Protective Behavior

by L A Witt

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Code black.” He pulled on his shirt and glanced at me. “Mass casualty and not enough personnel to handle it.”

  I grimaced. “Shit.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t sweat it.” I put a hand on his waist and kissed him lightly. “Fourth time will be the charm, right?”

  Ryan searched my eyes, then laughed. “Let’s hope.” He sobered, kissed me again, and shoved his phone into his pocket. “I have to go. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  And just like that, he was gone.

  In the bedroom, I lay back across the bed we hadn’t even started rumpling, and I sighed. After a second, the mattress dipped beside me, and a cheerful meow announced the arrival of Harley. She climbed onto my chest, sat down, and glared at me, twitching her tail as if to ask why the hell I wasn’t petting her, feeding her, or otherwise bowing and scraping.

  Well wasn’t that poetic? I’d had a brief taste of a long overdue evening with a man I was actually interested in, but now I was back to the status quo—alone in my apartment with my cat.

  I wiped a hand over my face. I was annoyed, but not at Ryan. It was the nature of his job, and truth was, it would only be a matter of time before I was the one called in on a moment’s notice. It didn’t happen as often anymore now that I was IA, but it wasn’t unheard of. So did that mean we were kidding ourselves if we thought we could get something off the ground—even if it was just a roll in the goddamned hay—when we were each at someone else’s beck and call?

  Or maybe this was a chance for us to decide if seeing each other was worth the hassle. We knew the price of admission right from the start—interrupted dinners, interrupted sex, interrupted literally anything that could be interrupted. If we could cope with that, then we had a shot at making this work.

  Except if we were constantly getting called away and one or both of us got tired of that shit before we could decide if this thing had any staying power…

  I sighed and absently scratched Harley’s ears. Right. Now I remembered why I hadn’t bothered dating in twenty-plus years. Well, that, and because the heartache of my last breakup hadn’t been worth the sex in the beginning or the monotony leading up to the end, and I’d decided a long time ago I didn’t need that in my life. I definitely didn’t want it.

  But then Ryan had come along, and suddenly I was willing to consider lowering decades’ worth of defenses to see if maybe, just maybe, this time would be different. The only way we’d ever find out, though, was if we could get through an evening or two without a pager going off.

  Well, it was what it was. I’d be patient because I wanted Ryan more than I’d wanted another man in a long time.

  I just had to hope one or both of our jobs didn’t stop this thing before it started.

  Chapter 6

  Ryan

  The evening got a hell of a lot worse than just missing out on sex with Mark, and that was saying something.

  By the end of hour twelve in the ED, flitting from Trauma One to Trauma Two and back again as new patients arrived, I was walking around in a daze, answering nurses and techs by rote as I sifted through the latest round of paperwork. A building collapse. A fucking building collapse. No, first a sewer collapse, then a building collapse, which led to an hours-long search by firefighters as they worked to dig out the survivors. Some politician would issue a sad-sounding statement about it in a day or so, something about how the unusual volume of rain had overwhelmed the already-stressed sewers and that the building hadn’t been inspected since it was built forty-odd years ago and oh, what a horrible accident, everyone was so broken up about it.

  So sad my fucking ass. The kid on the table I’d just sent off to surgery, the one who was probably going to lose his leg, he was sad. His mother, who’d just lost her husband in the crush of debris, she was sad. The people who had lots to say but absolutely nothing to do about the situation? They were just fucking sorry.

  “Dr. Campbell!” The charge nurse’s hand on my arm woke me out of my stupor. I wiped my free hand across my face and set my clipboard down.

  “Yeah, sorry Pamela.” I’d have given my right arm to have Ronnie working this shift instead of Pamela “Only Pamela, never Pam” Robinson, our newest and least experienced charge nurse. I’d already had to correct two of her directives to the lab, and that was time wasted that the people coming in here really didn’t have. And now she had the gall to look at me like I was a naughty puppy who’d just pissed on her floor.

