Bad Medicine (13 page)

Chapter 6

I shouldn't have laughed, was Molly's only coherent thought as she hit the floor. Over her head the Plexiglas shattered, spraying her with fragments. Out in the hall, the crowd had disappeared like kids at a school bell.

"Hail Mary, full of grace," the little secretary squeaked in her ear.

Molly almost laughed again.
She's right back in the back,
she wanted to tell the distraught woman, who was curled up tighter than a hedgehog beneath her.
I'll go get her right now.

The gunman emptied the clip into the wall over Molly's head and reloaded, walking and shouting epithets as he did. Molly finally reached up high enough to hit the toggle switch set into the wall right next to the chair. If she pushed it up, it called for security to respond. If she pulled it down, it meant for them to run like hell, and bring guns. She pulled it down. Then she yanked the cord to the mike so she could pull it onto the floor and alert the people in the back, who probably hadn't even heard the popping through the din of patients.

"Doctor Holliday to the desk stat," she announced, hearing her breathless voice throughout the floor. "Doctor Holliday."

A code they'd once thought cute. Doc Holliday meant a gunslinger on the street. Get the women and children into the saloon. With so many Wyatt Earp movies out lately, the gang-bangers were catching on. The staff was thinking of coming up with something else. Even so, Molly heard the brief halt in noise at the back, the terrible scramble to get the patients to safety.

The gang-banger was moving around to the doorway. Molly could hear him. At least she thought she could. Her heart was hammering so hard, she wasn't sure of anything.

For just the briefest of moments, she smelled the cordite and fought a rush of old memory. Crouched beneath a window in a Quonset hut, trying her damnedest to hand off instruments during a rocket raid in the middle of the night. Heart pounding, hands sweating, breath rasping in her throat as if she'd been in a fire. Trying to stay calm when the only thing keeping her alive was luck.

But she wasn't in a Quonset hut, and the enemy wasn't half a mile away. He had just reached the door to the triage station, where Molly and the secretaries crouched beneath the protective overhang of the desk.

He was smiling. A strong, handsome kid dressed in blue and black with dead eyes and a gun as his mouthpiece. A gun he was leveling at her again.

"This gonna be fun, ho'." He gave her a big smile. And then, before Molly could even close her eyes or start praying along with her secretary, he froze. Turned. Began to topple.

Only then did Molly hear the double sounds of a pistol shot and a deep, laconic voice.

"Police. Halt."

The gang-banger hit the floor like a felled tree, his eyes still open, and the secretary beneath Molly wet her pants. Molly damn near did the same thing.

"You okay?" a voice asked over her head.

It took that to make her realize that she'd closed her eyes after all. It was all she could do to breathe, much less respond. All she could see were those eyes. Dead, hard, cold eyes in a seventeen-year-old. God, what had this country done to its children?

"Yo, ladies, you okay?"

Molly opened her eyes again to find that there were two of them, one black, one white. Both as closed-off and controlled as the youth they'd shot. Both so similar to each other in civilian dress, grooming, and demeanor, that Molly wouldn't have needed them to announce their occupations to know. Cops the world over looked alike.

"I think so," she said, trying her best to straighten up.

She thought to check the boy on the floor. One look at the back of his head took care of that. The policeman hadn't taken a chance. Molly realized she was glad.

She got as far as her butt and stayed there. So far, not one of the secretaries seemed the least inclined to follow even that far.

"Ms. Burke?" the black cop addressed her, his expression never changing.

Molly allowed her surprise.

"Can I help you?" she asked, and realized that her voice was even less impressive than on the horn. Soon she was going to start squeaking like an asthmatic pigeon.

The white cop flipped a badge as the black cop reholstered his gun. "Detectives Martin and Jones from intelligence. We needed to talk to you."

"As soon as we take care of all this," the other one put in, bending to check out the young man he'd just brought down.

Just as he did, three security officers armed with everything from 9 mms to riot guns rounded the desk at a run. Their first reaction was to take aim at the black man bent over the black youth. Their second, upon seeing the badge the white cop flashed them, was to come to a screeching halt. Only then did Molly think to announce an all clear. She pulled the mike back into her lap and hit the switch.

"Billie Burke to the desk, please. Billie Burke."

Billie Burke being the actress who had played the Good Witch of the North in
The Wizard of Oz.
The witch who had sung to the Munchkins, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

Who said a crisis couldn't be creative?

* * *

"You piss him off, or what?" the homicide detective asked.

Molly tried to take another drink from a cup of coffee that was sloshing like a pool in an earthquake. The crisis had caught up with her so hard she couldn't hold still.

"Not unless he was dating the lady at the front desk," she said, swallowing back the bile that kept trying to work its way loose. It had already made it three times, and she was not in the mood to make it a fourth.

They were sitting back in the lounge, a converted linen closet that held a bulletin board full of notices, secondhand furniture from the Salvation Army resale shop, and a microwave. On the back wall where nobody who shouldn't could see it, was the hand inscribed plaque left by one of the first trauma residents to make it through Grace's program.
Traumaland.
It read.
From the slime to the ridiculous.

Molly couldn't agree more. She was sharing her shakes with the now-familiar intelligence team, a homicide guy she didn't know very well, the shooting team from the metropolitan police, and, for good measure, Kevin McCaully, who'd just happened to be the death investigator on for her big moment.

