Becoming His, Learning to Breathe: Part Two - The Collective - Season 1, Episode 8

by Ellie Masters

  I handed him the note Caleb’s mother had written. “The mother of the donor wanted the parents to have this.”

  He took it from me. “I’m headed to speak with them now. Do you want to give it to them yourself?”

  Did I? I wanted to know what a mother would say.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Sheldon led me to the waiting room where Josie and Mark Peterson waited.

  “Their daughter’s name is Kelly,” he said.

  “What organ is she getting?”

  “Kelly is in kidney failure. She’s been on dialysis a long time.”

  I walked into a waiting room and picked out the couple on sight. These were old timers, parents used to the rhythms of hospital life.

  Dr. Sheldon introduced me.

  I handed over the note. “I was asked to give this to you.”

  The woman took it from me, her lips moving as she read the words. When she was done she held it to her chest.

  Her husband, Mark, asked, “What does it say?”

  Josie read the note out loud. “It’s from his mother, she says, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to lose my son, but if his death means your child might live, then his life had meaning. He was my little hero.’”

  Mark reached over and took my hand in his. “Please tell her, he’s ours as well.”

  I never found the mother. Never relayed that message. Instead, I finished out my shift, my thoughts turning to the loneliness of my bed. The life of a trauma surgeon left little time for forming relationships, dating, or finding love. Hell, I hadn’t been laid in years. The closest I came were the dreams of Keith struggling to save a life. I imagined him crouching over me, breathing life into my dead lungs, and kickstarting my frozen heart. I hadn’t felt the excitement of anything beyond the cold words of a medical textbook, or the adrenaline rush of a trauma code, in nearly a decade. I needed more than a fuck. I needed someone else to make the life and death decisions in my world. My life sucked.

  Chapter 2

  Keith

  I sat in the report room, drinking coffee and wishing it was tequila, and one hell of a lot of it. My report was electronically filed, and I swear I could almost taste the tequila. But I was on duty through the night until 7:00 in the morning. It was always tough with kids. In fifteen years working a 911 truck, I’d seen more carnage and horror than any decent man should be forced to face.

  That kid Caleb … shit like that was burning me out. And there was nobody to blame, for Pete’s sake. A careless kid and an oops, and now he was dead. From the medical standpoint, I was glad Dr. Peters was there. She’s the brightest star in one hell of a constellation of doctors here. Fair being fair, she’s also the coldest and bitchiest of them. I’m close with a few of the doctors here, and with many of the nurses, and we can unburden to one another. But whatever humanity the woman has was reserved for her patients and their families. To the staff, she was all business, and zero emotion. I think she’d have been happier if patient care was entirely done by fucking robots. Sometimes, I think I’d be happier that way as well, and should get a job as a bank teller or some shit like that.

  My thoughts returned again to Dr. Laura Peters, MD. She had a string of other letters following her name, embroidered in blue against her starched bright-white lab coat, which to me looked like a steaming pot of alphabet soup. She’s an ice queen. She’s also drop-dead beautiful, if the truth be known, long and slender, really even elegant. If she showed a bit of humanity, I could even have a crush on her. But that wasn’t going to happen. I’d been through five girlfriends over the past two years. They were a good match in my dungeon and in my bed, but ultimately, four of them said I was simply too cold for them. The other simply couldn’t handle the hours I worked. Working 48-hours on-duty, and then 96-hours off-duty, had good and bad points, but meant I seldom had an entire weekend off work. Who knows, I considered. Maybe I’ve become a robot, but if so, why am I sitting here fighting crying about Caleb and his parents who looked destroyed?

  I guess the reverie could’ve lasted all day and into the night, but my walkie-talkie toned, a man-down call at Marson Park. Tom and I trotted to the ambulance, then drove to Marson Park, where we found a wino passed out drunk, reeking of things I didn’t want to consider. Jimmy Fletcher, a frequent flyer who needed to dry out. Again. We ran him to the VA, my third time to transport him in the past year, and God alone knew who else ran him how many times.

