Heart Stop

by Radclyffe

  “Has been for the last couple months,” Oz said, taking the lead.

  “Everybody sticking to their corners? No sudden influx of product driving down prices and making the distributors antsy?” Ramos asked.

  “Not that we’re hearing.” Oz glanced at Sandy. She still had plenty of her street contacts, especially among the girls who still worked them, and when she wasn’t in uniform, she made the rounds, listening, keeping an eye out for trouble, watching for changes in the pattern of life on the streets.

  “Nothing that anyone has noticed, Loo,” Sandy said. “Maybe now that it’s getting warmer there’ll be more activity, but everyone seems to be sticking to their own turf.”

  “What about the Salvadorans? Have they been throwing their muscle around?”

  “Here and there, a few excursions with them trying to gain a toehold in Center City and North,” Oz said, “but nothing that looks like a major campaign.”

  Sandy asked, “Did Frye—Lieutenant Frye—give any indication of what she was looking at?”

  “No, just general information gathering.” Ramos shrugged. “Keep your eyes open. If anything changes, let me know.”

  Sandy glanced at Oz. He was the senior partner, and rank required she let him brief the loo. He gave her a half nod, reading her mind.

  “We did get a case today, Loo, that might turn into something,” Oz said. “Maybe an OD, and that part looks pretty routine. But we could have a new product we haven’t seen before, and no idea where it’s coming from.”

  Ramos frowned. “New product, like what?”

  “Bird,” Sandy said. “The one—”

  “Yeah, I know the one. I read the reports. You think it’s here now?”

  “Maybe. We’re waiting on chemistries and tox,” Sandy said.

  “The ME on it?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Ramos tapped his fingers on the desk. “Could be nothing, but could be the beginning of something. Keep after the ME. Let me know as soon as you get a report.”

  “We’re on it, Loo,” Oz said.

  When they got back to their desks, Sandy said, “The ME’s gonna call me when she starts the post. You want to come?”

  “Hell, no. I hate that shit. It’s all yours, partner.”

  Sandy nodded. “Then I guess I’ll leave you to the typing.”

  His brows rose. “Hey, I don’t remember—”

  She grinned and grabbed her jacket. Absolutely anything was better than the laborious job of writing up the scene reports, entering witness interviews, and setting up the case log. “Fair trade. I’ll catch you later.”

  “Where you going?” Oz called as she beat a path to the exit.

  “To take some friends to breakfast.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jay rapped on Olivia’s open door, hefting the paper bag with the street dogs as she leaned inside. “Ready for these?”

  Olivia checked her watch as she motioned Jay in. “We ought to be in time to catch the last half of the afternoon review if we eat fast.”

  “What’s that?” Jay asked, snagging her two loaded dogs out of the bag and passing the rest to Olivia. “M and M?”

  As soon as she said it, she realized she’d just sent up a big flag announcing she really wasn’t tuned in to what she was supposed to be doing but stuck somewhere back in the world she’d supposedly left behind. Morbidity and mortality was a standard internal review process for all the medical specialties, where clinicians presented active cases that were problematic or of special interest. The idea was to keep everyone accountable for their decisions and to ensure that standard of care was met. There wouldn’t be any morbidity where the ME cases were concerned. Only mortality. “Sorry. Still catching up.”

  “Similar principle.” Olivia spread a paper napkin from the sack out on her desk and arranged her street dogs in a neat row. She pulled a plastic fork in a clear plastic sleeve out of her desk drawer, unwrapped it, and smoothed the chili evenly over the surface of each hot dog. Once things were arranged to her apparent satisfaction, she lifted the closest one and took a healthy bite. “It helps to think of a clinical diagnosis being the parallel to our cause of death.”

