Authors: Vicki Hinze
“Here’s fine.” Sara dumped her duffel bag on the chair. Too little floor space to put it anywhere else without tripping over it. “Thanks for everything.” Sara looked up, but Shank was gone.
Shrugging out of her jacket, Sara draped it over the back of the brown swivel chair, slid the duffel bag to the floor, and then sat down with a sigh. The chair squeaked, and a seat spring poked through the worn nylon and stuck her in the backside.
“Great. Just great.” She should have just murdered Foster, called this done, and spared herself and her esteem a lot of anxiety. Grumbling, she flipped open the first file—Patient ADR-17.
Two hours later, after reading and making notes on her five patients’ case histories and a brief, chilly visit from Martha, Sara headed toward the nurses’ station. Shank was returning a metal cart to the medication room. Not wanting to bother her, Sara dropped a stack of orders on the desk, which included a list of patient names, and then walked on down the hall toward the patients’ rooms. Maybe anonymity was in the best interests of national security, but it wasn’t in the best interests of the patients, so she’d studied their files and assigned them fictitious names. As solutions went, this compromise wasn’t great, but it beat the socks off calling these men by numbers—and she’d insist that they be called by those names. Unfortunately, she innately knew she would have to insist.
She straightened the white lab coat Martha had brought up along with the keys. Like with the pass, Sara had been instructed to wear the lab coat at all times when on the premises. Why, she had no idea. “Dr. Fontaine’s rules,” Martha had said. Sara supposed the coat could help people differentiate between staff and patients, and she also supposed she would encounter plenty more of Fontaine’s rules, and she’d like them about as much as she liked Fontaine’s fabled fury.
She checked to make sure her pass was clipped to her collar and then scanned her patient list. Four of the five assigned to her were on the second floor in regular rooms. She checked for the first patient’s room number. ADR-17, now Michael, was in 229.
Michael, she recalled from his chart, had been exposed to an orphanage bombing overseas. The experience severely challenged him,
as
he had just returned from a mission wherein two of his buddies had stepped on abandoned but live land mines. According to the notes in his chart, Michael was “not coping well” with the graphic deaths. Exactly how that “not coping well” had manifested in him had not been noted.
Never in her career as a psychiatrist had Sara seen such sorry charting. If not for Shank’s notes, Sara would be clueless on the condition of all of her patients.
She paused outside Michael’s door and then looked inside. Empty.
The next patient was ADR-22, the bedridden and vegetative man she’d named Fred. No inciting incident or criteria for the PTSD diagnosis had been noted in his chart. She tapped lightly and then opened the door to Room 222: Also empty.
The third patient, ADR-36, an athletic blond she called Ray, suffered episodes of extreme confusion. For the most part, it appeared Dr. Fontaine had done little more than keep Ray sedated—often with the maximum dosage possible without causing a drug-induced coma. Ray, not surprisingly, was asleep. Sara tried, but even shaking his shoulder didn’t rouse him.
That worried her. He was a noninsulin-dependent diabetic. Just to make sure this was sedative and not a diabetic coma, she did a finger stick and ran an Accu-check on his sugar. She stuck the testing strip into the machine’s slot and waited for the readout.
Forty-nine.
Forty-nine?
Sara reached over him and pushed the nurse’s call button. “Shank, it’s me, Dr. West.”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“Get some grape juice. Two packets of sugar in it. Ray’s room. STAT.”
Sara clasped Ray’s shoulders, stroked his face, clammy. So clammy. He roused slightly. Grateful for it, she heard a noise and looked toward the door.
Shank hustled in, thrusting the sugared grape juice at Sara. “I brought D-50, too—just in case.”
An intense dose of sugar to be injected through an IV. Sara hoped it didn’t come to that. She cradled Ray’s head in her arms and poured the grape juice down his throat. “Drink it, Ray. It’s really important.”
He gurgled and nodded. Most importantly, he swallowed.
