The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Read Free Book Online Page B

his skin felt waterlogged and heavy, he hadn’t really drowned. Not yet. He lifted himself out of the water, feeling the air on his skin and the ordered sense of muscles and bones moving as he stood up and climbed over the edge of the hot tub. The water streamed down his skin, staining the brown wood of the stairs. With deliberate effort, he took that strange and unfamiliar first step.

On Call
    â€œY OU CAN’T BE TOO CAREFUL,” HE SAID, AND he put the knife right in front of my face. He was right. You can’t.
    It’s funny how my head works at times like that – I measure, examine. Useless information – a flick knife, about four inches long, blade with a channel, wooden handle held together with brass rivets. Blade long enough to permanently damage internal organs – liver, spleen, lungs, heart. Longenough to do slapdash punctures through roping yards of intestine, long enough to nick the jugular or aorta on its knifely travels, long enough to open a femoral artery, the big leg bleeder.
    I’m always doing that – prepping for what comes next, trying to visualize the damage you don’t have time to get tests to con firm.
    I should have been thinking “walk slowly for the door, get away,” but instead, I was assembling information – still diagnosing. I should have been thinking about why we didn’t have panic buttons in the examining rooms, and why I was in there alone with him, anyway.
    Sometimes you get an early hint. And he gave me one – I’ve been an emergency room doctor for enough years now, and usually the first clue is early in the workup, while the door’s still open and no one has their clothes off yet.
    His was right inside the door, the first few words already filled out on his chart.
    â€œName – Miller, Robert.”
    You try to jolly them along, sometimes, try to get them away from focusing on their symptoms. Especially when they’ve been waiting a long time, and this guy had been.
    â€œHow are you tonight, Robert?”
    â€œDon’t call me that,” he said. The tone of his voice should have said it all.
    â€œThat’s not your name?” I asked – I hate it when the triage nurse gets it wrong.
    â€œThat’s the name
they
gave me. My real name is Elephra.” He spelled it for me – it wasn’t the name on his medicare card, clipped right there at the top of his chart.
    Wind it all back and I should have known right there. I should have stuck my head out the door and gotten one of the big orderlies, the guys whose uniform shirts strain at the buttonholes all across their chests, the guys who like putting the wild ones into restraints. But I didn’t – and that was the first mistake.
    The second mistake was purely positional. Picture a hospital examining room, door in one corner, everything pretty much white, the gurney – you know, the bed you sit on – in the middle of the room, cupboards with everything from stitches to basins to bandages. The big light overhead. If I’d been thinking, you see, I’d have been on the door side of the examining table, facing him. Any doubts at all, have your back to the door – it gives you a couple of steps, anyway, a chance to get out into the hall and to start yelling at the top of you lungs.
    But I’d walked to the other side, with my back to the cupboards. He was between me and the door I’d closed so he could take off his shirt and show me his back.
    I’m not a big guy, maybe 5’ 10” in my socks, handsome in that “he’s a doctor so he makes lots of money” kind of way. When I take my face apart in the mirror, though, I always think that too many parts are just too much – nose too big, eyes too far apart, eyelashes long enough for a woman but kind of dopey-looking on me.
    But that’s beside the point.
    I shouldn’t have been so easily