  “Same process, you mean,” Jay said.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  If Olivia was annoyed at Jay’s lack of experience, she didn’t show it. She was tough to read, which kept Jay teetering between intrigued and wary. The combination was oddly compelling, and unexpectedly attractive. Usually Jay didn’t go in for complicated women—she liked easy, straightforward connections that didn’t require a lot of maintenance. Her schedule never allowed for a relationship that needed much attention—she just wasn’t that available, emotionally or physically. Fortunately, she’d never had too much trouble finding like-minded women. The high-pressure, fast-paced world of emergency medicine was full of them. Olivia was exactly the kind of woman she avoided—driven, demanding, intense.

  All she needed to do was satisfy Olivia’s standards for the fellowship—that was her only goal, and she’d never failed at that kind of challenge in her life. As long as she focused on the job and didn’t worry about what kind of personal impression she made, she’d survive. “So everyone attends for case presentations?”

  “That’s right,” Olivia said. “The process serves the same purpose as M and M. First, it keeps everyone up to date on what cases have been handled and dispensed. It also provides the benefit of groupthink for those cases still open—when something seems problematic, more heads are often better than one. It’s a learning experience for the residents and fellows, and it keeps everyone sharp.”

  “Yeah, there’s nothing quite like standing up in front of your peers and defending what you’ve done,” Jay said. “Especially when there’s a complication.”

  “I’ve always found that policing our own is the best way to go.”

  “As long as you have someone who’s willing to make the hard choices sometimes.”

  Olivia smiled. “That’s what being in charge means, don’t you think?”

  “I do.” Jay shrugged. “I don’t believe in excuses. If you’ve screwed up, you own it.”

  “Agreed.” Olivia managed to polish off her lunch as quickly as Jay. “Ready?”

  “Sure.” Jay wiped her hands on a napkin and tossed the trash as she followed Olivia down the hall.

  “Tomorrow you’ll present our case from this afternoon.” Olivia stopped just outside the rear doors to the auditorium.

  “Okay—I’ll take notes.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage.” Olivia cut her a glance, smiling at her sarcasm. “Sit anywhere. I’m going down front.”

  “Your show?” Jay reached the door first and held it open for Olivia.

  “I try to keep it on track.” Olivia slipped past her, leaving the faint scent of citrus and spring in her wake.

  “I’ll bet,” Jay murmured as Olivia strode down the center aisle. The room lights were dimmed but she could see well enough to make out the people in the first few rows. Greenly might be the chief, but Olivia seemed to be the one actually running the day-to-day business of the department. No surprise there. Department heads often got caught up in the politics of the institution and ended up removed from the clinical practice of medicine. Ali was an exception—she led from the front. Her personal involvement in resident training was a big reason why the fellowships with her were so sought after. Jay remembered the day she’d gotten accepted—she and Vic had celebrated with a rare night out together when neither of them was on call. She’d thought she had her whole life figured out back then—training with Ali, then a position at one of the big trauma centers, maybe even back in Chicago with Vic. Anything was possible—she’d cleared the last hurdle with the best trauma fellowship in the country.

  Jay slipped into an aisle seat a few rows behind everyone else. She didn’t know any of them. Her life had come unmoored the night she’d stopped on a rain-slick highway behind a stalled vehicle, its emergency flashers nearly obs
cured by the torrential downpour. She had to forge a new path, create a new picture of the future, find a new image of herself to believe in and she didn’t have a clue where to start.

  Ali and Vic both thought this was her chance. They believed in her. She took a deep breath. For the first time in her life she wasn’t following in their footsteps. She’d never realized until now how much safety there’d been in knowing just what to expect every step of the way. She’d still had to work like a dog, had to prove herself—especially being Vic’s kid sister, but she’d had the best role models to live up to.

  Jay watched Olivia take the stage after a resident finished presenting a case. She strode to the podium and looked out over the audience, seeming to zero in on Jay for just an instant. “Forgive me for being late.” She scanned a printout she picked up from the lectern. “Dr. Kalahari. I believe you’re next.”

