Bobby Hutchinson - [Emergency 01] - Side Effects (HSR 723).htm Read online

  He'd been on Drug Squad for almost ten years now, exciting years, good years. He'd forgotten what it was like to wear a uniform. Maybe it was time to remember.

  He'd testify against Perchinsky. But he'd also go to the OC—officer in charge—in the morning and request a transfer.

  JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Alex sat up in bed and switched on the bedside lamp. She heard Cam come in the front door of the apartment. She'd been waiting for him, needing him.

  She listened to the familiar sounds he made, the clunk as he took his shoes off and dropped them by the door, the sound of water running as he washed his hands, the opening and closing of the refrigerator door, the whisper of his stockinged feet coming down the hall toward the bedroom. He stood in the doorway for several minutes, not moving or saying a word.

  He'd taken off his jacket. The soft old gray T-shirt clung to his torso, exposing broad shoulders and muscular arms. His gaze was shuttered, as if he didn't really see her at all.

  She finally said, "Evening, Sergeant. Come here often?" It was a silly ritual they had.

  "Same old crowd." His answer was automatic, with none of the suggestive insinuation he usually managed to instill. Alex had the definite feeling he was thinking hard about something else.

  At last he made a visible effort to smile at her, but it didn't quite come off. "You oughta be sleeping, babe." He sounded infinitely weary. He unfastened his leather pouch, removed gun and bullets and laid the gun on the dresser. Then he leaned once again on the door frame, a can of beer in one hand, and flipped the top. "You want some tea or something?"

  She shook her head, wondering why he didn't come over and kiss her.

  "I stopped in at the hospital. Your folks have gone home but Thea's still there. I sent her off to get something to eat—practically had to march her out at gunpoint, and she was back again in fifteen minutes. Wade's been awake off and on. He's still doing okay, according to the nurse."

  Alex sensed the distance in his voice, and just as she had for several weeks now, she felt that he was holding an integral part of himself away from her. Her heart sank. At the hospital earlier, they'd been so close. Why this distance again, just a few short hours later?

  "I called Intensive Care myself a while ago," she said. "He's pretty much out of danger now."

  She remembered the court case. Maybe that's what was bothering him. "How'd you make out with David, Cam?"

  He took a long swallow of beer. "David?"

  For a moment, she actually had the feeling that he didn't remember who David even was.

  "Oh, yeah, David. Fine. Well, not exactly fine, but at least he didn't pull jail time. Judge Raskins gave him a stern lecture, a five-hundred-dollar fine, a hundred hours of community service, probation."

  He fell silent again. She waited and then she added with a note of impatience in her tone, "So? How did Dave react?"

  Cam seemed unaware that she was irritated. He shrugged. "Oh, you know, typical Dave. Subdued in court, wisecracks when we got outside. He did indicate he's gonna make a real effort to clean up his act. I only hope he means it this time."

  "And did your meeting go okay?" He hadn't said what it was about, and she knew from long experience that he wouldn't tell her if she asked. He'd explained many times why he couldn't, but she still had trouble understanding.

  "Yeah." He sighed, blowing his breath out in a long whoosh. "Yeah, it went fine. Brought in a guy we've been looking for, I've been down at headquarters doing the paperwork on him."

  Again the taut silence.

  Alex hugged her knees beneath the light blanket, aware of exhaustion but unable to give in to it, wanting her husband to climb in beside her and comfort her.

  "Are you coming to bed, Cam?" Tonight, of all nights, she needed to be held. She needed his arms, his body, wrapping her in a cocoon of warmth and pseudosafety, so that after a long while she might be able to forget the moment she'd looked down and recognized her brother's face.

  But there was that distance in Cameron's voice, a kind of formality that both frightened her and prevented her from asking him to join her.

  "I think I'll catch the late news." He walked over and bent to kiss her. He smelled of coffee and secondhand cigarette smoke, the odors she associated with a police office.

  It was a perfunctory kiss.