  “I was calling you for almost a minute,” she said reproachfully.

  “Why? For what reason?”

  It took her brain a second to go from “waiting for an apology mode” to “work mode.” “Paramedics Gupta and Smith just called in. They have a man in his late twenties, suspected GSW to the upper right quadrant, BP dropping. ETA five minutes.”

  A gunshot wound. It probably wasn’t a person associated with the building disaster, then. “Do we have a trauma team free?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I bit back a curse. “What are the paramedics doing about the blood pressure issue?”

  “I, uh—they’re still on the phone, um.”

  I reminded myself that Pamela had been here even longer than I had today. “Give it to me.” My hand was sticky with sweat—I’d been wearing gloves for almost the entire shift. I took the phone from her. “Dr. Campbell here.”

  “Hey, Ryan.” It was Prasun Gupta. He went on without being prompted. “Our guy has a through-and-through gunshot wound to the right upper quadrant, vital signs are unstable, blood pressure is tanking. We’ve started an eighteen-gauge IV with lactated ringers, wide open.”

  I was already walking toward the trauma bays. The second one looked free now, techs and nurses hurrying to clean it up and get it ready for the next case. I silently blessed their efficiency. “Got it, I’ll be waiting. Do what you need to do keep his blood pressure up.”

  Prasun made an interested sound. “Waiting at the door, huh? What service.”

  “It’s been a hell of a shift. Come to Bay Two when you get here.”

  “Got it.” He ended the call, and I handed the phone back to Pamela, who was following me around with an anxious expression. “Call the lab, activate the transfusion protocol for trauma.” It would be second nature for them at this point. “We’ll need a couple units of O-negative waiting in Bay Two.”

  “Got it.” She got back to her station and I took a second to close my eyes and inhale, nice and slowly. One… two… three… This guy would hopefully be my last patient for the night. It was too late at this point—or really, too early—to text Mark, which was a shame because if I’d felt bad about our first date getting interrupted, it was nothing compared to how sorry I was having to leave him there, alone in his apartment, sexy and disheveled, his shirt untucked and his hair mussed from my hands…

  I exhaled, opened my eyes, and pulled on a fresh pair of gloves.

  You’ve got this. And eventually, you’ll get him too. Hopefully more than just in bed.

  A minute later Gupta and Smith came in through the doors, the patient strapped to a backboard on a gurney. He was a heavyset black man whose skin looked almost gray, his eyes shut and jaw clenched tight. One of his hands held something I couldn’t quite make out. Two of the techs joined them as they moved, one taking over holding the IV bag as the other slipped a pulse-oximeter over the man’s fingertip. I followed, listening to vitals as they were called out.

  “Transfer on three—one, two, three!” They shifted the man over to the hospital bed, then turned him slightly to remove the backboard. There were two wounds in his back, but only one in the front, so there was still a bullet in there somewhere. The wound in his back was smaller than the one in the front—through-and-through, shot in the back. The exit wound wasn’t huge, so the bullet must have been a relatively small-caliber. Even the smallest bullet can kill you, I reminded myself grimly as I stepped up to the foot of
the bed to watch the controlled chaos of the hospital team take over.

  “Starting him on lactated ringers,” one of the techs called out.

  “Where the hell is the blood?” I demanded, turning to Nurse Klein, who was in charge of prepping the room.

  He grimaced at me. “The lab’s run out of O-negative.”

  “Then they should be in here typing this guy right the fuck now!”

  “I’m on it.”

  I was going to be ripping some people new assholes before the shift was through, but for now I had to concentrate on my patient. Half a dozen different people moved around the bed getting the monitoring devices set up—machines to track his blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and pulse, as well as another IV in his left arm. He resisted the tech moving it. With the way this guy’s blood pressure was fluctuating, he shouldn’t have been able to resist it, but he seemed to be holding on to something in his hand with all of his remaining strength.

  I pointed it out to Prasun. “What’s that?”