Minutes passed. She monitored and saw him coming around. “Shank, get him a turkey sandwich up here, okay?” The juice would get his blood sugar up, but it wouldn’t keep it up. He needed protein to get stable.
“Right away.” Shank hit the call button. When a man answered, she clipped off the order. “Turkey sandwich. Room 226. Yesterday.”
“Yes, ma’am, Captain.”
Sara looked over Ray at Shank. The patient seemed worried. To convince him that she wasn’t, she asked Shank, “Are you up for promotion soon?”
“In about a year.” Shank picked up on Sara’s intention and ran with it. “I got my nursing degree and filled all the squares, so I should make it, but with all the cutbacks and base closures, who knows? These days, it’s pretty much a crapshoot.” She frowned down at Ray, who was definitely cognizant. “I’ll be out in the hall.”
She had something to tell Sara. From the look in Shank’s eye, something important. “Fine.” Sara nodded, turned her attention to Ray, talked with him for a few minutes, and then rechecked his sugar level. One-twenty. Fine.
When the orderly returned with the sandwich, Sara smiled at Ray. “I’ll be back a little later on. Eat every bite of that, okay?” She nodded at the orderly. “Will you see to it?”
He nodded, bobbing his glasses. “Yes, ma’am.”
Sara walked out of the room, closed the door behind her, and saw Shank, leaning back against the wall.
Anger glittered in her eyes, and she ground her teeth. “Fontaine has him on 70/30.”
“I figured that out.” And being a noninsulin-dependent diabetic, being on the time-released insulin had made Ray crash. He could have died. “The question is, why would Fontaine prescribe 70/30, when Ray’s diabetes has been well-controlled with just DiabetaT?”
Worry joined the anger in Shank’s expression and both carried over in her voice. “I don’t know.”
“Has Ray been on a feeding tube?” Often, diabetics were given tube feedings containing sugar, and the 70/30 medication was necessary to control the patient’s sugar level.
“No, he hasn’t,” Shank said. “There’s no reason for this. But Fontaine wrote the order, and William gave Ray the shot.”
“William?”
“My night-shift counterpart. Strong, strong Fontaine ally.”
“Cancel the damn thing.” Sara couldn’t figure it. Fontaine had to know what giving Ray the 70/30 would do to him. If she hadn’t recalled he was a diabetic and treated him, he could have died. “Monitor him closely, Shank. I want him stable as soon as possible. If his sugar falls either side of a 70-140 range, I want to know it immediately.”
“You’ve got it, Doc.”
“And no one gives orders on my patients but me.” Sara would be damned if she’d accept responsibility for the welfare of her patients with the director doing his best to kill one of them. “See to it that the rest of the staff gets the message.” She borrowed the expression from Sergeant Bush that had filled her with the dread of authority. “No exceptions.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Shank rubbed at her temple. “Would that include Dr. Fontaine?”
“Everyone short of God,” Sara insisted, her voice hinting at a yell.
“You’ve got it.” A relieved smile twitched Shank’s lips. “Flat out.”
Sara stood shaking with fury, barking at the woman, and Shank smiles at her? What was wrong with this picture?
Sara blinked, then blinked again, and the reason hit her. Shank was relieved. By intimating Sara would go toe-to-toe with anyone “short of God,” including Fabulous Fontaine, she had proven her intention to protect the men.
Shank went back into the room to check on Ray. Sara continued on her rounds, feeling a little more confident now that Ray’s crisis had been successfully handled, and she’d proven herself to her sole ally.
Her fourth patient, ADR-39, now Lou, sat in a chair beside his bed. Sara entered his room and spoke to him, but gained no response. She checked his reflexes. Lou didn’t so much as blink. Heart fine, lungs clear. Pupils normal and reactive. Yet nothing. Everything she observed coincided with Fontaine’s diagnosis of total withdrawal.