  I wasn’t hungry, but needed to eat, so we went out of service and found a burger joint near the VA hospital, where I ate a burger and fries, washing it down with a Coke, barely tasting any of it while brooding about poor Caleb. Tom was a good guy, I guess, but he was pretty much a basic EMT driver, eight months out of school, twenty-one or maybe twenty-two years old, green as a gourd … he simply didn’t understand yet. One way or another, I wasn’t fond of him and we certainly hadn’t bonded. But I was patient. What the hell, I had been much the same way when I’d been a greenhorn like him, a total trauma junkie with very little empathy. But I’m older now. Maybe I’m even wiser.

  Fortunately, the rest of the night went quietly. There was one COPD patient who called around 10:00 that night and was a routine transport on oxygen and an IV of D5W. The lieutenant asked if I was willing to work to 11:00 AM for comp time, and I declined. Actually, I think my exact words were “fuck off and die,” if I’m going to be brutally honest here. I had four days off and meant to spend them blitzed on booze. I was home at 7:30 and drunk as fuck by 8:30 before I dropped onto my couch to find a movie on HBO. I woke up at noon, hung over and needing to piss. After, I built a ham sandwich, I noted I’d need to hit the grocery store before long.

  I ate the sandwich, brooding while I watched TV and slowly sobered up. Already, I knew I’d be drinking myself to sleep. But I had to get the fuck out of my house for a while. It was too lonesome and too depressing. I was still brooding about that poor kid Caleb. And for reasons I couldn’t explain, my thoughts also kept circling to Laura Peters, M.D. and a whole pot of alphabet soup.

  At 6:00, I fired up my pickup truck to drive into town. It was an ancient 1980 GMC K-15 that I kept in immaculate condition. It had belonged to my father, who’d died when I was 17. Mom bumped it down to me and I’d kept it ever since. It was a relic. It even had an 8-track stereo system. The original red paint had grown dull, and a hell of a lot of it had flaked away, but I spent a small fortune having it restored into an enviable glittering candy-apple red. I’d even won blue ribbons for it at three antique auto shows held hither and yon.

  I drove to Louie’s, a steak place out on Highway 11, and went in, then ordered a huge porterhouse and a pitcher of Budweiser. Like a cop, I sat at a table with my back to the corner, facing the crowd and the door. Life had made me a bit paranoid, I guess. I was surprised to see Dr. Peters alone at a table thirty feet from me, with a bottle of wine before her, eating what looked to be a piece of baked chicken. I pondered saying hello to her, but decided against. I drank my beer and reflected on her beauty as opposed to my feelings about her. I kept circling the fact that I don’t like her and sure the hell didn’t want to socialize with her. My steak dinner arrived and I attacked the 24-ounce Porterhouse. But my eyes remained on Dr. Laura Peters, M.D. and a pot of alphabet soup.

  End of sample chapters…Grab your copy: books2read.com/OffDuty

  Learning to Breathe

  Why were dead people so much better at revealing their secrets than the living? Sally Levenson covered the woman with the starched sheet, and then pushed the body back into the freezer. The metallic door closed with a solid thunk, and she peeled off her surgical gloves with a snap!

  She tossed them into the waste bucket, wrinkling her nose at the smell. Not only were her hands tacky after a long day encased in nitrile, but they reeked of stale rubber mixed with the stench of sweat.

  Her back ached from the long hours on her feet, and the beginnings of a headache throbbed behind her eyes. Normally, an autopsy lasted no more than
a few hours. This one? She’d been at it all day and still wasn’t done.

  What had seemed like yet another junkie overdose had turned into something else. The pretty brunette had been found in a back alley with a needle stuck in her arm and puncture wounds in her thigh.

  A massive heroin overdose had killed the girl, but that wasn’t the end of her story. She had secrets to tell, and Sally was listening. One needle had been inserted into a vein, but the woman had been stabbed with several others. That’s when the dead girl had started to spill the mystery of her death.

