Graveyard Shift Read online

  David shook his head. He reminded me of a bull, mainly because he was large and slow-moving, but dangerous if he was roused. "Gotta get back. We do rounds every hour."

  That made sense. I felt comforted at their determination to do their jobs, even though one of their colleagues had fallen in the line of duty. I couldn’t hold them up any longer. "Be careful. Were you in the parking lot with Patrick, protecting the staff during the code? Thank you."

  "You're welcome," said David, already moving away, Michel in his wake.

  I felt a lump in my throat. I wanted to yell after them, Don't go back to the parking lot! Make sure you wear your coats and bulletproof vests, if you have them! Watch your backs! Literally!

  I sent a silent prayer toward them, even though I’m agnostic. They also serve, who stand and wait and patrol.

  They didn’t look back.

  19

  The next patient’s KNEE PAIN looked more like plantar fasciitis, but in addition to his heel pain, the guy had slipped on the ice the week before and bumped his knee, so I sent him to X-ray. I also handled a SORE TOE that looked like gout. Dr. Dupuis gave me the thumbs up and kept working.

  Since that didn't take too much brainpower, my mind flipped back to Patrick. Four guards on duty made sense to me. One could stay at the main desk, greeting patients, paging doctors overnight, and handing out call room keys. One would guard the ER doors. And two patrolled the rest of the hospital.

  Tonight, after Patrick’s death, I bet Charles performed double duty indoors, covering the ER entrance and paging people, while David and Michel covered the floors. The main doors were supposed to be locked overnight anyway, although staff ignored this edict when they left around midnight or reported for night shift duty, shouting cheerful hellos to each other.

  I checked my watch. If guard duty was anything like medicine, they'd tried to call someone in, but nearly everyone would be asleep at this hour. No one expected the Spanish Inquisition, and few expected urgent guard duty. Which meant that this trio would have to tough it out until the morning crew came on.

  I hadn't verified the guards’ work schedule, or really probed if Patrick had any enemies, but I could try again later. The ER worked like that. You had to take whatever information you could get, in quick bursts, before heading to the next patient, and the next.

  I Googled +"security guards" +"St. Joseph’s Hospital" +Montreal and was startled to uncover another news item from New Year’s that I'd missed while transitioning from Ottawa to Montreal.

  Maybe Patrick had more than one enemy.

  Many question marks hung in the air: Julie. Jesse. Jason. Patrick’s past. Alyssa’s attack. Plus this new question of an "incident" on New Year’s. Not to mention what happened to Ryan and the unusually silent Tucker.

  "Are you okay?" asked a low female voice.

  I turned and tensed when I saw who had spoken.

  Roxanne tried to smile at me over the clipboard in her hands. "You still mad at me?" she said.

  "I'm not mad."

  "Sure you are."

  I let the thought percolate through what was left of my brain. "Yes, but more frustrated. I wanted to do something for Patrick, not sit around with a thumb up my—you know."

  "I know. This has been the worst night shift ever. I didn’t want to block you from the code, but Dave thought it was the safest thing for you."

  Uh oh. Tears welled behind my eyes. I had to turn away from her to suppress them. If nasty people lashed out at me, I reacted with controlled fury, but kindness undid me every time.

  "We’re still friends, right?" Roxanne reached for my hand.

  I grabbed hers and nodded instead of talking. Less chance for weepage.

  "Okay, then." She squeezed my fingers, released them, and sped away in her pink pant scrubs and sneakers, clipboard already raised in the air.

  "Wait!" My voice broke.

  She swivelled around to face me.

  I hustled to her side so I didn’t have to shout, conserving my voice. "I need to know what happened on Friday. Patrick was involved in that, right?"

  Roxanne's face closed down. Dimples disappeared, eyelids at half mast, lips pursed. "That has nothing to do with anything."

  "Still. What happened?"

  She shook her head.

  "There’s that, and what happened on New Year’s. I know Patrick had trouble with Lori Goody because he was afraid of another 'incident.' I’m trying to figure out what went on."

  She twisted toward me and lowered her voice. "You heard about New Year’s?"

