Nightwatch

“Heather. Heather Corrigan.” Even those few words seemed an appalling effort for her and Rachel had to lean close to hear.

“Hello, Heather. I’m Dr. Browne.”

Heather’s lips curled in a faint smile and she half nodded before her teeth clamped again as another labor pain hit.

Rachel swabbed her forehead while Lydia prepped her belly. “Who’s your doctor, Heather? Do you have an OB? An obstetrician?”

Heather rolled her head back and forth in a negative response that obviously cost her. “Haven’t seen a—a doctor. I need to see…” Her already weak voice faded into nothingness as another wave of pain swept her body.

Katya raced into the cubicle carrying the FHD–100—a portable fetal monitor that ran on batteries. “I’ve got another orderly coming down,” she said. Then Reid covered Heather’s mouth with the mask.

“All right then,” Rachel said, putting on rubber gloves. “Let’s be on top of this, people. Everything’s going to be fine.”

ONLY, EVERYTHING WASN’T fine.

Rachel peeled off her paper scrubs and threw them furiously into the trash. She never got used to losing a patient. At least the baby would live, although his heartbeat was irregular and his jaundice was advanced. If only Heather had seen an obstetrician when she’d first gotten pregnant. Or even come to the hospital a few hours earlier.

Desperate for some coffee, Rachel headed toward the call room, but John Wilkins flagged her down from the other side of the hall. She stopped wearily and waited for him to reach her.

“Sorry, Doc. EMTs are bringing in a guy who had a roof cave in on him in the storm. They’ll be here in five.”

“Oh, Lord. Okay, when he gets here, can you get him cleaned up and into X ray and then come get me?”

“Sure, Doctor.” He paused midturn. “You okay?”

She looked at her watch. Almost 3:00 a.m. She’d been on duty for nearly seventeen hours. “I have to be, John. There’s nobody else.”

He nodded sympathetically. “I’ll take care of it.” He turned and hustled down the hall.

This time, Rachel made it to the coffee machine. She practically guzzled the first cup and was halfway through the second when John returned.

“He’s in X ray, Doctor. Whoa. They need you, stat.”

“That bad, huh?”

The orderly nodded.

Rachel slugged back the remainder of the coffee. “Well, let’s hit it.”

As she and John reached the X-ray room, the technician was just wrapping up. Rachel nodded and smiled at her, then approached the body lying on the gurney.

She noted approvingly that John had installed a saline drip and oxygen feed on the patient. She understood the orderly’s reaction. The face of the man on the gurney was in worse shape than many of the traffic accidents she’d seen—a palette of cuts, bruises and swelling distorting the features beyond recognition. “What’s his name?”

“Bruce Nepom.”

The man’s salt-and-pepper hair was matted with blood and he showed no signs of consciousness.

“Let’s get him in one,” Rachel said. As they walked, she pulled a small flashlight from her pocket and gently pried the man’s eyelids open, one at a time. She flashed the light across his eyes, but the pupils were blown—dilated and unresponsive to the light. “Bruce—Mr. Nepom. Can you hear me?” As expected, there was no reaction.

Rachel examined the man’s mouth. Three of his front teeth were broken, but he hadn’t bitten his tongue.

Once they were in the exam room, she pulled the sheet back to expose a well-developed chest with a smattering of graying hair, and a massive bruise along the ribs.

She noted John had already put in a catheter, and that most of the man’s injuries were upper body. She ran a finger along a tattoo on the man’s left shoulder—two dragons entwined around a Celtic cross. The tattoo had once been colorful, but the tints had faded and darkened.

“According to the EMTs, the whole roof fell on him,” John repeated.

She pulled on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “Let’s see what we can do to help Mr. Nepom.”

RACHEL HANDED HER NOTES to the admitting nurse in the E.R. “Hang on to these for me, will you, Karen?”

“Sure, Doctor.” She gave Rachel a quick once-over. “You look beat. About time you went home.”

Rachel glanced at the half-filled seats in admitting. Aside from the two serious operations, she and Amy had treated dozens of broken limbs, stitched up God knows how many cuts, and even treated a man whose foot had been caught under a falling tree by poking through his toenail with a red-hot paper clip to relieve the pressure. She smiled at that one. “That’s my plan, Karen. I’m hoping to sleep uninterrupted for a good twenty-four hours.”

“Good night, Doctor. Or rather, good morning.”

“See you later.” Rachel headed out the double doors to the parking lot, still worried about Nepom. The surgery had been a success, but that didn’t mean the patient would live. Even if he did, his head wounds were so severe she doubted he’d regain anything like normal consciousness.

Although the sun was actually rising behind her, she felt as if she were coming out of a movie matinee. It was as though she’d forgotten what natural sunlight was like. Standing on the steps a moment, she took a deep breath. Clean air, sunlight.

Great time to go to bed.

With leaden feet and a killer backache, she made her way across the debris-strewn lot to her car. It would take her ten minutes to get home. Twelve minutes to be in bed.

DR. GUY GIROUX CLIMBED over a fallen palm tree then up the rise at the edge of his property. From there he could see the road and, thankfully, the city maintenance crew hard at work disentangling the trees and cars that had prevented him from getting to the hospital the previous night.

The last he’d heard from the E.R., before his cell had gone dead, was that they were critically understaffed. As head of the E.R., he should have been there. Thank God Rachel had made it in, but with this kind of storm, the injured would be more than any one doctor could handle.

They should have been better prepared, given the run of bad weather they’d been having. It was only a couple of months ago that the last severe storm had come through, causing major mudslides that had washed away houses. Now this.

He headed back to his house, which mercifully had been spared the worst of last night’s storm. His neighbor’s ground floor had been flooded, and Mrs. Allen had come to him for help, but all he’d managed to do was get her and her three annoying Pomeranians into the warmth of his spare room.

It was the only thing that had gone right. Without television reception or phone service, he’d relied on his radio for any word of relief, but it hadn’t come till about an hour ago.

The storm was the worst recorded in the history of Courage Bay, California, and he knew firsthand how far back that history went. His great-great-great-grandfather, Pierre Giroux, had been the captain of an American twenty-one-gun sloop of war, the Ranger, which had blown off course during the U.S.–Mexican War and been shipwrecked in Courage Bay. Perhaps in a storm like this.

Guy heard the dogs yapping before he crossed his threshold. He liked dogs and ordinarily wouldn’t have minded their incessant barking, but not today when he was suffering from lack of sleep and a rare feeling of helplessness.

“Dr. Guy?”

He inhaled deeply and let the air out slowly, trying to ease the headache that had been building steadily from four this morning. “Yes, Mrs. Allen?”

“The babies are hungry. Do you think it’s possible to get into my house and get some food for them?”

“No, I don’t believe it is. But I have some ground beef in the freezer.” He closed the door behind him and headed for the kitchen, avoiding the small woman still dressed in her housecoat and curlers.

“They’d like that very much,” she said.