Buzz was out front running and sliding in the wet grass after the girl like Bambi on ice. The girl, however, seemed to have better traction with her bare feet, which I guessed were very used to going without shoes. Calluses probably helped.
“Leave me the hell alone!” she shouted.
Several neighbors came to the fence and one yelled, “Rebecca is not supposed to even be here. Her old man took her to the mental hospital yesterday. Guess she got out.”
Dano and I looked at each other.
“You go left,” he ordered.
I followed his suggestion, but when I got close enough to grab her, I ended up in a heap on top of Buzz, not even sure what went wrong other than “Rebecca” was slick. And not just because she was wet.
I could see Dano get close enough to her to grab her, but he hesitated. No loose clothing to grab onto. The underwear clung like a second skin and obviously Dano didn’t want to grab just anything.
“Can’t you get one little lady?” the burly cop rounding the corner of the house called out to Dano.
I heard a new curse word this time from Dano and thought the cop was taking his own life into his hands, and I wouldn’t want to be in his black boots once Dano had Rebecca secure on the stretcher.
The other cop came up behind the first one and they started laughing. Dano and Buzz kept trying to grab the girl to no avail-she was like the proverbial greased pig.
“Come on, Nightingale. Get your ass over here!” Dano shouted.
I got up, couldn’t help but wipe some recently cut grass from my raincoat, and ran toward where he pointed, trying to ignore the squish of my shoes and the mud that dotted my outfit. We’d tackled each other numerous times, as if in the fourth quarter of a football game, until we finally came at Rebecca from three directions and all landed in a heap on top of her in the middle of the backyard.
She looked at me and said, “Hey, my name is Rebecca. What’s yours?”
I bit my tongue while Dano took off his raincoat to cover the girl.
Wow. How sweet.
And my heart did a little end-zone touchdown happy dance.
Rebecca had chosen me instead of the males in the group to talk to, just as Pansy had.
We got Rebecca safely to the hospital. Dano followed the ER doctor’s orders en route to medicate her since she’d freaked out. Dano and I took her in while Buzz stayed to clean up the ambulance. While we stood talking to the doctor, he came in and turned in the remaining half vial of medication that had been used on Rebecca, then went back out to the ambulance.
I watched the nurse throw what was left out and give Dano the replacement medication to put in his box. I could hear poor Rebecca screaming in Exam Room 3, and I wanted to go hug her. I did step in and tried to talk to her, but she tried to bite me. With that I looked at the staff, wished them well and was out the door to find the guys.
“Got a chest pain,” Buzz yelled in the doorway.
Dano and I flew out the doorway and off on another run. This job was truly exhausting, and I could see how someone in it year after year could burn out. I’d been there, done that in medicine myself.
One could only take watching the suffering of human beings for so long.
Still, as evidenced by Dano covering up Rebecca, the guy had kept his smarts about him and his heart.
If he stayed at TLC much longer…who knew what he’d end up like?
Thank goodness Jagger had drifted toward helping Lieutenant Shatley with Payne’s homicide and the attempt on Pansy’s life, since I kept getting so tied up on real life-and-death situations. Leaving me to deal with the insurance fraud made sense.
Buzz seemed delighted to be driving, and when we got to the address of the eighty-four-year-old woman with chest pain, he went to call in on the radio. Dano and I jumped out and raced to the front door where an elderly man stood-nearly in tears.
We worked on Helen, the lovely woman who didn’t seem to be in any real distress. I gathered her chest pain was muscular, not cardiac, and the monitor said the same. But we started an IV, gave her oxygen and got her into the ambulance with the cardiac monitor attached.
Helen was a peach. She giggled like she was back in the thirties. After she said the pain was gone, she talked nonstop in the sweetest little-old-lady voice.
And she had a penchant for Dano.
I winked at him a few times while he carried on a conversation with the darling woman.
Thump!
Dano and I looked toward the back, where the sound had come from.
“What the hell?” he said, staring.
A sparrow glared back at him.
Dano and I looked at each other, then at the bird whose wing must have gotten caught in the crack of the doors. Dano banged on the window and told Buzz to stop for a second. Thank goodness Helen didn’t look to be in any distress.
“What’s wrong, Boss?” Buzz asked.
“Stop this thing. There’s a bird caught in the door.”
Dano and I must have thought of the absurdity of the scene at the same time, because we both suddenly broke out into laughter. The bird, too, didn’t seem to be in any distress. I think it grinned.
As usual, Buzz kept up his questioning.
“How do you know?” Buzz asked, still not pulling over. He always had to find out details. Well, I guessed, being a detail man was good for this profession, but I also wondered again if Buzz would survive it.
I thought Dano would explode. “’Cause it’s looking right at me!” he shouted, and then he and I started to laugh uncontrollably again.
Suddenly Helen waved a knobby finger at the two of us. “You two should be ashamed!” She went into a tirade about how we shouldn’t find it humorous that one of God’s creatures was stuck in the door.
Even when I tried to assure her that the bird didn’t look injured, she spat words at me that I don’t think ER Dano even knew. After a few minutes I was ready to medicate Helen with whatever Dano had given Rebecca, just to shut Helen up.
Buzz pulled over.
Dano opened the door.
The sparrow happily flew away.
And we hit the siren and lights to get Helen to the hospital ASAP-or I think Dano would have slugged her.
The sweet little old lady had turned into a tyrant right before our eyes. We dropped her off, restocked, didn’t go say goodbye to her for fear we’d upset her more and headed back to TLC-where I fixed myself a much-needed cup of stale tea.
And when I sat down to sip it, I realized that life was strange, people even stranger, and looking over the room of paramedics and EMTs, I wondered if there was a murderer among us.
Dano, Buzz and I had the worst day on record. After two more calls-one for a child who had a toy hatchet stuck up his nose and couldn’t breathe well, and the other for a construction worker who fell off some scaffolding and broke his back-we drove down through the worst section of Hope Valley with Buzz at the wheel.
He’d bothered Dano so much about being allowed to drive that Dano gave in, I’m sure just to shut up the eager “Sparkie.”
I leaned against the back wall of the ambulance and shut my eyes, trying to think out the case. This one had turned out to be a doozy. Way too many types of fraud to pinpoint anyone right off the bat. And I knew, just knew, that the murder and the attempt on Pansy’s life were related. I also knew money had to be the root of it all. Why else commit the fraud?
I tried to think of what I knew about the employees at TLC and if anyone had new “toys,” like a car, etcetera, that would warrant looking into. Just then, the ambulance lurched and hit something, and my head was jolted forward and back, smacking the wall as we stopped suddenly. “Ouch!”