  Prasun grimaced. “His phone. We cut everything off of him no problem—no keys, no wallet, by the way, and the only name we got out of him is Martin—but he was fighting us for the phone. It just seemed better to let him keep it.”

  “He can’t take it into surgery.”

  “He’ll be unconscious before long,” Prasun pointed out.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I looked at the monitors. Martin’s heart rate was rising to over a hundred and twenty beats per minute even as his blood pressure dropped down to seventy over forty. “All right, let me in.” I needed to pinpoint the source of the bleed and stop it, or the man wasn’t going to make it to the surgical team.

  His head was bobbing, eyes fluttering as I came in at his right side. The nurses were doing their best to keep pressure on the wound, but it wasn’t the visible wound that was the problem right now. “Martin, I need to—what the hell is this?” I roared in the direction of the door. Two cops were standing there, in my trauma bay, with Pamela right behind them wringing her hands. One of them was taller than me, broad through the shoulders and chest—a barrel of a guy, he could have been on a recruiting poster. The other was smaller, with a round, affable face set with an expression of concern. Right now, I wanted to punch it. “Get them out of here!”

  “Doctor,” the shorter cop said as he held up his hands placatingly, “we just need a moment to grab the suspect’s personal effects and we’ll get out of your way.”

  I felt the man on the table stiffen, his lolling head suddenly snapping into alertness as he heard the cop speak. He looked more scared now than he had since he arrived here.

  “This is a hospital, not a police station, and certainly not a prison,” I snapped. “In the hospital we do things my way, and that means you get the hell out of my ED and wait to speak to me until this man has been seen to.”

  “It’s just, there are potentially dangerous—”

  “If he’s not packing a bomb or a biological weapon, I don’t give a fuck. Get out.” I glared at Pamela. “Escort them to the breakroom and make sure they stay there.” I didn’t bother to watch them leave, just turned back to my patient. “I need to try and find where you’re bleeding from,” I said as if we’d never been interrupted. “It’s going to be unpleasant.” He was on heavy-duty painkillers, but nothing really killed the pain of having someone’s fingers in your abdominal cavity.

  “No shit,” Martin replied faintly. “You… take this for me.” I felt a nudge against my arm, and looked down to see his wavering hand holding up his phone. “Don’t give it to those… fuckers,” he continued. I could barely hear him. “Fuckin’… shot me.”

  I frowned even as I began to probe the wound. A nurse handed me gauze and a light. “Hemostats,” I said curtly, trying to find the source of the bleed even as my mind reeled from the revelation I’d just heard. The police had shot him? “Why?” I asked. Anything to keep him talking, keep him awake.

  “No reason.” His voice was barely a whisper now. “Don’t need a reason these days. Whatever they tell you, it’s lies. ‘M not the first, either… Shitty video on my phone, but JJ got it all. You… take this. Talk… to JJ…” Martin pushed the phone at me again, wavering but insistent. I finally took it and dropped it into my pocket. He nodded, then his eyes rolled back in his head as he passed out. Monitors screamed, and I felt desperately for the portal vein, where I suspected the nick was.

  “Heart rate at eighty beats per minute!” the nurse called out. “Seventy-five! Sixty-five, we’re dropping fast!”

  “Blood pressure is sixty over thirty!” a tech said.

  I couldn’t reach the vein. “Get me a milligram of epinephrine!” I called out. The drug was pushed into the IV, but it didn’t have the effect I was hoping for. A second later, the monitors flatlined.

  I felt a brief moment of panic before my training took over. I stepped back and a nurse stepped in. “Hold more pressure on the wound,” I directed. “Start CPR.” Another nurse began chest compressions while Nurse Klein started to bag him.

  “Should we intubate?” he asked.

  I only pondered it for a second. With the bleeding not under control and no response to the CPR yet, bagging was safer. “He’s too unstable. Keep going.”