  Junkies were beyond good at finding veins. Freakishly good, they invariably found their Highways to Heaven, but sometimes even dedicated addicts ran out of places to poke. Never had she seen them inject into muscle. Absorption was erratic and the high blunted. The girl’s body was one endless track of needle marks, but she still had several usable veins left. There was no reason to jab needles into the muscles of her thigh.

  There’d been bruising around the neck too. Another secret revealed. People thought she was odd when she said the dead spoke, but everybody’s story was written on their body, and inside as well. Sally happened to be an expert in getting to the root of those secrets.

  For example, the bruising around the neck was not the cause of death. There were no signs of a struggle either. No defensive wounds. Nothing under the fingernails but dirt and grime. No clumps of missing hair. The girl hadn’t died from strangulation. She’d barely been conscious enough to fight whoever had done it. Which meant the choking was either consensual, perhaps the girl was trading favors in kink to supply her habit, or, she’d been too out of it to realize her life was in danger.

  Either way, whoever had choked her had stopped before the girl died. Maybe they’d chickened out? Maybe the girl was already well on her way to oblivion at the end of an overdose? Except that didn’t make sense either. Someone administered a lethal overdose to make it look like the girl OD’d. Of that, she was certain.

  Which brought her to the weirdest thing about this case. Whole cloves, not the ground up spice people used in cooking, were in the girl’s mouth. They’d been there when the girl was alive because a couple of the woody stems had been aspirated into her lungs.

  It was time to call Detective Mackenzie and let him make sense of this. Her job was to collect the evidence. The questions of how and why belonged to the detectives.

  She dialed Mac’s cellphone, but it went straight to voicemail.

  “Detective Mac, it’s Doctor Levenson. I need you to call me as soon as you get this. I’m pretty sure this heroin overdose wasn’t self-inflicted. I’ll be finishing up my report tomorrow, but please call me as soon as you get this. Reid was asking about this earlier. I assume he’s consulting with you again, so I’m going to call him too.”

  Her news wasn’t necessarily urgent. The body would wait until the morning, but important evidence at the crime scene might be lost. With Mac not answering, she dialed Reid’s number. Unfortunately, his cellphone went to voicemail as well. She repeated the message she’d given Mac.

  A slow, ponderous tick tock pulled her attention to the industrial no-frills clock hanging above the two swinging doors. Ten minutes until six, and if she didn’t hurry, she was going to miss Derek’s call. Oddly peculiar about calling precisely at six, she found herself becoming conditioned to expect the call…and eager.

  Life had become stale, tasteless, and dull, about as exciting as the corpses she talked to during the day. Work filled her days. Books and television shows spanned the hours from getting home to falling asleep. There had been no joy. Nothing to look forward too. No giddy, stomach flipping excitement. Just dull, tasteless life.

  Then Derek LeMark showed up. He stole her breath, and, along with a kiss, made her laugh and smile again. He had her looking forward to every evening with his promised call. The air felt different too; charged with an energy she didn’t understand. Fresher and brighter, it smelled different. Tasted better, richer, if that were possible. And instead of plodding along, her days raced by. No longer achingly alone, he’d formed a connection with those nightly calls.

  Excitement vibrated in her chest with her rush to her locker. Her fingers trembled spinning the dials of the combination lock. What the two of them were building wasn’t clear, but his interest mirrored hers. The daily calls confirmed that, even if they hadn’t had a chance for a second date, yet.

  Her phone bounced in her hand while she waited. The sultry tones of Derek’s deep baritone would soon be caressing her soul. With the exhaustion of the day, she took a seat on the bench between the rows of lockers and hoped they would be able to find time for that second date.

  It was time to get away from the corpses who whispered the story of their deaths and spend time with the living. Not that she was complaining. Long days were a part of the job, as was the lack of conversation.

  Six pm and the phone rang. Her heart jumped. Sally cleared her throat to find her voice and steady the excitement racing in her veins. “Hello?”

