Far From True (36 page)

“What’s the deal?” Tammy asked. “All the other units book off sick? They go fishing for the weekend?”

“Negative. All engaged.”

“What?”

“It’s like an instant flu outbreak all over town,” the dispatcher said. “Let me know the second you’re available.” The connection ended.

“What’d he say?” Ali asked.

Tammy swung the wheel hard. She could see the blue H atop Promise Falls General in the distance. No more than a mile away.

“Something going around,” Tammy said. “Not the kind of Saturday morning I was expecting.”

Whenever Tammy and Ali got the weekend morning shifts, they usually started them with coffee at Dunkin’s, chilling out until their first call.

There’d been no coffee today. Audrey McMichael, it turned out, was their second call of the day. The first had been to the home of Orrin Gruber, an eighty-two-year-old retired airline pilot who’d called 911 after experiencing dizziness and chest pains.

He never made it alive to Emerg.

Hypotension, Ali thought. Low blood pressure.

And here they were again, with another patient experiencing, among other things, dangerously low blood pressure.

Ali raised his head far enough to see out the front window, just as Tammy slammed on the brakes and screamed, “Jesus!”

There was a man standing in the path of the ambulance, halfway into their lane. Standing was not quite accurate. More like stooping, with one hand on his chest, the other raised, palm up, asking the ambulance to stop. Then the man doubled over, and vomited onto the street.

“Goddamn it!” Tammy said. She grabbed her radio. “I need help!”

“Drive around him!” Ali said. “We don’t have time to help some geezer cross the road.”

“I can’t just—he’s on his knees, Ali. Jesus fucking Christ!”

Tammy threw the shift lever into
PARK
, said, “Be right back!” and jumped out of the ambulance.

The dispatcher said, “What’s happening?”

Ali couldn’t leave Audrey McMichael to tell him.

“Sir!” Tammy said, striding briskly toward the man, who looked to be in his late fifties, early sixties. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“Help me,” he whispered.

“What’s your name, sir?”

The man mumbled something.

“What’s that?”

“Fisher,” he said. “Walden Fisher. I don’t feel . . . something’s . . . not right. My stomach . . . just threw up.”

Tammy put a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to me, Mr. Fisher. What other symptoms have you been experiencing?” The man’s breaths were rapid and shallow, just as they were for Audrey McMichael and Orrin Gruber.

This is one serious clusterfuck. That’s what this is,
Tammy thought.

“Dizzy. Sick to my stomach. Something’s not right.” He looked fearfully into the the paramedic’s face. “My heart. I think there’s something wrong with my heart.”

“Come with me, sir,” she said, leading him to the back of the ambulance. She’d put him in there with Audrey.

The more the merrier,
she thought, shaking her head, wondering,
What next?

Which was when she heard the explosion.

•   •   •

When Emily Townsend had her first sip of coffee, she thought it tasted just a tiny bit off.

So she poured out the entire pot—six cups’ worth—as well as the filter filled with coffee grounds, and started over.

Ran the water for thirty seconds from the tap to make sure it was fresh before adding it to the machine. Put in a new filter and six scoops of coffee from the tin.

Hit the button.

Waited.

When the machine beeped, she poured herself a cup—a clean one; she’d already put the first one into the dishwasher—added one sugar and just a titch of cream, and gave it a stir.

Brought the warm mug to her lips and tentatively sipped.

Must have been her imagination. This tasted just fine.

Maybe it was her toothpaste. Made that first cup taste funny.

•   •   •

Before Patricia Henderson decided to try to get herself to the hospital, she dialed 911.

She figured, when you called 911, someone answered right away. First ring. But 911 did not respond on the first ring, nor did it respond on the second.

Or the third.

By four rings, Patricia was thinking maybe this was not the way to go.

But then, an answer.

“Please hold!” someone said hurriedly, and then nothing.

Patricia’s symptoms—and there were more than a few—were not subsiding, and she did not believe, even in her increasingly confused state, that she could wait around for some 911 dispatcher to get back to her.

