Extreme Measures (21 page)

“This cast looks new.”

“Get the monitor on her. Here, Billy. You know CPR. Take over this pumping. Sixty a minute. That’s it. Steve, ventilate her. Once every few seconds.”

“Monitor’s on.”

“What have you got?”

“Something. Wait a second. Yes, she’s in a very slow, regular rhythm. Eight, ten a minute. Complexes very wide.”

“Billy, you should have been doing CPR on this woman.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. She looked dead.”

“She probably is, but that’s not your decision to make.”

“Check her pupils, will you?”

Loretta felt hands on her eyes. For an instant she experienced a painful flash of bright white light.

“Dilated and fixed.”

“I told you she was dead.”

“Just keep pumping. Ray, get White Memorial on the radio. Tell them we’ve got a Priority One.”

“Any pressure?”

“None.”

“No pressure, no pulse, dilated pupils. Jesus, what in the hell was I supposed to think.”

“You weren’t. You were just supposed to start CPR and call us.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Get some epi in that line.”

“White Memorial, this is Boston Rescue, paramedic Driscoll speaking. We have Priority One traffic. Repeat, this is Priority One.…”

Voices began to blend with one another in Loretta’s mind. And although she understood almost nothing of what they were saying, just the sound of them made her feel better. The hands pumping on her chest hurt her, but they, too, were reassuring.

“Do you want to shock her?”

“What’s her rhythm?”

“The same. Eight a minute. Very wide complexes.”

“Just end-of-the-line beating. She needs drugs, not current.”

“What she needs is a goddam priest.”

“Cool it, Billy, will you?”

“The people at White Memorial say just proceed according to protocol and transfer as soon as possible.”

“Move the stretcher over here. Over here!”

“Stand back there, ma’am. Someone will be with you to explain everything in just a bit. It looks like heart failure.… I don’t know if she’s going to be all right. Right now it doesn’t look good.”

“Okay, get set to transfer. You two keep pumping and bagging her. Ready, Ray? Jimmy? Okay. One, two, three, lift!”

Loretta felt herself being lifted and then set down. For a moment the comforting hands stopped pumping on her. Then they started again.

“All right. Move back, everyone. We’re coming through. Coming through.”

Within the heavy blackness, Loretta Leone sensed more than felt the movement out of her apartment and down the hall to the stairs.

Help me
, she thought.
Just help me. I don’t want to die
.

The bell announcing wake-up in Charity sounded at just after six. Garrett Pike rolled off his cot and dressed. He could tell the day was going to be another scorcher. He studied the playmate on his calendar and decided, as he crossed off April 13, that the photo was
a keeper. Once, just once before he died, he would like to spend the night with a woman like that.

He left his room, which was on the floor above the men’s barracks, took his clipboard off the wall, and began making his rounds, checking off each patient’s name as he roused him and sent him toward the dining hall. One of the men, Dick, was clearly getting ill. He had been bathed in a feverish sweat the previous evening, but Dr. Barber had merely examined him and sent him back to bed. Now, his condition seemed worse.

Pike walked the man to the clinic and turned him over to Dr. Barber. Then he returned to the barracks. He was used to illness among the patients and expected that the man would be shipped out before long. It was not until the last of the male patients had been sent to the dining hall that Pike realized his count was off. In nearly two years, this was the first time.

Feeling the first twinges of panic, he searched the barracks and then hurried to the dining hall. A quick recount told him his survey was correct. The man called Bob was missing.

Dr. Barber at first took the news calmly. But as he, Pike, and John Fairweather began a systematic search, Barber’s concern grew. He hurried back to the clinic to ensure that the security system—a network of photoelectric cells and cameras encircling the town—was working properly. The system was—at least so he had told Pike—foolproof. And in fact, following an adjustment made after the Colsons’ surprise visit, he had seen animals as small as jackrabbits set it off.

“He’s here someplace,” Barber exclaimed, ordering a repeat swing through the buildings. “There’s no way he’s not.”

But minutes later John Fairweather called them to a shallow arroyo on the west side of town.

“He left through here,” the Indian said, pointing at some gouges in the dry earth.

“That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” Fairweather said. “Happened.”

To prove his point, he flattened out on the ground and worked his way serpentlike along the narrow gully, just beneath the intersecting photoelectric beams. The alarm, keyed to the loudspeaker system, remained silent.

“Go through again,” Barber ordered. “Go higher this time, on your hands and knees.”

Fairweather did as he was asked. Instantly the alarm began wailing.

“I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe this,” Barber exclaimed, his composure all but gone.

