Solemn Oath

“Maybe a pint.” Cowboy’s deep voice thickened with pain as the shirt came off. “No time to measure.”

Lukas stepped out into the hallway and called for a nurse, then returned to the bedside. He made a quick check of airway, breathing and circulation, then listened to Cowboy’s heart. Not bad, a little fast, but understandable under the circumstances. The left wrist had a strong pulse, and the fingers were warm and healthy.

When the relief nurse from upstairs stepped into the room, Lukas gave immediate orders for an IV and a trauma panel, then repeated his check on Cowboy, this time on the arm that had been shot. To his relief, it looked good. “Okay, Jake, I’ll regret this, but give my hand a firm squeeze.” He braced himself for the man’s well-known iron grip, but it didn’t come.

Cowboy grimaced again, the lines of his face deepening as his color faded. “Hurts to squeeze. Is it bad?”

“Not as bad as it could have been.” Lukas pulled on a pair of sterile gloves and reached for a packet of 4x4s. He removed the makeshift bandage and saw no active bleeding. He found the entrance and exit wounds. “What did he shoot you with?”

“Looked like a .22 rifle, almost point-blank. Just up and shot me in cold blood, the same way he did—”

A young steel-faced policeman pulled back the curtain and stepped into the room. “Dr. Bower? Do you mind if we interrupt? The sooner we talk to Cowboy, the faster we’ll be on the guy’s trail.”

Judy came in behind the policeman. “Dr. Bower, we just got a call from the fire department. They’re bringing in two more patients.”

Lukas shook his head in frustration. The day was exploding like popcorn in a microwave. Why did everything have to happen at once?

The secretary continued, “The nurse with Air Care just radioed us, and they’ll be here in a few minutes to pick up Mrs. Collins.”

“Thanks, Judy.” Lukas ripped open one of the sterile packs of 4x4s and a roll of elastic gauze, then regloved and dressed the wound. He looked over at the policeman. “Officer, you can do your interview now. Looks like I’ll have my hands full.” He turned and followed the secretary out of the room. “Judy, I need a right shoulder X-ray in five, and he’s going to need a surgical consult. Is Dr. Wong on call? He usually is when Cowboy gets hurt.”

“Yes, Dr. Wong’s the lucky guy today.” Judy grinned at him. “Cowboy won’t want a surgeon, he never does. Dr. Mercy will be here soon.” Her expression turned serious. “One of the patients they’re bringing in is our part-time EMT, Buck Oppenheimer. He got hurt in a fire.”

“Buck! How bad?”

“Haven’t heard yet. There was an explosion at the Pride of Knolls out by P Highway, and his buddies are bringing him in so he won’t have to wait for an ambulance. I sure hope he’s okay, and I hope his wife doesn’t kill him when she finds out he played hero again.”

Lukas nodded, then went in to check on Alma again and read her X-rays. There were no pneumothorax or rib or pelvic fractures, but the X-ray of her right tib-fib confirmed his worst fears. Both bones of the lower leg were shattered. If the blood vessels and nerves were as badly damaged as the bone, they would be doing an amputation in Springfield instead of a vascular and orthopedic repair.

Someone cried out in Spanish in one of the rooms, and Lukas hoped the interpreter would arrive soon. That patient was the one who reportedly had driven the car into Arthur and Alma’s tour group.

One of the most frustrating things in emergency medicine was treating those responsible for the pain and suffering of others—and one of the most difficult things to do was to have compassion for everyone involved.

Lord, give me strength and wisdom. Give Alma and Arthur Your peace, and use me as a vessel of healing. And, Lord, would You please slow things down a little?

Chapter Two

I f this was another disaster drill, Mercy Richmond was going to make someone pay dearly. She kept her white lab coat on to protect the pink-and-blue bunny scrubs she wore underneath—her family practice consisted mostly of women and children. After apologizing to the six long-suffering patients in her waiting room, she marched out the front door and down the block toward the hospital.

Mercy’s stomach growled. Monday afternoon was the worst time to get called out. There’d been no time for lunch. Everyone in this town of ten thousand must have developed strep, flu or pneumonia over the weekend. She shouldn’t have agreed to be E.R. backup today. Her patient volume had increased to the point that she was going to have to stop seeing new patients or start keeping the office open an extra day a week.

This spring she might have considered that possibility, but she’d won custody of her eleven-year-old daughter a few months ago, and she wanted to spend more time at home with Tedi. Since she no longer had to make two house payments, two car payments, and cover the bills her ex-husband had run up, she didn’t need the income she made from E.R. shifts. She hoped Theo never got out of that detox unit in Springfield. Her life was going so well with him out of the way…and with Dr. Lukas Bower taking more of an interest in her and in Tedi. Everything was looking good.