  “Sally,” the deep rumbling of Derek’s voice made her insides quiver. “How was your day?”

  A glance toward the doors to the autopsy room had her wanting to talk about anything other than what had kept her occupied all day long.

  “Busy. Had a routine case which turned complicated. How was your day?” Her fingers clutched the phone, desperate for more contact from this enigmatic man. The urge to ask if he was back in town barreled down on her, but she held herself in check. Being too needy had never been her thing.

  “I need to see you.”

  Goosebumps pebbled her flesh with the thread of desire tunneling through his voice. Love had filled her marriage. She'd been happy and content, but then Thomas had died. She wanted her heart to flutter, the butterflies to dance, and her blood to heat with desire again. She’d lived too quiet of a life since becoming a widow.

  “You do?” Her voice wavered, exposing her emotions. She hated that transparency, as if her entire existence hinged on what he might say next. Sadly, it did.

  “Are you available tomorrow night?”

  The automatic yes to his request stopped at her lips. She waited for an appropriate span of time before blubbering her eagerness through the phone. Of course she was available. She had no life. Holding back that one word, that one syllable, took every ounce of her will. It killed her not to rush into that silence, but she held herself in check, playing it cool like some love-struck sixteen-year-old.

  He had that effect on her; really it was everyone. She’d watched him at the ballet. Derek LeMark was a man women felt before they laid eyes on him. He’d done that to her. From that first evening at the ballet, and through that very first dinner, she'd felt every bit of him.

  “I understand if you’re busy,” he said, perhaps trying to give her an out, “but I’d love if you joined me tomorrow night. Giselle is playing.”

  He knew her passion for the ballet. Was it possible for a heart to flip for joy?

  “I’d love to,” she finally blurted out, trying not to sound too eager, but incapable of hiding her excitement.

  “Great. Do you think it would be possible to take Thursday off? I’m planning a late night.”

  The caution in his tone pulled her up short. “How late?”

  “Late enough that you won’t want to head in to work. Will that be a problem?”

  “I can’t take the whole day, but I can arrange to come in late.” And work even later. The thing about being the Medical Examiner for the county was she had no set hours. People died all the time, and dead people didn’t care how long they waited on her table before she began her exam.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I was hoping you could meet me like last time. I’m flying in late so won’t be able to pick you up.”

  “I’d love too.”

  “And I wanted to warn you.”

  “Warn me?”

  “My friends will be joining us in my box. I didn’t want it to be a surprise.”

  His f
riends would be there? Her stomach tightened. A date with Derek was one thing, but a group of strangers? Hello, social phobia.

  She choked out the words. “I’d love to meet your friends.”

  His throaty rumble eased her fears. “I’m happy to hear that, and don’t worry, I won’t leave your side.”

  People scared her. It’s one of the reasons she worked with the dead, but the pull of his voice said to trust him. He didn’t know her well enough to understand her social awkwardness could be crippling. Her husband had been the life of the party. She was used to hovering beside Thomas and distancing herself from the attention of others. But as long as she had someone to gravitate toward, she would be fine. Derek would have to provide that anchor now, whether he knew it or not.

  “We’re having dinner after the show, and I have a surprise.”

  Surprises made her anxious, but for him, she would play along. “What kind of a surprise?”

  His low chuckle made her squirm, like liquid heat that sound fluttered against her nerves. “If I told you, it wouldn’t be a surprise…but Sally…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m serious about being out late.”

  “Okay.” She’d make arrangements.

  “I’ll leave your ticket at will-call and meet you in my box.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “As am I,” he said. “I’ve missed the taste of your lips.”

  Her fingers pressed against her lips, remembering the passion of that kiss.

  “Good night, Sally,” he said. “Until tomorrow.”

  The connection ended, leaving her gripping the phone and tracing the seam of her lips. She missed the taste of him, too. His potent and enticing scent, sandalwood and something darker, had filled her dreams for weeks. She wanted to feel his touch, perhaps somewhere more than simply holding hands.