Mercy 6

“She’s withholding.” Claiborne kept looking at her, not even glancing toward Mullich. “She’s withholding what she should. For me. For herself.”

Mendenhall didn’t feel that she was lying or withholding. She just felt open.

“Thorpe asked me — us,” Claiborne nodded toward Mullich as he continued, “about Cabral coming to ER earlier. With that first wave of fevers. He heard something.”

Mendenhall returned his gaze. Only Pao Pao knew for certain what had happened. Only she had confronted Mendenhall. Pao Pao would not have said anything to anyone else. But plenty of other nurses and techs had been there, maybe noticed Cabral on that gurney, getting up from that gurney and scuttling away.

“We told him what we knew,” said Claiborne. “Nothing.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Okay. Now you tell me.”

Mendenhall stepped closer to Claiborne. “Cabral was on a gurney. I noticed him slip away. I did not start a chart for him. He was healthy. Scared. But fine.”

“You said yourself he was off.”

“Later,” explained Mendenhall. “I realized later. Suspected later. That’s the truth.”

“He was with us in the boiler room,” said Mullich. “He was the one who fetched Meeks.”

Claiborne’s expression remained flat. “Anything else?”

“I spoke with him after. Alone in a side room. I sent him back down to the boilers. I met him down there.”

Claiborne stood. He motioned to the first empty bed. “There,” he told her.

Mendenhall removed her lab coat and sat on the steel. The brakes weren’t set, so the bed scooted away from her weight and she had to restraighten it. She composed herself, adjusted her posture, rolled up her left sleeve, pumped forth a vein.

“Lie down.” Claiborne tied his mask and snapped on fresh gloves.

Mendenhall positioned herself, the steel cool against her shoulder blades. She flinched, confused. “Careful,” she said as Claiborne approached with the syringe. “I’m a live one.”

“I’m doing scans as well,” he said as he swabbed the insertion point. He drove the needle, his grip firm around her elbow.

“Anywhere I should focus?”

She watched her blood fill the syringe, was startled, as always, by the darkness of it. Not the color of the wounds she saw every day.

Not the bright red of movies. “No. I feel fine. You’ll find nothing in me.”

31

Pao Pao called her to the ER. A surgical tech had been injured trying to break through one of Mullich’s windows. One of the security officers who had restrained him was in, too. Mendenhall took solace in the call and the exit it provided. She paused outside the door to the Pathology lab. Claiborne and Mullich were in there with her scans. They would get to see them before she did, turn her, fold her, render her, float her above the room. Thorpe, too, would see them before she did, have them.

When Mendenhall got to the bay, to her remaining section along the wall, Pao Pao and an EMT were with the injured tech.

The tech’s complexion was waxy, and he was sweating as he lay back on the gurney. Pao Pao was pressing a wound above his left eye.

The nurse eyed Mendenhall hard as she approached. Mendenhall donned fresh mask and gloves. One bed back was Ng 23, her gunshot patient. She felt his gaze, too.

As she neared, Mendenhall could see everything. The position of the wound, the paleness, the quiver in the patient’s fingers. His head had struck a wall, maybe Mullich’s window, shoved there. One bed over sat the security officer, slumped to one side, arm hanging long and low. A separated shoulder, lots of pain.

She bypassed the tech and swerved toward the guard. “Sterilize and numb the wound,” she told Pao Pao. She looked at the EMT.

“Ready sutures.”

The security guard appeared startled even as he clenched against the pain in his shoulder. With a stiff arm, Mendenhall pressed him against the recline. He was big, his chest thick, his groan hollow inside it. She broke the seal on a foam bit and inserted it between his teeth. He seemed to know. His eyes widened. She palpated the inside of his biceps, checking against fracture. Without hesitation she pulled the arm, rotated, and shoved. The guard hummed loudly into the bit, eyes bulging. There was a wooden clunk as the shoulder set and the guard spit out his bit in a hard exhalation. The bit struck Mendenhall’s mask as she closed her eyes against the spray.

She glared at the guy. “Every time. Ev-e-ry time.”

His entire body relaxed, though his face appeared ready for pain, his eyes wide to the ceiling.

“It never gets old, does it?” she said.

He blinked, wiped tears with his good arm.

She offered him a Percocet and a cup of water, ordered the nearest nurse to dispose of the bit. She moved to the wounded tech.

Pao Pao dabbed the wound once more before clearing space for Mendenhall. The bleeding was still active, perhaps too heavy. The cut was maybe too close to the eye, ranging to the end of the brow.

Mendenhall changed into new gloves without looking away from the tech’s face. Pao Pao slapped the stapler into Mendenhall’s palm.