A Left Turn to Hell #2
Bailey suspected the only reason Sarree hadn’t retired was because she worried about Bailey, and it occurred to him that she might be rooting for Bailey to find a mate here because then she’d know he’d be okay.
“I….” Oh, how embarrassing. “I got all huffy with him today,” Bailey told her. “Because, well, he’s great at getting me to talk, but he’s terrible at talking himself, and I accused him of being secretive, but….”
“You haven’t told him?” Sarree demanded.
Bailey winced. “I-I didn’t realize what a mess I still was,” he said at last.
“Baby,” she said softly, “you should tell him. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t, but it will probably hurt his feelings.”
Trust Sarree to put it into perspective. Not unforgivable, but definitely addressable.
“Thanks, Sarree,” he said. “I…. Thank you.”
“My husband has a little cottage on the Gulf of Mexico ,” she said dreamily.
“All the kids will be out next year and in college. He’s making plans to add a craft room with natural sunlight and to buy me one of those expensive quilting machines for a retirement present.
” She gave his cheek a light pat. “I might start looking up sales.”
And with that she pivoted on her heel, and together they headed toward their patients. Bailey was left under no illusions that Sarree’s dreams rested on his narrow shoulders, and he owed it to her to meet any obstacle head-on.
Even the damage to his own heart.
THEIR MORNING passed relatively quickly.
They did rounds, Bailey prescribed treatments, recommended discharges or admissions depending on the case, and triaged anything serious, such as broken bones or cuts that would need stitches, or in the case of a young construction worker who had fallen off his ladder, both, plus surgery.
He and Sarree made an effective team—he made the stat decisions, she directed the troops—and together they worked their way through the morning. At around two, when he normally would have taken his break, he realized he was being run off his ass .
“Oh my God ,” he muttered to Sarree. “Where the fuck is Vlade?”
Vlade Karkov was a new attending, recently transferred from somewhere up north.
Neither Sarree nor Bailey knew him well—but then, he’d done his job crisply, efficiently, and without any particular emotion too.
While it was true that the Outskirt’s ER was sort of a family, they tried to be a welcoming one, especially because they wanted to keep people there and not lose them to states that weren’t trying to kill pregnant women on general principles.
They had tried to be friendly—they really had.
But Vlade had rebuffed their attempts and generally kept to himself, a thin-faced, severe-looking man in his early thirties with dark hair and a sour mouth, Bailey wasn’t sure if Vlade didn’t like gay people in general or Bailey in particular, but he always seemed to save an especially vile sneer for Bailey.
“Probably at the proctologist’s,” Sarree said grimly. “Lord knows, he needs that stick removed stat.”
Bailey grunted and rolled his eyes. “Agreed, but I could have sworn I saw him clock in.”
The computer where people logged in to their shifts was back by the crib, next to the vending machines with the good chocolate and the energy drinks on tap.
“I need to sign some charts,” Sarree said. “Get me a Monster and see if Vlade’s logged in yet.”
“Peach?” Bailey asked.
“Course,” she told him, nodding.
“I’ll be back.”
Bailey himself preferred coffee, but there was an espresso machine back there too, which put out extra-large portions on command. Bailey checked the big pocket of his lab coat to make sure his plastic travel mug was there and headed for the crib.
First he checked the computer. Vlade had logged in, nearly half an hour ago, which didn’t make any sense because why wasn’t he on the floor , splitting Bailey’s cases with him?
Next he went to the vending machines, picked up Sarree’s Monster drink and four giant chocolate bars (to share with Sarree and the other nurses), and set his cup under the espresso machine after he’d programmed in his favorite afternoon buzz with lots of sugar and cream.
While he waited for the machine to gurgle its way into coffee heaven, he peered into the crib from the window, uncomfortably aware that if he caught another couple doing what he and Dean had been doing three months ago, he’d be torn between being a total hypocrite and reporting them, and a total slacker and not.
He really, really hoped everybody in the crib was fully dressed, but still he checked, because seriously, where the hell was Vlade?
Bailey didn’t see anything at first (hooray!
Nobody had sex in the crib but Bailey!), but as he shifted his gaze from the darkness of the bunk bed to the oblique angle of the single cot, he could make out…
something . The pale flash of light as he moved picked up the features of a face held very still.
It looked like Vlade’s face, but… but the eyes were open. Not moving.
So very still.
With a frown, Bailey opened the door, and the light streaming in from the hallway illuminated a scene Bailey had never assessed, not even in the ER.
His doctor’s eyes made the diagnosis immediately, dispassionately.
Adult male, deceased, cause of death most likely exsanguination. Manner of death, stabbing. Vicious stabbing, lacerating the flesh of the chest and stomach but probably starting with a long, deadly gash of the throat.
His human eyes were not nearly as dispassionate. Holy fuck, the last time I saw something this bad was on a crime drama .
And the horror of the crime— not of the blood, not of the severity of the attack—was what moved Bailey, of his own volition, toward the bed.
