Chapter 12: Nights

He caught me at the auditorium doors afterward.

"Relax," he said. "You do the clinic. I'll do the meetings. Like old times."

"You've never been in that room."

"Nobody's going to check, Maura." He smiled with all his teeth. "Nobody ever checks."

My first night shift started a week later.

Seven p.m. to two-thirty a.m., the swing that every new intern got because nobody else wanted it.

Riverside's emergency department at night sounded like a train station that was also on fire.

The ED attending was sixty-one, bald, with forearms like a stevedore's and a voice like gravel in a bucket.

He'd grown up three blocks away.

"Archer. The bar clinic."

"Yes."

"My cousin goes. Says you yelled at him about salt."

"I didn't yell."

"He says you yelled." He handed me a chart. "Bay nine. Don't kill anybody."

By ten o'clock, the surgery floor was sending people down.

A woman two days out from gallbladder surgery with mild nausea.

An old woman with a dressing that needed changing.

All of them came with the same name on the transfer.

Cantrell, surgery intern.

"He's not even looking at them," the night nurse told me at the desk.

"Floor calls him, he says send them to the ED. Then he goes back to sleep in the call room."

At eleven-fifty, the doors from the ambulance bay banged open.

A motorcyclist, twenty-something, no helmet, hit by a car on Broad Street.

His lips were going blue.

"Trauma bay," the attending yelled. "Archer, you're up."

I put my hands on the man's chest.

The left side wasn't moving.

His neck veins were standing up.

His windpipe had shifted off center, pushed to the right.

"Tension pneumo on the left," I said. "Needle. Now."

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