Chapter 2
Ride-Along
"Peds dose. Epi. Anaphylaxis." Dom didn't look over from the wheel. "And don't give me the adult dose first and then walk it back. I've watched you do that twice."
"Point-oh-one migs per kig, one-to-a-thousand, IM, lateral thigh, max of point-three.
" Jonah had it before Dom finished the sentence, because he'd been drilling it in the shower that morning like a psychopath, mouthing dosages at the tile until the hot water ran out.
"Repeat every five to fifteen if I have to.
That's — did I get it? That felt right. That was right. "
"Don't ask me if it's right. Know if it's right."
"It's right." It's right, it's right, shut up, Jonah.
They were posting on the north end of Brackton, nose-out in an empty bank parking lot at two in the afternoon, engine running for the AC, and this was the eighth scenario Dom had fired at him since lunch — which had itself been a scenario, a burrito and a pop quiz, Dom eating with one hand and asking about pediatric burn fluid resuscitation with the other like the two activities were natural companions.
Jonah had gotten six of eight clean. The two he'd fumbled, Dom had said nothing about.
That was the thing Jonah was starting to understand about Dom Cassar: the man didn't correct you when you were wrong.
He just filed it, somewhere behind those flat brown eyes, in whatever cabinet he kept back there, and let you sit in the not-knowing.
It was, Jonah thought, an incredibly effective and deeply unpleasant way to teach. He loved it. He hated that he loved it.
Twelve hours in a box with a guy who gave you nothing, and you found yourself — no.
You worked. You worked to earn a single grunt of not-displeasure like it was a merit badge you could pin to your chest. Jonah had known men like this.
Coaches, mostly. The one who never said good job, so the day he finally muttered not terrible you'd have run through a cinderblock wall for him and thanked him for the concussion.
Jonah had run through a lot of walls in his life for men who wouldn't say good job.
That's a thing to unpack with somebody who isn't him, Jonah thought, and filed it in his own cabinet, which was considerably messier than Dom's and had a door that had never once shut all the way.
The rig ticked. The AC hummed. Out past the windshield a plastic bag did a slow tumbling cartwheel across the far end of the empty lot, heat coming up off the asphalt in a shimmer that made the whole world look like it was underwater. Jonah counted the seconds of quiet. He got to about forty.
"You're doing it again," Dom said.
"Doing what."
"The thing where you go quiet and your face does math."
"My face doesn't do math."
"Your face is doing long division right now.
" Dom reached over and turned the AC down a notch without asking, which after six hours Jonah had learned was just a thing the man did — adjusted the environment to his own settings like the rig was an outer layer of his own body, and Jonah was a guest in it.
"You want to ride the box, learn to let the quiet be quiet.
You spend your downtime running your own tape, you'll be cooked before a real call ever drops. Conserve."
"You told me that yesterday."
"I'm going to keep telling you until it takes."
Jonah tried. He genuinely tried to let the quiet be quiet. He made it another forty seconds, maybe fifty, watching the bag cartwheel, and then the question that had been sitting in him all day came up the way things came up in Jonah, sideways and without a permit.
"Can I ask you one thing that isn't a dosage."
Dom exhaled through his nose, which in the language of Dom Cassar was practically a written invitation.
"How do you know when to stop." Jonah kept his eyes on the parking lot, because it was easier to ask the real ones when you weren't looking at the person. "Working somebody. How do you know when you call it. When it's — when it's the protocol and not just you deciding you're tired of losing."
The bag hit the curb at the far end and stuck there, flapping.
"You follow the algorithm," Dom said. "Down time. Rhythm. Response to interventions. There's a number. You work the number."
"Yeah, but the number's not always—"
"The number is exactly what it is." Dom's voice didn't rise, but something in the cab shifted, dropped half a degree, and Jonah felt the door he'd been leaning against click quietly shut in his face.
"You want it to be a feeling. It is not a feeling.
The second you turn it into a feeling, you'll spend the rest of your career second-guessing bodies that were gone before you got the truck in park.