  "You get some sleep, love. You've been up a long time, and it was a rotten day."

  "Yeah. Yeah, it really was." It wasn't improving, either.

  She watched as he turned and walked out of the room. She heard the television go on, the volume muted.

  Feeling bereft and angry, telling herself she was just overtired and imagining problems in her marriage where there weren't any, she tossed and turned and finally fell into an uneasy, dream-filled slumber.

  She didn't wake completely when at last, sometime near dawn, he slid into bed beside her, but an enormous sense of relief and contentment filled her as his strong arms gathered her in, fitting her, spoon fashion, into the hard, familiar angles of his body.

  She slept peacefully then, unaware that he didn't sleep at all.

  "HI, WADE. HOW'S it going?" Alex put a gentle hand on his shoulder and flopped into the chair beside his bed. "I've been trying to break loose all day, but it's worse than Bedlam down there. Must be a full moon."

  His shoulder was one of the few places she could touch without encountering tubes or bandages or pulleys, and she let her hand test on the well-defined muscles beneath the hospital gown. "How'ie you doing, little brother? How're the hands today? Pretty painful, I'll bet."

  His room, overflowing with flowers, cards and balloons, was uncharacteristically empty of visitors this late afternoon, and Alex felt a guilty delight in having him to herself for the few moments she could spare from her duties in ER.

  "I'm fine. My hands are sore, but the nurses keep me nicely drugged up." The words were slurred. Wade's face was grossly swollen. The reconstructive surgery had begun on his cheekbone, making speech difficult, but he was determinedly cheerful.

  Twelve days had passed since his accident. Once Wade's condition had stabilized, he'd been transferred from ICU to the surgical ward on the hospital's fourth floor, and a steady stream of visitors had begun, chiefly rugby players, huge, awkward men clutching fistfuls of magazines, posters, cards, fruit, flowers.

  Alex had been on hand when several of them visited the first time. She'd witnessed the shock and outright horror in their eyes when they first saw her brother, flat on his back on the special Stryker frame bed, totally immobilized, his head hooked to the skull tongs.

  She gave them credit—they recovered fast, and their constant banter was wickedly funny and guaranteed to prevent any further show of real emotion, but Alex knew that although he couldn't turn his head to witness it, Wade was well aware of that first instinctive reaction. She could only guess what effect it had on him.

  The reconstructive surgery on his hands had also begun two days before, and Alex knew from talking to the plastic surgeon, Ben Halsey, that Wade's left hand had suffered irreversible damage—the first and third fingers had been amputated the day after the accident, and it was still questionable that the thumb would ever be usable. Ben had assured Wade, however, that the right hand would be fully functional once the necessary surgery was completed. Ben was also reassuring as to the work he was doing on Wade's face.

  "You're gonna be what the fan mags call rugged-looking when we get done," he'd predicted. "Which is pretty much what you were before this happened, am I right? This nose is definitely not the way God intended, and neither is your right ear, and that's not from the accident. So we'll straighten you out once and for all."

  Broken noses and damaged ears were trademarks of rugby players, and Wade had worn the marks of his sport with pride.

  Now, ironically, they would be eradicated. It would take numerous procedures, but when the surgery was finished, Ben was confident that Wade's face would bear little evidence of the damage it had sustained in either rugby or the acc
ident.

  The sight in Wade's left eye was still in doubt, although here, too, the ophthalmologist was optimistic. The dressing would come off in another two days.

  Wade knew he'd lost his fingers. He also understood the full extent of his other injuries. Once he'd fully regained consciousness, he'd ordered Thea out of the room and demanded that Alex be brutally honest with him. It had been one of the worst moments of her medical career. In theory, she agreed with a patient's right to know every detail involving his body, but this was her brother. Every protective instinct urged her to avoid telling him the truth, to prevaricate, to soften the facts.

