Chapter 31
Dr. Bradley juggled the cup of coffee in her hand as she rummaged through her purse for her key card. As soon as she found it and swiped her office door, she felt a presence over her left shoulder.
“Here, let me get that for you.”
Michael Radcliff pushed the door open with his left hand, and with his right hand, the one holding his cane, he gently but firmly pushed her through the door.
“Radcliff.” She said his name as calmly as she could because he appeared like a mountain to her. She could sense his power and vitality and knew better than to challenge or question him. Instead, she kept her voice light, even though she was scared to death. “I could have sworn you were discharged.”
“I was.”
Putting her purse on the desk, she shrugged off her jacket. “So you miss us that much? I’m flattered.”
“I learned something interesting last night.”
The way he said the words made Dr. Bradley’s heart pick up its pace. “Really?”
“I ran into my ex at a restaurant.”
Dr. Bradley could feel his eyes probing her, so she tried to keep her face expressionless. “Is that right?”
“She mentioned she knew you.”
Dr. Bradley considered pretending she didn’t know who he was talking about, but one look at his face told her that would be a mistake. “You mean Angela? Yes, we’ve met, but we—”
“Actually it sounded to me like you went to school together.” Rad corrected her.
“Oh, well. That’s a big school so—”
“And that you were sorority sisters.”
The room fell silent for a moment as Dr. Bradley tried to decide how she could call security without Rad knowing. She bit her lip and looked away.
“Funny, you never mentioned it.” He crossed his arms and stared at her with slanted eyes.
“To be honest with you, I didn’t know my college years would be of any interest to you.” Dr. Bradley forced a laugh but could not bring herself to meet his gaze.
“If we’re being honest then I have to admit she didn’t actually tell me that.” Rad leaned down and looked her in the eye. “I was just guessing.”
Dr. Bradley’s head jerked up. “Okay, you can stop with the games.” She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. “What do you want?”
“Who’s in room 313?”
Trying to catch the breath his question knocked out of her, Dr. Bradley walked over to her desk. “A lot of patients come and go here, Radcliff. I don’t have the rooms memorized.”
Rad grabbed her by the arm and led her back out the door. “It’s right down that hall, to the left, at the end.”
“Oh, that one,” she said weakly as she turned back to her office.
“Yeah. That one.” His voice was low and serious. “I couldn’t sleep last night and remembered the day you gave me the wheelchair and I went exploring on my own. Remember that?”
“Vaguely.”
“Only vaguely? Because you seemed pretty nervous when you saw me on this floor.”
“I was surprised, that’s all.” She laughed nervously. “I mean, really, I just didn’t expect to see you up here.”
“Okay, let’s cut to the chase.” He stood in front of her and hit the floor with his cane as if agitated. “Why is there a guard in front of the door?”
“I don’t know. She’s not my patient.”
The doctor couldn’t help but notice the expression on Rad’s face at the use of the word ‘she’ and realized he had come here only on a hunch. Angela must have said something last night that had gotten his wheels turning and Dr. Bradley had just confirmed his entire theory.
“But you’ve seen her.”
Dr. Bradley bit her lip. “Yes. We have rounds. I’ve seen the patient in that room.”
“I want to see her.”
She looked him straight in the eye. “No. You probably don’t.”
“I’m a big boy, Dr. Bradley. I can take it.”
“It doesn’t matter if you can or can’t.” She went back to the desk, sat down, and fingered through some files. “I don’t have the authority to get you in there. Those guards weren’t placed there by me.”
Rad put one hand on the back of her chair and one on the desk, and bent down with apparent effort. “Was she shot?”
The look in his eyes and the tone of his voice startled her.
“No. Why?”
He pulled himself back up and dropped into a nearby chair with a loud sigh, as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “When I was shot…” He paused, apparently trying to keep his voice from quivering. “I thought maybe she was hit too… that I had gotten her killed by running through the gunfire.” He choked up again and paused. “But I was just trying to save her.”
