Million Dollar Baby

Dallas scowled to himself. What was the old saying? Something about no rest for the wicked? The adage seemed to apply. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.” God, what he wouldn’t do for a hot shower, hotter cup of coffee, and about ten hours in the rack.

He only took the time to leave the chart in the patient’s room and give the third-floor nurses’ station some instructions about Bill Aimes’s medication. “And make sure he takes it,” Dallas warned. “It seems Mr. Aimes thinks he can self-diagnose.”

“He won’t fool us,” Lenore Newell replied, and Dallas was satisfied. Lenore had twenty years of nursing experience under her belt, and she’d seen it all. If anyone could get Bill Aimes to swallow his medication, Dallas decided, Nurse Newell could.

Unwilling to wait for the elevator, he took the stairs to the first floor and shoved open the door. The bright lights and frenetic activity of the emergency room greeted him. Several doctors were treating patients, and there was a crowd in the waiting room.

Shannon Pratt, a slim, dark-haired woman and, in Dallas’s opinion, the most efficient nurse on staff, gave the doctor a quick smile. “They’re on their way. Mike just called. They’ll be here in about five minutes.”

Mike Rodgers was one of the regular paramedics who drove ambulance for Riverbend Hospital.

“How’s the patient?”

Shannon glanced at the notes she’d attached to a clipboard that she cradled with one arm. “Looks like the information we received from the first call was right on. The paramedics confirmed what the woman who called in already told us. The baby—only a couple of days old—has some signs of exposure as well as possible jaundice and slight swelling on one side of the head—the, uh, right,” she said, rechecking her notes. “No other visible problems. Vital signs are within the normal range.”

“Good. Order a bilirubin and get the child under U.V. as soon as I finish examining him. Also, I want as much information from the mother as possible, especially her RH factor. If she doesn’t know it, we’ll take blood from her—”

Shannon touched Dallas lightly on the arm. “Hold on a minute, Doctor. The mother’s not involved.”

Dallas stopped. He glanced swiftly at Nurse Pratt—to see if she was putting him on. She wasn’t. Her face was as stone sober as it always was in an emergency. “Not involved? Then how the hell—”

Pratt held up a hand. “The woman who found the child—”

“The woman who found the child?” Dallas repeated as they passed the admitting desk, where Nurse Lindquist, a drill sergeant of a woman, presided. Over the noise of rattling gurneys and wheelchairs, conversation, paging and computer terminals humming, Dallas heard the distant wail of a siren.

Pratt continued, “The mother isn’t bringing him in. This is a case of abandonment, or so the woman who called—” she glanced down at her notes on her clipboard again “—Chandra Hill, claims. Apparently she’s saying that she discovered the baby in her barn.”

“Her barn?”

“Mmm. Doesn’t know how he got there.” Shannon rolled her large brown eyes and lifted one slim shoulder. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

Dallas swore silently. “If she’s not the mother, how can we do anything with—”

“We’re already working on consent forms,” Pratt cut in, ahead of him, as she usually was in a case like this. “The police are involved, and someone’s looking up a judge to sign the waiver so we can admit the kid as a Baby John Doe.”

“Wonderful,” Dallas growled under his breath. With his luck, the kid’s mother would show up, demand custody and file a complaint against the hospital. Or worse yet, not show up at all, and the child would have to be cared for by the state. “Just damned wonderful.” What a way to end a shift!

The siren’s wail increased to a glass-shattering scream that drowned out all conversation. Lights flashing, the white-and-orange rig ground to a stop near the double glass doors of the emergency room. Two men Dallas recognized hopped out of the cab and raced to the back of the emergency van.

“Okay, listen up,” Dallas ordered Pratt. “I’ll need that bilirubin A.S.A.P., and we’ll need to test the child—drugs, HIV, white count, everything,” he said, thinking of all the reasons a person might abandon a child. Maybe the woman couldn’t afford proper medical attention for herself and the baby; maybe the child needed expensive care. “And get ready with an IV or a bottle…” God, what a mess!

The paramedics shoved open the back doors of the ambulance. Pulling out a small stretcher and carrying it between them, Mike Rodgers and Joe Klinger ran across the short covered span near the doors. A tiny baby, insulated by a thermal blanket, was strapped to the stretcher and was screaming bloody murder.

“Okay, Doc, looks like it’s show time,” Shannon observed as Dallas caught a glimpse of another vehicle, a huge red van of some sort, as it sped into the lot and skidded into a parking space.

The doors to the emergency room flew open. The paramedics, carrying the small stretcher, strode quickly inside.

“Room two,” Nurse Pratt ordered.

Under the glare of fluorescent lights, Mike, a burly redheaded man with serious, oversize features and thick glasses, nodded curtly and headed down the hall without breaking stride. “As I said, it looks like exposure and dehydration, heart rate and b.p. are okay, but—”

Mike rattled off the child’s vital signs as Joe unstrapped the child and placed him on the examining table. Dallas was listening, but had already reached for his penlight and snapped his stethoscope around his neck. He touched the child carefully. The right side of the infant’s head was a little bit swollen, but there wasn’t much evidence of bleeding. A good sign. The tiny boy’s skin was tinged yellow, but again, not extremely noticeable. Whoever the woman was who found the child, she knew more than a little about medicine.

Dallas glanced over at the paramedic. “This woman who called in—Ms. Hill?—I want to talk to her. Do you have her number?”

