Mercy 6

Except her. ” She motioned toward Fleming, the one with the patient gown and bracelet. “She’s somebody else’s patient.”

“No, her, too,” he told her. “Seems she was officially checked out. Was gabbing with her roommate in recovery, having a Jell-O

together, then collapsed across her roomie’s bed. You get to start a whole new chart.”

Mendenhall sighed, started to raise her hand to her brow, then thought better of touching her face. “What was she in for?”

“Foot surgery.” Claiborne nodded toward Fleming’s right ankle.

The toes were thin and pale, the nails freshly painted red, post-op no doubt.

Mullich finally spoke. “How come you know everything?”

Claiborne only glanced at him before going back to Mendenhall.

“Because this is Hell. We end up knowing everything that happens.”

He motioned toward the ceiling but kept his eyes on Mendenhall.

“Up there.”

He kept looking at Mendenhall as he spoke to Mullich.

“Following her will give you the wrong impression of this building.

I wouldn’t advise it. Dr. Mendenhall still does the footwork. No one does that anymore. Not even the nurses. Just like now. Just like she came here.” With his gloved hand still curled, he motioned to the laptop on a side table. “On that screen there are probably five requests — orders — sent by Thorpe. Blood work. But right there,” he punched his hand toward Mendenhall, “is her. In person. Here to see me. Pay us a visit. Help us.” He extended the last two words. “I haven’t even seen Thorpe for over a year. To him, I’m a name at the bottom of a result.”

“It’s because I like people so much.” Mendenhall looked at Claiborne’s tech.

“It’s because you like bodies. The body.” Claiborne blew a hard breath, then gave orders to the tech. “Start blood work on Verdasco and Fleming. Zap Dozier.”

“Thank you, Dr. Claiborne.”

“Just get us out of here before midnight.”

She started to reply, but Claiborne raised his hand and closed his eyes. He held a gloved finger near his lips, shushing. He pointed up to the music, the weave of the violin, cello, and piano. “This is the best part.”

They listened to the quiet music and watched as the tech rolled Dozier to a corner of the lab. Mendenhall couldn’t really see the posturing anymore, any real lift in his shoulders that might indicate trauma. Infection was most likely, given the timing, place, and disparate persons. A janitor, nurse, patient, visitor. But the timing was almost too good. All must have been found within the same five minutes or so. All must have died fairly quickly, fairly together, either before or during their transport to the ER. A janitor slumped over a ladder. A patient slumped over another’s bed. Where had Peterson and Verdasco been found? How long had each of them lain undiscovered, unattended? … How bad was this hospital? She looked at Mullich, who was scanning the room, using Claiborne as a pivot for his gaze. How sick was this building?

5

She returned to her ER cubicle to do charts. Mullich was no longer following her, no doubt more intrigued by Claiborne’s Hell. Doctors hated charts because charts were menial, below a physician’s station. Mere data entry, what her mentor had called paperwork. But the most profound cause of that hatred was the fact that charts acknowledged an overseer, reminded a physician that all her decisions and acts were up for assessment, even though 99 percent of those decisions and acts were repetitions, determined by precedent. And that last fact was the most difficult part of the acknowledgment, that what they were all doing was mimicking, robotics, child’s play.

But these four new charts tagged on to the end of Mendenhall’s long day were different; she saw them as an act of organization and self-checking, probably what charts were originally meant to be, way back when Mercy General had been built, when the telescope on the roof had been whole and aimed toward the Milky Way.

Enry Dozier was a fifty-three-year-old janitor with a clean work record during seven years of employment at Mercy. His medical history was in the system and showed nothing unusual, nothing more than a slightly elevated BP, almost average for a black male. He never missed the hospital’s required checkup. He had been found slumped over his ladder in the seventh floor hall, one fluorescent tube leaning against a rung, the other shattered along the floor, presumably dropped. He was at the far end of the hall, past the patient rooms, so it was unknown how long he had been like that before being discovered by a patient taking a prescribed hall walk.

He had been unresponsive during transport to the ER.

Lana Fleming, a sixty-three-year-old retired middle school teacher, had been admitted for surgery to scrape bone chips from her talocrural joint. The procedure had been successful. Her medical history was in the system and showed nothing unusual, nothing more than being overweight, average for a white female over sixty.