Whatwouldit take to change his life?
BY THEtime the patient got to Recovery, he was short a spleen, had a Foley catheter for the next few weeks, and more surgeries in the pipeline. In some specialties that would be a cause for concern, but trauma had a lower bar for what counted as a successful surgery.
Still alive? Good job.
That wasn’t the news that Plenty’s finest wanted to hear. Deputy Tancredi scribbled down Tag’s brisk answer and tucked her notebook into her belt.
“Do you have any idea when I can speak to him?” she asked as she kept pace with Tag through the ER waiting room.
“Sorry,” Tag said as he stopped to check on a well-dressed woman who’d spilled coffee on her pencil skirt. “None. He had major surgery and significant trauma, Deputy. Until he comes around from the anesthetic, I can’t tell you anything about when or if he can talk to you. Ma’am, can you follow my finger?”
The woman laughed uncomfortably and wiped at her stained skirt with a handful of napkins. “It’s just the hiccups,” she protested, interrupted midsentence by a startled squawk of noise. Her cheeks flushed. “I’ve had them since last night, and—”
Tag held up a finger in front of her face and moved it from side to side. Her eyes jerked as she tried to track it.
“Any dizziness?” Tag asked. “Headache?”
She shook her head to the first question and laughed around another hiccup at the second. “I have three kids, a deadbeat ex, and a full-time job,” she said. “Ialwayshave a headache.”
Tag took the coffee off her, what was left of it, with a quick apology. He set it aside, took both her hands in his, and lifted them up in front of her.
“Hold them still?” he asked.
“Honest, I just need something for my hiccups,” she said as her left arm sank unsteadily down. “I don’t want to be a problem.”
Tag nodded. “How about we get someone to check that out?” he asked as he stood up. A shrill whistle caught one of the interns’ attention, and he got the woman, still full of protests about the hiccups she now wanted to believe in, into a wheelchair and on her way to a neurological exam.
“Must be odd,” Tancredi said as he turned back to her. “Always on the lookout for these subtle diagnostic telltales about your barista’s brain tumor or the postal worker’s staph infection.”
The wordsubtlemade Tag snort. “Trauma medicine isn’t that delicate,” he said. “The diagnostic test for a compound fracture is ‘Does their bone stick out of their leg?’ In her case, the first diagnostic tell was that she was in an ER. So I knew there was something wrong with her. Most people out in the world, I work on the assumption they’re doing okay.”
Tancredi chuckled and scratched her eyebrow. “Way to burst myHousebubble, Dr. Hayes.” She pulled a card out of her pocket and held it out, her name and number neat on the white surface under the San Diego Sheriff’s Department crest. “If anything changes with Mr. Morrow? Call me.”
He took the card and tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll pass it on to the nurse’s station,” he said as he checked his wrist. “By the time he comes around, I’ll have handed him over to the next shift.”
Tancredi shrugged her understanding and stuck out her hand to grip his. “Thank you anyhow, Dr. Hayes, I appreciate the help. Anything on this patient, okay, just keep me updated.”
One quick businesslike shake, and then she was done. Tag frowned after the deputy as she left through the sliding doors of the ER and wondered why she was so insistent. It was a cut-and-dried DUI. The yummy mummy had admitted as much even as she tried to bargain down her mimosa indulgence… unless she changed her story once her lawyer got to her, or a rich spouse made a few calls and put some weight on someone to make the accident look a bit more mutual fault. It happened. Tag made a mental note to remind the nursing staff of the borders of their responsibility between the patient and the police.
His stomach picked that moment to gurgle sourly behind his ribs. Lunch had been a bite of reheated noodles two hours ago, before a Code Blue interrupted him. Breakfast was yesterday. His bloodstream was, at any given moment, 70 percent coffee, but his stomach still needed something to soak that up.
“Later,” Tag promised it as he headed across the ER toward the food truck that would hopefully still be outside. The cyclist wouldn’t wake up for a couple of hours. Tancredi’s request wouldn’t be pressing until then.
It took him twenty minutes to get to the door, his scrubs a beacon for everyone in the ER too desperate to wait for their turn. A meth addict with a pit of an ulcer under his tongue huffed sour breath into Tag’s face, a frantic young mother’s baby had “meningitis” that turned out to be a heat rash, and a student nurse was in a panic about a nicked vein in a homeless man’s arm, and his blood was in the nurse’s hair.
The food trucks changed out weekly, ordered by some agreement the vendors had made between themselves. Today it was pizza, sold by the slice and served up by a genial old man who had silver dreads and a heavy hand with the toppings.
Tag ordered a slice, grabbed a can of seltzer to go with it, and paid. He slouched against the side of the truck while his order was prepared and finally let himself pull his phone out of his pocket. Three messages from Bass—What gets your cock so hard it hurts?at noon and then two question marks spaced an hour apart.
Heat flushed up the back of Tag’s neck, as though anyone who looked at him could tell what he’d just read. He shifted to the side, out of the food truck server’s view, and tapped out a quick answer.
Or tried to. His brain spluttered out a dozen toothless stereotypes—bad boys, motorcycles, big cocks—and he deleted them all after a second look at how trite they read. Give him medical jargon any day.
A finger poked him in the side. “Don’t text the ex,” Ned warned. “Trust me. My ex-wife kept them all and had the ones where I begged framed at the divorce party.”
Tag fumbled an attempt to close the app and nearly dropped the phone. He caught it and shoved it into his pocket, dry-mouthed and flustered at being caught. He supposed he hadn’t actually done anything inappropriate… unless someone scrolled back.
“You’re aware your ex was a very cruel woman,” Tag pointed out dryly.
