Critical Condition. Sandra Orchard

       Questions for Discussion

       Excerpt

      PROLOGUE

      Strange. Tara Peterson stepped out of a patient’s room only to be greeted by yet another call bell. Except this one blipped off as quickly as it sounded.

      It blipped again.

      A malfunction?

      Seeing no sign of the other on-duty nurse, she hurried down the hall to check on the cancer patient herself. Most days she loved being a nurse. But today, she would’ve happily traded in her orthopedic shoes for a pair of sling-backs and a plush leather chair behind a computer monitor. Eleven and a half hours of racing from one call to another, a stack of charts awaiting her attention, made it easy to forget she hated sitting still almost as much as she hated paperwork.

      She paused outside the room to ease a knot in her back and froze midstretch at the sound of something clattering across the floor, followed by a thud.

      Tara threw open the door. “Mrs. Parker, what’s wrong?”

      The frail young woman’s body stiffened, her hands contorting at an odd angle, her unseeing eyes rolling upward.

      A sudden shove propelled Tara across the room. She grabbed the bed rail, twisting her arm as momentum slammed her knees to the floor. Her head clipped the corner of the bed frame and stars exploded in front of her eyes. Biting back a cry of pain, she glanced over her shoulder in time to see the tail of a white lab coat whisk out the door.

      “Wait,” she shouted, a metallic taste filling her mouth.

      The bed rocked frantically, but a groan snapped Tara’s attention to the floor beyond, where a man lay sprawled on the cold tile. Blood spurted from a gash over his eye.

      He mumbled something Tara couldn’t make out.

      Gritting her teeth against the white-hot pain that shot up her arm, she grabbed a towel and pressed it to his cut. “Mr. Parker, you need to hold this so I can see to your wife. Can you do that?”

      Taking his grunt as a yes, Tara surged to her feet.

      Mrs. Parker thrashed wildly in the throes of a seizure.

      Tara pulled the code alarm, then checked Mrs. Parker’s airway. Clear—for now—but the woman was burning up.

      “You have to save her,” Mr. Parker croaked, his tortured gaze reaching out to his wife.

      Dr. Whittaker rushed into the room, his white lab coat flapping behind him.

      “Give her fifty c.c.’s of diazepam stat,” Whittaker barked.

      Alice Bradshaw, the other nurse on duty, shoved the crash cart through the door. “I’ll get it.”

      Dr. Whittaker steadied the patient’s arm, soothing her in the dulcet tones that had earned him the moniker Dr. Wonderful from more than one patient.

      As Tara tapped a vein to insert the intravenous, Mr. Parker cried out and clutched his chest.

      “Take over here,” Tara commanded the instant Alice returned with the diazepam. “I need to see to Mr. Parker.” Pulling a stethoscope to her ears, Tara knelt at his side. Parker’s breathing was shallow, his pulse thready.

      Dr. McCrae hurried in and glanced from Tara to the bed, where Alice was still struggling with the IV.

      “Help restrain the patient,” Whittaker ordered.

      Mr. Parker clutched Tara’s arm and muttered a desperate prayer.

      “It’s okay,” Tara soothed. “We’re taking good care of your wife. Don’t worry.”

      The man’s gaze shifted to the team around the bed. “You have to stop—” He gasped for air. “Stop the killer.”

      “The killer? I don’t understand. No one’s been killed.”

      Mr. Parker’s grip relaxed. And a moment later, his arm flopped lifelessly to the floor.

      ONE

      Detective Zach Davis turned up his collar against the brisk October weather and joined the hospital staff gathered outside Niagara’s newest cancer wing. The sooner he proved a murderer wasn’t behind the recent deaths at Miller’s Bay Memorial, the sooner he could escape.

      He couldn’t imagine why a couple of deaths in a palliative-care unit—a ward where people go to die—would warrant an undercover investigation. But his former partner Rick Gray had needed a detached officer from out of town and had refused to take no for an answer.

      Not that Zach had felt like explaining why this was the last place he wanted to be. He’d never told Rick he’d been married, let alone that his wife had died of cancer. As far as Rick was concerned, the five months Zach had spent posing as a computer-store owner made him the perfect candidate for his new cover as an information-technology consultant. End of discussion.

      At the front of the crowd, Dr. Whittaker—the namesake of the hospital’s new addition—slid giant scissor blades around the obligatory ribbon and offered the media a smile as polished as his two-hundred-dollar shoes.

      As spectators jockeyed to be the first through the doors, Barb, the real IT consultant, bumped her arm against Zach’s. “Come on, let’s get started.” The petite brunette hadn’t questioned her boss’s request to let Zach learn alongside her. He just hoped she’d be too distracted by her own work to notice what he really did.

      He followed Barb into the happy hum of staff sharing cake and juice with patients, smiling and clothed in bathrobes and brightly colored caps. The kind of caps that masked chemo-razed hair.

      His stomach knotted into a hard, tight ball.

      He’d held his palm to spurting bullet wounds, wrestled drug-crazed addicts, immobilized the fractured bones of abused wives. But not one of those encounters had hit him like this, with an unnerving sense that if he looked one of these patients in the eyes, his grip on his emotions would completely unravel.

      Someone—a nurse—cupped his elbow. “You okay? You’ve gone white.”

      “Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.” An antiseptic odor coiled through his nostrils, raking up memories of nightlong vigils at his wife’s bedside. Lord, why have You brought me here? I don’t want to remember.

      “You’d better sit a minute. You don’t look so good.” The nurse ushered him to a chair along the wall. “I’ll bring you a glass of juice.” Her compassionate voice pulled his thoughts from the edge of a dark abyss.

      His colleague had kept walking, but now, her three-inch heels clicked quickly toward him. As she drew closer, her puzzled scowl softened.

      Zach scraped a hand over his face. “That bad, huh?”

      “Oh, yeah. I take it you don’t like hospitals?”

      He shook his head. “Just cancer wards.”

      “You lost someone close to you?”

      Zach let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah.” Close. The word didn’t begin to describe what he’d lost. His wife had been everything to him. His best friend. His confidante. His very being.

      The nurse hurried back with a cup of juice. “This should bring back your color. You’d be surprised how many visitors we have who get a little faint. You’ll be okay in a few minutes.”

      He doubted more time here would do the trick, but he kept the thought to himself. Undercover work was all about attitude. With the right attitude, even in uniform, he could convince the wariest drug dealer to sell him a fix. He’d never allowed a situation to get the better of him. And he sure didn’t intend to start today.