As she stepped across the parking-lot curb and strode toward the E.R. entrance, the distant, thrusting rhythm of a helicopter in flight reached her for the first time. She noticed that the landing pad on the parking lot had been cleared of cars.

Okay, so this time it probably wasn’t a drill.

She looked down. That probably wasn’t fake blood on the concrete, either. In the back rooms of her clinic, she had never been able to hear the ambulances when they pulled into the E.R. Always before, she had considered that to be a good thing. Today, though, she could have used a little warning.

She rushed through the sliding glass doors to find the waiting room filled with people in various stages of fluster. A patient with a splinted arm was being helped inside by a friend. The buzz of voices and the aura of worry greeted her like a familiar coworker. A group of three middle-aged women and two elderly men stood in the west corner by the vending machines with their hands clasped, praying.

That happened a lot around here. It didn’t matter what you thought about God the rest of the time, when you faced life and death in the emergency room, you begged Him to give you another chance. Mercy had done it herself when her own daughter nearly died from a life-threatening allergic reaction to a bee sting—she who had always prided herself on her self-reliance. She’d even considered herself an agnostic until Lukas Bower exploded into her life last spring with his gentle humor, strong compassion for others and his vibrant faith. Nothing in her life had been the same since.

A moan and a tormented shout reached her from one of the exam rooms, but she couldn’t understand the words. The mingled scents of antiseptic, body odor and diesel exhaust from the ambulance bay drifted through the room.

“Thank goodness, Dr. Mercy,” Judy called from the emergency desk. She pulled off her reading glasses and picked up a clipboard with a T-sheet already attached. Her short salt-and-pepper hair spiked out on the right side, where she’d been keeping her ink pen tucked behind her ear. “Dr. Bower’s in Trauma One trying to save the leg of a lady who got hit by a car. Her husband’s in Trauma Two in stable condition, and the guy who hit everybody is in exam room three.” She shoved the clipboard across the desk. “There’s lots more, but Dr. Bower wanted you to see about the man in Two. Name’s Arthur Collins, and he’s really upset about his wife. They just took him off the backboard. Nice guy. Never complains about his own pain. Wish my husband treated me like that.”

Mercy took the chart, then paused as the patient in Three—or so she presumed—shouted something again. The words were slurred, and they sounded Spanish. She raised a brow at Judy. “Who did you say that was?”

Judy waved a dismissive hand. “That’s the drunk driver who hit them. He drove right up onto the courthouse lawn and mowed over a bunch of people from a tour group. He doesn’t even speak English.”

“Has he been checked?”

“Dr. Bower ordered some tests and a trauma panel, but they’ve been busy with the other patients, and nobody’s gotten to him yet except to put him on oxygen.”

“Get to him.”

Judy shrugged. “Okay, but I hope we can find somebody who can speak Spanish. So far the translator hasn’t come in.”

The thumping of the helicopter rotors grew louder as the Air Care helicopter descended to the landing spot outside, the loud whomp-whomp-whomp of the rotors vibrating the windows.

“Oh, good, they’re here for Alma Collins,” Judy said.

“How many patients do we have, and how many more are coming?” Mercy asked, glancing at the T-sheet.

“We’ve got six in and two more coming that I know about, but Dr. Wong’s on his way over to take care of our favorite exotic-animal rancher.”

“Cowboy’s hurt again?”

“He sure is. His neighbor shot him.”

Mercy wasn’t sure she’d heard the secretary correctly. “ Shot him! ”

Judy shook her head. “Nobody’s going to tell me human beings aren’t meaner than any other mammal. Looks like we’ll all be busy for a while.”

Mercy suppressed a sigh. “Call my office, then. Tell Josie to do a triage and find out who really needs to see me today. Let her know what’s going on here. She’ll have to send some people home.”

“Don’t worry, Dr. Mercy. They’ll come in here looking for you if they have to.”

Mercy carried her clipboard into Trauma Room two, where Claudia Zebert, a stout fifty-year-old RN with twenty-five years of E.R. experience, took the blood pressure of a slender forty-seven-year-old man in a pressure turban. The view box on the wall held two shots of a dislocated right shoulder. Not broken. That made things a lot easier.

Mercy stepped up to the exam bed. “Mr. Collins? I’m Dr. Mercy Richmond. My patients call me Dr. Mercy, and you just became one of my patients.”

He looked up at her with troubled hazel eyes. “Dr. Mercy…that’s a good name for a doctor.”

“My father was a physician, and he named me. When I got my license, our shared last name confused patients, so we both started using our first names. We were Dr. Cliff and Dr. Mercy.” Were . Dad was dead now.

“You can call me Arthur. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m so worried about my wife that I’m not very good company.”