“Thanks for a good day, I’ll see you back here for another one in the morning.”
“Yeah, you too,” she replied. “Try to stay awake on the way home. I’ll message you a sign-off time after I do my timesheet.”
“Hey, Virginia.”
“What?”
“If I had the four hundred grand…”
“I know. Thank you.”
“Let me know if you need anything.”
She smiled. “Thanks, Anton.”
The station phone started ringing. There was only one possible caller, the dispatch center. It was a secured line.
Anton turned his head toward the phone mounted on the wall of the station. It kept ringing. “Virginia…. No.”
“It might be important…”
“Of course it’s important! Someone rang for an ambulance!” Anton raced the rumbling V8, temporarily drowning out the ring of the phone. “See ya tomorrow!” he yelled out the window as he peeled out the roller door and into the street.
Virginia sighed. She really needed to get back to her father and see if he needed anything. That’s what she was supposed to do. She’d spent her life helping others, why couldn’t she just go home and be with her father? Was it because she couldn’t face the fact that she couldn’t do anything to save him?
She walked over to the phone. “Central, this is Beaumont.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Virginia, it’s Peter,” came the familiar voice of the radio despatcher. “Is Anton still there?”
“Just driving out the door as we speak.”
“Can you stop him?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Look. I’ve got a 28-year-old cardiac arrest I can’t cover. It’s about half a mile from the station, and the next closest is at 42nd street tidying up a non-transport but can’t leave yet. Can you help me out? I wouldn’t ask, but it’s an emergency.”
“Peter it’s two hours and forty minutes into overtime already, I'm exhausted.”
“I’ll write you up for a midnight sign off. That’s four hours overtime pay and you should be on your way home by eleven at the latest. I wouldn't normally ask but I've got no coverage at all right now.”
Virginia made a noise as she breathed out. “All right, all right. Midnight sign off?”
“Right. Thanks Virginia. You’re my new personal hero.”
“Yeah right. I’ll jump back in 326, okay, same portable radio numbers as today.”
“Great.”
Virginia looked down and realized she was still holding the keys in her right hand from when she had parked the van a minute ago. In disbelief she hung up the now empty receiver, and unlocked the van again.
She turned the key, sat down and cranked forward the driver’s seat, and the job lit up on the mobile data screen. The computer’s alarm chimed urging her to mark the van as responding before she could open up the details of the case. It was to an address she knew well, public housing, probably ground floor unit judging by the number. She could have almost driven there with her eyes closed.
She grabbed the radio mike, and for the benefit of the other crews more than anything else she voiced the job, “326 dayshift responding hot to 892–896 Franklin for the unconscious query arrest. Responding single.”
“Thanks again, 326,” the dispatcher replied. “I’ll get you some back up as quickly as I can.”
Virginia switched the lights and sirens on and joined the traffic. She weaved in and out. She was driving hard, alternating between heavy braking and hard acceleration — after all, she was on her way to a twenty-eight-year-old cardiac arrest victim and some emergencies are more critical than others.
Blue and red lights reflected off the buildings and the emergency strobe lights shot into the traffic up ahead. She reached sixty miles an hour, and something stirred in her subconscious. A sixth sense, developed over nearly sixteen years of service as a paramedic and highly attuned to pick up the little things that didn’t make sense, was trying to warn her there was something wrong about the case.
What had happened to cause an otherwise healthy twenty-eight year old’s heart to suddenly stop beating?
Chapter Sixteen
It never ceased to amaze Virginia that no matter how long the shift or how bone-tired weary she was, there was always the clear-eyed, sharpness of mind that returned to her on the way to a critical patient, especially if she was on her own.
Red and blue lights flickered and glinted all around her as the engine roared beneath the steering wheel. The wail and yelp of the siren smothered everything audible and Virginia visualized and then committed to the route she would take. Familiar sensations of the body systems gearing up inside her were distracting as adrenaline coursed into her body. She calmed her mind by assessing the sensations individually, and rationalizing them away. The tingle at the kidneys that resonated right down to the deepest core of her gut. The involuntary deep breath as her cardiovascular system started to feed oxygen to the tissues of the body in primal preparation for the battle ahead. She enjoyed the fear in her. This was what had kept her in the job. This was what made Virginia Beaumont tick.
She entered the street and killed the noise of the siren, followed by the lights of the beacons. Finding the driveway, she pulled up into the cramped parking lot and squinted to study the red brick building, using the powerful sidelights fixed to the ambulance. Sometimes she could get a good sense of what was inside from what lay on the porch or in the yard, and this complex had all the hallmarks of a certain type of clientele. Children's toys and the discarded remains of whitegoods and most of a shopping cart lay undisturbed on the tufty unkempt grass.
Taking in the scene, she shouldered an oxygen kit and strong-armed the two other medical kits through a squeaking, heavily rusted gate, and crossed the no-man’s-land grassed yard to the door. The glass and aluminum door stood propped open with the top half of a broken baby stroller. Even in the cold, the musty air smothered her senses momentarily. The hallway was long and dark. Taking her mini flashlight off her belt, Virginia shined around for a light, and found a timed night light button near the door. Worn, it popped straight back out when she pushed it in.
She muttered while holding it in and craned her neck to see the details of the hallway, and any unit numbers. The door at the end of the hall on the right was ajar. Palming her flashlight, she picked up the kits and headed in.
“Ambulance!” she called out as she approached the door.
“Paramedics! Anyone home?” Virginia nudged the door with her kit, but hung back before the threshold, keeping her feet in the hallway. There were no neighbor's doors opening, the only light was flashing from the buzzing florescent on the exit sign above the door where she entered, and it seemed far away at that moment. It was quiet. She didn’t like it, and hated not having her partner there.
The alarm bells of her sixth sense kept ringing — something’s not right.
Virginia placed her kits on the concrete hallway and used her flashlight to peer into the darkness inside the unit. She took the radio mike from her left epaulette in a wide pinch with her right hand and depressed the button. “Three — twenty — six to Central.”
“Go ahead three — two — six.”
“Thanks, Central. I’m at the given location at 9 of 118 Nostrand Avenue and the unit is in darkness but I have access. What’s the ETA on the backup car?”
“Stand by twenty-six. Central calling nine seventy, nine-seventy are you on the air?”
“Nine-seventy,” crackled the reply.