“Don’t need to,” Mike said. “She followed us here. Drove that damned red van like a bat outta hell….”

The red van. Of course. Good. Dallas wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t the mother just trying to get some free medical attention for her child. So how did she know about the child’s condition? Either she’d diagnosed the baby herself or someone else had…someone who understood pediatric medicine. One way or another, Dallas thought, flashing the beam of his penlight into the baby’s dark eyes, he needed to talk to Ms. Hill.

“When she shows up,” he said, glancing at Nurse Pratt, “I want to see her.”

* * *

RIVERBEND HOSPITAL SPRAWLED across five acres of hills. The building was either five floors, four or three, depending upon the terrain. Painted stark white, it seemed to grow from the very ground on which it was built.

It resembled a hundred other hospitals on the outside and inside, Chandra thought; it was a nondescript medical institution. She’d been here before, but now, as she got the runaround from a heavyset nurse at the emergency room desk, Chandra was rapidly losing her temper. “But I have to see the child, I’m the one who found him!” she said, with as much patience as she could muster.

The admitting nurse, whose name tag read Alma Lindquist, R.N., didn’t budge. An expression of authority that brooked no argument was fixed on features too small for her fleshy face.

Chandra refused to be put off by Nurse Lindquist. She’d dealt with more than her share of authority figures in her lifetime—especially those in the medical profession. One more wouldn’t stop her, though Nurse Lindquist did seem to guard the admittance gate to the emergency room of Riverbend Hospital as if it were the portal to heaven itself and Chandra was a sinner intent on sneaking past.

“If you’re not the mother or the nearest living relative,” Nurse Lindquist was saying in patient, long-suffering tones, “then you cannot be allowed—”

“I’m the responsible party.” Chandra, barely holding on to her patience, leaned across the desk. She offered the woman a professional smile. “I found the boy. There’s a chance I can help.”

“Humph,” the heavyset nurse snorted, obviously unconvinced that the staff needed Chandra’s help, or opinion for that matter. Alma Lindquist lifted her reddish brows imperiously and turned back to the stack of admittance forms beside a humming computer terminal. “I’m sure Dr. O’Rourke will come out and let you know how the infant’s doing as soon as the baby has been examined. Now, if you’ll just take a chair in the waiting area…” She motioned a plump hand toward an alcove where olive green couches were grouped around Formica tables strewn with worn magazines. Lamps offered pools of light over the dog-eared copies of Hunter’s Digest, Women’s Daily, Your Health, and the like.

Chandra wasn’t interested in the lounge or hospital routine or the precious domain of a woman on an authority trip. Not until she was satisfied that everything humanly possible was being done for the baby. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just see for myself,” she said swiftly. Lifting her chin and creating her own aura of authority, Chandra marched through the gate separating the examining area from the waiting room as if she’d done it a million times.

“Hey! Hey—you can’t go in there!” the nurse called after her, surprised that anyone would dare disregard her rules. “It’s against all procedure! Hey, ma’am! Ms. Hill!” When Chandra’s steps didn’t falter, Nurse Lindquist shouted, “Stop that woman!”

“Hang procedure,” Chandra muttered under her breath. She’d been in enough emergency rooms to know her way around. She quickly walked past prescription carts, the X-ray lab and a patient in a wheelchair, hurrying down the tiled corridors toward the distinctive sound of a baby’s cry. She recognized another voice as well, the deep baritone belonging to the redheaded paramedic who had hustled the baby into the ambulance, Mike something-or-other.

She nearly ran into the paramedics as they left the examination room. “Is he all right?” she asked anxiously. “The baby?”

“He will be.” Mike touched her lightly on the shoulder, as a kindly father would touch a worried child. “Believe me, he’s in the best hands around these parts. Dr. O’Rourke’ll take care of the boy.”

The other paramedic—Joe—nodded and offered a gap-toothed smile. “Don’t you worry none.”

But she was worried. About a child she’d never seen before tonight, a child she felt responsible for, a child who, because she’d found him, had become, at least temporarily, a part of her life. Abandoned by his own mother, this baby needed someone championing his cause.

The baby’s cries drifted through the partially opened door. Without a thought to “procedure,” Chandra slipped into the room and watched as a scruffy-looking doctor bent over a table where the tiny infant lay.

The physician was a tall, lanky man in a rumpled lab coat. A stethoscope swung from his neck as he listened to the baby’s heartbeat. Chandra guessed his age as being somewhere between thirty-five and forty. His black hair was cut long and looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb in some time, his jaw was shaded with more than a day’s growth of beard, and the whites of his eyes were close to bloodshot.

The man is dead on his feet. This was the doctor on whom she was supposed to depend? she thought angrily as her maternal instincts took charge of her emotions. He had no right to be examining the baby. Yet he touched the child gently, despite his gruff looks. Chandra took a step forward as he said to the nurse, “I want him on an IV immediately, and get that bilirubin. We’ll need a pediatrician—Dr. Williams, if you can reach him.” The physician’s gaze centered on the squirming child. “In the meantime, have a special crib made up for him in the pediatric ward, but keep him isolated and under ultraviolet. We don’t know much about him. See if he’ll take some water from a bottle, but keep track of the intake. He could have anything. I want blood work and an urinalysis.”

“A catheter?” Nurse Pratt asked.