  "I saw it online when I looked up security at St. Joe’s. The CBC interviewed an indigenous couple who said that four guards beat them up on New Year's. They didn't name the security guards, because they hadn’t been charged yet and were only 'under investigation,' but I assumed that one of them was Patrick."

  Roxanne’s head dipped in acknowledgement as she held the clipboard in front of her chest, almost like armour. "I don't—I wasn't working that evening."

  I waited. Her work status was irrelevant. She would have scooped up all the details regardless. I was an outsider, but no one would exclude Roxanne.

  She licked her lips. "They weren't patients. They were friends visiting a patient on the unit, and they were all drinking and yelling and disturbing the other patients. You know what it's like."

  Yep. The Intensive Care Unit existed as a mini-universe, blessed with one-on-one nursing care, where only a beeping monitor dared to interrupt the silence. It was a haven of quiet control, unlike the bedlam of the ER.

  "So the other patients and families complained, and the nurses called the security guards. You know it's their job to walk out disruptive visitors. Or anyone else, like on Friday..." She closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her forehead.

  I'd never seen Roxanne nearly break down like this. Every one of us rode close to the edge tonight. Her words confused me, though. "Wait. You said nothing happened on Friday."

  She shook her head. "We’re talking about New Year's. Never mind me, I’m tired." She flashed me a smile with some of her trademark spirit.

  No, she hadn’t convinced me. Something happened on Friday. I opened my mouth to press her.

  She cut in first. "So anyway. On New Year’s, we had four guards on. Double the usual staff ever since—"

  Since 14/11. Yay.

  "—that incident in OB." She supplied her own euphemism for the hostage taking, before moving on to New Year's. "Yes, Patrick was one of them. Actually, it was the same team as tonight. They went up to the unit. It was supposed to be no big deal, you know, jolly them up and walk them out of the hospital. They didn't think of calling the police because the couple seemed loud but not—dangerous, you know?"

  "Right." I shuddered inside. When you weren't expecting a problem, it meant you weren't prepared for the worst. Ever since 14/11, I expected non-stop torment and brimstone.

  "It was a man and a woman. The woman was so drunk that she kept falling down. Patrick tried to help her up. He was the tallest guard. I think he did that sort of thing a lot, but the drunk guy thought Patrick was hitting on his woman and swung at him. The other guards told the guy to get back, but he was like a bear. He jumped on Patrick and started whaling on him, too close together for the guards to get a clear shot with a taser. They got in with their batons—"

  I recoiled. Steel batons.

  "As soon as the guy got off Patrick, the guards put away their batons. They swear. But afterward, the guy said he was going to kill them. The woman screamed that they hated Indians. She cursed them out, said they were using racial slurs."

  I exhaled. Although I couldn’t imagine Patrick spewing hate, all bets were off when you were under attack. Exhibit A: me, tonight.

  "The guards denied it, but they were scared. The guy went to UC four hours later. He ended up having two broken ribs and a hemo-pneumo."

  I already knew that from the article. He said he couldn't breathe and ended up diagnosed with a punctured lung. The CBC obtained med
ical records showing that UC doctors had installed a chest tube and drained blood from around his lung. Those batons could have killed him.

  "The couple got a lawyer. They went to the media. We don't know what's going to happen, except the hospital admin replied to the media and promised to get to the bottom of it. You know what that means."

  It meant heads were going to roll. And not the CEO's head, but the underlings', because once again, shit rolls downhill. I closed my eyes, trying to process everything that had happened at St. Joe’s during my research block in Ottawa. I hadn't gotten a whiff of it, even though I'd rejoined the ER this week.

  I ignored everything except medicine when I was working, and residents were scattered around at various hospitals, post-vacation, but it struck me again that no one except Tucker and Tori truly talked to me.

  It was possible that the guy had gotten the hemo-pneumo later, in between leaving St. Joe's and going to University College, but in another, more likely way, the guards could have killed him.

