Chapter 30 Sloane
Sloane
It’s been fifteen days. Fifteen days, And I haven’t heard a peep out of Zeth.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Him camped out on my lawn, stalking me from my place to the hospital and back every day?
Maybe. I sure as shit didn’t expect total radio silence.
The worst part of it all is that I’m on edge, constantly on the lookout for him.
I’ve played the part of the unhappy victim in our strange relationship for a while now, but the reality of it is…
I want to know where he is. What he’s doing.
And why he hasn’t been to see me. I have officially lost my mind.
I know why he’s disappeared off the face of the planet, and I’m aware that it’s my own stupid fault.
The kiss. I realize now that there’s nothing more intimate than kissing someone when they’re inside you.
And as far as I can tell, intimate is the last thing Zeth wants this thing between us to be.
“Urgh. Meat loaf today. Why does it feel like every day is meat loaf day in this canteen?” The interns in front of me, two young women clutching their trays to their chests, whine about the food while I flick through my patient list on my intake tablet.
One pelvic fracture, one mystery rash and fever, one gunshot wound to the chest. The last guy was brought into the trauma center under lights and sirens, barely breathing, pulse thready and failing.
He’s young. Some kid whose brother owns a bunch of fresh produce markets downtown.
Or did own before his head was blown off.
Gang-related, they say. Mob bosses, they say.
I have problems believing that, though. Seattle is hardly known for its seedy criminal underbelly.
Either way, the kid’s brother was killed, and the kid himself almost died.
Right now he’s sleeping off the anesthetic upstairs in the ICU with a phalanx of cops guarding either end of the corridor.
They’re either afraid he’s going to escape, or they think someone will be along soon to finish off the job.
Either way, the police presence makes me anxious.
It always does. That uniform. I associate it with one thing and one thing only: Alexis.
When she went missing, my parents’ house was crawling with cops for days.
At first, they were serious and determined, assuring Mom and Dad that Alexis would show up, that they’d find her.
But as the days ticked by, fewer and fewer cops showed up at our house, and when they did, they told a different story each time.
We have a lot of open cases. Manpower is tight, but your girl is our priority.
We still have good leads. There’s no reason to give up hope.
These things take time, Mrs. Romera.
It’s been well over a month, Mr. and Mrs. Romera. Alexis’s file will remain open, but until we have any fresh leads, there isn’t a lot we can do right now. Keep us apprised if you should hear from your daughter.
“Dude. Tell me you did not just take the last vanilla pudding.” The voice cuts through my thoughts.
I turn around to find one of the fresh interns glaring at the pudding cup I just took from the refrigerated cabinet.
She looks up, and I gain a perverse sense of pleasure when I witness the realization dawn on her face: Ahh shit! Resident!
I know the girl. Jefferies. She’s a loudmouth. Thinks she’s a contender for a surgical placement. But then again, these walking, talking morons all think they’re in the running for a surgical placement.
“Problem, Jefferies?”
She shakes her head. “No, Dr. Romera. Definitely no problem here.” She squeezes past me, hightailing it before I can give her morgue rounds with Bochowitz for the rest of the week.
They hate that punishment. Bochowitz has been working the morgue for the last thirty-eight years.
He’s impossibly cheerful all the time. Like, all the time.
He also has an unnerving habit of talking to his patients.
They’re all dead, of course, so they don’t respond, but somewhere along the line, Bochowitz developed a habit of replying for them.
It’s creepy, yes. He’s a little creepy, but despite his peculiarities there isn’t a single thing Bochowitz doesn’t know about the human body.
As an intern, I’d keep Bochowitz company in the basement of St. Peters.
I had no interest in involving myself in the politics or factions of my peers.
But, more importantly, I was also learning.
I catch sight of Dr. Patel on the other side of the canteen, eating alone. I haven’t seen him since the night Zeth brought Lacey in. He looks up, sees me approaching, smiles…
“Hey, Sloane. What’s cracking?” He kicks out the chair on the other side of the table opposite him with his sneakered foot. “Heard you got stuck with the mafia kid with the GSW.”
There was a time when we’d have fought over a gunshot wound patient.
We’ve seen so many of them now, though. The outcomes on them are so bleak that a lot of residents will try to pass them off on whoever’s standing closest. “Yeah,” I sigh.
“Guy circled the drain for a moment, but we pulled him back.”
Suresh nods, swallowing a mouthful of food.
“That kid’s got a rap sheet longer than your arm.
My mom shops at that store. Keep telling her not to.
She used to like chatting to the woman there—what’s her name?
I can’t remember. Anyway, it was her husband, Matty, who got shot there couple of weeks ago.
The wife and the brother, the kid you have upstairs?
Both of them know who killed Matty, but neither of them will breathe a word to the cops. Apparently, they’re scared shitless.”
This all sounds to me like something that would go down in New York or Chicago.
I open up my pudding, spooning some into my mouth.
“I don’t really wanna think about any of that.
I wanna think happy thoughts,” I tell him, grinning.
“When’s your wedding again?” I received an invite months ago and mentally filed the event away under the heading “happening too far in the future to worry about.” The date must be creeping up, though, because half the hospital’s buzzing about it.
“Less than a month now,” Suresh says, winking.
“Me, a married man. It isn’t fair, is it.
I’m in my prime. The world’s women shouldn’t be denied this.
” He gestures with his fork down his body, waggling his eyebrows.
He isn’t what you could term classically handsome, but he has something about him that women really do go crazy for. I laugh off his silliness and shrug.
“You’re gonna love it. Rebecca’s so excited.”
“I know,” he says, his voice turning serious. “She told me to tell you that you’ve gotta bring a plus one. Mandatory, I’m afraid.”
I haven’t even thought about a plus one. I cower in my seat, eyes down on my pudding. Maybe I could bring Pip as my plus one. People do that, right? Bring friends as dates to weddings? I ask Suresh this and he just gives me a look.
“No. It has to be someone you’re sleeping with.”
Hah! Yeah, right. Like Zeth Mayfair is plus-one material.
“Or someone you intend on sleeping with after you get shit-faced at my wedding,” Suresh continues, winking again, just as one of my colleagues, another resident, Oliver Massey, hurries into the canteen. He looks harassed. He spots me, and my stomach sinks when he hurries in my direction.
“Need you upstairs, Sloane. The cops are demanding a play-by-play with the doctors working on the Stanton guy.”
Great. I throw my plastic spoon back into my pudding cup. Lunch break over.
“Remember, Sloane,” Suresh calls after me. “Someone you’re fucking!”
An entire canteen full of people turns to watch me scurry away, red-faced.