Paul had no time to argue with Pia’s decision to take her car; she ran out to the ER parking lot and jumped in the VW, barely waiting long enough for Paul to hop in and get his door closed. As he struggled to fasten his seat belt, she was already on the way.
“Pia, let’s think about this. What are we going to do, even if we see the right white van? And how will we know it is the right van? And you forgot your seat belt.”
Pia cast Paul a dirty look as if to say “you are not my keeper,” and accelerated out of the hospital lot. Aggressively she zigzagged through traffic on her way to the freeway, heading northwest.
“We’re going to find them, then improvise. If nothing else, we’ll follow them to Nano.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know! What I do know is that we can’t sit around and wait for the police to go see the EMTs. I’m sure Mariel had some excuse… whoa! Look out!”
Pia swerved to avoid a car that was trying to execute a perfectly legal lane change with blinkers flashing. The driver didn’t see Pia coming up fast.
“Pia, we’re going to get into an accident, if not arrested.”
“No, we’re not! There’s the freeway ramp.”
Pia drove onto the highway, where her speed was less conspicuous. She pushed on, driving over eighty, till she slowed and took an exit.
“What are you doing?” Paul gripped what he could to keep himself righted.
“This is the fastest way to Nano, plus it intersects the road to Carter Lake Loop, which is coming up right now.” She rolled through a stop sign, then accelerated again. “This is actually the Carter Lake Loop road now. The Nano main entrance is coming up on the left in just a few minutes.”
“How are we going to recognize the van other than the fact that it’s white? A white van is not much of a description. Pia, this is crazy.” Paul’s knuckles were blanched holding on to the armrest.
“I’m going to drive right past Nano, and then we’ll follow the road north heading for Carter Lake Loop. There can’t be that many white vans around.”
They drove for a few minutes in a tense silence. Pia was hunched forward, holding the steering wheel tightly in both hands. She was on a mission.
Paul allowed himself to look out the window and recognized where they were. He saw the logic in Pia’s plan, but still wondered what they could do once they saw the van, provided they did see the van.
Pia drove quickly but attentively. She passed the turnoff to the Nano security gate on the left without slowing, and had to blare her horn to warn a black Suburban, which threatened to pull out in her way. She continued on, banking to her left, accelerating again.
“Okay, now what?” Paul questioned.
“We’re just going to head out toward Carter Lake Loop. I estimate we probably have ten minutes or so on them. I think it is better to drive out and intercept them. I have a suspicion there’s a separate entrance to Nano that I’d like to find. I don’t think they’ll use the main entrance.”
“Why don’t we just call the police and let them handle this?” said Paul. Pia’s determination and rashness were making him nervous.
“The police have already been called, and they’re up with the EMTs. Besides, I’m sure Mariel has some kind of watertight legal explanation for what’s going on, just like when she stormed into the ER to get the runner. The local police are not going to help with the situation.”
Pia continued the gradual left-hand turn following the road until it straightened out. They were now passing the Nano property on the left and a few of the Nano buildings could be seen poking up through the evergreens and aspens. To the right the road fell off into a gully containing a tree-lined mountain brook. She was traveling at more than fifty miles an hour.
Pia glanced over to Paul and was about to say something, but suddenly something caught her attention. Out of the corner of her left eye, Pia saw a shape in her side mirror bearing down on her car. Before she could even respond, she felt the shuddering impact as her VW was rammed hard across the rear on the left side. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep the car straight as the giant shape pushed and pushed, grinding her car toward the edge of the road. Pia may have screamed, but the sound was drowned out by the rending of metal as the car hit the soft gravel at the side of the road, followed by a second of silence as it flew off and down the embankment toward the tree line. Then she felt a sickening thud, accompanied by the smashing of glass, as the car rolled once, then twice, and perhaps again, but Pia couldn’t know how many times, because everything went black and was perfectly still and quiet.
CHAPTER 32
George Wilson looked down at Pia lying in the hospital bed and felt sick to his stomach. When he received word of what had happened some forty-eight hours after the event, thoughtfully sent along by Zach Berman through Whitney Jones, he dropped everything, made a plea to his chief of radiology about having to attend to another family emergency, this time relatively for real, and rushed straight to Boulder. Since he had arrived two days previously, he hadn’t left the hospital once, and had only slept fitfully for forty-five minutes at a time slouched in a backbreaking hospital room chair.
George’s mind kept sliding back to the time he and Pia had stood in a different hospital room, in New York, watching their fellow medical student Will McKinley fight for his life. McKinley was still worrisomely ill with a recalcitrant, antibiotic-resistant infection in his skull. Even though George had been told that Pia’s injuries now weren’t life threatening like they were initially, he couldn’t help but think of Will and how close he and Pia had come to being in a permanent state of limbo, hanging between life and death. Head injuries could be like that.
Pia had been severely injured. She had fractured her left arm in two places, mid-humerus and radius, and four ribs. The ribs were apparently from the steering wheel. As the roof of the car had compressed when the vehicle rolled over, Pia received a serious blow to the head and a resultant concussion, and her neck was badly strained with bleeding into the para-spinal muscles, so she was wearing a neck brace. She had suffered some internal injuries as well, trauma that couldn’t be seen but was more life threatening than the broken bones and cuts and bruises, a very familiar sight to George. The blunt force of the crash and probably the steering wheel had ruptured Pia’s spleen, causing blood to pump into her abdominal cavity, and without the rapid response of an ambulance and EMTs from this same hospital, Pia could well have bled to death as she lay unconscious in the wreckage of her new automobile. Luckily they had accurately diagnosed the problem and had alerted the ER so that when she had arrived, she was taken almost directly to surgery to stem the bleeding. There was no doubt it had saved her life.
Pia was still currently in a drug-induced coma to allow the swelling of her brain to subside, and was being artificially respired to make sure she got full aeration of her lungs. To monitor this, she was given round-the-clock nursing care. George understood all this, but he was desperate for Pia to wake up so that he could hear her voice, but he knew he had to be patient, and he was learning that that was a virtue he had in short supply. There was nothing he could do, and he hated the feeling of powerlessness.
George heard the door to the room open and felt someone come in and stand next to him. At first he thought it was one of the nurses, but it wasn’t.
“Any change?” asked Paul Caldwell.
“Hello, Paul. No, nothing new.” George met Paul when he had first arrived. Paul, too, had been standing vigil in between runs back down to the ER. George’s first reaction was anger and jealousy, but he soon realized that both emotions were uncalled for. When he heard that Paul had been in the vehicle involved in the accident with Pia, he had assumed Paul had been driving and was responsible for what had happened. And he had further assumed that he and Pia were an item, which seemed to make superficial sense, as George recognized Paul as a handsome and intelligent doctor. When George learned that he was wrong on both accounts, he felt foolish and was moved to admit his mistake and apologize. He also quickly came to be grateful for Paul’s concern and the fact that Paul had been an effective ombudsman for the most difficult period of Pia’s hospitalization, making sure the best surgeon available had come in to take the case.