his radar most days. “No. This has got nothing to do with her.”
Charlie grunts. “Well, either way, I can’t help you, son. I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout some missin’ hooker. I’d forget all about ‘er if I were you. Sounds to me like you bin carrying this ‘round wiv you the past two years. You carry it ‘round much longer, I think maybe you and I are gonna develop a little bit of a problem.”
I tilt my head to one side, considering the dangerous look on Charlie’s face. We’ve already developed a problem; he just doesn’t know it yet.
******
I’ve got fifteen minutes to get home before Lacey officially freaks the fuck out. I’ve been gone all day today waiting to speak to Charlie, the first time since Frankie laid me up with a gunshot wound, and my co-dependant houseguest became even more co-dependant during that time. Like, forget the co. She’s just dependant. I’m only just starting to graze the surface on the girl’s backstory. She’s already told me some dark shit that went down in her household as a kid, but I know there’s more. She had it way worse than me. Fucked as it may sound to me now, she didn’t get lucky like I did. Charlie is a hateful, vengeful, evil son of a bitch every day of the week that ends in a Y, but he saved me. I’d literally be dead right now if he hadn’t have taken me from my uncle when I was six.
You really know your problems are bad when you wish a psychotic, drug-pushing Englishman had come to your rescue as an impressionable youth. I don’t know if Lace does wish for that, though. I just know she gets fucking crazy when I leave the warehouse for too long. If this version of me right now could go back in time, say, fifteen months and have a conversation with the me from that time, I think past me might shank current me in the ribs for going so damn soft. I mean, shit. I’m rushing home for a woman. And I’m not even fucking her.
Her phone keeps on ringing out every time I call, and that makes my palms sweat like a rapist sent down the line at Chino. I did a stint in Chino one time; let’s just say I saw first hand what happens to guys who force themselves on others. Women, kids, animals, doesn’t matter. A rapis
t in a prison like that is a man living on borrowed time.
“Come on, fuck, Lacey. Pick up the goddamn phone.” She doesn’t pick up the phone. I break every speed limit and run every red on my way home, gunning the Camaro’s engine to the hilt. It’s raining when I finally arrive. The warehouse is a two-storey fortress, silhouetted and daunting in the storm-colored evening. The huge steel doorway, covered in blistered red paint, is still locked and chained like I left it, but Lace has a key. She could have left if she wanted to. The thumping music coming from inside tells me she hasn’t gone anywhere, though. Maybe that’s why she didn’t hear her phone.
Hope. Hope is a nasty little bitch.
I know I’ve fucked up as soon as I step foot through the door. The place is trashed. Broken furniture lay discarded like kindling on the floor; the TV is smashed but still works well enough to produce skull-splitting white noise and a fuzzy, distorted screen. There are shattered beer bottles all over the place and clothes absolutely everywhere, both mine and Lacey’s. Shit.
“Lacey! LACE, WHAT THE FUCK?” I roar. I charge from the main living space through into my bedroom—she hides in my bed sometimes when she’s really struggling. I’m never in it, you feel, but sometimes she says it makes her feel safe. She’s not in my bed, however. And not in hers, either. It’s full blown panic stations when I find her in the bathroom.
She’s gone and done it a-fucking-gain.
Her skin is almost blue this time. Her body floats fully stretched out in the water filling the tub, which is a deeply offensive shade of crimson. I jump in feet first, dragging her limp body out with me. She weighs nothing at all, so lifeless in my arms.
“Fuck you, Lacey. Fucking fuck you.”
Her wrists are a mangled mess. I wrap her up in her duvet and dump her ass in the passenger seat of the Camaro, and then I drive. I drive her to the one place on the face of this planet I really don’t want to go. The place I chose not to go when I was in trouble myself—St. Peter’s Mission of Mercy Hospital.
