Читать книгу The Secret Price of History - Gayle Ridinger - Страница 10

The internist on ER duty at Valley Hospital was drinking a coffee by the vending machine. The night shift was never easy. There were always young people who'd been butchered or mangled in car crashes. Then there were the overdose cases. And a heart attack victim or two.

He'd taken up the cruel habit of making bets with the nurses; they called it 'The Who's Next?' game. Like on TV, there was an accumulating jackpot.

Tonight he was on a winning streak. He'd guessed five cases out of five.

When they paged him, he'd just wagered on a new heart attack case: "Male, sixty years old, been with a prostitute."

Reading the cell-phone page from the ER admissions desk, however, brought a doubt to his mind:

"On the double. Come see."

Come see? he wondered.

No, he'd never seen anything like it before. Through a fog of consternation, he heard a male nurse say that the young woman had been dumped at the entrance from a car which had then taken off at high speed. "Apparently there was a shiny reflecting wrap over the license plate, and so none of the TV cameras recorded the number. Probably was coming from downtown," he added.

The internist leaned over the bloody human pulp at its middle, which looked a hell of a lot like the cadavers he'd poked at in medical school. The difference was that there still was, by God, heaving life in it, in her. Life, despite the slashed open abdomen, the hacked off breast nipples, the missing teeth and fingers…The poor creature. A piece of a hand moved, and then a faint wheezing came from her mouth, together with a drool of bloody bubbles.

He managed to bend over what had been a head and face in time to hear a wheezed, "Stop him." Then the breath came no more.