She let go of the receiver, not bothering to place it back in the cradle, and looked for her purse. Was that it, over there,
waaaay
over there, on the small table by the front door?

Patricia squinted, and determined that it was.

She stumbled toward it, reached into the bag for her car keys. After ten seconds of digging around without success, she turned the bag over and dumped the contents onto the table, most of them spilling onto the floor.

She blinked several times, tried to focus. It was as though she’d just stepped out of the shower, was trying to get the water out of her eyes so she could see. She bent over at the waist to grab what appeared to be her keys, but was snatching at air, some three inches above where her keys lay.

“Come on, stop that,” Patricia told the keys. “Don’t be that way.”

She leaned over slightly more, grabbed hold of the keys, but tumbled forward into the hallway. As she struggled to get to her knees, nausea overwhelmed her and she vomited onto the floor.

“Hospital,” she whispered.

She struggled to her feet, opened the door, made no effort to lock it or even close it behind her, and went down the hallway to the elevators, one hand feeling the wall along the way to steady herself. She was only on the third floor, but she still possessed enough smarts to know she could not handle two flights of stairs.

Patricia blinked several times to make sure she hit the
DOWN
instead of the
UP
button. Ten seconds later, although to Patricia it might as well have been an hour and a half, the doors opened. She stumbled into the elevator, looked for G, hit the button. She leaned forward, rested her head where the doors met, which meant that, when they opened on the ground floor a few seconds later, she fell into the lobby.

No one was there to see it. But that didn’t mean there was nobody in the lobby. There was a body.

In her semidelirious state, Patricia thought she recognized Mrs. Gwynn from 3B facedown in a puddle of her own vomit.

Patricia managed to cross the lobby and get outside. She had one of the best parking spots. First one past those designated for the handicapped.

I deserve one of those today,
Patricia thought.

She pointed her key in the direction of her Hyundai, pressed a button. The trunk swung open. Pressed another button as she reached the driver’s side, got in, fumbled about, getting the key into the ignition. Once she had the engine running, she took a moment to steel herself. Rested her head momentarily on the top of the steering wheel.

And asked herself,
Where am I going?

The hospital. Yes! The hospital. What a perfectly splendid idea.

She turned around to see her way out of the spot, but her view was blocked by the upraised trunk lid. Not a problem. She hit the gas, driving the back end of her car into a Volvo owned by Mr. Lewis, a retired Social Security employee who happened to live three doors down from her.

A headlight shattered, but Patricia did not hear it.

She put the car into drive and sped out of the apartment building parking lot, the Hyundai veering sharply left and right as she oversteered in the manner of someone who’d had far too much to drink or was texting.

The car was quickly doing sixty miles per hour in a thirty zone, and what Patricia was unaware of was that she was heading not in the direction of the hospital, which, ironically, was only half a mile from her home, but toward the Weston Street Branch of the Promise Falls Library System.

The last thing she was thinking about, before her mind went blank and her heart stopped working, was that when they had that meeting about Internet filtering, she was going to tell those narrow-minded, puritanical assholes who wanted what anyone saw on a library computer closely monitored to go fuck themselves.

But she wouldn’t get that chance, because her Hyundai had cut across three lanes, bounced over the curb at the Exxon station, and driven straight into a self-serve pump at more than sixty miles per hour.

The explosion was heard up to two miles away.

•   •   •

Those sirens woke Victor Rooney.

It was a few minutes past eight when he opened his eyes. Looked at the clock radio next to his bed, the half-empty bottle of beer positioned next to it. He’d slept well, considering everything, and didn’t feel all that bad now, even though he hadn’t fallen into bed until almost two in the morning. But once his head hit the pillow, he was out.

He reached out from under the covers to turn on the radio, maybe catch the news. But the Albany station had finished with the eight o’clock newscast and was now onto music. Springsteen. “Streets of Philadelphia.” That seemed kind of appropriate for a Memorial Day Saturday. On a weekend that celebrated the men and women who had died fighting for their country, a song about the city where the Declaration of Independence had been signed.

