Working Stiff

by Annelise Ryan

  His eyes narrow and he takes a step back. “Deals? I’m not sure what you mean by that.” He looks over his shoulder with a tense, wary expression, as if he thinks someone might be trying to sneak up on him.

  “One of the surgeons told us about it. Dr. Arthur Henley?”

  I watch closely for a reaction, but all he does is look over his shoulder again. As he does so, I notice a dark, bluish colored blotch on his neck and recognize it immediately—Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic form of cancer commonly found in AIDS patients. That explains his gaunt appearance. As I study his profile, I am again struck by the thought that something about him seems familiar and I wonder if he might have been a patient of mine in the past. This feeling of déjà vu is strong enough that I finally ask, “Have we met before?”

  He looks back at me with an expression of surprise, then shakes his head. “No, I don’t think so. And I’m afraid I can’t help you.” He turns and disappears back through the metal door, letting it close behind him. I stand there, stunned by his abrupt dismissal and wondering if I should follow him into the back to pursue the matter. Then I think that maybe instead I should take advantage of his departure by having another look at the stuff on the desk. I shift nervously from one foot to the other, wondering if he might return and debating how brave I am.

  I can hear muffled voices emanating from the back, letting me know the man isn’t alone. While I can’t hear any specific words or even tell for sure what gender the voices are, the overall tone is one of strident discord, suggesting an argument of some sort. Curious, I move closer to the big metal door, craning my ear toward it as if that will somehow help the sound waves come through it better. I keep an eye on the front door; if someone comes strolling in, I don’t want to get caught eavesdropping. Doing it is one thing. Getting caught doing it is something else altogether.

  As soon as I reach the door, everything in the back grows quiet. I wait several minutes and when nothing happens, I turn my attention back to the desks. I scan a pile of papers on top of the closest one and see that it is a stack of invoices, though there appear to be some different papers beneath them. Giving the front door another cursory glance, I reach over and push the invoices to one side. Just as I touch them, the phone on the desk rings with a harsh, shrill sound—not one of those modern, cricket-chirping rings—and between it and my guilt-edged nerves, I nearly jump out of my skin.

  I back away from the desk quickly and stand a safe distance away, trying to make my heart settle down. A button on the phone flashes on and off as the thing rings and rings and rings. Somewhere around the fifth ring I start to count, making it to fifteen before the phone turns quiet and the flashing button goes dark.

  It strikes me as odd that no one answered the call…. Odd and a bit spooky. I start to get a feeling that something isn’t right and cautiously make my way back to the metal door. I put my ear to the surface but can’t hear a thing. After a moment of debate, I grab the handle, depress the thumb latch, and slowly push the door open.

  The room extends back about a hundred feet or so, the walls lined with shelves that hold every conceivable type of medical or personal care supply. In the middle of the room are groupings of hospital beds, wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and other pieces of large equipment. At the back of the room is another metal door, this one with a push-bar handle and a red EXIT sign overhead. Directly to my right, nestled in the corner, is a small glass-enclosed office. The lights are on and one of the drawers to a big metal filing cabinet is standing open, but there is no one in there. In fact, there is no one anywhere that I can see.

  “Hello?” I try. “Is anyone here?” Not so much as a whisper. Goose bumps raise along my arms.

  On the far side of the room I see another closed door located midway down the wall. There is a piece of paper taped to it and I move closer until I can make out what is written on it: REST ROOM. I breathe a sigh of relief as I realize the gaunt man is probably in the john. Knowing what I do about the effects of AIDS and its treatments, it isn’t a stretch to think he might have some physical problems that require a lot of bathroom time. I decide to wait a little longer but after another few minutes of the eerie silence, I can’t take any more. I move toward the bathroom door, intending to knock on it—courtesy be damned—but slow when something beneath it catches my eye.

  I gasp when I realize it is a pool of dark red blood that has oozed under the door from inside the bathroom and is now spreading its way across the floor. My nursing instincts kick in and I rush toward the door, trying to sidestep the gruesome puddle. I grab the doorknob and discover the door is locked.

