Off Duty

by Ellie Masters

  “Please don’t think it’s easier for me,” she said. “But … I guess we live in different worlds.”

  “I envy yours,” I said. “I had the grades to get into medical school, but not the money. So here I am, a degree in biology, and working as a paramedic. I like to think I’m good at it. Scratch that. I damn well know I’m good at it. I’d test for lieutenant and probably pass, and get to drive a desk, but all three lieutenants are younger than me and have been there longer, so unless one of ‘em dies, I’m stuck on an ambulance until I retire. After that? Who the hell knows … maybe high school science, 20 years of showing 10th grade kids how to dissect frogs. The thought is breathtaking, ain’t it?”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Look, I know I’m not good at saying it, but I’ve been in this game as long as you have, Keith, and you’re the best paramedic I’ve ever seen, and anyone you ask in that ER would say the same. But don’t think I can’t do your job. You’re smart, and you’re skilled, but I have training and responsibility a million miles beyond yours.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, not choosing this battle. “You ready?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Look … thank you for being the gentleman last night. I guess, the way you see me and my bitchiness, I’m glad you treated me right and didn’t take advantage of the situation.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, do you think I’m so much of a fucking loser that I’d rape you passed out?” I said, fighting a sharp burst of anger. “Goddammit, just get in the truck so I can take you to your car.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said, actually managing to blush.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Keith, I didn’t mean it that way,” she repeated.

  “Look, get in the truck,” I said. “I’m done with this discussion.”

  “Goddammit, I meant I’m grateful you were a gentleman, that you didn’t post photos on Facebook of me drunk, or put me in my car drunk, or didn’t otherwise make a fool of me. Swear to God.”

  “Yeah, but you doctors seem to think God doesn’t exist,” I said.

  The trip to the restaurant was a silent one. I didn’t wish to speak to her, and I guess she had nothing more to say. I stopped next to a black Mercedes, the only car in the lot. “My daddy had a truck a lot like this one, an ‘80 Chevy,” she said. “His was black as midnight in a mineshaft, but … it brings back good memories.”

  “This was my father’s truck,” I said. “How’d you know it was an ‘80?”

  “Square headlights,” she said. “The body style changed in ‘81, and through ‘79, they all had round headlights. Thank you again, Keith.” She exited the truck, got into her Benz, fired it up, and drove off.

  For my part, I decided some fish needed to die this day, sped home, hitched up my boat, and drove to the lake. I puttered around and caught three bass, but mostly wanted to be on the lake, and didn’t give much of a damn about the fish. I drove home, filleted the fish, put four fillets in the freezer, and grilled the other two after baking a potato on the grill. I ate well, then drank myself to sleep, wondering why I was still annoyed by Dr. Laura Peters, M.D. and other alphabet soup. Maybe I should’ve taken the plunge and loans and gone to medical school, I drunkenly pondered. By now, I’d be several years out of residency and in practice, I knew. But that wasn’t the choice I’d made and it was too damn late to do it now. By the time I finished a residency, I’d be ready to retire.

  I dreamed of Laura Peters that night, of taking her to my dungeon and doing all sorts of delightful evil with her, something else I knew was never going to happen.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next few weeks found me actively avoiding Keith. He’d taken care of me in my drunken stupor, acted like a complete gentleman, and right when I thought he might almost be human, he turned everything around calling me a cold-hearted and entitled bitch. Those hadn’t been his exact words, but he had this image in his head that I was living some kind of dream life.

  Money had always been hard for my family. I didn’t ride on anyone’s coattails. I worked my ass off in college, waiting tables until I found a more lucrative stream of money stripping. God, his comment about me slithering around stage had hit a nerve. There was no way anybody knew of that past, and I intended to keep it that way.

  Despite what he thought about my perfect life, nobody ever gave me anything. Every penny I earned went to fund my education and I still wallowed in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

  Easy? Privileged?

  Keith had no idea.

  While all my college friends were shaking their asses at frat parties, football games, and just hanging out, I was either in the library studying my ass off, or I was shaking it to earn money to put food on my table, a roof over my head, and somehow survive the overwhelming debt piling up.

  What would Keith think about that? His drunken-assed Ice Queen had stripped her way through college? Why did I even care what Keith thought about me?

  My pager went off, and I groaned. Another trauma call coming in. Like I had for the past few weeks, I prayed Keith wasn’t on that run. Since that night, the few times I had seen him, I couldn’t get past the look in his eye. Not the judging one, but something darker, an assessment of sorts. It was like he was trying to figure me out, or get under my skin, or… hell, I don’t know. I was delusional when it came to him and, to my chagrin, he was definitely under my skin.

  That man occupied my thoughts more hours in the day than I cared to admit, and he’d starred in way too many dreams. Dreams which began with heated words, arguments, and me storming off. Those turned into ones of him chasing me down, pinning me in place, and those…well, those turned into decidedly dark and twisted things.

  I waited in the trauma bay while sirens sounded outside. The crew was bringing in a gunshot victim.

  “Do we know where the patient is shot?” I turned to Nancy, my best trauma nurse, and she shrugged.

