Passage

“No, I’ve got Mr. Mandrake’s number,” Joanna said grimly. “He managed to get to Mrs. Davenport before I did. That’s the third interview this week he’s ruined.”

“You’re kidding,” Eileen said sympathetically. She was still looking at the number on the pager. “It might be Dr. Wright’s. He was here looking for you earlier.”

“Dr. Wright?” Joanna said, frowning. The name didn’t sound familiar. From force of habit, she said, “Can you describe him?”

“Tall, young, blond—”

“Cute,” Tish, who’d just come up to the desk with a chart, said.

The description didn’t fit anybody Joanna knew. “Did he say what he wanted?”

Eileen shook her head. “He asked me if you were the person doing NDE research.”

“Wonderful,” Joanna said. “He probably wants to tell me how he went through a tunnel and saw a light, all his dead relatives, and Maurice Mandrake.”

“Do you think so?” Eileen said doubtfully. “I mean, he’s a doctor.”

“If only that were a guarantee against being a nutcase,” Joanna said. “You know Dr. Abrams from over at Mt. Sinai? Last week he suckered me into lunch by promising to talk to the hospital board about letting me do interviews over there, and then proceeded to tell me about his NDE, in which he saw a tunnel, a light, and Moses, who told him to come back and read the Torah out loud to people. Which he did. All the way through lunch.”

“You’re kidding,” Eileen said.

“But this Dr. Wright was cute,” Tish put in.

“Unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee either,” Joanna said. “I met a very cute intern last week who told me he’d seen Elvis in his NDE.” She glanced at her watch. The cafeteria would still be open, just barely. “I’m going to lunch,” she said. “If Dr. Wright shows up again, tell him it’s Mr. Mandrake he wants.”

She started down to the cafeteria in the main building, taking the service stairs instead of the elevator to avoid running into either one of them. She supposed Dr. Wright was the one who had paged her earlier, when she was talking to Mrs. Davenport. On the other hand, it might have been Vielle, paging her to tell her about a patient who’d coded and might have had an NDE. She’d better check. She went down to the ER.

It was jammed, as usual, wheelchairs everywhere, a boy with a hand wrapped in a red-soaked dish towel sitting on an examining table, two women talking rapidly and angrily in Spanish to the admitting nurse, someone in one of the trauma rooms screaming obscenities in English at the top of her lungs. Joanna worked her way through the tangle of IV poles and crash carts, looking for Vielle’s blue scrubs and her black, worried-looking face. She always looked worried in the ER, whether she was responding to a code or removing a splinter, and Joanna often wondered what effect it had on her patients.

There she was, over by the station desk, reading a chart and looking worried. Joanna maneuvered past a wheelchair and a stack of blankets to get to her. “Did you try to page me?” she asked.

Vielle shook her blue-capped head. “It’s like a tomb down here. Literally. A gunshot, two ODs, one AIDS-related pneumonia. All DOA, except one of the overdoses.”

She put down the chart and motioned Joanna into one of the trauma rooms. The examining table had been moved out and a bank of electrical equipment moved in, amid a tangle of dangling wires and cables. “What’s this?” Joanna asked.

“The communications room,” Vielle said, “if it ever gets finished. So we can be in constant contact with the ambulances and the chopper and give medical instructions to the paramedics on their way here. That way we’ll know if our patients are DOA before they get here. Or armed.” She pulled off her surgical cap and shook out her tangle of narrow black braids. “The overdose who wasn’t DOA tried to shoot one of the orderlies getting him on the examining table. He was on this new drug, rogue, that’s making the rounds. Luckily he’d taken too much, and died before he could pull the trigger.”

“You’ve got to put in a request to transfer to Peds,” Joanna said.

Vielle shuddered. “Kids are even worse than druggers. Besides, if I transferred, who’d notify you of NDEs before Mandrake got hold of them?”

Joanna smiled. “You are my only hope. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Wright?”

“I’ve been looking for him for years,” Vielle said.

“Well, I don’t think this is the one,” Joanna said. “He wouldn’t be one of the interns or residents in the ER, would he?”

“I don’t know,” Vielle said. “We get so many through here, I don’t even bother to learn their names. I just call all of them ‘Stop that,’ or, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I’ll check.” They went back out into the ER. Vielle grabbed a clipboard and drew her finger down a list. “Nope. Are you sure he works here at Mercy General?”

“No,” Joanna said. “But if he comes looking for me, I’m up on seven-west.”

“And what about if an NDEer shows up and I need to find you?”

Joanna grinned. “I’m in the cafeteria.”

“I’ll page you,” Vielle said. “This afternoon should be busy.”

“Why?”