  The guy thought Patrick had disrespected his woman. Patrick's buddies had broken his bones and busted his lung. The guy could try his luck with the courts, but they might not look favourably on a stereotypically drunk Indian. As in one of my favourite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, he might have decided that he had to create his own odds.

  So did that man return tonight to shoot Patrick in the throat?

  "Those batons," I said aloud. "They might not even have known how hard they were hitting. Batons are like having a bionic arm to beat people up."

  Roxanne shook her head. "It's not that bad. They get training every year on how to use them. They know what they're doing."

  Did they? I suspected that the police received more than an annual baton workshop. Patrick might have learned some techniques in his CÉGEP police course. Still, I couldn’t imagine how they’d feel like experts with q 365 day training.

  I shook my head. "I'm surprised they’re allowed batons and tasers at all."

  "Oh, in Montreal, the security guards pair up with the police. It's almost like they work as a team, because the police can't show up everywhere instantly. The guards practically live here."

  Right. With one visitor beaten and one guard shot dead within ten days.

  Still, I considered it a win that I could solidify two candidates on Patrick’s enemy list: Julie's abusive boyfriend and the nameless New Year's visitor. "Did Patrick have any other enemies?"

  "Not that I know of." She glanced at room 6 and scooped her clipboard off the table. "I’d better check some vitals."

  "Sure. One last thing. Could you tell me what happened on Friday?"

  Her face tightened.

  20

  "What’s wrong?" I said.

  Roxanne jabbed a pen behind her ear. "Don’t worry about it. Listen, you look after yourself. I know that your ex is haunting you."

  Huh? That came out of nowhere. "What are you talking about?" I never discussed Ryan at work. Even when he was my everything, he lived in Ottawa and rarely made it to the hospital. And now that I’d switched exclusively to Tucker, I tried not to let Ryan cross my consciousness.

  Roxanne pressed on the clipboard clamp, opening and closing it on the piece of paper it contained. "I hope you’re all right. I know that an ex can be...dangerous."

  Wait. Was she saying what I thought she was saying? I cleared my throat. "Ryan would never hurt anyone, let alone me."

  "Right." Her eyes rested on me in a way that guessed how I sobbed alone in the car. How I sometimes walked outside, by myself, at night, for hours, while Tucker slept, because I ached too much to lie beside him. How I tried to reconstruct Ryan’s smell from a stolen sweater, or pulled out his letters and scanned his old messages.

  Roxanne bit her lip and shook her head. "I’m not trying to judge, but we had a talk on intimate partner violence. Leaving your partner is the most dangerous time."

  My brain silently exploded before I recovered my voice. "I know that. I said it to room 13 myself tonight. Ryan’s not like that. He’d kill himself before he’d attack me."

  Roxanne sighed.

  "Okay, I know I have a few risk factors. Like my age, between 25 and 34. But Ryan never hit me"—spanking doesn’t count—"in anger. He doesn’t have a gun, he doesn’t drink or take drugs. He’s...annoyingly Christian. So don’t worry about me and Ryan. Not that way." Coughing overtook me.

  Roxanne patted me on the back. "I hope you’re right."

  We both laughed a little, because of my name, and she added, "I’m trying to look out for you, Hope."

  "I appreciate that. Well, good luck with those vitals." I saluted her as she left, but couldn’t relax until she’d cleared the Plexiglass walls. Man, that was bizarre.

  Who told her about Ryan? I couldn’t imagine Tucker confessing. He and Ryan practically incinerated each other when I tried to date both of them at the same time. Tori knew, but her lips were hermetically sealed. Although other residents were aware of our love triangle, most of them seemed too busy to gossip about us.

  Ryan had picked me up once or twice at St. Joe’s, so it was possible Roxanne had figured it out herself. I watched her slim body motor toward bed 13, and I wondered.

  "Right on, Hope!"

  When I turned around, Dr. Dupuis distracted me with a fist bump. "We did it!" Dr. Dupuis followed the fist bump with a finger explosion, so I belatedly joined in.

  "We did?"

  "Yes! There are no patients left to be seen!"

