Fracture(16)

“Urgh. Meatloaf today. Why does it feel like every day is meatloaf day in this canteen?” The interns in front of me, two young women clutching their trays to their chests, whine about the food while I flick through my patient list on one of the electronic tablets the hospital purchased for the ER earlier in the year. One pelvic fracture, one mystery rash and fever, one gunshot wound to the chest. The last guy was brought into the trauma center under lights and sirens, barely breathing, pulse thready and close to non-existent. He’s Italian, some kid whose brother owns a bunch of fresh produce markets downtown, or at least he had before his head had been blown off. Gang-related, they say. Mob bosses, they say. I have problems believing that, though. Seattle is hardly known for its seedy criminal underbelly. Either way, the kid’s brother was killed and the kid himself had almost died. Right now he’s sleeping off the anesthetic upstairs in the ICU with a phalanx of cops guarding him at either end of the corridor. They’re either afraid that he’s going to escape, or they think someone will be along shortly to try and finish off the job. Either way the police presence is making me anxious. It always does. That uniform. I associate it with one thing and one thing only: Alexis. When she went missing, my parents’ house was crawling with cops for days. At first they were serious and determined, assuring my mom and dad that Alexis would show up, that they would find her. But as the days ticked by less and less cops showed up at our house, and when they did they would come bearing a different story each time.

Manpower has to be reduced to ensure officers are dealing with all open cases.

We still have good leads, there’s no reason to give up hope.

These things take time, Mrs. Romera.

It’s been well over a month, Mr. and Mrs. Romera. Alexis’s file will remain open but until we have any fresh leads there isn’t a lot we can do right now. Keep us apprised if you should hear from your daughter.

“Vanilla pudding? Sister, tell me you did not just take the last vanilla pudding.” The voice cuts through my thoughts. I turn around to find one of the fresh interns glaring at the pudding cup in my hand, the one I just took from the refrigerated cabinet in front of me. She looks up and I gain a perverse sense of pleasure when I witness the realization dawn on her face—ahh shit! Resident. I know the girl, Jefferies. She’s a loudmouth; thinks she’s a contender for a surgical placement. But then again these walking, talking morons all think they’re in the running for a surgical placement.

“Problem, Jefferies?”

She shakes her head. “No Dr. Romera. Definitely no problem here.” She squeezes past me, grimacing, hightailing it before I can give her morgue rounds with Bochowitz for the rest of the week. They hate that punishment. Bochowitz has been working the morgue for the last thirty-eight years. He’s impossibly cheerful all the time, like all the time, and he has this unnerving habit of talking to his patients. Of course, they’re all dead so they don’t respond, and Bochowitz, somewhere along the line, developed a habit of replying for them. It is creepy, yes, but despite all of his peculiarities there isn’t a single thing Bochowitz doesn’t know about the human body. As an intern, I’d voluntarily spent a lot of time down in the basements underneath the busy hub of St. Peter’s keeping Bochowitz company, keeping my head down. It was best not to involve myself in the politics and factions formed by my contemporaries. But more importantly, I’d been learning.

I catch sight of Dr. Patel on the other side of the canteen, eating alone. I haven’t seen him since the night Zeth brought Lacey in. He looks up, sees me approaching, smiles…

“Hey, Sloane. What’s cracking?” He kicks out the chair on the other side of the table opposite him with his sneakered foot. “Heard you got stuck with the mafia kid with the GSW.”

There was a time when a gunshot wound was an exciting case we would have fought over, but now, having seen so many, we all know they’re just liabilities waiting to happen. The outcomes on them are so bleak that a lot of residents do their best to pass them off to whoever’s standing closest at the time. “Yeah, I know. Guy circled the drain for a moment there but we pulled him back.”

Suresh nods, swallowing a mouthful of food. “That kid’s got a rap sheet longer than your arm. My mom shops at that store. Keep telling her not to. She used to like chatting to the woman there—what’s her name? I can’t remember. Anyway, it was her husband Frankie that got shot there couple of weeks ago. Both her and the brother, the kid you have upstairs? Both of them know who killed Frankie but neither of them will breathe a word to the cops. Apparently they’re scared shitless.”