Lou’s inciting incident had been wicked. He’d needed critical counseling immediately, but he hadn’t gotten it. Undercover, he had infiltrated a hostile terrorist group and had been exposed and tortured. His release, Sara gathered from subsequent nurse’s notes, had been part of a diplomatic-exchange solution that wasn’t termed as such, as the government of the United States takes the official stance of not negotiating with terrorists. She supposed some latitude on that policy was warranted when the hostage had Top Secret information running around in his head.
On leaving Lou’s room, she checked her list. Her fifth patient, ADR-30, whom she’d tagged Joe, was housed in the Isolation Wing. For what reason, only he and Dr. Fontaine knew. Not a word as to why Joe required isolation had been charted.
Remembering those “moments of lucidity” Foster had mentioned, and combining them with the isolation, Sara guessed that Joe could be Foster’s operative. She made her way over to the Isolation Wing, paused at the heavy steel door separating it from the rest of the second floor, and then tapped the wall buzzer.
An intercom on the wall activated, and a man answered. “Isolation.”
“This is Dr. West. I’d like to see my patient.”
“Yes, ma’am, Major.”
Major.
The facility’s gossip grapevine had been buzzing. She would never remember to use ranks or any of the other military jargon. Why did it matter in here, anyway? It was just more unnecessary red tape, like the million and one acronyms she’d noted over the years. The military absolutely loved acronyms.
The door alarm buzzed, and she walked through. The walls were white. No paintings, or even wallpaper, relieved the starkness. Fluorescent lamps recessed in the ceiling glared harsh and unforgiving light down on the spotless white-tile floor. Doors lined both sides of the hall. Not seeing anyone, she walked on down the corridor. When it made a bend, she saw a replica of the other second-floor nurses’ station, though this one was protected by ceiling-to-floor Plexiglas barriers. Why, Sara couldn’t imagine. A second set of alarmed doors separated nurses from patients.
A man about thirty with a blond crew-cut and three stripes sewn to his sleeve sat at the desk before a row of room monitors, reading a novel. “Hi, Major.”
“Hi.” She glanced at his name tag above his shirt pocket. KOLOSKI. Sara nodded, letting her gaze drift over the monitors. Apparently each room was a camera room. “I’d like to see ADR-30, please.”
“Second door on your left.” He nodded. “I’ll buzz you through.”
“Thanks.” Sara turned, then paused and looked back at
him. “From now on, I’d appreciate it if you’d call him Joe.”
Koloski dropped his book. “Whatever for?”
She’d suffered one too many indignities today, and the urge to blister Koloski’s ears hit Sara hard. Yet she had enough problems, she really didn’t need another enemy, and he hadn’t caused her any trouble. He’d actually, by God, looked her in the eye—a rare treat around here. And it wasn’t his fault that her patience was shot. Biting back the reprimand, she opted to explain. “We’ll call him
Joe
because he’s a human being. Because he’s lost too much already, and he shouldn’t lose even more. And because anonymity isn’t conducive to forming attachments, and attachments are essential for healing.”
Koloski looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Explaining, it appeared, had been a wrong move. Using her clout. That would have been the military way. Its members were huge on clout. Responding innately to it had been drilled into them since induction. Koloski was discomfited because she’d acted out of character—for a major. Maybe she could still pull her fanny out of the flames. “And because I’m a major, and I said so.”
“Yes sir, ma’am.” He looked relieved.
Well, she’d gotten lucky. Finally. “Thank you, Koloski.” She nodded, then walked to the door outside Joe’s room and waited for the buzzer. When it sounded, she stepped through.
Joe was on his feet but stooped and curled into a ball in the corner of a padded room as white as everything else in the Isolation Wing. No window. One door. He was a large man; thirty-three, according to his records. His black hair sheened glossy in the glaring light, and he had his face buried against his chest. Mumbling incoherently, he was clearly disoriented and in emotional distress.
He was also straitjacketed.
The door slammed closed behind her.
Hyperalert, Joe jerked up, glared at her. She looked into his angry eyes and swallowed a gasp. He was
the
one. Her other half. She recognized him just as her mother had recognized her father, and Brenda, David.