  Olivia commenced to pepper the presenters with questions, especially anyone in training, and within moments Jay’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land dissipated. Olivia was fast and sharp and supremely confident. Jay liked watching her work. She appreciated anyone who commanded their field with skill, and Olivia was clearly that. Not so very different from the surgeons she admired. She listened with half an ear to the cases, only half surprised that there wasn’t all that much difference between the kinds of reviews she was used to and these. Sure, these patients started out dead, rather than ending up that way, which was often the case in the M&M conferences at the hospital, but the disease processes and the workups were strikingly similar. Any clinician would likely be intrigued, and she was.

  If her body hadn’t been aching and her head spinning with the changes that twelve hours had brought her life, she probably would have been even more engaged. But she hadn’t done any strenuous physical labor in months, and the aches and twinges in her body were dragging at her mind. She needed to get back in shape. She needed to get back on top of her game if she was going to survive in this new arena. And watching and listening to Olivia, she realized that she wanted to do more than survive. She wanted to make an impression. Hell, she wanted to impress her. Maybe just because she was so impressive herself.

  “It’s already getting too complicated,” she muttered. All the same, she felt a twinge of life returning, a challenge to prove herself, and she’d never been better than when she was challenged.

  When the session ended, people dispersed, a few scrutinizing her as they passed. Everyone seemed to have a destination except her, another foreign experience she could do without. She waited in the hall until Olivia came out, relieved when Olivia headed for her as if their meeting was planned.

  “What did you think?” Olivia asked.

  “I liked the 3-D reconstructions as part of determining mechanism of injury. The imaging software is amazing.”

  “Wait until you run your first one from a scene you’ve worked up yourself. You’ll want to go back and look at everything again, just to compare the projections to the physical findings.”

  “How soon is that going to happen?” Jay asked.

  Olivia laughed. “In a hurry?”

  Jay grinned. “Never saw the point in going slow.”

  “No, I bet you didn’t.” Olivia unlocked her office door. “You can leave your jacket in here if you still want to stay for the first post.”

  Jay piled her field kit and windbreaker on a chair. “I’m staying until we’re done.”

  Olivia gave her a long, piercing look. “How long has it been since you’ve been on your feet for four hours straight?”

  Jay flushed. “About nine months.”

  “If you get fatigued or cramped, you will say so. Agreed?”

  Jay calculated the odds of being able to hide her physical discomfort from Olivia and didn’t like the numbers. She unclenched her jaws. “Absolutely.”

  Olivia’s slow smile suggested she’d been reading Jay’s mind. “Good. Follow me.”

  The brief scrub-up in the small antechamber was nothing like what Jay was used to in the OR—they didn’t need to be sterile, and there was no one to infect in the next room. They just pulled on cover gowns and face shields for their own protection and headed inside. The autopsy table didn’t look all that much different than an OR table except for the drain pan underneath. The instruments Olivia spread out on a towel-draped stainless steel stand while a skinny guy in scrubs removed a body bag from a big refrigerated cubicle looked familiar too, with the exception of a long-handled snipper that looked like it belonged in a garden shed.

  “Is that a hedge clipper?” Jay asked.

  Olivia nodded. “It’s easier to remove the sternum with that—the surgical rib cutters take too long.”

  “Ookay,” Jay muttered.

  “Ready, for him, Doc?” the skinny guy asked Olivia.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The attendant unzipped the bag, and he and Olivia swiftly lifted the body of a teenage boy onto the table. Jay looked at the penetrating wound on his chest, mentally tracing the path the bullet probably took, seeing in her mind’s eye what she would have done if he’d landed in the trauma unit with that wound, still alive.

  “No one even cracked his chest,” Jay said softly.

  “No. He was DOA.”

  “So we’re it for him,” Jay said.

  “That’s right. We’re his doctors now.” Olivia held a scalpel out to Jay. “Are you ready to start?”

  Jay hesitated, then took the blade in her left hand. “Just tell me where.”

  *

  “Hey, Rookie,” Sandy said when Dell answered her cell. “You home yet?”