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Well, it would help to know if we’re dealing with a head shot, chest shot, or gut shot.” I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice. Any advanced warning helped us prepare. Sometimes these crews thought we were miracle workers and would sort it all out once they arrived. Not me. I liked to know. Having the time to call in extra help, or hell, even set up a chest tube tray, were seconds I didn’t have to waste once I had the patient on my table.

  Seconds meant the difference between life and death.

  Nancy’s mouth twitched. I couldn’t tell if I’d annoyed her or if she was laughing at me.

  “We’ll know in about three…two…” She counted down the seconds. That woman was crazy intuitive, even psychic. She kind of freaked me out.

  When she reached one, the outer doors slid open and two men guided a stretcher inside. My luck, which had been good these past few weeks, turned south fast, because Keith walked beside the stretcher, his powerful arms flexed with every squeeze of the self-inflating bag. He breathed life into the patient, while my mind went blank. His gaze cut to mine, and our eyes connected across the space. Beside me, Nancy jumped into action, while I stood still, pinned by the simmering anger in his heated gaze.

  Now what the hell had I done to deserve that? Or, maybe that was my overactive mind at work? What was it about him? And why did my thoughts focus more on him than the man lying on the table?

  One look, gunshot to the chest. Shit.

  Keith blinked, and shook his head. He’d missed giving a couple breaths via the mask, almost as if he, too, had been distracted. He’d probably been eyeing one of the nurses on his way in. Insufferable flirt.

  It was time to swallow my pride. Like the few times this past week, I approached him, and pretended like he hadn’t seen me in all my drunken glory. Because of that night, I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since. I pretended I was the consummate professional, someone to be respected instead of ridiculed. I’d embarrassed myself in front of him, and I hated how much that mattered.

  In some wei
rd way, his respect meant something to me.

  Before I could speak, Keith barked vitals out to me. “Gun shot to right chest, Heart rate dropping. Not breathing. Carotid pulse thready, none in extremities.”

  Shit, the man was in shock.

  I reverted to what I knew best, the cleanness of the rhythms of trauma medicine, and ignored the thudding of my heart. Keith smelled too damn good and was impossible to ignore.

  “Bleeding?”

  He shook his head. “No exit wound.”

  The bandage he had dressed in the field only showed a small dab of blood, which meant…

  “Nancy, I need a chest tube tray.”

  There’d been no need to yell, but that’s what I did. Nancy had already grabbed a few more nurses. The respiratory therapist, Mark Tribault, stood at the head of the bed. In some hospitals, I would’ve had to place the breathing tube to secure his airway, but our therapists were allowed to take over that task. In this case that was a blessing.

  A quick listen with my stethoscope revealed what I’d already expected. The right lung was down, and the chest was probably filling with blood. I had three priorities. Drain the blood. Inflate that lung. Stop the bleeding.

  “Activate massive transfusion protocol,” I ordered.

  To anyone not familiar with a trauma bay, the scene may have looked a bit chaotic, but to us it was a well-synchronized dance. Mark took over the airway from Keith. Mark secured the airway, inserted a breathing tube, and hooked our patient up to a ventilator. This left Keith standing right next to me as I cleaned and prepped the right chest to insert the chest tube.

  The deep pull of Keith’s breaths whispered against my neck. Close quarters were simply a part of this job, but with Keith standing that close, it felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  I angled my chin toward the bandage he’d placed in the field. “I’m going to need that off.”

  While I scrubbed at the man’s skin, Keith leaned over me, and helped Joyce, a young nurse, peel back the bandage. The scent of him was intoxicating, and it took all my concentration to not let his nearness affect me.

  I bit my lower lip as I made the incision over the man’s rib, and inserted the chest tube into the side of his chest. Blood poured out. I barked out orders for blood, fluids, and a surgical tray. We had an active bleeder on our hands and were losing our patient. Joyce secured a second intravenous line, adding to the one Keith had placed in the field. While my team poured in fluids and blood, I cut open the man’s chest.

  An hour later, our patient was stable enough to move to the main operating room. I stretched, leaning back and twisted to relieve the kinks in my back. Reaching into the back pocket of my scrubs, I searched for my phone, what I found was a note instead.

  “Smile, Doc. You’re prettier with a smile than a scowl.” It was signed with a scratch of ink…’K.’

  I glanced around, but Keith was nowhere to be found. When he’d left I couldn’t say, except I felt oddly disappointed. Why, still remained a mystery. He and I didn’t mix. It wasn’t that we were oil and water. Something crackled in the air between us. It was a combustible energy I found confusing in a man who I couldn’t stand.

  But, he’d left me a note. And, that made me smile.

  CHAPTER 8

  I slipped the note to Dr. Peters, then rounded up Tom and took him to an exam room, where I shut and locked the door. “Put us out of service, Tom,” I ordered.

  “Dispatch will want to know why,” Tom pointed out.

  “Use your imagination,” I said. “Take that boot knife of yours and slash a tire or something, just put us the fuck out of service.”

  “Okay,” Tom said, the fretful rookie.

