Page 9 of Wicked Things
FOUR
SLOANE
Zeth: I’m going away for a few days. I won’t be long, though. Michael’s going to come stay at the house with you.
Zeth’s text is not the beginnings of a discussion. It’s a statement. He’s going away to finally deal with the Italians. He must be, or he would have been more specific about his destination. I close my eyes, trying not to freak the hell out. I wish he’d talked to me about this before just vanishing off this morning. I would have tried to talk some sense into him. We haven’t heard from the east coasters in over a month. I’ve been beginning to assume that torching the warehouse was their way of punishing Zeth, and that the loss of his property was enough for them. Zeth hasn’t said otherwise, but clearly he still considers them a threat. A very grave threat, if he’s willing to leave town right now.
I start typing out a response to him, my finger hovering over the touch screen as I type one thing and then think better of it, deleting the text and starting over. There’s no point in being angry or disappointed with him. He’s doing what he thinks is right for me and the baby. I’d rather the three of us went and lived in a beach shack in Mexico than have him put himself in danger again, but he is the kind of man to ever turn tail and—
“Dr. Romera?Dr. Romera!We have incoming!”
Head nurse of St. Peter’s of Mercy hospital, Grace Miller, barrels around the corner, dragging a paper apron from her body and slamming it into a HAZMAT bin as she charges toward the ER entrance. I can already hear distant sirens wailing—more than one ambulance, which means more than one patient.
Shit. I slide my phone into my pocket, and I take off after Grace, abandoning my coffee as well as Mikey the intern, who was waiting for me to delegate patients to him. I reach the drop off point out of the front of the building moments before the first emergency response vehicle arrives. An EMT opens the rear doors of the ambulance from the inside and jumps out, turning and sliding a gurney out behind her.
“Partially de-gloved right hand. Severed ring finger. Metacarpal fractures. Analgesia administered in the field. Crush syndrome presented on the scene. Fluids have been hung. Patient is a twenty-eight year old woman, trapped in an elevator. She was trying to climb out and got pinned by her hand overnight.” The EMT hands Grace a bag of saline to hold as she pushes the gurney toward the hospital entrance.
I catch sight of the woman’s hand at the same time as Grace, who pales significantly. “Jesus,” she hisses. “That’s…that’sgotto hurt.” So much blood. So much bone. Shattered bone. Visibly crushed tendons.
“Poor woman,” Grace hisses. “There’s no way we’ll be able to regain full mobility.”
I look down at the hand, and I can’t help but agree. The damage is catastrophic. With the crush syndrome and the loss of the index finger, it’s a miracle the EMTs didn’t call ahead to ask permission for a field amputation. My stomach twists at the sight of the blood-soaked bandages that are wadded up at the end of the gurney.I begin a visual examination of the patient’s hand, trying to assess the true extent of the damage. “Give me a read out. What are her vitals looking like?”
“Sloane?”
My head snaps up.
“Sloane. Oh my god.Sloane…” The woman on the gurney cries out, her voice choked with pain and fear.
“Patien’s regaining consciousness!” Grace dumps the saline beside the woman on the gurney, leaning over her, checking her pupils. I follow suit, shock making my skin prickle, the hairs on my arms standing on end. She knows me. She said my name. And her voice…
The second I look up at the patient’s face, it’s as though time stands still. Holy shit. It’s…
Fuck…
It’sPippa.
******
How long has it been since I’ve spoken to her? Weeks? God, no. It’s been months. At least two months. There was a time not too long ago when I wouldn’t go a day without speaking to her, even if it was just a text or an incredibly brief phone call. When I met Zeth, though, everything changed. It was shitty of me to cut her out of my life so thoroughly, but the way she reacted to my relationship with him was violent to say the least. She did what any good friend would have done. She worried on my behalf. She lost sleep, wondering if I was okay. I could understand all of that, even though it was frustrating, but when she called Lowell in…
I’ll admit, that has been a hard betrayal to forgive.
Now, she’s looking up at me with sheer terror strewn across her face, and I feel like my heart is being forcibly ripped from my chest cavity and stomped on over and over again. I go to take her hand, to tell her everything is okay, but I quickly realize that would be a bad idea.
I’ve given her more pain meds, and she doesn’t seem as on edge as she was when she first arrived. She’s very spaced out, though. It’s hard to get a straight story from her.
“So, you were working? What were you doing in that building so late at night on your own?”
Pippa blinks hazily at me, her pupils contracting and dilating like the shutter of a camera lens. She shakes her head, closing her eyes. “I had a meeting. I was on my up to see my client, and...” She frowns, deep lines of confusion marking her brown. She has tiny flecks of blood all over her face, like delicate freckles. “The lights went out,” she says. “The elevator just…stopped. I couldn’t…I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t breathe. It was stifling in there. Everything was pitch black.” She opens her eyes, suddenly alert. “Wait, where’s Teddy?”
“Teddy?”
“There…there was another man in the elevator with me. The janitor for the building. He only had one more floor to clean and...then he was going to go home to his wife and…his little baby boy.”
The EMTs are long gone, so I can’t ask them about a guy called Teddy. Another ambulance did pull up after Pippa’s EMTs went back out, but I wasn’t hanging around to ask them questions about their patient. I was too worried about Pippa to be paying attention to anything else. Now that I’ve cleaned and wrapped her hand, given her more fluids, raised her body temp and gotten her comfortable while we wait for ortho and plastics to come down and see her, I’m feeling a little less fried. My emotions are all over the place. Pregnancy has turned me into some sort of emotional train wreck.
Oh, shit. Pregnancy. The baby. I haven’t even told Pippa about the baby yet. I’ve been meaning to for weeks, but it’s always better to wait until you know the pregnancy is safe before you start shouting the news from the rooftops. Still… Pippa and I have been as close as sisters since before we attended medical school. She’s going to be incomprehensibly hurt if I don’t tell her before one of my colleagues mentions something in front of her.
