Absolute Zero Page 7

  The engine quit and for the first time in three days Broker was in an enclosed, dry, quiet place that smelled securely of radial tires and clean concrete, only more so because it was a hospital with a red cross.

  The rear door jerked opened and a woman, a man, and a haggard Allen Falken reached in. The woman wore jeans under her plum-colored smock. Allen and the man wore hospital blue. Broker and Shari helped them lift Sommer’s stretcher and transfer it onto a wheeled gurney cart.

  In the flurry of movement, Allen looked at Sommer, then called to Milt who did not respond. He turned to Broker.

  “Milt said the lump went down an hour ago. Sommer felt better, then he got delirious,” Broker said.

  Allen shot a look at the other man. “We’re up shit’s creek for time if he perforated; where the hell’s that anesthetist?”

  “She’s coming.”

  Then Allen, who seemed taller now, commanded Broker. “You’ve got to get another gurney and load Milt yourself, the storm caught them at shift change and they’re way understaffed. C’mon people, let’s hustle,” he urged everyone as Brecht, the nurse, and the paramedic rushed Sommer up a ramp, through heavy swinging doors, and into a corridor.

  Iker followed them, returned with a gurney, and helped Broker load Milt. Sam the driver stayed behind the wheel, talking into a snarl of static on his police radio.

  They wheeled Milt into a small equipment-packed alcove with two treatment tables on the right. Shari came down the hall and supervised while they heaved Milt on the table. Then she waved them away and cut off Milt’s wet clothes.

  Broker followed Iker down the hall and focused on a wall poster that diagramed potential fishhook accidents and the proper first-aid procedures. Dizzy at the heat in the building, he steadied his arm on a wall, and saw that his cheap wristwatch was still running. The time was 9:45 A.M. They had dumped in the storm a little before eight yesterday morning. They’d left the camp on the point at ten. Getting Sommer out had taken fifteen minutes shy of twenty-four hours. Broker’s knees started to wobble. He’d been traveling on rough water, bouncing in rougher air. Now he was having trouble finding his land legs.

  Up ahead, they had Sommer in the hall in front of an elevator surrounded by bristling carts stacked with monitors and a tangle of IV lines and electrical cords.

  “Where’s Amy, goddammit?” Brecht yelled. “It won’t be pretty if we have to cut this guy without her.”

  “We paged her. She’s coming.”

  Sommer screamed as Allen, Brecht, and the nurse freed him from the rigid stretcher in a coordinated surge and discarded it along with the soaked sleeping bag. His eyes rolled, gumdrops of sweat mobbed his face. “HURTS GODDAMN HURTS!” he screamed.

  “You’re okay, Hank,” Allen said. “You’re in a hospital. We’ll take good care of you.” Metal shears flashed in his hand as he cut away Sommer’s clothes. The material disappeared in a blue cyclone of activity as electrical leads attached to rounds of tape were thwacked into place on his bare chest. Bumpy trace lines jumped on a cardiac monitor.

  “FUCK YOU HURTS!”

  “He’s delirious. He can’t hear you,” Brecht said to Allen. Then he called out to Judy, “Get STAT CBC with diff and lytes. I’ll get a blood pressure. Start two large-bore IV’s antecubital and run them wide open,” Brecht slapped on a blood-pressure cuff and pumped it up while the nurse strung liters of saline IV and popped catheters in the hollows of Sommer’s elbows.

  Broker watched Allen take a stance astride the crisis. Hair askew, still unshaven from the trail, he was a rougher version of his usual self. He has to be beat, thought Broker. I sure am.

  “This guy NPO?” somebody yelled.

  Broker turned at the bright female voice and matched it to a young woman with straight-ahead posture who jogged down the hall in jeans sticky with snow stuck to her knees. She shook more snow from her hair, cast off her jacket, and caught a blue smock the nurse tossed to her. She had large gray eyes under tawny, pale blond hair, no makeup, and freckles dotted her cheeks.

  Brecht nodded at Allen. “Amy, Dr. Allen Falken.”

  “When’s the last time he ate?” she asked.

  “Not since midnight, right?” Allen craned his neck around the huddle of medics and queried Broker.

  Broker nodded. “That’s what Milt said.”

  “Is he allergic to any medicine?” She asked.