  I knock loudly. “Hello? Sir? Are you okay in there?” I holler. I lean close and listen but hear nothing. I try again, this time pounding on the door with my fist. “Hello? Are you okay in there?” Still nothing. And the circle of red at my feet is growing. I study the doorknob, see one of those little holes you find on interior doors and realize I can get the thing unlocked if I can find something small enough to poke in there.

  I head to the corner office, search around and spy a container of paper clips. Grabbing one, I bend it out as straight as I can and hurry back to the bathroom, where I jam it into the hole in the doorknob. After groping around for several seconds I finally hear a click and turn the knob. The door opens only a few inches before meeting some sort of resistance. Pushing harder, I feel the tiniest bit of give and strengthen my efforts, eventually getting a wide enough space to stick my head into the room.

  And then wish I hadn’t.

  The gaunt fellow I saw earlier is, indeed, in the bathroom. Though to be honest, I can’t be 100 percent sure it is him since his face is badly misshapen and part of his head is missing. But the clothes, the overall physique, and the Kaposi’s sarcoma I can see on his neck suggest it is the same man. He is wedged between the toilet and the door, his head—or what’s left of it—is turned to one side and one leg is crunched up between the toilet and the wall. On the floor, in his right hand, is a gun. His index finger is loosely curled around the trigger.

  Aided by adrenaline, I push the door as hard as I can, shoving the man’s prostrate body through the slick pool of red that surrounds him until I can squeeze myself into the room. I kneel down and instinctively start to place my fingers along the carotid artery in his neck, but then I stop myself. There is no doubt this man is dead. His skin is dark and dusky and there is brain matter splattered on the floor and walls. And I suspect he might have AIDS.

  While I’ve seen some pretty gross things in my nursing career, and there aren’t many things that bother me anymore, something about this scene makes my stomach churn threateningly. Maybe it’s the close quarters, which seem to concentrate that awful, charnel smell. Or maybe it’s the sudden awareness that I am alone with this corpse, isolated and far from help. I stand, turning my head away from the body and toward the sink, feeling like I might throw up. Eventually the feeling passes and the clinical side of my brain takes over again.

  Reluctantly, I look back toward the body, trying to recall some of the things I have read in the office library or been told by Izzy regarding the assessment of a death scene. Too late, I realize I have already contaminated a fair amount of the evidence simply by entering the room and moving the body as much as I did to get through the door. Still, given what I can see, it seems pretty obvious that the man has committed suicide—stuck a gun to his head and blown a good part of it away.

  Carefully, hoping not to contaminate the scene any further, I work my way out of the room and head back to the small office, where I grab the phone off the desk and punch in 911.

  “9-1-1 operator. Do you have an emergency?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly an emergency,” I tell the woman. “But I have a dead man here.”

  “You have a dead man there?” she repeats, her voice shrill.

  “That’s right. He shot himself.”

  “Is this 2104 Callaway Road?”

  “Yes, I believe so. I’m at Halverson Medical Supply
.”

  “Um…may I have your name, please?”

  “Mattie. Mattie Winston.”

  “Okay, Mattie. Um…I will…I am dispatching police and emergency rescue to the scene and they should be there shortly. Um, let’s stay calm. Panic is our enemy.”

  So far, the only person who seems to be panicking is the operator. “I’m okay,” I tell her.

  “Okay…um…can you tell me the victim’s name?”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “Okay. Okay. Um…are you near the victim?”

  “Not really. He’s in a bathroom a little ways from here.”

  “Are you using a portable phone?”

  I am, and say so.

  “Okay. Good. Um…I want you to go back to the victim and listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. We’re going to render some first aid until the rescue team arrives, okay?” Her voice wavers as if she is about to burst into tears.

  “I really don’t think first aid will help at this point,” I tell her as I make my way back to the bathroom. I wince when I see the bloody footprints I’ve tracked across the floor. “He’s dead.”