  “That’s detective rookie to you, Officer,” Dell said, a smile in her voice. “No, the lieutenant just called us all in for a meeting. I’m on my way to Sloan’s place now.”

  “Something breaking?” Sandy wended her way through the crowd on the stairs down to the Broad Street subway line, moving on auto, watching everyone around her with the sixth sense she’d learned on the streets and honed as a cop.

  “Don’t know,” Dell said. “I hope so—it’s been quiet for too long.”

  “Yeah.” Sandy knew Dell loved being part of Frye’s elite squad, partly because Dell hero-worshiped Frye like most every other cop except probably Watts, and even an old half-burned-out dickhead like Watts respected her. Maybe even had a soft spot for the lieutenant, though he’d never let it show. But Dell loved the action too—loved being out on the edge on her own, undercover, making things happen. Scared the crap out of her, but she’d never let Dell know that. Dell needed her strong, just like she needed Dell steady. “So you’ll let me know, if you can?”

  “Sure, baby. You on your way home?”

  “Just a quick stop. I’m gonna be a little late.”

  “You catch a hot lead?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I want to talk to some of the girls. Get a read on what’s happening out there.”

  “Okay. You turn up anything, give me a shout.”

  “I will.”

  “Be careful, huh.”

  Sandy smiled. Dell always said that, every time they parted. “Always. And don’t be a hero.”

  Dell laughed. “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  She jumped off the subway two stops later and hurried to their apartment. She needed to change before she made the rounds. Otherwise, she might as well hang a sign around her neck that screamed I’m a cop. Plus, she wouldn’t be caught dead going anywhere in her work clothes when she wasn’t on duty. Sexy they were not, and when she met up with Dell later she definitely wanted sexy. That way she’d be ready for anything.

  Smiling to herself, she shed her cop regalia and slipped into a tan leather skirt that stopped a few inches above her knees, a forest-green silk shirt that Dell had picked out for her, and a short-waisted leopard-patterned jacket. She slid into two-inch platforms that looked hot but let her actually run in them if she had to, and checked herself out in the mirror. The outfit didn’t exactly shout hooker
, but it didn’t shout cop, either. She pulled the pins that held her hair back when she was working and shook it out. She kept it three or four inches shorter than she used to, but it was still long enough to catch Dell’s eye, and that’s all that mattered.

  She checked her weapon and secured it in the inside pocket of her shoulder bag along with her badge, and slung the funky sequined bag over her shoulder. Funny, how quickly she could step back into the old life just by changing her clothes. She knew she wasn’t really going back, but she felt herself sliding from one reality to another, from the hard blue line of the cop universe into a world of shadows and shifting allegiances that hardly anyone she knew could understand, except Dell and Frye and the others. The only ones she trusted, the only ones she’d ever let see her completely.

  She stopped just inside the door, grabbed the pad where they left each other notes, and wrote, I love you, Rookie. Get ready. Smiling to herself, she locked up and headed back to the subway to look up some old friends.

  Chapter Nine

  “This is exactly the opposite of what you’re used to doing,” Olivia said as she stepped up to the autopsy table opposite Jay. “Examination of the critical anatomy is still key, but how you get there is reversed.”

  “I understand,” Jay said, trying to get used to the feel of the scalpel in her nondominant hand. She was happy to see it wasn’t shaking. They were alone in the big room, and the only sound, the hum of the air filtration unit, rose and fell like a quiet wind. Jay was used to music—Ali preferred country, she liked rock when she had the choice—and the tumble of a half dozen other voices in the background punctuated by the beep of monitors and the blare of alarms.

  The silence here was oddly intimate, enclosing her in the cone of overhead light with Olivia and the boy. When she rested her right hand on his shoulder, the coolness penetrated the latex covering her fingertips. Her reflexes signaled an alarm until her mind clicked over into the new reality. She wondered if she’d ever get used to the absence of living warmth in her hands.