by L A Witt
I nodded. “Right. Yeah. We should.”
I half-expected a witty quip about someone figuring out we’d disappeared to fool around, but he didn’t even muster a halfhearted smile.
Instead, without another word, he unlocked the restroom door and pulled it open.
And it was over.
Chapter 16
Ryan
It was embarrassing to admit to myself, but there was no other description for what I did after the wedding other than, well… wallowing in feels. Pouting wasn’t adult enough, and moping wasn’t dramatic enough. All I thought about was Mark, whether I was waking up in the morning or getting ready for bed at night. I wonder if he’s done with work yet. I wonder which side he likes to sleep on. I wonder whether he’s thinking about me.
It was pathetic, and my coworkers were quick to point out to me that I needed to get my head out of the clouds when I flat-out forgot I’d left a patient in an exam room the second day after the wedding. She’d been fine, fast asleep on the bed with her sprained ankle elevated, but it was a mistake I couldn’t repeat. I needed to focus. I needed to move on.
I got better at work, at least, and if I spent a few too many minutes—or hours—reliving my too-few moments with Mark in the privacy of my own home, then that was my business. I succeeded in banishing him to my off-duty hours for almost a week when a call came in from an unfamiliar number over my lunch break.
I stared at my phone warily. I hadn’t seen Officers Russel or DeMarco lately, but that didn’t mean they weren’t watching me. Could it be one of them? Was I about to get into a world of trouble? There was only one way to find out.
Warily, I answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“Dr. Campbell?” It was a woman’s voice, low and surprisingly melodious.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“This is Lieutenant Bridges with the Department of Internal Affairs. I believe you know one of my detectives, Mark Thibedeau?”
Oh, damn. This was Mark’s boss. I sat up straighter in my chair, my very mediocre lunch forgotten in front of me. “Yes, I am. Has something happened? Is he all right?”
There was a pause. “He’s fine,” the lieutenant said slowly. “Do you have any reason for believing that he might not be all right?”
And now I was officially over-reacting. I didn’t need to be perceived as unreliable by Mark’s boss. “Just curiosity,” I replied. “It’s been a while since we’ve spoken.” A week was a while, wasn’t it?
But the lieutenant sounded pleased when she spoke again. “I see. Well, Doctor, the reason I’m calling you is because I’d like to schedule a one-on-one interview with you to go over your statement about the circumstances surrounding Martin Fredericks’ death. It’s just a formality, but I think it would be prudent for you to review things with someone you’re not… otherwise acquainted with.”
Read: fucking. Only we weren’t fucking, not quite, more’s the pity. Still, this was a good sign. It had to be. If Mark’s boss wanted to get my story straight, then maybe the case was finally making progress toward an actual trial. The sooner Officer Russel and his Neanderthal partner were convicted of murder and sent away, the sooner Martin’s family—and everyone else connected to this fucked-up case—could try to move on with their lives, without having to look over their shoulders to check for dirty cops.
“What’s the soonest you could meet with me?” she continued.
“I, ah…” I mentally reviewed my schedule for the rest of the week. “I’m free tomorrow morning, actually.” I wouldn’t go on call until the afternoon, and even then it wasn’t likely I’d have to go in until Friday. Thursdays were slow days for our ED.
“Let’s say, tomorrow morning at eleven? You can find my office in the west wing of City Hall, but if you have any trouble just call this number and my secretary will guide you in.”
“I’ll do that.” I was more than happy to do that. Progress, progress! My stupid heart leapt about in my chest without permission. “See you then.”
“Until tomorrow, Dr. Campbell.” She ended the call, and I squeezed my eyes shut and did a mental fist-pump. This was good, this was so good. There was nothing about this that wasn’t good. If the higher ups were tying up loose ends, then things had to be moving forward, which meant the case was being taken seriously. There would be justice for Martin yet, and this whole thing would be over soon. I hoped, anyway.