  “Is it . . . ?” An out-of-place guy peered over their shoulders. He wore a white shirt, loose collar, tie unknotted, and his face sagged, blotched with concern.

  “It’s bad, Mike,” Brecht said as he probed Sommer’s lower abdomen gently with his palm. Sommer thrashed and screamed.

  “Jesus,” Mike said.

  “It’s the real deal. Like a burst appendix.”

  “You’ve done an appendix,” Mike said.

  “I stabilize and ship south. My thing is your kid’s ear infection. This is way over my head. We have to open his abdomen and do a small bowel resection.”

  “Don’t lecture me, I know what it means,” Mike hissed in a trapped voice, a hospital administrator treading in his worst nightmare. Lawsuits circled his furrowed brow like a halo of hungry sharks.

  “He’s gotta do it,” Brecht said, jerking his head toward Allen.

  “Let me think,” Mike said.

  “No time to think,” said Amy, the new arrival.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike countered.

  “Means you’re going to have a lot of paperwork to do if this guy tips over because you shipped him,” she continued. “There’s EMTALA, there’s a blizzard. We have a licensed surgeon on board and a guy who’s septic with a perforated bowel. Not cool, Mike.”

  “Amy’s right, we try to ship him, he will fucking die.” Brecht bit off each consonant for emphasis.

  Mike turned to Iker, who shook his head. “I won’t put him back out in that weather. No way.”

  Lastly, he looked at Allen who waited a beat and called it: “We open that belly or he’s dead. Make a decision. Fast.”

  “Okay.” Mike hitched up his belt, squared his shoulders, and nodded to Allen. “Take him downstairs to the OR and scrub in. But Amy—I want all your stuff in recovery in case we have to reintubate. I mean, syringes full, everything. No one’s going to say we weren’t on top of this.”

  Then Mike saw Broker and Iker standing there leaking puddles of lake water and ice melt. He cleared his throat and motioned to the paramedic. “Shari, get these guys something dry to wear.”

  As they retreated back toward the garage, Broker watched Brecht, Amy, and the nurse shove the gurney toward the open elevator. Allen walked last, his hands held high, poised. Amy bent over Sommer, worked his jaw between her hands, opened his mouth, and looked into his throat. “Oh shit, this guy’s got an airway from hell,” she said merrily.

  “But you can intubate him?” Allen asked.

  “I can intubate him anywhere, anytime,” she shot back, a little cocky, a little high on the action.

  The elevator doors closed behind them.

  Chapter Nine

  Milt lay in the ER room cubbyhole draped in a floral-patterned hospital smock with an IV in his arm and an ice pack on his swollen right shoulder.

  “That smock had to be recycled from Martha Washington’s drapes,” Broker said. He was feeling good. Tired as hell but good.

  “Oh please,” Shari groaned. Then she bent over Milt and said, “You probably tore a muscle and went into spasm in the plane.”

  “I’d rather break a bone than tear a muscle,” Milt said as his eyelids fluttered and he struggled to stay awake.

  “I hear you,” Shari said.

  “Hank?” Milt asked, drifting.

  “Allen is operating,” Broker said.

  “For the report, what happened out there?” Iker asked.

  Milt twitched, a modified shrug. “Straight-line winds dropped on us. Worst water I’ve seen on a lake. Hank had a hernia and he paddled his ass off. That’s when he blew
his gut. He and Broker swamped. Broker pulled him out.” His eyes rolled toward Broker. “Guess he got his adventure to write about,” Milt said, smiling weakly.

  A lean woman in a blue smock and trousers came up silently in tennis shoes. She wound her dark ponytail into a hair net and pulled on latex gloves.

  “Some day, eh, Nancy?” Shari said.

  The nurse raised her brows, which emphasized the circles of fatigue under her eyes. “I worked all night watching two wards, now I still got them plus recovery when they bring that guy up.”

  They chatted quickly, then the nurse syringed a dose of pain reliever into Milt’s IV, pointed to the puddle of water on the floor, and politely waved them off.

  Broker and Iker followed Shari back into the empty garage. Sam and the Tahoe were gone. It was a busy afternoon.

  Shari opened a locker, threw them towels, and turned her back. While they stripped and dried off, she rummaged around, clucking, obviously enjoying the fact that the two sweatshirts she heaved back to them were decorated with really hideous logos. Mismatched sweatpants followed.

