Black Lightning

CHAPTER 6

The wailing siren built to a deafening crescendo that was abruptly silenced as the ambulance braked to a stop in front of the construction site. Both doors flew open and two white-clad men leapt from the cab, one of them racing around to the back of the vehicle to pull out a stretcher, the other, carrying a small tank of oxygen and a face mask, breaking into a run toward the area where Glen Jeffers lay.

“Let me through,” the paramedic commanded as he pushed his way through the crowd gathered around the fallen man. “Who’s in charge here?” Without waiting for a reply, he knelt beside Glen’s body, quickly felt for a pulse, then put the mask on Glen’s face and turned the oxygen to high flow.

“We think he had a heart attack,” Jim Dover said. “We were all up on top. All of a sudden Glen started looking weird. We thought it was just fear of heights, but—”

His words were cut off as the second paramedic pushed through the crowd, unrolled the portable stretcher and lay it next to the unconscious body. “Myocardial infarction?”

“Looks like it,” the first medic said. “Let’s get him on the stretcher and into the truck.” Working together like a well-oiled machine, the two paramedics moved Glen onto the stretcher, then started back toward the ambulance. The construction crew fanned out ahead of the stretcher, clearing the way, while Alan Cline, together with George Simmons and Jim Dover, kept pace next to Glen.

“He’s a member of Group Health,” Alan Cline said, his voice trembling as he saw the bluish cast his partner’s face had taken on. “If you can take him up there—”

The paramedics slid the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, one of them climbing in to attach Glen to the waiting IV and heart monitor. “You can go with him,” the driver told Alan Cline. “There’s plenty of room, and if he wakes up—”

Alan Cline didn’t wait to hear the medic finish what he was saying, but scrambled into the back of the ambulance. The driver slammed the door shut, then dashed around to the driver’s seat. The ambulance started up the street, turned right up the steep slope of the hill, and then the siren came on.

Muffled by the walls of the ambulance, its wail took on a mournful, keening note, and as Alan Cline gazed at his partner, he wondered if it would be possible for Glen to survive at all.

It was like slowly coming awake in a pitch-dark room. Except the first thing that met him as he came into consciousness was pain.

Pain such as he’d never experienced before.

Pain that consumed him.

Pain that threatened to tear his mind apart.

Away!

He had to get away from the pain before it destroyed him.

Where?

Where was he?

His mind struggled against the blackness, and slowly it began to recede.

Now he could hear sound.

It seemed to be coming from somewhere far in the distance, but in a moment Glen was able to identify it.

A siren, like a police car, or an ambulance.

The dark receded further, and he was able to see. But it was odd — he seemed to be floating in some dimension he didn’t quite understand. Far below him, he could see two men crouching near a figure on a stretcher. They were confined by walls, as if perhaps they were in—

An ambulance!

But why?

Even as the question came into his mind, he knew the answer, and looked down once more at the figure on the stretcher.

He was looking at himself.

His shirt was open, his chest bare, and his face looked as pale as death.

Death.

The word hung in his mind.

Was that what was happening to him? Was he dying?

But if he was dying, why didn’t he feel anything?

Then he knew.

He was no longer in his body. Somehow, during that last terrible flash of blinding pain, he’d managed to escape, slipping away from the agony before it could break his mind.

Now, gazing back down at his body, he could see that the pain was still there, for his face was contorted into an anguished grimace.

He heard Alan Cline’s voice drifting up:

“Jesus, what’s happening? Can’t you do something for him?”

Another voice, this one shouting, but somehow no louder than Alan’s had been:

“We’re losing him! I’m gonna need some help back here!”

As Glen floated far above, the scene continued to unfold. Though he felt nothing, he knew the ambulance had stopped, for now the driver had joined the man who crouched over him. As the first medic began pressing rhythmically on his chest, the second one removed a plastic object from a cabinet fastened to the ambulance’s wall.

Almost disinterestedly, Glen Jeffers watched as his own mouth was opened and a plastic airway was thrust down his throat.

“Let’s get some lidocaine into him,” he heard the other medic order. As if no time at all had passed, he saw the other medic slide a needle into the IV tube and press the plunger. But even as the drug was going into Glen’s system he heard the paramedic who was crouched over his body speak again.

“We’re getting PVCs! Get the defibrillator ready!”

“What’s happening?” he heard Alan Cline ask. “What’s PVC mean?”

“Premature ventricular contractions,” the paramedic snapped. But when he spoke again, his tone had changed, now sounding almost pleading. “Come on,” he crooned. “Come back to me!”

The words hovered in the space around Glen, but held little meaning for him. Darkness began closing around him until he seemed to be in the depths of a tunnel, with only a single speck of light visible in the distance. As the voice of the medic spoke again, Glen began moving toward the light, and now the light itself seemed to be beckoning to him.

He moved faster and faster through the landscape of his own life, watching himself as a baby in his crib, at home, and now his mother was picking him up, holding him, cuddling him. Then he was at school, and everyone he had ever known — everyone he thought he had long ago forgotten — was there.