  After putting us out of service with dispatch, he stared at me as I scissored off my uniform shirt, then gaped more at the hole in my tee-shirt, the dark color concealing a blood stain that looked like I’d lost maybe a half-pint of blood. While on scene, crowded with cops, a little girl maybe four or five years old came out from behind a chair where she’d been hiding when the shooting went down. She had a little derringer in her hand, a piece of crap pistol generally only good for barrel-to-head assassinations. I don’t think she was shooting at me, just a careless fucking kid, but a careless kid with a loaded pistol in-hand. That made her plenty dangerous.

  She shot me.

  I swear to God I saw the bullet as it traveled to my chest, felt an all-too-familiar punch and burn as it hit, but the pain told me the bullet had done no serious damage. I ignored it. I had a patient to attend, so I tuned my mind to my patient and away from the pain. The cops didn’t have to disarm the kid. When the derringer fired, she dropped it and bawled in terror. I wasn’t going to be the drama queen and add to the kid’s freak-out. My only reaction at the time was a grunt as air was punched out of my lungs. Until this moment, I think Tom didn’t even know I’d been hit.

  In the exam room, I slid the tee-shirt off and told Tom to glove up and rinse the thing in the sink. He gaped at me but did as told while I found forceps on a tray, took a deep breath, and found the base of the bullet, gusted out the breath, took another deep breath, and yanked it out. It had hit my sternum and didn’t penetrate, and a distant part of my mind realized the round had to have been a .22 short. I think at that range, even a .22 long-rifle would’ve punched through and I’d be strumming a harp upstairs, or, more likely, getting jabbed in the ass downstairs with a pitchfork or trident or whatever the fuck it was demons toted about.

  I slipped the bullet into my pocket, then had Tom round up towels, and poured irrigation saline onto the wound. I had Tom squirt half a small tube of triple antibiotic ointment into the hole. Tom shaved off the chest hair in a biggish square surrounding the wound, then dressed the wound with gauze pads and tape.

  I was wringing out my tee-shirt for the last time when Dr.Laura Peters, M.D., alphabet soup, and a fiery expression, barged into the exam room. “What the hell’s going on here?” she demanded.

  “Just some first aid,” I said. “I figured there was enough going on out there without bothering you for a Band-Aid.” I put my shirt on and she gaped as I turned to face her. The white gauze was as visible behind the hole as birdshit on a windshield.

  “You got fucking shot, and you’re calling it first fucking aid?” she snapped. “How much more fucking macho are you going to get?”

  “It’s nothing,” I insisted. “Look, a kid, barely more than a toddler, picked up a little Saturday Night Special and it went off and dinged me. It didn’t even penetrate the sternum, so I plucked it out. It’s not my first time. I had to do it when I was in the Navy and a corpsman with the Marines. Ricochet got me in the thigh and I had to yank it out of the hole, then stuff it with gauze and wrap the thing. The lieutenant put me in for a Purple Heart. That, and five dollars, bought me a coffee at Starbuck’s on my way home.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth and lie down on the stretcher,” Dr. Peters said. But her alphabet soup, all 10 gallons of it, cut no ice with me. I wasn’t her patient. I wasn’t her employee, not even by proxy. I was employed by the city, not by this sexy pot of alphabet soup.

  “No, Ma’am,” I asserted. “I need to run home for a fresh uniform shirt and get my ass back on-duty. This is Friday and I’m in the barrel until Sunday morning. Goddamn if I’m going to leave EMS shorthanded. We’re a medic down in two stations, one with a broken leg he got when he tripped over a root out camping, and another with a death in the family that had her out of town at a funeral. You know how it gets out there. Never mind. You don’t know. You have no idea, Ma’am. I didn’t get to go home injured when I got shot in the Middle East, and I ain’t going home now.”

  “Look, don’t make me pull rank,” she said, growing red-faced with annoyance.

  “Tom, why don’t you go get us a cup of coffee from the report room?” I said. Tom knew an order when he heard one, and looked grateful to escape the friction as he escaped the room. “You have no rank, Dr. Peters,” I sa
id when the door closed behind Tom.

  “Keith, your Chief Mickey Ranford is a friend of mine,” Peters said. “I can call him right now and have you ordered to stand down. I trust your medical judgment that it’s just a flesh wound, but I mean to treat the wound. What hit you?”

  “This,” I said, digging into my pocket and coming up with the .22 slug.

  “A .22,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to explain this to you Dick-and-Jane, but your pride seems to be in your way. See Keith. See bullet hit Keith. See Keith trying to self-treat. Macho Keith. See microbes on the bullet, on Keith’s fucking shirt, on Keith’s tee-shirt, on Keith’s skin. See the wound infect. See Keith go from lightly injured to septic shock in about three days. Stupid Keith. He’s on medical leave with sepsis for six weeks because he was Mr. Macho. Now, shed that shirt and lie on the fucking stretcher, God damn you.”

  “No,” I said. “I had Tom pack it in antibiotic ointment, and if I need treatment, I’ll make an appointment with my own doctor Monday. Go tend to someone who has an emergency. I know you hate my ass, so I’d rather you don’t treat me anyway.”