  While Shari made appropriately disparaging remarks, they put on the dry clothes and blue slippers. They went back into the hospital and padded down a corridor walled with floor-to-ceiling plate glass that churned, aquarium-like, with silent snow.

  “Worse than the Halloween storm in ninety-one,” Iker said. Broker, too tired to comment, plodded on to the staff lounge and flopped on a couch. In less than a minute he was chin on chest in a deep nod. He came up from the nod and heard Iker ask Shari what was going on downstairs in the operating room.

  Shari pointed to her stomach and drew her finger down to her crotch. “They cut him open and lift out his intestines. Then they snip out the perforated section and sew it back together. After that they wash out his stomach cavity real good. They have to repair the hernia, but because of the presence of infection, they won’t use a patch, so they stitch him up the old-fashion way.”

  “Ouch,” Iker said.

  Broker didn’t hear the rest of the conversation because he was fast asleep.

  “Hey, Broker, wake up, man.”

  “Wha . . . ?” Broker lurched forward and checked his watch. It was just past noon. He blinked and saw Iker’s square, smiling face.

  “They’re done. They’re bringing him up to the recovery room.”

  They turned through the halls, entered the ER corridor, and Broker could almost feel the sunbeams peeking around the corner. The only person not smiling was Hank Sommer, who was sprawled out on a gurney, trussed in his own ugly floral gown. The agony that had gripped his face for twenty-four hours had melted away. With his mouth open in a long yawn he looked—if not peaceful—certainly burned-out stoned.

  Directly over Sommer, Amy, the gray-eyed nurse-anesthetist, pulled off her bonnet in a triumphal gesture, shook out shoulder-length hair, and pushed the gurney. Nancy, the busy nurse, with her hair coiled in a net, hauled the other end. They steered the bed into a small room and detoured around a tall cart on casters that looked like a Craftsman tool chest with red drawers, and parked him next to the wall.

  “What’s the crash cart doing here?” Amy asked.

  “Mike wanted it prepositioned.”

  Amy rolled her eyes and nodded at a trayful of tiny drug bottles and syringes positioned on the bed between Sommer’s feet. “I hear you, he wants all my stuff ready, too.” Then they switched Sommer from a mobile monitor to the bigger monitor bolted to the wall. The wired beep beep beep of his pulse, blood pressure, and oxygenation graphed steadily across the video screen.

  Allen shuffled down the hall flanked by Brecht and Judy, the nurse who’d helped unload the Tahoe. They all wore blue tunics, trousers, blue booties over their shoes, and blue bonnets. Like rakish ascots, blue masks hung loose at their throats.

  To Broker they seemed to move with the quiet swagger as would a blue-uniformed bomber crew who had just pulled off a dicey mission. And there was no doubt who the pilot was. Allen’s throat and a wedge of chest showed through the V-neck of his scrub blouse, and a spatter of Sommer’s blood dotted the hem. His strong hands swung at his sides as he took his victory lap along the surgeon track, that fine line between the kill floor and The Resurrection.

  Broker added his grin to the wave of admiration.

  Allen pulled off his bonnet and ran a hand through his matted hair. The corners of his lips dimpled up and, in a grateful gesture, he held up his right palm to shoulder level and high-fived Broker.

  “So he’s all right?” Broker asked.

  Allen nodded and showed even teeth in a tired grin. “Hey. He lucked out. He had a good surgeon.” More seriously, he said, “We caught it in time. He should be fine. Fine,” he repeated, and scuffed his feet and tripped off balance, and Broker noticed that as he moved farther away from the OR, he seemed to diminish in stature. To physically shrink.

  Broker reached out to steady him and Allen blinked, then squinted as his eyelids trembled. “I’m all in,” he said. “Pooped.”

  “I hear you,” Broker said, craning his neck to see into the small recovery room.

  “Let the anesthetist make sure Sommer’s all the way awake and stabilized. A few minutes,” Allen said.

  A congratulatory huddle formed in the corridor—Iker, Shari, Broker, Brecht, and Mike, the very comforted-looking administrator. After a moment, Broker stepped away and poked his head into the recovery room and listened to the medical chat.

  “He’s breathing well, sats good, rhythm stable,” Nancy said.