He raced to the clinic and shut down the siren. Then he brought out a detailed topographical map of the area and set it out for Pike and Fairweather to study.

“Who is he?” Pike asked.

“No one who could have done this on purpose,” Barber responded angrily. “It was an accident. A goddam fluke.”

John Fairweather shook his head. “No fluke,” he said.

“That man was too doped up to find his way out of a paper bag. Someone had to have helped him.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Pike said.

“Well, did you watch him swallow his pill like you were supposed to?” Barber demanded. “Did you?”

“I … I thought I did,” was all Pike could say.

Barber just cursed.

“He has fifteen, sixteen mile of desert to cross before he reach a road,” Fairweather said. “Hard desert on days like this.”

“Do you think he could make it?” Barber asked.

“Doubtful. Very doubtful.”

“Well, I want you to find him, dammit.” Barber was nearly screaming now. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this.”

Two miles southwest of Charity, the man named Bob kicked off a branch of a small cactus, crushed it with a stone, and rubbed some of the sweet nectar within it over his lips.

E
ven when confronted with Eric’s near certainty that the tattoo identified Thomas Jordan as Scott, Laura could not shake the hope—and the belief—that her brother was alive. She lay awake for much of the night, creating scenarios that would fit the facts as they knew them. In the end, though, the feasibility of each one of them collapsed beneath the reality that somehow both Eric and the nurse at White Memorial would have to have been mistaken.

Eventually, with the help of a third or fourth trip through the same news on CNN, she managed to slip into a fitful half-sleep. She awoke after just an hour, walked to the window, and gazed out at the night-lit city. Then suddenly, without warning, she was crying; sobbing in the racking, merciless way she hadn’t since two days after her parents’ funeral—the moment when the reality of their deaths first truly sank in. And she knew, as she braced herself on the window ledge to keep from crumpling down, that she was
grieving—not only for Scott and whatever horrible things he had been through, but for herself; for the connections she had walked away from in her life, or broken before they could grow strong; for the chances she had chosen not to take; for the isolation she had imposed on herself, waiting until … until what?

Thirty years of living, and what did she have to show for it? What impact had she made?

She called Eric to invite him over for breakfast, half believing that their evening together had been a dream. She was prepared for rejection, prepared for him to tell her he had business to attend to at the hospital, that she would have to face the day alone. And for a moment as they talked on the phone he seemed about to do just that. She was afraid she had once again given out the keep-your-distance message so many men over the years had accused her of sending. Then, as if a taut cord had snapped, the uncertainty vanished from Eric’s voice. Suddenly he sounded anxious to see her.

She put on a pair of jeans and a Shaker-knit sweater, and hurried to a nearby Store 24 for juice, muffins, and two cups of coffee. She was crossing the lobby of the hotel, heading back to her room, when the desk clerk called her over and handed her an envelope with her name and
HOTEL
CARLISLE
carefully printed on the outside. She waited until she was settled on her bed to open it.

Laura was preparing to go and question the desk clerk about the note when Eric rang her from the lobby. She took the elevator down, pleased to sense herself so excited to see him again. He greeted her with an uncertain kiss on the cheek. She held him tightly.

Eric glanced back at the empty lobby and then kissed her again, this time with much less inhibition.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I am now. At least I’m better. The things we learned last night about Scott didn’t really sink in until about four this morning. The hours since then have been a little rocky.”

“I understand. Well, for what it’s worth, I couldn’t wait to see you again.”

“You know, at one point, while we were talking on the phone, I thought you were going to beg off.”

“I almost did. I was on the verge of getting myself into a situation at the hospital that probably isn’t right. Some of the things you said to me last night helped me decide to get out of it before I drifted in over my head.”

“In that case I’m glad I said them.”

Eric sighed. “Unfortunately,” he said, “a byproduct of my refusal will be that I won’t get that promotion.”

“What do you mean?”

He hesitated for a time and then briefly recounted his contacts with Caduceus, and his decision first to join their efforts in exchange for the promotion, and then to let the whole business go.

“I think you did the right thing,” she said after a time. “The whole idea sounds a little scary.”

“Actually, doctors use unauthorized therapies more than you might think—a drug or piece of equipment that’s approved for one purpose, but that theory or their own testing has convinced them is effective for another. I did it myself once.”

Thoughts of the pericardial laser immediately
conjured the scene at the bedside of Thomas Jordan. And in that moment Eric knew that for as long as he practiced medicine, he would never again knowingly risk a patient’s life by using an unapproved therapy.