Putting his head in his hands, he sat breathing heavily, rubbing his temples as if trying to clear the images from his mind. “They worked on me on the helicopter—not her. I thought she was dead.”
Dr. Bradley stood and put her hand on Rad’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you thought that. They were working on you because you were bleeding to death. She had critical injuries, but not the type that could be treated on a helicopter. All they could do was try to get her stabilized.”
She sat back down and stared at the mountain of a man who had appeared so frightening a few minutes ago. Now he seemed on the verge of tears, an emotional wreck caused by the anguish he’d been living with without telling a soul. She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “She’s got a traumatic brain injury. She’s been in a drug induced coma to help her heal.”
Rad stared straight ahead. “She doesn’t have any family. No one to visit.”
“Yes, I noticed that.” Dr. Bradley leaned back in her chair with a pencil in her hand, tapping it on the desk. Then she stood. “There is nothing I can do that won’t jeopardize my license. I’ve already disclosed more than HIPPA rules allow. I’m sorry.”
Rad continued to stare at the wall on the opposite side of the room and nodded, but his mind seemed elsewhere.
“But sometimes the guard goes outside with me for a smoke.” She glanced at her watch. “Right around now.”
Rad’s gaze slowly returned to hers, and the look on his face made her want to wrap her arms around him and comfort him. They burned with want and need and a yearning she had never before seen in a man’s eyes.
She pulled out a piece of paper and wrote #1833 on the page, underlining it twice even though she knew he understood it was the keypad code to get through the door. Then she grabbed a cigarette and a lighter from her purse. “I hope the hell you’re out of this hospital by the time I get back in about ten minutes.”
Rad waited for the sound of the two voices to disappear down the hall. He’d grabbed a white lab coat from Dr. Bradley’s office, and although it was snug, hoped it helped him fit in. Walking to the door, he took a deep breath and tried to prepare himself for what he was going to see.
The click of the door lock unlatching after he’d punched in the numbers sounded like a gun blast to his tightly strung nerves. As soon as he stepped inside, the sound of machines greeted his ears, some beeping rhythmically, others humming, still another making a sickening sucking noise. He walked toward the bed and noticed how small and fragile she appeared as she lay amidst a maze of blinking modern technology.
“Lauren.” Rad tried to fight the inclination to run from the room as he saw the number of tubes sticking out of her nose and mouth and even her head. He inched closer and saw her face was still swollen, but the black and blue patches now had a yellowish cast. Her head was shaved on one side, and a tube disappeared into a hole above her ear. Even though her eyes appeared to be slightly open, he could tell they were not seeing.
There was barely an inch of her he could touch that was not hooked up to some sort of life-giving or life-monitoring machine, but he found a finger and grasped it firmly.
“Hey, baby,” he said, choking back tears. “I promised I’d see you again. Remember?”
Within moments, the timer on Rad’s watch beeped, and he knew he had to leave. Bending down, he kissed her cheek tenderly. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything but getting better. I got your back now.”
As he exited the room, he almost ran into a nurse coming in. He gave her a nod and continued walking, stripping off the lab coat in the elevator.
Once outside the hospital, he sat down on a bench and called Wynn.
“Hey, man. I need a ride.”
Before he could tell Wynn where he was, he heard Heather’s voice come on the phone. “Michael Radcliff where are you? Why haven’t you answered your phone? Tell me you didn’t sleep with Angie last night. I’ll kill you if you did.”
The phone line became scratchy and muffled as if there was a tug of war going on, and then Wynn came back on. “Sorry about that. She grabbed the phone out of my hand. Where you at?”
“No, I didn’t sleep with Angie. And sorry, I had my phone turned off. I’m at Walter Reed.”
He heard Heather yell something in the background but couldn’t make it out.
“Why? Your leg bothering you? You sick?”
“No.” Rad paused a moment, wondering how much to tell over the phone. “Remember the comment Angie made last night that for all we know someone could be right down the street?”
Wynn paused as if he were thinking. “Yeah.”
“And remember that story you told me about a no-count love?”