I let Pamela know there was the possibility I might be a bit delayed in the afternoon, depending on how long the lieutenant kept me. She nodded her understanding, a phone against her ear as she simultaneously took notes and checked in a young man with a constipated expression. The rest of my shift flew by—even the part where I had to deal with the guy who did, in fact, have a fecal impaction that required a manual assist. It didn’t matter—nothing could phase me.
I wanted to text Mark and let him know what was happening. I wasn’t going to, of course, but I wanted to. Instead I ordered delivery—Thai, not Italian, because I totally wasn’t pining—opened a bottle of wine, and called Samantha. She was more than happy to distract me by telling me in detail about her stepdaughter’s new boyfriend and, more specifically, his facial tattoo. “—a snake, and its tail looks like it goes right into his ear. It’s pretty small, but still, it’s probably good that he’s an apprentice welder, all things considered.”
“You’re one to talk,” I said, lazing back against the couch with a bowl of massaman curry in my lap. “Or did you think I forgot about your tramp stamp?”
Samantha inhaled sharply. “You promised you’d never mention that again,” she hissed at me.
“No, I promised I’d never bring up the fact that your artist spelled ‘Princess’ with three s’s.”
“So don’t bring it up!”
It was a nice way to spend the evening, and I woke up the next morning feeling oddly… excited. Anticipatory, I guess was the best way of putting it. I was ready to talk to Lieutenant Bridges, so ready it was all I could do not to head to City Hall early and pace outside her office until she let me in. Considering I needed her to view me as a competent and level-headed professional, I figured that wouldn’t help all that much, so I reined myself in until ten-thirty. I dressed in a sharp suit, tamed my hair into something approaching “respectable,” and headed out the front door toward the driveway where I’d lazily parked my car last night instead of putting it in the garage.
I didn’t make it to the car. I didn’t even make it to the walkway. I took three steps away from my door when suddenly the horizon seemed to fall on its face as a blow to just above my left knee forced my foot out from under me with two stairs left to go. I tumbled down onto the grass to the right of my walkway, hitting hard on my forearms and palms as I brought my arms up to protect my head. It was a miracle I didn’t do a faceplant, but I didn’t have time to congratulate myself—the hard tip of a boot drove straight into my side, scraping across my lower back before the sole stomped straight down on my kidney.
I would have screamed if I could have forced my lungs to work, but I couldn’t. I was more than scared, more than in pain—I was bewildered. I’d never been attacked before in my life, not even on a playground by another child. I couldn’t wrap my reflexes around what was happening to me.
I raised my head and got a brief glimpse of my attacker, but he was wearing a thick black jacket and a ski mask—cliched, but it made the whole thing more terrifying. The next kick took me in the gut, and I grunted as the smoky tendrils of pain started to spread, connecting and strengthening. I curled around my midsection, both hands clutching the spot where it felt like a dull knife had been jammed into my abdomen. Internal bleeding? Consider an ultrasound or an endoscopy, depending on location. My mind babbled treatments at me even as my body cringed—I was good under pressure, but only at being a doctor. Turned out I was absolute shit at defending myself, much less fighting back.
A thick, gloved hand grabbed the top of my head and forced it off the ground. “Stay away from
the Fredericks case,” my attacker hissed in my ear. “Or this is just the beginning, Doc.” He let go, and I had one moment to think, Oh, maybe I should look away before the boot came flying at my face.
The world ended with a whimper—which I was pretty sure came from me.
“…-bell? Dr. Campbell?” A somewhat familiar voice was saying my name, gently but firmly. “No, I’m pretty sure he’s waking up—Dr. Campbell? Ryan?”
“Mmm?” I managed after a second. Jesus, I hurt, but the worst of all was the enormous pneumatic hammer that had taken up residence inside my skull.
“Can you open your eyes for me, Dr. Campbell?”
“Mm.” I tried, but the light immediately made the pounding even worse. “No thanks,” I slurred out. Shit, had my mouth been hit too? I felt around inside of it with my tongue—just a bitten cheek. “What’s… What…”
“One of your neighbors found you collapsed outside your house and called 9-1-1,” the paramedic explained. “It looked like you fell down the stairs.”
