Nathan's Run (1996) (17 page)

Between the day's two momentous events was an endless stream of broken bones and sliced flesh, all of which had to be handled in due course, prioritized in order of the injuries' threat to the longterm health of their owners. As he slipped a set of x-rays into the clips on the viewer, he frowned, instantly regretting the decision of the triage nurse to put this case at the end of the line. Ordinarily, broken fingers were, on the ER's scale, a low-priority injury, but this guy was the exception. The ghostly white hand on the screen before him was more than just broken; it had been mangled. The pain must have been excruciating, Tad thought. How odd that he would have sat so patiently in the waiting room for-he referred to the admissions chart-four hours! Cringing at the potential liability an event like this posed to his hospital, he made a mental note to follow through on it later. It was, after all, not the sort of note one would want to have in writing, in case Mr.-he referred to the chart again-Bailey turned out to be the litigious sort.

Putting on his best clinician's face, Dr. Tad (as he was called by his staff) slid back the curtain and addressed for the first time the occupant of Bed Four. "Good afternoon, Mr. Bailey," Tad greeted his patient. "I'm Dr. Baker. I see by your chart that you've had an accident. Hand injury, huh?" Mr. Bailey looked awful. He was drawn and pale, like someone who was fast approaching the limit of his pain tolerance.

Mark jumped at the suddenness of the doctor's entrance, mustering only a wan smile in response to Baker's clinically cheerful greeting. The intense throbbing in his hand had transported itself all the way back to his shoulder blades now, and lighthearted conversation was no longer in his repertoire.

Tad reached gently out toward his patient. "May I see it, please?" he asked, nodding toward the hand. The look he received as his reply told him that Mark Bailey had no plans to let anyone within five feet of his injury. Tad softened his voice nearly to a whisper. "I promise I won't move anything around, okay? I'll be very, very gentle."

Mark studied the doctor's face for a few seconds, then gently passed his right hand over, carefully supported by his left. "It really hurts, Doc," he said.

"I bet it does," Tad agreed. "I've seen your x-rays. It's really quite a significant injury you've sustained. How did it happen?"

The first time that question had been asked, by the triage nurse, Mark had been caught off guard, and he had stammered clumsily through the poorly formulated lie. In the ensuing hours of his wait, he had worked through most of the details, actually practicing the answer out loud once, albeit at a whisper. "I was changing out the brakes on my car when the jack slipped," he explained. Smooth as silk, he commended himself.

Tad winced at the thought. "Didn't have it up on blocks, huh?"

"Nah, I was too stupid to do that," Mark said. "You know. I was in a hurry; took shortcuts. Same old story I guess you guys hear every day."

Tad smiled noncommittally, knowing right away that the story was a lie. First of all, the fingers were still on the hand; a highly unusual outcome for that particular scenario. For another, the angulation of the fractures was all wrong. An impact from a single heavy object should project a uniform force more or less perpendicular to the plane of the body part being injured. In Mark Bailey's case, the displacement of the bone ends was longitudinal in the case of the first digit, and lateral in the case of the fourth.

The fact that patients lied to him-and many of them did-was typically not a source of great concern to Tad. Quite often, he had to admit that if he were in the position of the patient, he, too, would probably try to float a story in hopes of mitigating the embarrassment. Nine times out of ten, he played Mr. Gullible. People had the right, after all, to live their lives any way they wanted to, and it wasn't his place to interfere with their fantasies, so long as they weren't harmful to others.

But harmfulness was the key. In the medical world, as in the legal, the good of the many outweighed the privacy of the one. When a gunshot case or a case of suspected child abuse came to him, he was legally bound to report it to the police, even over the objections of the patient. The same was true for knife wounds and other acts of criminal brutality, but only when there was clear, irrefutable evidence that such acts were the source of the injury. While few doctors argued the spirit of the law, the way it was crafted put them in a very difficult position, because the burden of proof ultimately fell on the physician. Overreacting and reporting a case based merely on one's supposition of foul play would place a doctor in violation of the Hippocratic Oath if his or her suspicions proved groundless. On the other hand, ignoring a bona fide criminal act would place a doctor in violation of the criminal statutes of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In either case, the doctor's license to practice medicine would be at stake.

