“You bought me a drink,” she said.
“Stoli and lemon, right?”
“can you get me something non-alcoholic?”
It took several moments for that to register. He got up to go to the bar and spilled his beer on his jeans. This was all going to hell and they hadn’t even started.
He got her a soda and sat back down. He couldn’t take his eyes off the rock on her finger. “When are you getting married?”
She put her hands under the table. “couple of months.”
“So soon?”
They looked at each other.
“If you need an usher or anything...”
It was meant to be a joke. She didn’t laugh. She looked at him with such a sad expression. He realised she felt sorry for him.
“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Adam.”
“I’m just curious. What does he do?”
“He’s a movie star, all right? He makes fifty million dollars a year and he owns three Ferraris and he’s best friends with the President. How does that sound?”
“Like you’re aiming too low.”
She smiled. She could still laugh at his jokes, that was one good thing. “This is a bad idea--we both know it. I was going to ring you this morning and call it off. I should go.”
“You haven’t asked me about Mexico yet.”
She put her bag down. “How was Mexico?”
He shook his head. She was right, this was a bad idea. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What is it you wanted, Adam?”
“I wanted to know whether it’s better with him than it was with me.”
“Don’t.”
He caught her wrist. “Did you sleep with him while you were still sleeping with me?”
She practically ran out of the door. Heads turned, first at the door swinging shut behind her, then at him. He stayed and finished his beer, in turmoil.
There were three guys standing at the bar, drinking too fast, talking too loud. As he walked out he thought he heard one of them say something, about him, perhaps about her. Or perhaps he imagined it. But they were staring at him and he didn’t like the way they laughed.
He rounded on them.
“What’s your problem?” one of them said.
“What did you just say?”
The guy spread his arms and looked at his buddies, all mock innocence. “Didn’t say nothing, pal.”
He didn’t believe him. Or perhaps he was just looking for a fight.
He turned away from the door and went in, swinging.
Chapter 47
Adam slept through his alarm. When he finally stumbled into the bathroom he caught his reflection in the mirror and reeled back.
“christ, I can’t go into work looking like this.”
He chanced a second look. He had had the damage fixed up by Mike, a friend of his at the Massachusetts ER, but it was still obvious that he’d been in a fight. He was supposed to be on duty in half an hour. He’d better get dressed and get in a cab. Bill was sure to hear about this. He’d better get his story straight.
He looked worse than he did yesterday. He gingerly touched his eyebrow and the three butterfly stitches Mike had used to close the wound. He had a bruise the size of a baseball on his cheekbone and there was a large red scab over the bridge of his nose. Nothing broken, Mike had said. It sure didn’t feel it. What a mess. But if you insist on going three on one in an Irish pub, what do you expect?
He’d better get to work.
* * *
He saw two of the interns staring at him from the nurse’s station as he walked in. Jackie and Fiona saw him as well. No one said anything. He went to change into his scrubs.
He was still trying to remember more about the fight. It had broken off before it had really gotten started. One of the barmen, a big strong Irish boy, had pulled them off him before they could do any real damage, got them all to leave. Adam remembered thanking him but the lad was in no mood for gratitude and just told him to get himself cleaned up in the restrooms. When he came back out the manager was waiting for him. He said he had heard what had happened and told him to never come back.
It was the first time in his life he’d ever been banned from a bar.
“A late achiever,” he said to himself and forced a smile.
But Bill wasn’t smiling when he stalked into the ER a few minutes later. Someone must have rung upstairs and warned him. “In my office,” he said. “Now.”
Chapter 48
“What the hell’s going on?” he said. “What happened to your face?”
“I was out having a drink with friends. Some guys were hassling one of the women at the bar, I stepped in to help out. Some punches were thrown.”
“Looks like they were all thrown at you.”
“Do I get a finder’s fee from the ER?”
Bill didn’t think that was funny. “This is not acceptable, Adam.”
“It wasn’t my fault, Bill. I was doing the right thing.”
“I will not have my staff brawling in public, and you can’t work in the ER looking like that. You’ll scare the life out of the patients. Go home. Get some rest. Come back when you don’t look like the Elephant Man.”
“Sorry, Bill.”
“Just go home.” He turned and was about to walk off. “I’ll have to get Jay in on his day off to cover for you. Make this the last time.I’m giving you your sabbatical. This is the last time I’m cutting you slack. Are you reading me?”
“Loud and clear,” Adam said.
* * *
A pick-up ran a red light on Malcolm X and Tremont, the paramedic said as he rushed the gurney into Trauma 1. He t-boned their patient on the passenger side and pushed her vehicle into a light pole on the other side of the road.
“Her blood pressure’s crashing,” he said, “I couldn’t get a vein.”
They had followed spinal protocol, strapped her to a backboard with a cervical collar, her head held still with Velcro straps. She was in her late twenties by the look of it. Nurses cut off her blood-drenched clothes while another took over ventilation. Her colour was bad. She was losing blood from somewhere.
