Unfortunately, the lounge was occupied by two nurses on their coffee break. He’d planned to stretch out on the couch but decided he’d use one of the cots in the locker room instead. As he passed the window, he glanced out and noticed a light in one of the offices across the way in the Scherington Building. Counting the windows from the end, Thomas realized that it was Ballantine’s. He looked up at the clock over the coffee maker. It was close to 2:00 A.M.! Had the janitor just forgotten to turn it off?
“Excuse me,” called Thomas to the two nurses, “I’ll be in the locker room if they call me from surgery. In case I fall asleep, would one of you mind coming in and giving me a nudge?”
As Thomas went through the swinging doors to the locker room, he wondered if the light in Ballantine’s office had anything to do with the fact that George Sherman’s car was in the parking lot. There was something disturbing about those two facts.
The windowless alcove with the two cots was not completely dark. Light from the surgical lounge drifted through the short hall to the locker room. As usual the cots were empty. Thomas had the suspicion that he was the only person ever to use them.
Reaching into the pocket of his scrub shirt, he found the small yellow pill he’d placed there. Deftly he snapped the tablet in half. One half went into his mouth where he let it dissolve on his tongue. The other half went back into his pocket in case he needed it later. Before he closed his eyes, he wondered how long he had before he would get called.
At 2:45 A.M., the stairwell seemed to belong in a gigantic mausoleum rather than a hospital. The long vertical drop acted like a chimney of sorts, and there was a low-pitched whine of wind coming from somewhere in the bowels of the building. As the figure in the stairwell opened the door on the eighteenth floor, air hissed out as from a vacuum jar.
In usual hospital dress, the man was not afraid of being seen but still preferred not to be. He checked carefully to make sure the corridor was deserted for its entire length before allowing the door to close behind him. As it swung shut there was the same rude sucking noise.
One hand thrust into the pocket of his white coat, the man moved silently down the hall to Jeoffry Washington’s room. There he stopped and waited for a moment. There was no sound of activity coming from the nurses’ station. All that could be heard were distant, muted sounds of the cardiac monitors and respiratory machines.
In a blink of the eye the man was inside the room, slowly closing the door to the hall. The only light came from the bathroom where the door was cracked an eighth of an inch. As soon as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he pulled his hand out of his pocket, gripping a full syringe. He dropped the cap from the needle into the opposite pocket and moved rapidly to the bedside. Then he froze.
The bed was empty!
His jaw straining to its limits, Jeoffry Washington yawned hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. He shook his head and tossed the three-week-old Time magazine onto the low table. He was sitting in the patient lounge across from the treatment room. Getting up, he pushed his IV pole ahead of him out of the lounge toward the semidarkened nurses’ station. He’d hoped that a stroll down the corridor would have helped his insomnia, but it hadn’t worked. He wasn’t any sleepier than he’d been tossing in his bed.
Pamela Breckenridge watched his progress through the doorless opening of the chart room. She’d become accustomed to his appearances over the past two nights. To save money she’d been brown bagging it rather than using the cafeteria, and Jeoffry would appear just as she was ready to eat.
“Is it possible for me to have another sleeping pill?” he called.
Pamela swallowed, told him it was, and directed the LPN to get Jeoffry another Dalmane. Dr. Sherman had obliged by adding a “repeat × 1” after his initial order.
As if he were standing at a bar, Jeoffry accepted the pill and the miniature paper cup of water the LPN extended toward him over the counter of the station. Jeoffry popped the pill and tossed off the water. God, what he wouldn’t have done for a few tokes of grass. Then he began the slow trip back up the corridor.
The hall darkened as he moved away from the nurses. Presently he saw his shadow appear in front of him on the vinyl floor, growing as he walked. The IV pole made it look as if he were some prophet clutching a staff. To open his door he thumped it with the wheeled footplate. Inside he hooked the door with his foot and shoved it closed. If there were any chance of dropping off to sleep, he had to shield himself from the noise and lights from the corridor.
Arranging the pole next to the bed, he turned and sat down, intending to lift his feet and stretch out. Instead he stifled a scream.
Like an apparition, a white-clad figure emerged from the bathroom.
“My God!” said Jeoffry, letting out his breath. “You really startled me.”
“Lie down, please.”
Jeoffry complied immediately. “I never expected you at this hour.”
Jeoffry watched as the visitor pulled out a syringe and started to inject the contents into Jeoffry’s IV bottle. He seemed to have some difficulty in the darkness as Jeoffry heard the bottle clank repeatedly against the pole.
“What kind of medication am I getting?” asked Jeoffry, unsure if he should say anything but sufficiently confused as to what was going on to overcome his hesitancy.
“Vitamins.”
To Jeoffry it seemed like a strange time to be getting vitamins, but the hospital was a strange place.
Jeoffry’s visitor gave up trying to get the needle into the base of the IV bottle and switched to the injection site in the plastic tubing close to Jeoffry’s wrist. This was far easier and the needle immediately slipped through the small rubber cap. Jeoffry watched as the plunger was rapidly depressed, causing the fluid to back up in the tubing, raising the level in the chamber above his head. He felt a twinge of pain but assumed it was just the rise in pressure in the IV.
But the pain did not disappear. Instead it got worse. Much worse.
“My God!” cried Jeoffry. “My arm! It’s killing me!” Jeoffry could feel a white-hot sensation that began at the IV site rise up in his arm.
The visitor grabbed Jeoffry’s hand to keep it still and opened the IV so it ran in a steady stream.
The pain that Jeoffry thought had been unbearable got worse and spread like molten lava into his chest. He swung his free hand over to grasp his visitor.
“Don’t touch me, you friggin’ faggot.”
Despite the pain, Jeoffry let go. To his bewilderment was added fear… a terrible fear that something awful was happening. Desperately Jeoffry tried to free his arm with the IV from the intruder’s grip.
“What are you doing?” gasped Jeoffry. He started to scream, but a hand was clamped roughly over his mouth.
At that moment Jeoffry’s body experienced its first convulsion, arching up off the bed. His eyes rolled up and disappeared inside his head. Within seconds the spasms increased to become a grand mal seizure, rocking the bed back and forth. The intruder dropped Jeoffry’s arm and pulled the bed away from the wall to reduce the banging. Then he checked the corridor and ran back to the stairwell.
Jeoffry convulsed in silence until his heart, which had begun to beat irregularly, fibrillated for a few seconds, then stopped. Within minutes Jeoffry’s brain ceased functioning. He continued to convulse until his muscles exhausted their depleted store of oxygen…
• • •
Thomas felt as though he’d just closed his eyes when the nurse bent over and shook him awake. He rolled over in a daze and looked into the woman’s smiling face.
“They need you in the OR, Dr. Kingsley.”
“Be right there,” he said thickly.
Thomas waited while the nurse beat a hasty retreat, then swung his feet to the floor. He paused a few minutes for the dizziness to clear. Sometimes, thought Thomas, sleeping for too short a time was worse than no sleep at all. He steadied himself at the entrance, then stumbled over to his locker. Getting out a Dexedrine, he washed it down with water from the drinking fountain. Then he changed into a fresh scrub suit, but not before he’d rescued the half pill he’d left in the soiled shirt’s breast pocket.