On and on it went, his life spread out before him, and as he experienced it all, he grew ever closer to the welcoming beacon of brilliant white light at the end of the tunnel.

Now he could see figures in the lights.

His grandparents were there, and someone else, someone he recognized in an instant.

The baby.

The baby they’d lost twelve years ago, when Anne had gone into premature labor with their second child.

Alex, his name would have been.

And now here the baby was, waiting for him, his arms held out eagerly.

Glen moved faster now, racing toward the light, leaving even the memory of the pain far behind.

Then, from behind him, he heard a voice, pleading with him not to leave.

Not a single voice, but a plaintive chorus, a blend of tones in which he could hear not just Anne, but Heather and Kevin, too.

Calling out to him, pleading with him.

He paused, slowing his rush toward the light, and looked back.

All was darkness, a vast and forbidding expanse of black, which he knew was filled with pain.

Ahead, bathed in the sweet light, his grandparents and the child he’d never met awaited, reaching out to welcome him.

The voices from the darkness cried out again, though, and with a great wrenching pang of anguish, Glen knew that he had to turn away from the light, had to make his way back into the darkness.

Those who awaited in the light were eternal, and would be there to welcome him when the time was right.

But behind him there was still unfinished business, still things yet unaccomplished, still deeds left undone.

Turning finally away from the light, Glen Jeffers started back into the darkness.

“Put it up to three hundred joules and hit him again,” the paramedic who was struggling to revive Glen ordered. The driver adjusted the controls on the defibrillator, and a second later Glen’s body jerked involuntarily as the flash of electricity shot through him. His heart stopped for a moment, then started up again. “That’s the way,” the medic murmured under his breath as he studied the display on the monitor. But a second later he saw his patient’s heart run wild again, the first fluttering pulse turning into a useless vibration.

“Try again at three-sixty,” he commanded, pressing the paddles against Glen’s naked chest.

Once again the defibrillator fired. The paramedic held his breath as he watched the monitor, then ordered a milligram of epinephrine, and resumed applying CPR. As the seconds ticked by and Alan Cline unconsciously held his breath as he prayed helplessly for his partner to live, Glen’s heart began to beat again, and a moment later he was once more breathing on his own.

Scrambling into the driver’s seat, the second paramedic jammed the ambulance into gear and pressed on the accelerator.

The siren wailed its mournful plea, clearing the streets ahead.

The back doors of the ambulance were thrown open. Even before Alan Cline could scramble out, two orderlies pulled the stretcher bearing Glen Jeffers onto a gurney and wheeled it through the doors to the Group Health emergency entrance on Thomas Street. His mind only starting to recover from the shock of what had happened at the top of the skyscraper, Alan followed the stretcher inside, but as it turned left through another set of double doors, Alan went to the right, toward a counter behind which several people were struggling to cope with the barely controlled chaos of the emergency room.

On a worn Naugahyde sofa a large woman sat with her arm curled protectively around the shoulders of a sobbing child; in a chair nearby, a teenage girl with stringy blond hair and a vacant expression was attempting to nurse a baby whose screams made it sound as if it was in excruciating pain.

A man with eyes that smoldered with fury clutched at the makeshift bandage that had been wrapped around his upper right arm. When a woman with an already purpling bruise on her cheek tried to help him, he shoved her roughly away. “Ain’t you already done enough, bitch?” he growled, and the woman instantly recoiled as if he’d struck her. A second later, as a policeman appeared, the injured man turned away from the woman, who immediately began insisting to the officer that nothing worthy of a police report had brought them to the emergency room.

The whole scene struck Alan Cline as coming from some alien planet he knew nothing about, and for a moment he felt completely disoriented. Then he remembered Glen, still unconscious — perhaps even dying — being rushed into the opposite wing.

“The man they just brought in,” he said, injecting himself into the midst of a conversation one of the staff behind the counter was carrying on with a distraught woman. “Where is he?”

“Can’t you wait your turn like everyone else?” the woman demanded, fixing Alan with a glare from her drug-dilated eyes. “You’re not the only person here, you know.”

“Just tell me where they took him,” Alan demanded of the woman behind the counter, who had already moved closer to him, as though she welcomed even a momentary distraction from the angry patient’s siege.

“The cardiac case?” the receiving nurse asked.

Alan Cline nodded, and the nurse immediately handed him a clipboard. “If you could just fill out as much of this as possible, I’ll find out where your …” She paused expectantly, waiting for Alan to identify himself as either a relative, a friend, or perhaps even the lover of the patient.

“I’m his partner,” Alan offered, then, remembering Seattle’s domestic partnership ordinance, whose passage had been a cause for celebration among at least half a dozen of his employees, he spoke again. “His business partner.”

“Whatever,” the nurse said. “All I really need is his name, if he’s a member of Group Health. I can pull the rest of it out of the computer.”

“Then why can’t you pull my prescription out of the damn computer,” the woman next to Alan complained as he wrote Glen’s name down for the nurse. When the nurse simply ignored her, the addict swore under her breath, seemed to consider the odds of convincing the nurse to give her whatever it was she wanted, then shambled out, after mumbling that she would report the nurse to the co-op’s board.