  In the final analysis, though, she knew that if the situation was reversed, she'd want the unvarnished truth, just as Wade did. And so, feeling as though she was about to be sick, she quietly listed for him the staggering damage his beautiful young body had sustained, and to the best of her ability, she projected what the outcome of those injuries would likely be.

  When there was nothing more for her to say, he'd been still and silent for a long time. "So," he said at last, "let's see if I've got this straight. The worst scenario is, I spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, a half-blind gimp with limited use of my hands. But I'm gonna look like a real sex symbol doing it, thanks to the inspired work of the best plastic surgeon around."

  "But that's not the way it's going to be." Alex was vehement. "I just told you, you've got a good chance at making a full recovery. Nobody can predict these things, and you've already regained some sensation in your legs. You have to concentrate on getting completely well."

  He hadn't answered. Instead, he'd asked more difficult questions in an impersonal tone, as though they were discussing a stranger. The bandages half covering his face and the fact that he couldn't move his head made it impossible to read his expression, and when neither of them could think of anything more to say, he'd asked her to leave him alone. She'd refused. He'd insisted and then cursed her viciously, and at length, and when the curses finally became sobs, she'd held him as best she could and wept with him.

  Since that time, Wade had said little about his injuries, either to Alex or to Thea, who still spent every spare moment at his bedside, although she wasn't here now.

  "Where's Thea this afternoon?"

  "She had a shoot." He sounded indifferent. "She'll be here later. She always is."

  Alex was endlessly grateful to Thea for being so consistently there for Wade, but it was nice to have a chance to talk to him alone.

  "So what's shakin' down in the ER? You said it was busy." The tongs made it impossible for him to move his head, but he rolled his good eye to the side in order to look at her.

  "Is it ever busy! Phew! We had two drug overdoses right off the bat, and then they brought this other guy in. He seemed to have OD'd as well, but he had this distinctive smell, and I realized he was in a diabetic coma. I was still dealing with him when a woman staggered through the door and delivered right there on the floor—a good big baby, too, a boy. She said she ate burritos last night and couldn't make up her mind whether she was in labor or just had gas."

  Wade laughed, just as she'd hoped he might. "Sounds as if she has as much trouble making decisions as you do, sis."

  He'd always teased her about being indecisive, and it delighted her that he was doing it now. "Phooey. I make snap decisions all the time. Doctors have to."

  "At work, maybe," Wade persisted. "But when we were kids at home you were hopeless. I remember you changing your clothes fifteen times before you'd leave for school in the morning. It used to drive me nuts, because I had to wait for you."

  "Well, clothes, now that's different. I still have a few problems there. But you've got to admit when it comes to the big things, I make up my mind fast enough. Look how quick I got married once I met the right guy."

  "I still figure Cam drugged you. Normally it would have taken you till you were forty-something to decide."

  It was so good to hear some of Wade's old spark.

  "Oh yeah? Well, I've got news for you, little brother. When I know exactly what I want, I move with the speed of light."

  "I can't wait to hear Cam's take on that. Where is he, by the way? Don't you guys usually meet for lunch on his days off?"

  Alex frowned. "I'm not sure where he's gotten to. I called the apartment, but he wasn't there. He's probably out for a run or something." Actually, she'd tried to call Cam numerous times that morning without success. He'd taken a few days off and he should have been home, but he wasn't. It was silly to feel so bereft just because she couldn't get hold of him when she wanted to, she told herself.

  "I'd give a lot to join Cam for a run."

  Wade's tone was wistful, and it brought sudden bitter tears to her eyes. His injuries would determine so much of Wade's life from now on. She turned away and pretended to rearrange a bouquet of roses on his bedside table, holding her eyes wide open until the tears dried.

  "Dr. Ross to Emergency. Dr. Ross to Emergency." The disembodied voice brought Alex reluctantly to her feet. "Gotta go. See you when I get off shift," she promised. "Anything you need?"

  "Nope. What the hell would I need that I don't already have in this five-star joint?" His good eye winked at her, and she bent to kiss his undamaged cheek before she hurried out.