  We kept going for another twenty minutes before I finally called it. It felt like a failure—every death in the ED did, but this one in particular ate at me. We had done so much work tonight already, helped so many people from the building collapse steer clear of the brink of death, only to falter with a fucking gunshot wound. I pulled off my bloody gloves and threw them away, then looked at Klein. “Call the morgue. Get them ready to accept the body.”

  Klein frowned. “Not his family?”

  “Prasun said he didn’t find any ID on him, so until we know more, there’s no one to call.” I watched a tech cut the lines leading into the body, then drape it with a sheet. “Speaking of knowing more, I need to go talk to those cops.” Those goddamn, interrupting, asshole cops.

  “Maybe change your scrubs first, Doc,” Klein suggested.

  “Nah, I don’t think so.” Those fuckers had barged right into my trauma bay. I wasn’t going to clean off the blood just to make them comfortable. “Did you see where Prasun left the patient’s belongings?”

  “I think they’re beside the—yeah.” He moved the mobile IV stand out of the way and picked the bag up off the bedside table, then handed it to me. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” I resisted the urge to rub my aching eyes. Gloves or not, I needed to sterilize my hands before I’d feel good about touching my face. “I’m clocking out after I get this one into the system, so if you need me for something, don’t wait too long.”

  “Will do, Doc.”

  Pamela met me in the hallway outside of Bay Two. “Dr. Campbell, I’m so sorry about the interruption,” she said in a low voice. She was wringing her hands—something she only did when she was really upset. “I told them to wait, but they were extremely insistent about staying close to the patient. Something about possible gang retaliation? They made it sound like we might have people breaking in here to go after this guy!”

  And yet none of that had come out of their mouths once they got into the room, just a demand for his belongings. Given what Martin had said about how he’d gotten shot in the first place, that felt more than a little shady to me. “I doubt we’re about to be in the middle of a gang war,” I said at last. “I’ll talk to them, see if I can get some clarity.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Any new calls?”

  She shook her head. “Chest pain and a suspected fracture in the waiting room, but I’ve got someone else on those. As soon as the handover is finished you should go home and get some rest.”

  Pamela was a decade younger than me, but she acted twenty years older. “You too.” I headed for the breakroom, looking forward to giving these officers a piece of my mind.

  They were both standing when I got in, looking extremely agitated. “What’
s the status of our suspect?” the chattier of the two asked as soon as I entered the room.

  I frowned. “Why do you need to know so badly?”

  “He’s a person of interest in a gang investigation,” the cop said immediately. It seemed like he’d been practicing his lines. He held up his hands and smiled, shaking his head. “Look, excuse me, we went about this the wrong way. I’m Officer Russel, this is Officer DeMarco. We apologize for stepping into your… operating theater?” he guessed. “Surgery center? Whatever it is, we’re sorry, but that individual might have information that’s vital to our investigation.”

  “He won’t be able to help you now,” I said.

  “Dead?” Officer Strong and Silent finally spoke up. I nodded. He shared a long look with Officer Russel.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that.” Officer Russel picked up the conversational ball like it had never been dropped. “You were working so hard in there, we’d hoped for the best. But if we could have the victim’s personal effects now, we’d appreciate it.”

  I held up the bag. “These need to go to his family.”

  “Anything he had on his person must be rendered into police custody until our investigation is concluded,” Officer Russel replied.

  “He didn’t have any family,” Officer DeMarco put in. “He was a banger, plain and simple. The gang was his family, right up until it wasn’t.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, but Officer Russel interjected. “Let’s keep this friendly. I’d rather not have to get a court order for that bag, Doctor, and I’m pretty sure you’d rather that too. Getting the courts involved can be a messy thing. Just give it to us and we’ll leave you and your ED alone.”

  Was that a threat? I was so tired I could barely tell a question from a statement, but that sounded like a threat to me. Martin’s phone sat like a lead weight in my pocket, far heavier in my mind than on my person. Now would be the time to hand it over, along with the bag of belongings. I could wrap all this up in a second, extricate myself from something that seemed more menacing than it should.