Stockholm Syndrome

Chapter 2

I screamed. It happened so fast. I’d never even seen anyone use a gun, except my dad fooling around with a BB gun in our back yard, and now Stan dropped to his knees before he caught himself on his hands, gurgling.

Behind him, the blonde woman and her husband ducked into triage and slammed the door behind them.

“Call 911!” I yelled in the general direction of the nursing station. The triage nurse had probably seen or heard enough that to call for help, but it never hurt to sound the alarm.

My eyes fixed on the bloody hole in his back. I fell on my knees beside Stan. Did he have a pneumothorax? The hole in his chest could kill him within minutes.

My first instinct was to turn on him on his back, because that’s how patients always roll into the emerg, face up. Also, the exit wound in front of his chest would gape more than the relatively neat hole in back.

 I stopped myself and grabbed my stethoscope. Even with Stan face-down, I could listen to his breath sounds.

“Don’t touch him,” said the burqa woman.

She trained her gun on my face.

My hands stilled, barely grazing the navy rubber tube of my stethoscope before I lifted both palms in the air. “Look. I’m a doctor. He’s a doctor.”

“I need Casey Assim,” the woman said. Her voice had descended into growl territory.

It took me a second to process that. Casey. That was the name the ward clerk had buzzed us about in Manouchka’s room. So Casey Assim must be a patient, a new one who hadn’t made it on the board yet. The one Stan had been on his way to deliver?

Stan tried to cough. He choked instead. The breath rattled in his lungs before he started crawling on his hands and knees toward the open doorway. Toward the case room. The closed triage door. The nursing station. Civilization.

I heard a nurse scream from further down the hallway. She tried to stifle it, which made it sound even worse.

Even from my view at least thirty feet away, I could tell that they’d sealed all four case room doors, but the nursing station was an open desk area. The counter might protect you a little, but not the open table.

Maybe the staff would run toward the OR and back out the other side of the U, toward the ward. But could the patients run that fast?

The overhead paging system blared, “Code Black, Fourth Floor. Code Noir, quatrième étage.”

Then someone pulled the fire alarm. The shrill ring flared in my ears.

“Is Casey the person you’re looking for?” I asked, raising my voice above the alarm. My arms quivered in the air. “I—”

The burqa woman looked down at Stan crawling and shot him in the back of the head.

The sound of the bullet echoed through the hallway.

His body flopped on the floor.

Blood coursed from his head.

I couldn’t make a sound.

I’d met murderers before. But they’d never killed anyone in front of me.

This was like an execution. And what had Stan done? He just hadn’t broken patient confidentiality. He’d done the “right thing.” Now he was probably dead.

I didn’t want to die.

I really didn’t want to die.

I gazed down the case room hall, now empty of obvious human habitat, although I knew the triage room must be packed like Sonic dance club on the night of a full moon, and at least three out of four women labouring in the case room hadn’t made a break for freedom.

It was just me and the burqa murderer now.

The fire alarm shrieked overhead, a real high-pitched scream that made my jaw ache and my arms tremble.

This can’t be happening.

Oh, yes, it could. I’d survived enough tight situations to know that real life could surpass any nightmare.

They call me the detective doctor. But it’s one thing to try and figure out any wrongdoing after the fact. It’s quite another to have someone a) pull out a gun, and b) shoot your senior resident in front of you.

“How may I help you?” I said, trying to sound civil, like this was normal. Like I wasn’t about to get whumped. I thought of my main man, Ryan. My first runner-up, Tucker, who made my toes curl. My little brother, Kevin. My parents. My grandmothers.

I love you. I’m sorry I never told you enough.

The burqa woman detoured to grab me from behind, her body a solid presence behind mine while she drilled the muzzle of the gun against my right temple. The muzzle was still warm from shooting Stan.

She’s right-handed, I noticed with the back part of my brain. Maybe it would make a difference, maybe it wouldn’t. But my shocked brain insisted on memorizing facts like this and noticing that she smelled like warm beer and tangy sweat.

“Get me Casey Assim,” she said. “Now.”