Page 7 of Absinthe Dreams
So, even though Emergency Medicine was my main department and the one I loved most, I could only work it six months out of the year at most, which, thankfully, was working out for me. I would do my three months, then move to a different ward for three, then bounce back to the Emergency Department.
It was an experiment, and this hospital was a proving ground for its implementation in other hospitals. The plan was for it to continue in this way for a minimum of five years. It wasn’t entirely without flaws, nor was it without merit. One of its saving graces was that it was a teaching hospital, and having a bunch of extra residents around did help fill some of the gaps.
Still, it was definitely a profit killer having to keep the staffing levels at a level that made the whole thing work. There were plenty who were upset about that part, but I was definitely teammedicine should not be for profit anyway,so shareholders could honestly cry harder for all I cared.
It wasn’t perfect, like I said, but it was working, and working pretty well – at least for us and the city… but then there washim.
I’d rotated from the emergency department to what had to be one of the second or third hardest roles within the hospital. The palliative care ward.
Some saw this as the last stop on the train to nowhere that was hospice care, but that wasn’talwaysthe case. Sometimes, patients were admitted to Palliative Care as a temporary measure along their healing process to make some gains when it came to their pain, mental health, or to get their nausea and vomiting to a tolerable level. It was about comfort care and quality of life care. Yes, most of the patients admitted were admittedly suffering from a diagnosis of something terminal – be it a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer, or some sort of blood or bone marrow disorder.
It was the perfect ward for Lucas Levi Belmar to hide.
Luke was a nurse on the Palliative Care ward, and God knows for how long he’d been getting away with it, but he was also a serial killer. One I had caught due to some inconsistencies with where several patients were in their illness versus their death. It was painstaking work auditing the charts. But once you had a patient like Maurice Chandler – who was in pain, sure, and sick, yes – likely terminal, also yes, but who held such a positive outlook and was fighting the good fight for as long as he could to walk his daughter down the aisle in just a few more weeks…
No, his suddenly giving up the ghost wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right, and nothing was right about it. Something was wrong – very wrong – and I’d gone digging and a pattern had emerged.Easy to miss at first – I mean, most of these patients in Palliative weren’t honestly going to make it in the end. A lot of those who died on the ward were about an inch from leaving and going into hospice care – but Maurice?
No.
He was in heart failure, and it was only a matter of time, but he was so damned determined and had no reason to go like he did. It just didn’t make sense.
So, when I started taking a backhoe to the ward’s statistics and death records, I found that every patient had one nurse in common, with L.L. Belmar signing off on all their final paperwork, I got suspicious.
Someone on the ward tipped him off by the time the authorities were called in, and he slipped the noose that was closing in on him. Now, while he was terminated from the hospital, and the police were supposedly on a manhunt for him, the whole thing was very much being kept under wraps so as not to create a scandal with the hospital.
It very much left me twisting in the wind between a rock and a hard place, though.
While the hospital said they were grateful for my finding the discrepancies and protecting patients, it also felt like they didn’t appreciate me blowing the whistle and bringing things to light.
And while the NOPD said they were looking for Luke Belmar, it didn’t feel like they were looking very hard. It especially felt like I was expendable when the notes and flowers started.
I knew they were from him, but the police weren’t convinced. No matter how many times I had gone to them for help, they assured me that it was most likely just a coincidence. Luke had a particular modus operandi, and killing me would be so far outside his typical MO that it was unlikely he would come after me.
When I again shoved the blatant threatening notes across the desk, I was told that they couldn’t do anything because the notes didn’t say directly ‘I’m going to kill you’ or any other blatantly threatening language, and that there was honestly nothing they could do until whoever sent them actuallydidsomething.
Yeah, and I quote, “Call us when something actually happens.”
As in,don’t call us until you’ve been hurt, raped, or even killed. Until then, it’s not our problem.
One officer told me that if I was really so worried for my safety, it was best past time I got myself a gun.
…like I hadn’t already thought about that, and I hadn’t already secured one for myself.
I’d even gone so far as to sign myself up for a security service. It cost a pretty penny, but it would be worth it.
The thing just looked like a necklace with a stone, but if you pressed hard enough, it sent a signal. The service would call your phone, and if you didn’t answer, they’d immediately dispatch help.
It was like a fashionable life-alert, except that instead of dispatching medical or fire services, it sent the cops, and the company updated the police in real-time on your exact location.
At least for the private company, the notes and threatening messages had been enough – even if the cops didn’t give a damn.
I went home, pulling carefully down the narrow alleyway behind the rows of houses on my street and equally carefully parking my tiny roller-skate of a Smart Car in the narrow, itty-bitty driveway behind my house that was once upon a time meant for a horse and buggy and nothing more.
I didn’t bother to open the garage door and pull in. I had too much random shit from when my brother had stayed with me for a while before taking off to parts unknown. He was aprofessional student. Both of us had been academically inclined growing up.
There was nothing else to do in our small town with Mom working as hard as she did as a grocery clerk, and our father in jail.
I was the eldest of the three of us, with River right behind me, and our half-brother, Reigel, being the youngest and still living with our mom, and yeah, mine and River’s dad at seventeen.
