He opened his eyes. “Hey, Alta.” He reached for the edge of the doorway and the outstretched hand of the nurse who had ruled the emergency department since before he had returned home to become chief of police.
“Easy now,” she said, and Clare was on the other side, reaching for him as well, and there was a gurney, set nice and low and easy for him to sit on, fall back on, stretch out on. An orderly helped him settle his leg and then raised the gurney to table height. Russ stared at the sky, bright and cold.
“You’ll have to move that pickup,” Alta was saying to Clare. “Back out of this drive, down the street, next hospital entrance is visitor parking.”
Clare leaned over so that her face was hanging above him, just like she had done in the moments after he had fallen. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said.
“Call the station for me,” he said. “They’re shorthanded already with Noble and Lyle out. Tell Harlene to call in the part-time guys. Tell her to let the staties know we may need back up. Call Bob Mongue, the zone sergeant at Troop B, he’s got like a dozen kids and he always needs overtime. Tell her-”
“Russ.” She rested one hand on his chest, her mouth quirked in a smile that was half exasperation, half amusement. “Harlene’s been the dispatcher for what, twenty years? She’ll know what to do.”
Her face was replaced by Alta’s. “Let’s get you inside and give you something to take the pain away, hmm?” She grabbed the side of the gurney and they began rolling. “I thought for sure when the reverend ran in here that you musta been shot or something. The ice got you, hmm? I was hoping for something more exciting than a slip and fall. We get three-four cases a day this time of year.”
He wondered, as they shouldered their way through the double doors into the steamy, moist heat of the emergency room, if Debba had been telling the truth. If Allan Rouse had slipped and fallen just like he had? And if so, then where the hell was he?
Chapter 21
Now, her cell phone worked. She pocketed it as she crossed the parking lot toward the sidewalk that ran along the front of the hospital. She knew if she used the main entrance, there would be a lot of meaningless red tape about signing in and checking if Russ had been admitted yet. She was going back to the emergency room.
She had had a short conversation with Harlene, who became all brisk and efficient as soon as Clare had reassured her that Russ was safe and unlikely to need anything more than a cast. “Fell down at a crime scene and broke his leg, huh? The guys are never going to let him forget this.” She had promised to notify everyone in the department and directed Clare to not let Russ fret. “No fretting. Got it,” Clare said as she rang off.
She pushed through the entrance of the emergency department, the old-fashioned swinging doors whump-whumping around her, and spotted Alta manning the admissions desk at the end of the drab green hall.
“He’s already inside, getting his prelim workup done,” Alta said as Clare neared. “They’re getting him changed and starting an IV. I’ll let you know when you can go in.”
Clare thanked her and took a seat in the waiting room. Someone had thumb-tacked glossy cardboard hearts and doilies onto the institutional green walls and forgotten to take them down after Valentine’s Day. Maybe they kept them up until they could be replaced by jolly cartoon bunnies and two-foot-high chicks for Easter. Rather than cheering the place up, they emphasized the vinyl sadness of the brown-and-chrome chairs, which looked as if they had been bought secondhand from a modernistic jetport lounge in 1964. Clare settled into the slightly curved back of hers and tried to resist picking at the peeling piping. Across from her, a woman with the look of a farmer’s wife from up Cossayuharie way was resolutely leafing through a Woman’s Day magazine, ignoring the waiting room’s other inhabitant, a man dressed in the contents of a Goodwill donation bin. He smelled powerfully of alcohol and was mumbling to himself.
Clare glanced at the contents of the table at the end of her row of chairs. Three Sports Illustrateds, a Fly Rod and Reel, two Travel + Leisures. None of them less than two years old. She crossed her arms over her chest and sat. She could hear the drunk mumbling, not angry or threatening, but more like he was holding up both ends of a conversation. She glanced back at him. He looked worn down and used up.
She leaned over the back of her chair so she could see him better. “Excuse me,” she said. The farmer’s wife lowered her magazine and stared. “Excuse me,” Clare said again. “Do you have a place to stay?”
The man stopped talking and looked at her, like one party to a tête-à-tête examining an interloper.
“Because if you don’t, I know a shelter. You can’t drink there, though.”
He blinked at her, dropped his head, and resumed mumbling to himself.
“Don’t worry about him, Reverend.” Clare whipped around to see Alta standing there, a clipboard in her hand. “He comes in every once in a while. He’ll be here overnight, drying out.” She spoke a little louder to the man. “Doctor will see you in just a few minutes, Mr. Arbot. You hang in there.” The man gave no sign he had heard the nurse.
“Can I go in?” Clare asked her.
“Yep. He’s had some pretty powerful narcotics, so don’t be surprised if he seems out of it. We’re waiting on radiology to clear out, and then he’ll go in for his X rays.”
“Did the doctor say anything?” Clare knew that under the privacy laws, Alta really had no business telling her anything. She wasn’t a relative, nor was she visiting in her official capacity. But the nurses had gotten used to seeing her around as she and the town’s other clergy rotated through the unpaid post of hospital chaplain. Alta responded exactly as she would if Clare had been going in to pray with or counsel a patient who had requested her.
“Looks like a simple fracture, although of course we won’t know for sure until radiology. It’s a bad break, though, and Dr. Stillman will want to put him under to set it. So I suspect the chief will be our guest at least until tomorrow.” As she spoke, she led Clare to the brushed-metal doors separating reception and waiting from the actual emergency room. She whacked a fist-sized button set in the wall, and the doors hissed open. “Right through there,” she said. “He’s in the third bed down.”
Clare, following the nurse’s directions, parted the third pair of limp blue curtains. “Hey,” she said.
Russ was reclining on an angled hospital bed, begowned in a johnny, his broken leg elevated on a pair of poofy pillows. As Alta had said, there was an IV in his arm, and whatever was in it must have been pretty good stuff, because the lines of pain and fatigue that had been chiseled into his face were gone. In fact, Clare had never seen him looking so relaxed.
“Hey,” he said, waving her in.
“How are you feeling?”
“Stoned.” He laughed. It was different from his usual laugh, lighter, younger.
Clare smiled. She nodded toward his leg. The break was hidden by a twill-covered ice pack the size of a small sandbag. “I meant that.”
“I’m not feeling much pain, but Jesus, it looks awful. Take a look.” He sat upright and flipped the ice pack off. He was right. It did look awful, swollen and spectacularly bruised. He resettled the bag over the break and leaned back again.