There was no doubt that Mark Bailey's injuries were the result of something other than the causes described by the patient. In Tad's judgment, these fingers had been broken intentionally, by someone who seemed talented at doing such things. This judgment was not something he could prove, however; nor could he ignore his suspicions. He needed to delve a little further into the details-not because the law required it, but because it was the right thing to do. Finger-breaking was not a talent he preferred among his neighbors.

"So your hand got caught under the wheel itself?" Tad asked as he gently turned the hand over in his own, trying for the sake of argument to match the purported mechanism of injury with the damage done to Bailey's hand.

"Sure did:' Mark said, his body tense and ready to take back his hand if the doctor broke his promise not to hurt him.

Tad noticed his patient's uneasiness and smiled kindly, tenderly resting the injury back on Mark's chest. "Relax:' he urged softly. "The last thing I want to do is to hurt you."

Now that he was back in sole control of his pain, Mark did, indeed, relax. "You're right, Doc:' he said. "You didn't hurt me a bit. Kinda nice, for a change."

Interesting turn of phrase, Tad thought. "Oh, really? How do you mean?"

"How do I mean what?"

"You said it was a nice change that I wasn't trying to hurt you. I was just curious what you meant."

Mark was exhausted, mentally and physically. He didn't even remember saying that, but now he had to come up with something to cover it. "Did I say that?" he stalled.

Tad pretended to be distracted by Mark's chart. "Mm-hmm. Somebody been hurting you, have they?"

Mark laughed at the very thought of it. "Nobody but myself, Doc. I guess I meant doctors. You know, even when they're trying to help you it still hurts."

Tad nodded and smiled. "Really no such thing as a painless shot, is there?" He finished jotting his note on the chart, and flipped it closed. "Here's what we're going to do with that hand," he explained. "We're going to put you under a light general anesthetic, and we're going to have to set the bones. Looks like somebody might have already tried to do that, but made a bit of a mess of it." He looked to Mark for a reaction, but none showed.

Tell me about it, Mark thought. His stomach turned all over again at the memory of sitting there on the filthy floor of the Hillbilly Tavern, grinding his own bone ends together as he brought the fingers back into alignment. It was the only way to even begin to walk out of there. Despite the initial agony, his efforts had reduced the sharp, electric pain to the dull throb that currently wracked his entire body.

"Once we've got that taken care of," Tad continued, "we're going to put you in a soft cast for a couple of days just to make sure we've got the swelling under control, and then we'll do a hard cast for probably ten to twelve weeks. How's that sound?"

"Just peachy?'

"There's also a chance you'll need surgery," Tad finished. "The x-rays show some possible involvement of the metacarpals-the little bones in the back of your hand that run from your wrist to your fingers-and that can mean tendon or ligament damage that can't be fixed as easily as bone. We won't know for sure, though, for another couple of days. There's been a lot of bleeding in the hand, making damage assessment by x-ray a little more complicated."

"So you're gonna have to knock me out?" Mark asked. There was an edge of hope to his voice.

Tad nodded. "It'd be pretty tough getting bones set any other way." It was time to push. "Why do you suppose only two fingers got broken instead of your whole hand?"

Even through the haze of his pain, Mark instantly spotted the hole in his story. Shit. He suspects something. But suspicions were different from knowledge, and he was in too deep to change his story now anyway. "I have no idea," he said. "Just lucky, I guess."

"You can do without too much more of that kind of luck," Tad joked, his eyes probing Mark's face for the truth, and getting a "kiss my ass" in response. "It's interesting, too, that the fractures angulate in different directions. If I didn't know better, I'd swear that your hand was deliberately broken." That was smooth as gravel, he chided himself.