The rest of the trauma team arrived. An intern was checking pulses in her arm, neck and feet. She had an avulsion to the scalp but he ignored it, that wasn’t her critical problem. Her blood pressure was sixty over zip. He guessed a belly bleed or pelvic fracture.
They had only just finished placing the leads to the ECG when she went into fibrillation. Jackie started chest compressions. Adam took the paddles and waited till everyone was clear. After two shocks the heart returned to sinus rhythm. “We need a line,” he said, and Jay started searching for a vein.
He took the laryngoscope and stared down at his patient’s body. He thought: I think this is Elena, but it could just be his mind playing tricks again and he wasn’t going to repeat that fiasco. No more fumbles in trauma rooms.
And then he saw the birthmark on her left hip.
“Doctor Prescott?”
He made sure both lungs were properly ventilating then handed the bag mask to Fiona. Jay had managed to find a vein.
“We need X-rays, now. What’s the blood pressure?”
“Up slightly. Eighty over forty.”
“Good, let’s get her into X-ray now! Have we got a name?”
“Elena Jones,” one of the nurses said.
There was a man standing at the doors, staring at the gurney as the nurses wheeled it past him. He was white.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s her boyfriend,” Jay said. “He was on the phone with her when the accident happened. He just walked up to the desk five minutes ago, he knew the car’s tags, it’s a match. That’s how we ID’d her.”
So this was his rival. One of the nurses brushed him with her shoulder as she rushed past. The man staggered back as if he’d been hit.
The janitor came in to mop the blood off the floor. Adam peeled off the gown and gloves and walked out to the parking bay. Ther
e were two interns out there and a security guard, a group of nurses on the other side, smoking cigarettes.
He leaned against the wall, staring at the sky. Her new boyfriend came out of the ER. He leaned back against the wall, slowly slid down to his haunches and put his head in his hands. Adam went over to the nurses, bummed a lighter and two cigarettes and went over to him. “Here,” he said.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I.” He lit both cigarettes and gave him one.
He took it. “Is she going to die?”
“I don’t know. She’s stable for now. She’s gone to X-ray, then they’ll take her up to surgery. There’s extensive internal bleeding and there may be some brain trauma.”
“Thanks for what you did.”
“Do you have anyone who can sit with you?”
“Are you married?”
Adam shook his head.”
“Have you ever loved someone so fucking much you think you’d die without them?”
“I think I know the feeling,” Adam said.
His pager went off. He stubbed out the cigarette--it tasted foul anyway. “Have you called her family?”
His eyes were glassy and unfocused, he wasn’t even sure that he’d heard him. Adam patted him on the shoulder and hurried back inside.
He couldn’t think about this right now. It would have to keep until later; right now he had work to do.
Chapter 49
He stood at the door of the ICU and watched her sleep. She didn’t look like Elena anymore. They had shaved some of her hair to suture the laceration to her scalp, and she was so pale her skin seemed translucent. He could make out the pale veins on her forehead.
She had fractured and displaced her pelvis, and the surgeon had performed an emergency hysterectomy. She had been resuscitated twice more on the operating table but now, twenty-four hours later, her prognosis was promising. They had taken her off the ventilator and there were no indications of brain damage. Death had caught her by the coattails but she had torn herself free.
Her eyes blinked open.
She frowned. For a moment she didn’t recognize him.
“Hi, Elena.”
Her lips curled into a painful smile. “Oliver. Baby.”
So that was his name. “No,” he said, “It’s Adam.” He looked at her chart; flicked through his own ICU notes, then the surgeon’s.
“Where’s Oliver?”.
“I don’t know.”
“He was just here.”
A nurse looked in. Elena repeated her question. “Oliver? He left two hours ago. He was here all night, I told him to go home and get some sleep. He looked exhausted, poor man.”
“I thought he was here,” Elena said. Her eyes flicked from side to side, confused. “I must have fallen asleep.”
“He’ll be back in a few hours,” the nurse said.
“I don’t remember what happened.”
“Drunk driver hit you,” Adam said. “You’re lucky to still be here.”
Adam squeezed her hand and stayed with her until she slipped back into another drugged sleep. He didn’t want her to wake up again and call him Oliver so he decided to leave.
As he was walking out he saw a thirty-something blonde woman get out of the elevator and hurry toward the ICU. She stopped when she saw him, couldn’t hide a look of distaste.
“Hello, Julie,” he said.
“Adam. How is she doing?”
“She’s doing better.”
“Thank God. I was here all last night with...”
“Oliver. We’ve met.”
That seemed to throw her. “I had to get home and take care of the kids for a few hours. God, I thought we were going to lose her. Were you...were you in the ER when they brought her in?”
He nodded.
“That must have been hard for you.”
“It’s hard now. At the time I had a job to do.” He didn’t want to stand here and do this. He nodded towards the ICU. “You should go in. Has anyone told her about the baby?”