He managed to avoid the pool of blood, a heretofore unnoticed job skill, and after gloving up on reflex, using the box of gloves on the table in the crib, he held two fingers to Vlade’s cooling neck and reinforced what he’d already guessed.
Vlade may have clocked in, but he’d never be working a shift again.
Bailey straightened, his foot disturbing something on the floor next to the pool of blood. As he bent to retrieve the small shiny thing, he heard a ruckus outside the crib door and froze.
“Look, it’s not my fault I left my lucky coin at the scene” came a thickly accented voice. “It was weird doing it in a hospital. Almost like a murder in a church, right?”
His heart, already doing the merengue in his ears, jumped to triple-time timpani in his throat, and he glanced around frantically for a place to hide. Holy fuck. Holy fuck , he was standing in a murder scene , and the murderer was back for his lucky coin !
Without thinking, Bailey clutched the coin in his hand, approached the cot from the end instead of the side where the blood was, and wriggled underneath it, against the wall, hoping this wasn’t where they found his body when Sarree came searching for her Monster.
The door opened, the usual corridor of light blocked by the broadest set of shoulders Bailey had ever seen, or so he guessed from the silhouette thrown by the man’s shadow.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck….”
The man swore gutturally, and Bailey tried to stop breathing.
“Do you see it, Shev?” This voice was sharp and somehow… smaller. Maybe simply higher in register? But it also seemed to fit a man small in station. Without meaning to, Bailey thought about Wallace Shawn, and the way his voice cracked when he yelled at Bob Parr in The Incredibles .
“Nyet. Is not here. Damn.”
There was an irritated grunt, and the footsteps receded, followed by the slow thunk as the pneumatic door shut.
Bailey stared at his Fitbit and tried to control his breathing for another two minutes.
Two seconds in, just as the killers probably rounded the short little hallway into the main corridor, the espresso machine let out the hiss and scream of scalded coffee and steamed milk. Even through the walls, Bailey heard their voices.
“What was that?”
He pulled out his phone and texted Dean.
Killers in the hospital.
Dead doctor in the crib.
Coming back, may see me.
L—
The door burst open, saving him from making a really embarrassing mistake, and at that moment he heard Sarree’s voice echoing down the corridor.
“Doctor Dodge!” she called. “Bailey! There is a four-car pileup coming in, and apparently we don’t get breaks!”
The door clicked shut, the footsteps receded, and moments later Sarree burst into the crib just as Bailey scrambled out from under the bed.
“Bailey!” she cried, for a moment only focused on her one goal. “What in the name of heaven are you doing in here while— Jesus Christ Almighty !”
Bailey gaped at her. “Sarree!”
“It’s not using his name in vain when you are calling on him in need,” she retorted, staring at Vlade in slack-faced horror. “What happened?”
“There were two men in here,” Bailey said, trying to hear his own voice over the roaring in his ears. “Did you see them when you came down the corridor?”
She forced her square, lined face to turn toward him and away from the dead man in the crib.
“No,” she rasped. “I mean… I saw the back of them. A really large man in a boxy suit and a smaller man wearing a little straw fedora, slacks, and a dress shirt. They had slick, shiny shoes, like the oil men.”
Bailey nodded, knowing she was talking about the guys who got rich quick by striking oil on their property. They were often the same guys who wrecked pricey cars on the local highways after drinking more than their limit.
“Okay,” he said. “Good. I… I texted Dean. Let’s get forensics up here, have them wait for Dean, and you and I go do our jobs.”
She nodded once, curtly, and then stared. “Bailey,” she said faintly, “please tell me you’ve got spare scrubs in your locker, or a spare lab coat.”
Bailey looked down at himself and grimaced.
While he’d managed to keep his hands from the bulk of the blood dripping off the cot, his elbow, hip, and thigh were absolutely saturated.
“Fuck me,” he muttered. “I’ll hit the showers, you throw me some scrubs.
Give me five minutes to bag and tag this shit, and I’ll be out there before the ambulances pull in. ”
In any other hospital it would make sense that the crib and the showers and the locker room would all be right next to each other, but the crib had been designed for something else—there was speculation that it had been meant as a conference room—and other speculation that the architects had gone “Wait, what do we put in this odd intersection when all the other rooms have a different purpose altogether?”
Whatever the reasoning, Bailey had to stride down the corridor covered in blood before he took another right to the locker rooms and the showers.
Like Sarree, he was moving with purpose, his mind on his goal, and later he would marvel that he was so single-minded at being the doctor that met the four-car pileup when his team was shorthanded, that he didn’t see the two men striding down the corridor toward him until he took that right.
One of them must have gasped, and he glanced up in a preoccupied way and caught the eyes of the absolutely enormous man, pure brutal muscle and a face like slabs of meat assembled and roughly carved, as they passed each other.
As Bailey turned toward the shower, the man’s eyes began to change.
From surprise to calculation to realization, and as Bailey kept his no-bullshit stride, he wondered when the killers would put together that Bailey had been there, had accidentally wallowed around in the puddle of blood, and could identify them both by their voices.
And now by their faces.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.