Fitting.

Victor had always liked Springsteen, but hearing the song saddened him. He and Olivia had talked once about going to one of his concerts.

Olivia had loved music.

She hadn’t been quite as crazy about Bruce as he was, but she did have her favorites, especially those from the sixties and the seventies. Simon and Garfunkel. Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Beatles, it went without saying. One time, she’d started singing “Happy Together” and he’d asked her who the hell’d done that. The Turtles, she’d told him.

“You’re shittin’ me,” he’d said. “There was actually a band called Turtles?”

“
The
Turtles,” she’d corrected him. “Like
The
Beatles. No one says just Beatles. And if you could name a band after what sounded like bugs, why not turtles?”

“So happy together,” he said, pulling her into him as they walked through the grounds of Thackeray College. This was back when she was still a student there.

The better part of a year before it happened.

Three years ago this week.

The sirens wailed.

Victor lay there, very still, listening. One of them sounded like it was coming from the east side of the city, the other from the north. Police cars, or ambulances, most likely. Didn’t sound like a fire truck. They had those deeper, throatier sirens. Lots of bass.

If they were ambulances, they were probably headed to PFG.

Busy morning out there on the streets of Promise Falls.

What, oh, what could be happening?

He wasn’t hungover, which was so often the case. A relatively clear head this morning. He hadn’t been out drinking the night before, but he had felt like rewarding himself with a beer when he got home.

Quietly, he’d opened the fridge and taken out a bottle of Bud. He hadn’t wanted to wake his landlady, Emily Townsend. She’d hung on to this house after her husband’s death, and rented a room upstairs to him. He’d taken the bottle with him, downed half of it going up the stairs. He’d fallen asleep too quickly to finish it off.

And now it would be warm.

Victor reached for it anyway and took a swig, made a face, put the bottle
back on the bedside table but too close to the edge. It hit the floor, spilling beer onto Victor’s socks and the throw rug.

“Oh, shit,” he said, grabbing the bottle before it emptied completely.

He swung his feet out from under the covers and, careful not to step in the beer, stood up alongside the bed. He was dressed in a pair of blue boxers. He opened the bedroom door, walked five steps down the hall to the bathroom, which was unoccupied, and grabbed a towel off one of the racks.

Victor Rooney paused at the top of the stairs.

There was the smell of freshly brewed coffee, but the house was unusually quiet. Emily was an early riser, and she put the coffee on first thing. She drank at least twenty cups a day, had a pot going almost all the time.

Victor did not hear her stirring in the kitchen or anywhere else in the house.

“Emily?” he called out.

When no one called back, he returned to his room, dropped the bath towel on the floor where the beer had spilled, and tamped it down with his bare foot. Put all his weight on it at one point. When he’d blotted up all the beer he believed was possible, he took the damp towel and placed it in a hamper at the bottom of the hallway linen closet.

Back in his room, he pulled on his jeans and took a fresh pair of socks and a T-shirt from his dresser.

He descended the stairs in his sock feet.

Emily Townsend was not in the kitchen.

Victor noticed that there was an inch of coffee in the bottom of the pot, but he decided against coffee today. He went to the refrigerator and pondered whether eight fifteen was too early for a Bud.

Perhaps.

Sirens continued to wail.

He took out a container of Minute Maid orange juice and poured himself a glass. Drank it down in one gulp.

Pondered breakfast.

Most days he had cereal. But if Emily was making bacon and eggs or pancakes or French toast—anything that required more effort—he was
always quick to get in on that. But it did not appear that his landlady was going to any extra trouble today.

“Emily?” he called out again.

There was a door off the kitchen that led to the backyard. Two, if one counted the screen door. The inner door was ajar, which led Victor to think perhaps Emily had gone outside.

Victor refilled his glass with orange juice, then swung the door farther open, took a look at the small backyard through the screen door.

Well, there was Emily.