  I checked my WOW. He was right. No one in the queue. He’d swept through the list like a chainsaw. No, like a forest fire. It was almost frightening, how fast the man could see patients, and do it well, unlike Dr. Callendar. I gave him his due. "You did it."

  "Don't sell yourself short, Hope. You're my right hand woman who won't quit, even after a patient tries to strangle you. Now go get some sleep."

  I glanced at the monitor to check if any of my results had come back, flagged by a white bar.

  "If and when anything comes back, I'll deal with it. I know how to handle a knee film. Now go lie down." He hesitated. "Make sure you don't knock on the staff room door. Dr. Chia is, ah, having a rest."

  I had to swipe my hand over my mouth to hide a smile. He loooooved her so much.

  "I'll be out here. You know where to find me." He handed me the key on the two foot-long yellow handle.

  "Thanks, chief." An unfortunate turn of phrase because it reminded me of the guards beating the indigenous man. My smile faded before I took the key in hand.

  "What's wrong?"

  I squeezed the wooden handle in my fist. Where should I begin? Patrick’s death. His girlfriend’s beating. A patient's visitor’s beating. The constant ache of Ryan’s absence, exacerbated by Tucker’s muteness. The throbbing in my throat and neck.

  I decided to zero in on the unanswered question. "What happened on Friday?"

  "What?"

  "Something happened here on Friday when I was in my clinic. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  Dr. Dupuis frowned at me. "Not really. Whatever happened is not as important as you getting some rest. Go." He pulled his phone out of his pocket like he was going to time me with the stopwatch.

  "Fine." I strolled past the break room en route to my call room. The new nurse with the wavy blondish hair, Amber, raised wide eyes from her phone and shoved it in her pocket.

  "You okay?" I said.

  She shrugged. "I guess this is part of the deal?"

  "I guess."

  She sniffed and rubbed her long, freckled nose. "At least now I have battle scars."

  "That’s true." I was probably only a few years older than her, but I felt like an old roll of carpet ready to topple over. Meanwhile, she looked as wispy as candy floss. I wondered if she’d make it to next month, let alone next year. ER nurses are tough not only because the work hardens them up, but because the gentle lambs end up driven into more idyllic pastures. Say, a nice clinic that runs 8 to 4, with a wall to pin a picture of you
r kindergartener. "Sucks. Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but did you work on Friday?"

  She shook her head, pocketing her phone.

  "Oh. Did you hear anything that happened on that shift? Especially involving Patrick, the guard who got shot?" It was a leading question, but I only had a few seconds before Dr. Dupuis might swoop down on us.

  Her head tilted back. She pulled the elastic out of her hair and began braiding it. "Now that you mention it, Linda overheard a patient threaten him last week. I don’t know what day it was—"

  Who cared. I needed to add to my list of villains. "Who?"

  Her eyes darted from side to side, and she dropped her voice, afraid someone might overhear us. "She didn’t say much, except that it was this giant man who said he'd pop off...his balls and..."

  Poor Amber. Her pale skin flushed as she struggled to repeat the words. Finally, she managed to whisper, "...chew them like candy."

  "That is gross." And sort of creative. I’d never heard that one before.

  "Linda said he laughed it off, but she could tell that it bothered him."

  "That would bother anyone. I don’t even have balls, and it makes me want to cross my legs."

  Amber nodded and looped the elastic on the end of her neat braid.

  "But a patient like that would be a Code White, right? Was he admitted? He might still be on the floor. And do you think Linda remembers his name?"

  Amber shook her head. Her braid swung side to side. Her prominent nose and narrow face made her more gawky than pretty, which made me feel even more protective of her.

  "Never mind. I’ll ask Linda later. Thanks, Amber."

  Once ensconced in the call room, shoes off, door locked and my body tucked into the single bed, I pulled off my glasses. I felt too tired to sit up and place my glasses on the desk, even though it was only two feet away from me. So close, and yet so far.

  I sighed and placed my glasses beside the pillow, against the wall. "Try not to crush your own glasses," I instructed myself.

  Then I closed my eyes, but my occipital lobe replayed Patrick’s eyes, magnified by his own hyperopic lenses.