I bit out a laugh. “No.”
“No, you didn’t fall down the stairs?”
“Nope. Absolu… No. I was…” Wait. What had happened to me? I did remember the stairs, and falling, but that was because of someone else, not me. “I… Someone else was there.”
“Okay,” the paramedic agreed in her soothing, whatever-the-patient-says voice. “On a scale of one to ten, where’s your pain at, Dr. Campbell?”
“Five.” I inhaled a little deeper and almost cried. “Ow, fuck, seven. Seven. Maybe an eight.”
“You have a suspected concussion, so I’m going to stick with prescription-strength acetaminophen in your IV for now. We’ll be at All Saints in just five more minutes, okay? Can you tell me more about what hurts?”
I catalogued my aches and pains, and by the time we got to the ED—my own emergency department, for fuck’s sake, the shame burned almost as bad as the boot prints—the painkillers were kicking in and I was able to be succinct about the parts that hurt the worst. My gut was bad, but from the way my kidney was screaming at me I knew I was going to be looking at blood in the water for a while. Not to mention the state of my face, which felt like it had gone through a windshield forehead-first.
Lucky me, Ronnie was working the front desk and was, as usual, a model of efficiency. She had me taken to a private room and put on Dr. Kleinman’s schedule in no time, her face completely composed as we went through the concussion protocol tests, but the little tremor in her hands gave her away. The techs and the other nurses—they stared at me like they didn’t recognize me, or didn’t want to, at least.
I caught Ronnie’s hand as she finished getting me hooked up to the monitors. “Take this, please,” I said, handing over my cell phone. I was lucky it wasn’t broken. “Call the last number dialed that isn’t Samantha and let Lieutenant Bridges know what happened, and why I can’t meet with her in…” I glanced at the clock. “Five minutes ago. Fuck.”
“I’m sure she’ll understand,” Ronnie said gently.
“No, this is…important. Really important. Okay? Just let the lieutenant know where I am and what happened, and that I’ll call her as soon as I’m out of here.”
Ronnie squeezed my hand. “That might be a while, Ryan.”
I grimaced. “I know.” Did I ever know. If I was lucky, I wouldn’t have to be admitted—on the other hand, the longer I was here but wasn’t admitted, the more the hospital could charge my insurance, who would in turn pass those bills on to me. It was such a shitty system, and I had never been more grateful I had only myself to afford. Yay loneliness.
Yeah. Yay.
Camille Kleinman was the doctor I hoped to be in ten years or so—calm, wonderfully compassionate, but still matter-of-fact. She did end up sending me for an ultrasound and a CT scan, which turned up no internal bleeding, and personally stitched up the cut just past my forehead, which had turned my hair into a crusty, blood-soaked mess. She stuck with the Tylenol for the pain—our emergency department was trying to cut back on using opioids if other painkillers weren’t contraindicated. I resented that policy right now.
“You should take at least a week off,” she told me at the end as she disposed of her nitrile gloves. “You need to rest and let your body heal. We don’t want any complications from the concussion.”
“There won’t be any com—”
“Dizziness, mood swings, memory problems, difficulty falling asleep.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “You know this stuff, Ryan. You’ve said the same thing to your patients many times before.”
“I know, but I’ve got things to do.” I have a statement to give. I have a threat to report. Or should I report it? My attacker spoke like they knew what was happening with Martin Frederick’s case—was he a cop? Was he one of the officers who’d been stalking me? How had he known where I was going? Or was it just a coincidence that I’d been attacked right before I went to my interview with Lieutenant Bridges, an attack that had already been planned?
“Doctors really are the worst patients,” Camille mused. “Ryan. I’m telling you, you need to be careful with this. You aren’t going to be up for much more than lounging around on your couch for the next few days anyway, not with the bruises you’ve got coming in. A week, minimum. I’m putting my recommendation in your chart.” She set her hand on my shoulder. “In the meantime, you have a visitor, if you’re up for it.”
