Deadly Beloved(67)

“Really,” Shirley Bates said. “I was warned before I came here, but you never understand until you see it for yourself. That’s true, don’t you think? I was warned, but the first time I saw a baby come in here with a gunshot wound, I nearly died.”

“Mmm,” Liza said.

“And now this thing with Congresswoman Corbett. A woman like that. It just goes to show. Nobody is safe anymore.”

“Mmm,” Liza said again.

“They took all the people at that party to St. Elizabeth’s. They should have brought them here. We’ve got much better facilities here.”

“St. Elizabeth’s was closer to where they were.”

“Closeness isn’t everything. Oh, well. There’s a woman who’s dead, you know. And this other woman, the one the reception was for, this Miss Paris—”

“Parrish.”

“Well, she hardly sounds like somebody who leads a calm life, what with all this going off to war zones and all that, but that’s just my point. I mean, she’d just come back from some civil war in Africa and she’d been just fine and she’s here for hardly a day and boom. Isn’t that ironic?”

“It’s certainly something.”

“The paper says it’s the same kind of bomb in a pipe that blew up that car in the parking lot a couple of days ago. You know the one. Where the woman was supposed to have killed her husband.”

“Yes,” Liza said. “I know the one.”

Shirley Bates let a smug little smile paste itself over her face. Shirley was a plumpish little woman, the kind who always seems to be on a diet to lose just five more pounds. She was one of the least intelligent nurses Liza had ever known.

“You know what I think?” Shirley said. “I don’t think that woman killed her husband at all. I don’t think she had anything to do with any pipe bombs. No matter what the papers have to say. The papers have all been taken over by liberals anyway.”

“What?”

“It will be black gangs, you just watch. That’s what it always is these days. No wonder Africa is always in the middle of some kind of war. These are very violent people we’re dealing with here.”

“What are you talking about?” Liza demanded. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

“Of course I am,” Shirley said. “I’m talking about Negroes. Except we’re not supposed to call them Negroes anymore because the liberals won’t let you do anything. The liberals suck up to them. But everybody knows the truth anyway. You can’t avoid it.”

“I don’t think I want to continue this discussion,” Liza said.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Shirley said, “but I get tired of pretending that I can’t see what’s going on right in front of my nose. I mean, just look around this place. Look around down in ER. All that blood. Children coming in battered. Children coming in drugged up. People shot. It’s always Them.”

I ought to get up out of this chair and move, Liza told herself. I ought to slap this silly woman’s face. I ought to do something. But she was too tired. Her legs felt full of lead. Up at the checkout to the cafeteria line, Liza saw Leyla Williams, one of the best nurses in the Peds ICU and as black as the skirt on a witch’s dress. She started to wave frantically.

“There’s Leyla,” she told Shirley Bates. “Maybe she’ll come over to join us.”

“Leyla?”

Leyla saw them and nodded. Liza started to feel a little better. “Leyla’s one of my oldest friends at this hospital.”

Shirley turned around, saw Leyla coming toward them, and made a face. “And that’s another thing,” she said. “They really can’t keep this up with the affirmative action. Affirmative action. What a name for it. It just means letting in people who aren’t qualified and pretending they can nurse.”

“Affirmative action,” Liza said. “I get it. That’s how you got this job.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind,” Liza said.

Shirley Bates gathered her papers together and got up. “I’m going back to work now. I know I have to live with these people, but I don’t have to pretend to like it. You ought to consider these things, Liza. You ought to consider what it means to you to have liberals running the world.”

“Right,” Liza said.

Shirley Bates said, “You shouldn’t let those people fool you. Look what they did to that Congresswoman Corbett, who always made out she was such a big friend of theirs. I mean, most of them are still jungle savages.”