  “Okay,” Amy said as she scanned the monitors. “Let’s rouse him, get him to raise his head, squeeze a finger, swallow.” Amy leaned over Sommer. “And wait for the eyelids, the littlest muscles are always the last to come back. Who’s got the Narc keys?”

  “Got them right here. I’ve got everything today.”

  “Get twenty-five milligrams of Demerol and give it IV.”

  Nancy went to a closet next to the oxygen outlet, opened the locked door, and went in. Amy moved the tray from the foot of Sommer’s bed, looked around, and then placed it on a corner of the crash cart. Nancy returned with a slender syringe.

  “Wait a sec. Let me get him talking,” Amy said, propping her elbow next to Sommer’s head. She leaned down and dangled her index finger in the loose fingers of his right hand. “Can you blink? Can you squeeze my finger?” she asked.

  Sommer’s eyes swam around, fluttered. He pressed her finger and tried to move.

  “Take it easy,” Amy said, patting his arm. “You’ve got a few stitches in your abdomen.”

  Sommer pursed dry lips. “ ’peration.”

  “That’s right. You’ve had an emergency operation that went just fine and now you’re in the recovery room.”

  He blinked, focused, blinked again. “High,” he said slowly.

  “Hello, yourself.”

  “No. Stone . . .” He took a breath, wheezed. “Grog . . .”

  “Yep. We gave you something. We’re about to give you some more of the good stuff.”

  “Hi,” Sommer said.

  “Right, you’re stoned, huh,” she said.

  Sommer raised his head and attempted to look around. “No,” he said more distinctly. “Hello.” He studied her. “You’re pretty,” he said in a halting voice. Then he squinted at the badge on the front of her blue tunic that read: amy skoda, crna. “You’re pretty, Amy,” he said, a little surer.

  Amy executed a modified curtsey and said, “Thank you, and you’re lucky to be alive.”

  Sommer blinked, the electric beep speeded up, and his voice sank. “Where?” he struggled to raise his up on elbows. Fell back.

  “It’s all right,” Amy reassured him. “You’re in a hospital.”

  His eyes turned to dark tunnels, remembering. “Storm.”

  Amy nodded. “Mister, you’ve had quite an adventure.”

  “Others?” he whispered, almost inaudible.

  That’s when Amy saw Broker edging through the door.
She backed away from the bed, signaling to Nancy, hooking two fingers, squeezing her thumb in a squirting gesture. Nancy injected the Demerol into Sommer’s IV, then discarded the used syringe in the Sharpes Box.

  “Sorry, Mr. Broker, if observers are a hindrance, they will be removed,” Amy announced as she put her palms on Broker’s chest and backed him out into the hall. Then her stern expression relaxed into a smile. “Let him rest a few more minutes.” Her hands lingered a beat longer than necessary and then she poked the logo on Broker’s garish yellow sweatshirt with a straight finger. “Oh my,” she said. A crawly drawing of a plump wood tick with a grinning cartoon-bug face bannered the shirt, with the caption:

  Natural Wood Ticklers.

  Sexual Aids & Muskie Lures.

  Camp’s Bait Shop

  Hayward, Wisconsin.

  “If I didn’t have a sense of humor, that might offend me,” she said, maintaining direct eye contact.

  Broker, never good at small talk—and wondering how she knew his name—asked, “Do I know you?”

  Her face went from warmly inviting to snappy attention as her eyes shifted past Broker. “Dr. Falken.”

  Allen, gray with fatigue, shambled up and gestured with an upturned palm. “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s out of the woods,” Amy said with a straight face. “Vitals are normal. He roused, raised his head, squeezed my finger, swallowed, and told me I was pretty.”

  “Are you treating for pain?”

  “Nancy gave him twenty-five milligrams of Demerol. I’m going to get him something cool for his throat.”

  Amy breezed past and Broker watched her model the possibilities of baggy blue trousers as she walked down the hall. “She’s pleased with herself,” he said.

  “Yes, nice, ah, glutes. Nordic skiing, diagonal stride, would be my guess,” Allen yawned. He blinked and continued in a more serious voice, “She was extra careful extubating him and bringing him out of anesthesia. He has a tricky throat to work in. She’s as good as or better than anyone I’ve worked with in Level One, so she’s earned some strutting rights.” As an afterthought, he said, “She’s wasted on this place.”