SATISH
Satish’s pulse started gyrating as soon as he stepped through Stanford’s back entrance into ER. No patients waiting for triage, but nearby a man groaned. A woman’s scream rose over a baby’s wails. Lights popped on and off on electronic boards above a command-center desk. Announcements in medical jargon broke through the din of the sick and scared. Smells of puke and shit and alcohol and antiseptics and cleaning fluids and a steady buzz of adrenaline added to the sense of descending into the lowest region of hell.
Satish ground his teeth. God, he hated hospitals. He loathed emergency rooms. Going to either as a cop had always raised his heart rate higher than visits to the morgue.
For the record, he also hated morgues.
He held his CDL to a young, muscular woman with spiked green hair. Eyes squinted, she glanced up from her iPhone. She checked a clipboard, gave it to Satish without speaking. He scrawled his name next to an X and laid the clipboard back on the desk.
Deep into her game, fixated on her phone, the guard continued texting.
Didn’t matter. Satish had the name he needed. Anne Hood, the charge nurse, would cut the red tape separating him and Dr. Richard Cohen. Without waiting for any of the nurses to look up from their computers, he stopped in front of a middle-aged blonde with black-framed glasses halfway down her nose. He identified himself and asked for Anne Hood.
The blonde, Hilary Asher, kept pounding her keyboard. “Anne and Dr. Cohen have a new patient. She asked me to take care of you, Mr. Patel. Give me a sec, and I’ll page Dr. Ramsey. He was on call when your friend came in.”
“Who else can I talk before the next Ice Age?” Satish flexed his fingers but kept his voice even.
“You can talk to me.” Hilary stood, came around the desk, and hitched her chin toward an open door. “I was with Cassie in Trauma.”
He followed her through the windowless door. She shut it, and the walls shrank. Equipment on either side of the empty bed expanded. Contracted. Closed in on him. She motioned toward a straight-back chair.
I’d rather sit in the electric chair. “What’s her condition?” He fought the dread uncoiling in his stomach.
“Grave. She’s lost a lot of blood—”
“Was she conscious when you admitted her?” he barked, ignoring the compassion that peered at him from Hilary’s blue eyes.
“The EMTs gave her Valium in the bus. She was in a lot of pain.”
“Did she say anything?”
Hilary gave him a my-aren’t-you-the-sensitive friend look. She said, “Gibberish. No one could make sense—”
The door swung open. A short, square black man dressed in blue scrubs entered, hand extended. His name tag read Thaddeus Ramsey, M.D. His dark eyes focused on Satish as if he was the last person on earth, and Satish’s pulse slowed.
“I am sorry, Mr. Patel,” Ramsey said in the musical cadence of Africa or Indonesia, “to inform you your friend will not survive her assault. Her brain, for all practical purposes, has shut down ...”
The lyrical intonation and word-choice softened the impact, but not the message.
Satish’s lungs felt heavier than cement. He locked his jaw. Why, even expecting Cassie would die before he reached the hospital, did he feel as if he’d lost a part of himself? He barely knew her. He’d known Maverick less. Yet they’d touched his life in some profound way he couldn’t grasp. Senseless. Bloody senseless. Their deaths ...
What had they ever done to deserve such violence?
“Can I see her?”
Dr. Ramsey nodded. “She’s not conscious, and her life has almost reached the end of its journey. Stay with her for as long as you are able.”
“Thanks.” Dry-mouthed, Satish wanted to say more but couldn’t. The room now enclosed him like a coffin.
Dr. Ramsey eyed him from the doorway. Satish inhaled, straightened his shoulders, took a step.
“She’s in a private room.” Dr. Ramsey led Satish through a long, windowless corridor. “With the door closed, it is very quiet. No machines. No interruptions. We gave her morphine—enough to cut the pain. Some people become agitated—a reaction I’m sure you’ve seen.”
“A few times.” Satish and Ramsey walked side by side like boys coming home from school. Satish hesitated to break the bond they seemed to have established, but this could be his last chance. He blurted, “Did she say anything? It’s important.”
A sign with a circle enclosing an X and NO VISITORS hung on the door where Ramsey stopped. “I could not go to court and swear this, but I think she mumbled one word over and over and over.”
Blood rushed to Satish’s head. “I won’t ask you to go to court.”
“Red. I think she repeated red. Her voice was very weak. I may have misunderstood.”
“No.” Satish fisted his hands. “You understood.”
The doctor waited for Satish to amplify the statement, but gave up and opened the door. “I must warn you, Mr. Patel, this will be difficult to see.”
The smell of death hit Satish in the gut. His gaze snapped to her chest. Each shallow rise and fall came further and further apart. He approached the bed and took her hand.
Cold. Turning waxy and yellow. Her face belonged in a horror movie—one cheek torn away, one eye covered with bandages. He forced his gaze upwards. Someone had covered the top of her forehead with a thin gauze band, but blood had congealed in her matted blonde hair. He stroked her hand. Half the long, red nails she’d cared for so meticulously were broken or cracked in jagged spikes.
God, did she claw the bastard’s eyes? Any chance of DNA under her nails?
“I’ll find him, Cassie. I promise.” The guilt gnawing at his stomach chomped off more of his guts.
Cassie sighed.
He stayed with her for a while—even after her last breath was exhaled.
He stayed a while longer—until he thought he could walk out of the hospital without cursing God.