"Well, you're the doc, Doc. Maybe you can write me up in a medical journal or something."

"You're sure that's how your hand got broken-a jack fell on it?"

Stick with medicine, Doc, Mark thought. This police work just ain't for you. "A jack? God, no. The whole goddamn car fell on it. You don't think I'm lyin' to you, do ya?"

Tad stared just long enough to convey his true thoughts. "Of course not. No sane person would lie to his doctor. To do that would just delay recovery."

Piss on it, Tad thought, its your hand and your life. I've done my part. He clicked the ballpoint back into its casing, and stuffed the pen into the breast pocket of his lab coat.

"Rest quietly for a little longer, Mr. Bailey. The orthopod will be here in a minute to work on you. I'll see you later."

It was just after seven-thirty, and Monique Michaels was surprised to hear the sound of Warren's car in the garage. Most nights he didn't get home until nearly seven, and she'd assumed that his investigation of the Bailey thing would keep him much later than that. After fourteen and a half years of marriage, she could tell just by the way he slammed the door of his patrol car that he'd had something less than a good day. Having heard a good portion of The Bitch that morning, followed by continuing coverage not only of the Bailey boy's escape but of his media appearance as well, she couldn't blame him if he was a little cranky. Plus, it had been a long time since he'd had to play policeman for real, and he probably was exhausted.

The meal of the day had been spaghetti, and the kids had snarfed up all but a thimbleful of what she fixed. Even as the doorknob turned, she was already pulling a frozen Mexican dinner out of the freezer.

Warren's look said it all as he entered the kitchen. Rigidly well-postured by nature, and normally energetic even in the evenings, he looked as though he'd slept fully clothed in a windstorm. Monique nearly laughed at the sight of him. "Boy hunt getting you down, dear?" she teased.

A wry smile brightened his face. "Don't you start with me. I'm getting too old for this shit."

"Is my baby tired?" Monique mocked in a little-girl voice as they hugged and kissed. "Not enough sleep last night?"

As part of a well-practiced ritual, Warren went directly to the cabinet over the stove and pulled down a gray lockbox, the kind secretaries normally used to store their petty cash, and thumbed the combination. When it opened, he slid his .38 caliber Police Special, holster and all, off of his belt and deposited it in the box. He still preferred the five-shot snub-nose over the bulky cannons selected by most of his subordinates. Next came the speed loader he carried in his suit coat pocket. After locking the box again, he placed it back in its assigned spot over the stove. As a young, newly married police officer many years before, he'd balked at the notion of being separated from his weapon. In the end, Monique had prevailed, of course, and in the succeeding years, he had come to be far more satisfied knowing that the kids couldn't become a statistic than he was paranoid that he wouldn't be able to repel an attack on his family.

There just was no denying it anymore. He had become the old fart he'd always feared.

"It's been a zoo, hon," he explained as he put his weapon away. "Just an absolute zoo. You'd think Al Capone had escaped, instead of some kid."

"Do you think you'll catch him?"

"Oh, we'll catch him, all right," Warren said. "Once we figure out where to start looking for him."

Monique led her husband into the living room and sat him down on a chair, where she moved around behind him and began massaging his shoulders. "I guess that means you don't have many leads."

"Leads," Warren snorted. "It's not that we don't have many leads. We don't have any leads."

"What about your man Thompkins?" Monique teased. "He seems hard-charging enough to turn up some clues."

Warren dramatically dropped his chin to his chest and rubbed his forehead. "You heard that, did you? Could you believe it? He was supposed to get their permission, not beat them into submission. What a bonehead."

"Now, Warren, I'm sure he was just trying to do his job and make a good impression."

Warren snorted again. "Yeah, well, so was Barney Fife. And I can assure you that Patrolman Thompkins made an indelible impression on a lot of people. The county executive even called me today and asked me to send his regards. I have a meeting scheduled tomorrow afternoon for just that purpose."