For a moment, Wynn was silent. “What did you do, Rad?”
“I found someone I was looking for.”
The line grew quiet, and then Wynn whispered as if he’d moved to a room where Heather could not hear the conversation. “You kidding me?”
“No, brother. I’ll be waiting out front. We have some work to do.”
When Wynn and Heather pulled up, Wynn had to grab Heather’s arm to keep her from bounding out of the car to give Rad a hug. Instead, they waited for him to climb into the back seat.
“How’d she look, brother?” is all Wynn said.
“Alive.”
Wynn glanced back at the mixture of relief and pain on Rad’s face. “You wanna talk about it?”
“Not right now.” Rad turned and stared out the window, overcome with a mixture of emotions. The relief that came with knowing Lauren had successfully made the transition from survival to recovery was tempered with the knowledge that she was still beyond his reach. “We have a lot of work to do.”
After a few minutes of going over his plan in his head, Rad pulled out his phone. Before he dialed, he leaned forward and put his hand on Wynn’s shoulder. “Think we can keep those rooms another night?”
Wynn looked over at Heather, who nodded. “Sure.”
“Then let’s head back to the hotel.”
As soon as they got back to the room, Rad laid out his plan. He would call McDunna, tell him he’d found her, and ask for authorization to get past the guard to visit. The circumstances, in his mind, outweighed normal protocol, and he assumed the higher-ups would agree.
But he soon learned this was not the case. Even with McDunna going to bat for him, the officials continued to deny her existence, and even threatened Rad with discipline for saying he had seen her.
After a few hours of trying, Wynn put his phone down. “I’m sorry, man. I don’t know who else to call.
Rad leaned back in his chair, his lips pursed, his jaw set, and nodded. “Thanks for trying.”
“Guess it’s time to move to Plan B.”
Rad gazed at Wynn curiously.
“I’ll take out the guard, tie him up and stick him in a closet while you go in for another visit.”
Heather leaned in from the balcony. “No you won’t.”
Rad smiled. “Sorry, bro. I gotta go with Heather on this one. I don’t think that will work.”
“Well, let’s go back and check it out anyway.” Wynn stood and squeezed Rad’s shoulder. “You’re good at bluffing. Maybe you can just talk your way past the guard.”
Rad nodded and shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
When they got back to the hospital, Rad told Wynn and Heather to stay in the waiting room while he tried his luck at getting past the guard.
He squared his shoulders when he stepped off the elevator and walked confidently toward the room. He knew the guard at the door would only be following orders, but maybe he could get him to see his side of things and bend the rules just a little.
When he turned the corner, his heart jumped and dropped all at the same time. There was no guard. Maybe Wynn had been right with his theory the guard took more than one smoking break a day.
As he got closer, his pulse quickened at the thought of getting to see her again. But when he pushed the door open, his heartbeat came to a thudding halt. There was no buzzing or beeping or blinking lights. The bed was empty, but the room was not. A nurse turned and jumped in surprise.
“Can I help you?”
Rad tried to act calm, even though his mind was racing. Had something happened? Had they rushed her to surgery? Where was she?”
“I, ah, just came to see this patient.”
The nurse smiled and turned back to a piece of equipment she was wiping down. “Oh, sorry. She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Rad swallowed hard.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Yeah. Been moved, I guess.”
“Oh. Moved.” He breathed again. “You know where?”
“No.” She gazed up at him curiously. “I’m new to this floor.”
“But you’re sure she’s just been moved. She didn’t… she didn’t…”
The nurse paused a moment as if just understanding what he was saying. “Oh, no. No.” She shrugged. “Pretty sure, anyway. I heard them talking about a chopper for transport, but there’s no record to check.”
Rad stood silently in the doorway another moment as his eyes swept the room. “Thanks for your help.”
When he made it down to the waiting room, the expression on his face must have told Wynn and Heather things had not gone as planned. Neither asked any questions or even said a word. And when they got to the car, Wynn turned up the music loud enough that Rad’s choking sounds of disappointment and despair could barely be heard.