Chapter 13: Harriet

"Harriet," Boone said again. "Let go."

Her fingers came off the steel one at a time.

Then her knees went.

He caught her under the arms before she hit the floor.

I was on my knees beside her with two fingers on her wrist.

Fast. Thready. Skipping.

"Where's the pain?"

"It's heartburn."

"Harriet. Where."

She put her fist in the middle of her chest, the way every heart attack in every ER I'd ever worked had put it.

"Down my left arm," she said. "And my jaw. Since the sauna. I thought it'd pass."

"Boone. The clinic. Can you carry her?"

He already had.

***

The ECG printed out in a long pink ribbon.

I didn't need to read it twice.

The ST segments climbed off the baseline.

A big one, in the front wall of her heart.

The physician assistant came running in his slippers with his hair flat on one side.

He looked at the strip over my shoulder.

"Oh, no," he said quietly.

"Aspirin. Mine, not the kit's. Then nitro, under the tongue."

He got them.

Harriet chewed the aspirin and made a face.

"Tastes like a chalkboard."

"You're having a heart attack. Complain later."

"I'm the station manager. I complain when I like."

Her lips were gray.

In Seattle she'd have been on a cath lab table in forty minutes.

A cardiologist would thread a wire up her wrist and open the artery with a balloon.

Here there was no cardiologist.

There was me, and the drug safe.

The only clot-buster at the station was alteplase, from the Ludlow kit.

The pharmacy in Christchurch hadn't stocked it.

I took the box out of the safe.

The sticker said next year.

I peeled it with my thumbnail.

The date underneath had passed eleven months ago.

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