  She met Thea by the elevator, noting with amusement the lecherous glances the other woman was attracting from two male interns who stepped off the elevator right behind her. Alex would bet they had no real reason to be on surgical, apart from ogling Thea.

  "Is he okay? The damned shoot ran longer than I figured. The photographer was a certifiable idiot." Thea cast an anxious glance down the corridor, in the direction of Wade's door. She was wearing tight, faded jeans and a skimpy red T-shirt, and Alex wondered a little jealously how anyone could look as stylish and outright sensual in such ordinary garb. There seemed to be an aura around Thea that telegraphed a sexual message to every male she encountered.

  "He's fine. I just popped in to say hi while there was a quiet moment downstairs, but I'm being paged, so I guess it's over. Gotta run. See you later." She headed for the stairs, knowing they'd be faster than the elevator. As she hurried down the twisting stairwell, she pondered the relationship between her brother and his beautiful model.

  She hated to be cynical, but it was more than likely Thea's visits would gradually become less frequent and then cease altogether as time passed. Her brother had been a celebrity of sorts, well-known and adored by millions of foreign fans, and even a fair number here in North America.

  Thea had accompanied Wade on some of his tours, and he'd gone along on several of her exotic shoots, to Africa and once to Asia. Now, everything would change for them, and it wasn't going to be easy or fun or romantic at all. Wade was facing months of hospitalization, probably years of rehab, and Alex knew the depressing statistics on relationships in such situations. Very, very few of them survived.

  "Statistics be damned," she muttered hotly as she burst through the doors on the main level and ran pell mell down the corridor toward the emergency room, dodging staff and visitors. Statistics didn't mean a thing. What were the stats, for instance, on marriages like her own, a doctor working three shifts and a cop doing the same, with schedules that never seemed to mesh? It had been three weeks now since she and Cam had even had days off together. Apart from the dreadful hours they'd spent when Wade was injured, she'd seen little of her husband recently.

  She scowled because she couldn't help but feel that Cam wasn't trying as hard as he could to change that. In the past, they'd done their best to meet for lunch, at least. They'd kept each other posted on their schedules and stolen the odd half hour in which to be together, to share the small and large events of their days. She'd waited for him today, eager to spend even a few moments with him, but Cameron hadn't appeared, and there'd been no phone call, either.

  So where the blazes was he?

  Feeling a combination of anxiety and mounting annoyance, she burst through the doors and in
to the familiar chaos of the E R.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "CAM? Cameron? You home?"

  But Alex knew before she closed the apartment door behind her that he wasn't there. There was an emptiness and a silence to the rooms, apart from the yowling of her huge, cinnamon-colored cat.

  Pavarotti did his best to tell her he was glad she was home at last. The distinctive, deep-throated yowl that had inspired his name reverberated throughout the small apartment.

  She bent to stroke him as he twined around her ankles.

  "Let's get you some food, you noisy old thing." She made her way to the kitchen. The message light on the answering machine blinked imperiously, and she punched the Play button.

  Maybe Cam had called. Maybe there'd been an emergency and he'd had to go back to work early. Maybe—

  But except for two, the messages were the ones she'd left herself, asking him to call her.

  One of the other calls was from her mother, a reminder that the following Thursday was Wade's thirtieth birthday. Eleanor wanted the entire family to gather in his hospital room for a party.

  Alex shook her head in exasperation. Eleanor should know by now that Wade hated having a fuss made over his birthday at the best of times—and these were anything but the best of times.

  Alex was equally certain Eleanor hadn't asked her son's opinion—as usual, their mother was bulldozing along, doing what she wanted, regardless of her family's feelings.

  For Wade's sake, Alex would do her best to convince Eleanor the party was a bad idea, but she was almost certain her mother wouldn't pay any attention.

  The other call made Alex smile. It was from her mother-in-law, Verna Ross. If there could be an exact opposite to Eleanor, Verna was it, and Alex loved her for it.