“You knew?” “We caught up for a drink a few weeks ago and she was drinking orange juice. I sort of guessed.” She still stood there. “She won’t be able to have children now. Did they tell you?”
Her eyes filled up and she fumbled in her purse for a tissue. He wanted to feel sorry for her but that was too much of a stretch, even now. “Poor El...oh fuck... ‘
“You should go in.”
“Does...does he know?”
“You mean...Oliver? I don’t know. I’m not part of the family any more, Jules.”
He grabbed a handful of tissues from a nurse’s trolley and handed them to her.
“I’d better get back to work,” he said, but it was a lie because he’d finished his shift.
“Okay,” she said and went into the ICU, almost on tiptoes, like she was walking into a minefield.
He went downstairs and changed out of his scrubs. He walked home.
* * *
He cut through Boston Common, hands deep in his pockets. For no reason at all, he started thinking about the Crow.
If Elena couldn’t have children, would that change anything for her, or for her and Oliver?
Forget about it, Adam. What happened to Elena was an accident, these things happened every day, it had nothing to do with the Crow. The only guy to blame for this tragedy was the drunk guy in the pick-up who ran the red light.
I was one of the good guys. I shocked her heart back into rhythm, got her blood pressure back up, stayed calm and focused and got the job done.
Remember that.
* * *
It was dark by the time he reached Beacon Hill. He lived in a narrow street of Federation style row houses: there were gaslights, converted stables, Grecian doorways. If it wasn’t for the cars parked up and down the street it would be easy to think he had stepped through a hole in the fabric of the world, gone back two hundred years.
A little like Santa Marta.
Back in his apartment he found the bourbon and poured what was left in the bottle down the sink. He transferred the dirty dishes from the sink to the dishwasher and put the CDs back in their right boxes.
He spent the next two hours tidying up. He had let things slip since he got back from Mexico. It was time to get things back on track.
He made himself dinner then turned on the TV. At a quarter to four in the morning he was still staring at the screen, some detective show from the sixties. Where had the last eight hours gone? He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on one of the barstools and put his head on the breakfast bar for a moment and fell asleep. The alarm on his wristwatch woke him. He showered and put his cold cup of coffee in the microwave. He remembered it when he was halfway across the common.
He just wished he had gotten that photograph back from the Crow.
Chapter 50
They had met at a costume party for Jay’s birthday down in Cape Cod. Lynne had always teased him that he thought he was God, so he thought it would be fun to go dressed as the Devil. He chose the costume, complete with a plastic pitchfork from a costume shop in Cambridge. He drew on a goatee and twirling moustache with a marker before he left the ER and drove straight down after a twelve-hour shift.
* * *
Jay had booked a friend’s art gallery for the night. It had once been a church, and the local stories of a haunting only added to its cachet, and certainly didn’t harm art sales. It was built out of red brick, and was probably no more than two hundred years old.
When he arrived the party was already well under way. The walls were pulsing with the throb of the music. He hoped the ghost like techno-pop.
Most of the guests were Jay’s friends from Harvard, there were a few nurses from the ER, Fiona and Jackie were there, but they had an unspoken agreement to ignore each other outside work.
He got himself a beer from the bar in what used to be the nave and decided to take a look around. He went up a dark brick staircase to the choir loft.
He didn’t noti
ce her straight away; she was standing in the shadows watching the light show and the dancers below. He didn’t know what made him stare. It couldn’t have been her face because it was hidden behind a very elaborate brown beard and her body was mostly concealed under a long, flowing robe. He liked blondes, but he didn’t know she was blonde because she was wearing a wig.
Perhaps it was her legs; the robe wasn’t as authentic as anything the real Jesus would have worn. It was slit to the thigh. But it must have been more than just the flash of a long and shapely leg. There were lots of girls there that night with nice legs.
Perhaps it was her animation when she talked, or something in the way her friends looked at her. Even a woman with a bushy brown beard can have charisma; that was what he told himself later, anyway.
She was with a couple of girlfriends. One of them drifted away to dance and then a man joined them and started hitting on her friend, so he took his chance. She was drinking punch. He got her another.
He held out the glass. “can I tempt you?” he asked, which was perhaps an obvious thing to say to a girl dressed as Jesus, but he couldn’t think of anything better after twelve hours in the ER.
“If you could it would be a miracle.”
“Like your costume. Where did you get it?”
“This isn’t a costume. I really am the Messiah.”
“I didn’t know the saviour of all mankind had such great legs.”
“If you really want to be saved you shouldn’t be looking.” She looked him up and down. “I like the horns. They’re very...upright. Not so much on the rest of it though. I don’t like to be mean, but I have a better beard than you.”
“Be careful what you say. I’m the one with the pitchfork.”
She smiled. “So when you’re not tempting the Son of Man, what do you do?”
“I bargain for souls. What about you?”
“Different line of work entirely. I’m a graphic designer in an advertising agency.”
The Black Witch of Mexico Page 13
