Return of the Reaper novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Night Shift

Doyle woke on a stretcher in a supply room with fluorescent light in his eyes.

The ceiling was made of white tile, and the shelves around him were stacked with gauze, saline and boxes of gloves.

A woman in navy scrubs was kneeling beside him with a curved needle in a clamp.

She had a messy top knot of light-brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a green hospital lanyard that swung every time she pulled the thread.

"Don't move," she said. "I'm on stitch fourteen of twenty-two."

His left side felt packed in ice.

"I can't be here," he said.

"You're here. Your blood pressure was eighty over fifty, and you were trying to find a stuffed owl."

She glanced at the clock over the door.

"I haven't put your name in the system. That gives us about forty minutes."

Doyle turned his head.

"Why?"

"Because of what the cut looks like." She tied off a stitch with two quick flicks.

"A box cutter, a clean pull, and nobody called a cop. I've worked nights here seven years."

Her hands were quick and warm and completely without hesitation.

There was something familiar about the way she tucked her chin when she worked.

"Have we met?" he said.

The needle paused for half a second.

Then it went on.

"You wouldn't remember," she said.

"Three years ago in March I was the night nurse for Anna Roark, on Ontario Street."

"I sat with her the last three weeks."

The room seemed to drop away from under him.

"The hospice nurse," he said slowly.

"Noelle Tarrant."

"I didn't look at anybody that month."

"No," she said. "You came in at dawn off a shift and stood at the end of the bed."

"I handed you the chart and went home. That was our whole conversation, every morning."

She said it gently, without blame.

She finished the last stitch and laid a flat dressing over the line of them, pressing it down with her whole palm.

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