  “Please,” she says. “Stay calm and listen to me. What you and I do in the next few minutes may save this man’s life.”

  I can hear the frantic rustling of papers in the background and figure it is her step-by-step CPR instructions. I sigh. “Pardon my bluntness, ma’am, but nothing you or I can do will save this man’s life. He is dead. Very dead.”

  “We can’t be sure of that,” she says quickly, her voice high and squeaky. “Sometimes people only look dead.”

  “No, I’m certain he’s dead. Totally and completely dead.” Some dark corner of my mind urges me to sing out in a Munchkin voice: “He’s really most sincerely dead.”

  “Now, please, don’t panic. Just do what I say. I want you to go to the man and look to see if he is breathing.”

  “Look, I’m a nurse. I know what I’m looking at here and this man—”

  “If he isn’t breathing, then you will need to give him artificial respiration, or mouth-to-mouth breathing. To do that, you first need to open his airway by tipping his head back. Place one hand beneath his chin and the other one on his forehead.”

  There is a rote quality to her voice that tells me she is reading what she’s saying. “You don’t understand,” I interrupt. “He—”

  “Then you need to tip his head back by lifting up under the chin and exerting downward pressure on the forehead. Then—”

  “Lady, he doesn’t have a forehead!” I say it a bit more abruptly than I mean to, but it is the only way I can think of to break through this woman’s automaton frame of mind.

  There is a moment of startled silence. Then, in a high, squeaky voice, “What did you say?”

  “I said he doesn’t have a forehead. Not much of one anyway.”

  “He doesn’t have a forehead?”

  I hear more papers rustling and stifle a bizarre urge to laugh. “I don’t think your instructions will tell you what to do if someone is missing a forehead,” I say calmly. I hear her swallow—a big, echoing gulp—followed by a little cough. “You’re kind of new at this, aren’t you?” I say.

  “Um, yeah. Is it that obvious?”

  “Probably not to everyone. But I spent several years working as a nurse in the ER, so I’m kind of jaded.”

  I hear a noise and turn to find a uniformed police officer standing in the doorway to the showroom. It is Brian Childs, one of the cops I know from working in the ER, and he looks wired and ready to jump. As soon as he sees me he relaxes a little, though his hand hovers close to the gun strapped to his side.

  “Mattie, hi,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  I nod. He looks around the room warily.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Far as I know,” I tell him, to which the 911 operator says, “Pardon me?”

  “Sorry, I was talking to an officer here.”

  “An officer is there?” She sounds greatly relieved.

  “Yes. Brian Childs.”

  “Okay. That’s good.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name?” She sounds shocked that I would ask such a thing. “It’s Jeannie. Why?”

  “I just wanted to know. Thanks for your help, Jeannie.”

  “I wasn’t very good, was I?”

  I realize then that she probably thinks I want her name so I can file a complaint about her. “You did fine, Jeannie. Honest. The first few times are always rough.”

  “I guess.”

  “Hey, someday I’ll tell you about a few things I bungled back when I first started working in the ER. It will make you look like a pro.”

  She lets forth with a nervous little laugh but I can tell her tension has eased some.

  “Look,” I say, seeing Brian signaling to me, “I need to talk to Officer Childs, so I’m going to hang up.”

  “Okay.”

  “And, Jeannie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hang in there. It gets easier.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” she says. “But thanks.”

  Brian speaks to me as soon as I disconnect the call. “Dispatch said there was a shooting here?”

  I point to the bathroom door and say, “In here,” though I could have saved my breath since he is already heading in my direction, his nose wrinkling at the acrid smell of blood.

  “Whoa!” he says, sticking his head through the opening in the door and looking inside. “Guy did a number on himself, didn’t he?”

  “He did that,” I agree, peering over his shoulder to see if it is as awful as I remember. It is.

  Brian lifts a walkie-talkie to his mouth and hits the button. “All clear in here, Junior.”