“A visitor?” Who could that possibly be? My mind immediately flew to Mark, but I told it to get a fucking handle on itself. “Um, sure.”
“I’ll tell her to come in.”
The lady who stepped into the room was wearing a formal police officer’s uniform, pressed to within an inch of its life, right down to the sharp-edged hat which she had tucked under her left arm. Her hair was in a neat, dark braid, and her expression was solemn. “Dr. Campbell.” She came over and held out her right hand. “I’m Lieutenant Adelaide Bridges, with the Department of Internal Affairs. I’m very sorry to be meeting you like this, sir.”
“Likewise.” I braced myself for a firm grip, but her handshake was very polite. “I would have called you myself, but that wasn’t really in the cards for a while.”
“I understand. I spoke with your nurse as well as the paramedics, who filed a police report once it became clear that you believed yourself to be the victim of a deliberate attack.”
Believed myself? That was unsavory language. “I am the victim of a deliberate attack,” I said. “Someone was waiting outside my house for me. They knocked me down, they threatened me—”
“Your injuries are inconclusive, though,” the lieutenant interrupted. I sensed a glimmer of compassion in her, but it was restrained. “Through the lens of a skilled defense attorney, they could be the result of falling down your front steps.”
“I have a boot print on my back.”
“Do you? Or do you have a massive bruise whose outlines are becoming more and more obscure by the moment?” she challenged.
For fuck’s sake. What was I supposed to do, take a picture of my own back during the stretch where I was unconscious? It didn’t matter, anyway. “I’m still willing to do an interview with you. Now, if you want.”
She shook her head. “Anything you say so soon after being diagnosed with a concussion will be suspect. The defense could use this incident to destroy your credibility. The interview will have to wait until you’re healthy again.”
More time lost. Time that the Fredericks family would never get back, time that Officer Russel and Officer DeMarco could spend terrorizing them, and me, and anyone else who worried them. I decided to keep the details of the threat to myself for now—what could Bridges do about it anyway? “Fine,” I said, my voice clipped. “I should be back to work after a week or so.”
“That will be sufficient.” She began to turn, then paused and looked at me. “This is a setback,” she said carefully, “but it won’t hurt the investigation. It will just delay things a bit.”
I
recognized that this was her trying to be nice, and dredged up a smile. “I understand. Thanks for coming to meet with me.”
“Of course.” She nodded, stiffly, then left the room. I leaned my head back against the crisp hospital sheet and stared blankly up at the ceiling.
I was looking at a week alone, a week of lonely recovery that I couldn’t get out of if I didn’t want to compromise my future testimony. I could ask Samantha to come join me, but… honestly, she wasn’t the person I wanted to see. And I didn’t want to put her in a position where she might be hurt just for being around me.
I felt tears prick my eyes, and raised a hand to cover them just as they overflowed. The truth was, I was scared. If the goal of the attack had been to intimidate me, then it had worked brilliantly. I didn’t know how I was going to sleep tonight. Fuck, I didn’t even know how I was going to walk up to my own front door. I hurt, and I was worried about the effects of the concussion, and I didn’t feel safe in my own skin. In less than a minute, my life had been turned upside down, and I had no one to help me right it.
“Ryan?”
I sniffed hard, wiped my face with my hand, and looked over at Ronnie, who was standing in the doorway. “Yeah?” I said as brightly as I could manage.
She pretended not to notice the crying. “I get off shift in ten minutes. Can I drive you home?”
“That would be great.” Anything to delay the start of my isolation-slash-healing period. “Thanks so much.”
“It’s the least I can do.” She looked like she was about to say something else, then bit her lower lip. “I’ll be right back.”
“Okay.” Ronnie left, and I took the time to try and pull myself together. Jesus Christ, it was hard to sit up, but I used the bar on the side of the bed for leverage and eventually managed it. Standing? That was another question, but one I didn’t have to answer quite yet.
It was going to be a long week.