Work the number. The number keeps you sane. "
Does it, Jonah didn't say. Because from eighteen inches away, Dom Cassar did not, if Jonah was being honest, have the look of a man the number had kept sane. He had the look of a man who'd built a very tidy house on top of something that was still, quietly, on fire.
The tones dropped before Jonah could put his foot any further into it, and honestly — thank God.
***
The address was a third-floor walk-up in a building that smelled like every third-floor walk-up Jonah had ever climbed: old carpet, somebody's onions, a radiator painted so many times over the decades that the valve didn't turn anymore.
Dispatch had it as a fall, elderly male, and by the time they'd hauled the stair chair and the monitor and both bags up two flights — Dom taking the stairs at the same unhurried pace he did everything, which drove Jonah insane, the man would not hurry, the man had apparently retired from hurrying — Jonah could hear the scene before he could see it.
A woman's voice, thin and cranked all the way to the top of its range.
And under it, a man's, confused and going mean.
"Sir, you have to let them— Dad. Dad. Stop— he won't let me— oh, thank God, up here, please—"
The apartment was small and overfull, forty years of a life stacked into four rooms, and the man was down on the floor between the coffee table and the couch, eighty if he was a day, tangled in a bathrobe, one leg folded wrong beneath him, and swinging.
Not hard. But swinging — batting at his daughter's hands, at the air, at nothing, the specific loose furious flailing of a person who'd gone somewhere the rest of the room couldn't follow him to.
Jonah's brain did the thing it did on scenes, the good thing, the one reliably good thing about him: it slowed the whole world down and started sorting.
Diaphoretic. He's soaked through the robe.
Skin's gray — not the OD gray from last night, the other gray, the wet one.
The fall's the symptom, not the problem.
Look at the daughter — she's got a glucometer in her fist, she already knows, she just can't get near him—
"He's diabetic," the daughter said, breathless, catching Jonah catching it. "He didn't eat lunch, he does this, he gets like this and he won't let me test him, he won't—"
"Okay. Okay, we've got him now." Jonah was already going down onto the floor — low, under the man's eyeline instead of over it, palms open and empty and out where he could see them.
"Hey. Hi. My name's Jonah. I'm a paramedic.
I'm gonna come sit right down here with you, okay?
" Not reaching. You did not reach for a scared animal, and right now this gentle terrified old man was a scared animal, nothing more and nothing less.
"Nobody in here is gonna grab you, I promise.
I bet you feel like absolute garbage right now, though, huh?
I bet you feel shaky and awful and everybody's yelling and you don't know why. "
The man's swinging slowed. His eyes fixed on Jonah's face, unfocused, searching for something to hold onto.
"Yeah," Jonah said, soft, like the two of them were quietly agreeing on something the others weren't in on. "Yeah. I know. Can I see your finger? Just the one finger. That's the whole deal, I swear."
Behind him, Jonah could feel Dom. A presence at his back, filling the doorway, not helping and not stopping him.
Watching. Filing. And some idiot reflex in Jonah, even here, even now with a man's blood sugar in the basement, wanted to turn around and check whether he was doing it right — and he stamped that reflex flat, hard, because the man on the floor needed all of him and none of him was for sale to Dom Cassar in this particular thirty seconds.
The finger stick read LOW. Just the word. No number. Which meant the meter had thrown up its hands and stopped trying to count that far into the dark.
"There it is," Jonah breathed. "That's the whole story right there.
Okay." He looked up, and Dom was already holding out the D10 — hadn't been asked, had just moved, the man moved like weather when it actually counted, and Jonah filed that, filed it hard — and Jonah got the line, first stick, talking the entire time, turning the needle into something gentle with nothing but his voice.
"Little poke, that's it, you're doing so good, this stuff is gonna make you feel like a person again, I promise. Thirty seconds. Stay with me."
It took closer to ninety.
But it took. And that was the mercy of sugar — it wasn't the OD, the ugly resurrection, the swinging arm and the fury.
Sugar came back like a sunrise. The gray went out of the man's face by slow degrees, the searching stopped, his eyes found the room and stayed inside it, and then he looked at Jonah — really looked, an old man on his own living room floor in a bathrobe in front of strangers — and his whole face crumpled into mortification.
"Did I hit somebody," he said.