  Junior, I know, is Jonathan Feller, another cop about my age.

  “Shit, Mattie. This is a mess, ain’t it?” Brian says.

  It certainly is, enough of a mess that my lunch begins to churn menacingly in my stomach. I gulp in a breath of air and not only smell the thickening blood that suddenly seems everywhere, I swear I can taste it. My stomach lurches, tossing a burning dose of acid up my throat, and I swallow hard several times, hoping to convince my GI tract that down is the only way to go. I get a brief reprieve when I hear the door to the front showroom open. I turn, grateful for the distraction and expecting to greet Junior.

  But it isn’t Junior; it’s Steve Hurley. He sees me and frowns, not quite the response a girl hopes for from the man who kissed her silly just the night before. He walks toward me, and I can’t help but wonder if he is remembering the kiss, too.

  The mere sight of him gets my pulse racing, and when he stops and looks at me with those gorgeous blue eyes, my legs begin to shake. My stomach gets this odd, squishy, butterfly feeling and his closeness seems to rob me of all self-control, leaving me stunned and senseless.

  All thought escapes me. As does my cheeseburger, the remnants of which splatter all over his shoes.

  Chapter 25

  As Hurley reveals his impressive knowledge of profanity, my mind clicks back into detached clinical mode as I eye the mess I’ve just barfed all over his shoes. A pickle slice, whole and intact, rests on his laces and I make a mental note to try to chew my food more thoroughly in the future.

  “Jesus Christ, Winston!” he says, shaking his foot. “Couldn’t you have tried to make it to the bathroom?”

  “Well, I suppose I could have,” I say crossly. “But there’s the little matter of a dead body in the only bathroom I see here, which is what made me lose my lunch in the first place.”

  “Oh, that’s just great,” Hurley mutters. “How the hell am I supposed to clean this off my shoes if I can’t use the bathroom?”

  “Try this,” I offer, grabbing a bottle of sterile water and a package of waterproof bed pads from a nearby shelf. I notice some bottles of mouthwash nearby and grab one of those, too, stuffing it in my pocket. I don’t normally condone theft or shoplifting, but I
figure in this case it is for the greater good, a benefit to mankind…well, at least the mankind who have to share breathing space with me.

  Hurley is working at cleaning the vomit off his shoes when Junior comes in through the back door. As soon as Junior joins Brian in the bathroom and I’m certain Hurley is well distracted, I head for the door Junior just came through. Behind the store is a narrow alleyway that backs up to a hill. Checking to make sure the door is unlocked, I let it close and open my bottle of mouthwash. I gulp a mouthful, swish it around, then spit it out onto the pavement. Twice more and I almost feel human again. Shoving the bottle in my pocket, I reach for the handle to head back inside, only to have the door meet me halfway, colliding painfully with my hand as Hurley pushes through it from the other side.

  “Ouch, damn it!” I yell, shaking my hand and hopping around as if that might somehow lessen the pain.

  “Sorry,” Hurley mumbles. “Didn’t know you were there.”

  I suck at the base of my thumb where the worst of the pain seems to be concentrated while Hurley stares at my mouth with an expression of unadulterated hunger that makes me ache in a whole different way.

  “What are you doing here already?” he asks, dragging his gaze up to my eyes and shaking free of whatever fantasy he’s created.

  “Already?” I repeat, puzzled.

  “Where’s Izzy? Don’t tell me he’s got you out on your own already. You’re hardly ready.”

  “I’m not here in any official capacity,” I explain. “And how do you know I’m not ready?”

  “If you aren’t here in an official capacity, then why are you here?”

  It’s a good question, one I’m not too keen on answering since I don’t want Hurley to know I am conducting my own investigation into the death of Karen Owenby. “Personal business,” I say, thrusting my chin out in a way that dares him to call me a liar.

  “And you just happened to find this dead guy here in the back?”

  “Actually, he was alive when I got here.”