Every one of them had spent time at the front desk, where they considered, shook their heads, and told Molly how lucky she was. She hadn't argued. After about an hour of intense activity along a work lane that was still packed to the rafters, most of the rest of the gathered forces were milling around waiting for evidence to finish, while the intelligence team and homicide sat back with Molly, who was around waiting for her legs to work.

"What gang did he belong to?" she asked.

Martin looked up. "That boy was a bad fucker. Name's Mustaffa. Belongs to one of the Hoover offshoots."

Molly nodded. Wondered if she should bring Bone into this. Wondered whether this cop would ruin her uneasy alliance with a boy who still had a spark left in his eye. Cops saw gang-bangers for the crimes they committed. Molly could still, sometimes, see the children searching for a place to belong, a family to call their own A flag they could show with pride.

She understood how the cops felt. But she understood how the kids felt, too. At least the very young ones, who still had a small chance at survival.

"It was my fault," Sasha said, walking in, her ashen face frozen into stone to prevent betraying emotion. In defiance of every hospital and city ordinance, she was working on a cigarette. As hard as she was pulling on the thing, she must have left a smoke trail halfway down the hall, which would explain why Georgia Prendergast followed her into the room at warp speed.

"This is a no-smoking area," she informed Sasha in arch tones. Georgia, a chunky little bleached blond who had her blue-shadowed eye on the administrative suite, loved nothing more than impressing the people who could promote her by ratting on the ones who couldn't.

Sasha didn't even bother to turn around to confront the interloper. "This is also a no-kill zone," she countered icily, "but we've already shot that to hell tonight. And since everybody's already here, I bet they wouldn't mind making it a deuce now rather than having to come all the way back out again."

She glared at all three policemen, who just shrugged agreeably. The homicide guy was even obliging enough to pull out a clean DD-5 form and click open his pen. Sensing that a frontal attack wasn't going to do her any good, Georgia beat a strategic retreat.

Sasha never condescended to notice. Her attention was equally divided between Molly and Phillip Morris.

"She's running right home to the nursing supervisor to tell on you," Molly warned her.

Sasha took care of the last of her cigarette and ground it out in an emesis basin. "I'll eat her liver."

The police shifted around to continue their questioning. It wasn't yet meant to be, though. From behind Sasha, another country was heard from.

"Hey, Chernobyl, was that you in the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral up there?"

Only one person had the guts to call Sasha Chernobyl. He wedged his way through the crowd at the door and grinned for everybody in the room. "We on the news," he announced. "Of course, you man James here jus' happen to be there when the cameras showed up. The hospital now owes me time and a half for public relations."

"Of course they do," Sasha retorted.

James wasn't in the least intimidated. In fact, he broadened his grin to exhibit his two prize gold crowns. Short, black, bald, and round, James was the evening pharmacy supervisor. He was also the proud holder of the best collection of reggae in the city, which seemed to follow him long after the radio was switched off. He never stopped moving, and he always moved to the beat of invisible drums.

"We're kind of busy here," one of the cops informed him.

He didn't bother to answer. "Oh, it was you, Miss Molly."

As in, "Good Golly Miss Molly." James had a nickname for everybody he supplied.

"It was me, James."

His nod was brisk. "Fearsome. Real fearsome. You need a little help wit' you nerves? Your man James is holdin', just like always."

Everybody on the couch but Molly went right on point.

"We're police," Martin informed him so that he might have the chance to sneak back out before incriminating himself and causing them more paperwork.

"It's okay," Molly informed them both. "He's not holding what you think he is. Would you mind, James? Just put it on my tab."

James laughed and bounced a little on the balls of his feet. "James always takes care of his customers." Then he reached into his lab coat pocket and pulled out a Ding Dong. Molly caught it on the fly, which just left James with his real mission up here. "Hey, Chernobyl, where you want that stat streptokinase?"

"Medprep," Sasha told him, looking straight down at the top of his head as if he were a Munchkin who had somehow strayed into
Swan Lake.
"I'll be there in a minute."

James nodded, took another bright, assessing look at the glowering police, and bounced back out the door. As he headed down the hall, Molly could hear him singing, "Kill the white man," just loud enough for the white cops to hear.

Martin sighed, his attention drawn to Sasha, who still hadn't moved. "We have to talk to Ms. Burke—"

"You have to talk to me, too," she said, then turned to Molly for what sounded suspiciously like an apology. "He said he needed to be seen," she said in a way that made Molly think that these weren't the first cops she'd relayed the information to. "I told him to wait with everybody else." She couldn't quite say she was sorry, but Molly understood.

"No," Detective Jones said, closing his notebook. "It was his fault. You all were just there. Word's already out on the street that it was a cop shoot, so you don't have to worry about the rest of his posse comin' back on a mission to even things up. We'll have everything else cleaned up as quick as we can."

Sasha couldn't seem to break eye contact with Molly, as if waiting for her absolution but incapable of asking for it. Molly didn't know what would make Sasha feel better.

Molly did her best to smile. She could have told Sasha it hadn't been the first time she'd been shot at, but Sasha already knew that. She could have told her at least they were all alive, but Sasha knew that, too.