“Do that,” the nurse sighed, not even looking up from the computer screen she was studying. “See you tomorrow.” As the woman disappeared out onto the street, the nurse finally glanced up, shaking her head sadly. “She thinks we’re a methadone clinic,” she explained. “Comes in practically every day, asking for — Ah, here it is!” She studied the computer screen, then smiled at Alan Cline. “Mr. Jeffers is just being admitted to the cardiac care unit.” Just then, Jim Dover burst through the doors, spotted Alan and joined him at the counter.

“Where’s Glen?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

Alan shrugged. “He’s in cardiac care,” he said. “Find out where it is while I call the office.”

Leaving Dover to get the information from the nurse, Alan crossed to the pay phones that lined one wall of the emergency room, found one that wasn’t broken and dialed the number that would bypass the switchboard and ring directly at the desk of Rita Alvarez, Glen’s secretary. As briefly as he could, he told her what had happened.

Sitting at Glen’s desk, where she had answered Alan Cline’s call, Rita Alvarez glanced at the small television her boss had told her to set up in the office that morning in case his wife showed up on CNN. Now, as she listened to Alan’s disjointed account of Glen’s heart attack, she found herself gazing at Anne, who, along with the warden and the rest of the witnesses to the execution, had just entered a room filled with reporters, cameras, and lights. “Go find out what’s happening,” she said. “Just stay with Glen, and let me know what’s going on. I’ll take care of everything else.” Hanging up the phone, Rita Alvarez went to work, first making a list of the people who had to be notified immediately, starting with Anne and progressing quickly through clients who had appointments with Glen that day, the firm’s attorney, and some of his closest friends. Less than a minute later she was speaking to the operator at the prison where Anne had just witnessed Richard Kraven’s execution.

“It’s an emergency,” she explained. “I need to talk to Anne Jeffers right away. She’s there at the prison. She was one of the witnesses—”

“Everyone wants to talk to everyone who witnessed the execution,” the operator interjected. “And everyone says it’s an emergency. If you’d like me to add your name to the list—”

“I’m secretary to Mrs. Jeffers’s husband,” Rita interrupted. “He’s just had a very bad heart attack. He may be dying.”

Anne hung up the phone but lingered over it, her hand unconsciously resting on the receiver as if maintaining physical contact with the instrument could somehow keep her connected to Seattle and whatever was happening there. A heart attack? Glen? But how was that possible? He wasn’t even forty-five yet! And he jogged every day, watched his weight — both of them were the quintessential Seattleites, spending as much time as they could out-of-doors, skiing at Crystal Mountain and Snoqualmie in the winter, rowing on the lake and exploring the San Juan Islands in sea kayaks in the summer. People like Glen didn’t have heart attacks!

Then she remembered the day almost ten years ago when she’d heard that Danny Branson had dropped dead while jogging, and Danny, only thirty-two at the time, had always been a major jock, running track all through their high school years. So what was life, anyway? Just a big lottery? Even if you did everything right, did you just drop dead?

The terrible feeling of fear and helplessness that had come over her as she listened to Rita Alvarez’s report of Glen’s heart attack began to transform into a calm determination: what had happened to Danny Branson would not happen to Glen. He would recover; together, they would learn everything there was to know about heart attacks, and they would see to it that he didn’t have another one. As the last of the terror faded from her mind, her fingers finally left the phone and she turned around to find Mark Blakemoor watching her, his eyes betraying a concern he rarely allowed to be exposed, either on the job or off.

“Has something happened, Anne?” the detective asked.

“It’s my husband,” she replied. “He’s had a heart attack. I have to get home right away. My flight’s not till tomorrow.” She felt panic rise. “I have to get home!”

Mark Blakemoor reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled gabardine jacket and handed her an envelope. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours,” he told her. “If there isn’t room for both of us, you fly, and I’ll go home on your ticket tomorrow.”

Anne’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “And in return?” she asked. There had to be a catch: in all her years of dealing with cops, Mark Blakemoor had been the single individual who refused to divulge anything unless he was promised a future favor as the price. Now, to her surprise, he shook his head.

“This isn’t work,” he said. “This is personal. With personal, everything’s a freebie. Okay?”

“Let’s go,” Anne replied, instinctively knowing that he didn’t want to be thanked for the offer.

Five minutes later they were out of the prison, being driven through the crowd of demonstrators and reporters in a car the warden had supplied.

At least, Anne reflected as she heard the muffled questions the press was shouting after the closed vehicle, I don’t have to keep talking about the execution. One more article for the Herald and then, perhaps, she would take a leave of absence, and concentrate on Glen’s recovery.

As the car sped away from the prison, the thought lingered in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more it appealed to her.

After all, soon it would be summer, and school would be out, and the whole family would be together. Then her mood darkened: how much of the family would there still be?

What if Glen didn’t make it? What would she do? How would she cope? How could she live without Glen?