Manhattan Lockdown

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

GABRIEL HAUSER LOVED his work. The seventy-hour weeks never fatigued him. In fact, they gave him a purpose and energy. He had reached the stage in his career when he could have left the demands of the emergency room, where the pace was dictated by the randomness of stabbings, shootings, accidents, heart attacks, and drug overdoses, for a private practice with its regular hours, predictability, and bigger income. But he had learned his trade in war zones. He’d experienced the miracle of repairing shattered bodies and restoring life. And he accepted the fact that often people were brought to him so damaged that the ingenuity of his hands and the creativity of his mind could not prevent their deaths.

Whenever he walked into the hospital, Gabriel felt a sense of relief, comfort, and the return to the familiar. He had the same reaction when he entered the apartment where he lived with Cam, the reassurance that he was in the place where he was meant to be. The doctors’ entrance, through which he passed simply by waving a plastic card over an electronic eye, opened into a gleaming hallway.

The changing room had the look and feel and atmosphere of a locker room in a men’s gym. There were rows of steel lockers, a sauna, a steam room, and shower stalls. As in a locker room at an old gym, the air was always moist.

When he reached his own locker, he was immediately taken aback by something totally unexpected: the combination lock to his locker was missing. He pulled the door open. The locker was empty.

Gabriel heard Vincent Brown speak behind him. “Dr. Hauser, we had quite a scene this morning. Too bad you weren’t here for it.”

Gabriel turned. Brown was in his starched scrubs. He was the senior doctor in the emergency room and, like a commanding officer in the Army, his uniform always looked “strack”-the Army expression for neat and stiff.

“What happened?”

“Mama Bear, Papa Bear, and Baby Bear came to take away your stuff.”

“Do you think, Vincent, that you can stop for once with the sarcastic shit? What’s going on?”

Vincent Brown approached him. He was shorter than Gabriel. He had a neat mustache and the haughty look of a minaret. He was angry. “What the hell are you up to, Hauser?”

“Up to? I came here to work.” Gabriel, too, was angry. Suddenly he had the sense that he might hit Brown or that Brown might hit him. It was that infusion of street adrenaline.

“There were cops all over this place. They smashed your locker, they took your clothes. They showed me a picture of Patient X52.”

“So what?”

“So what? They asked whether you treated him. I said ‘yes’. They asked for how long. ‘Thirty minutes.’”

“Thirty minutes? That’s bullshit.”

“They asked whether I saw you talk to him. ‘Yes’. How long? ‘The full thirty minutes,’ I said.”

“I was with him for three minutes, you know that. What are you doing to me?”

“And they wanted to know whether you took anything from him. ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘possibly.’”

“That’s a lie, and you know it.”

“Or whether you gave him anything. I said something went back and forth between the two of you.”

“You weren’t even on the floor then.”

“They asked to take a look at your treatment notes on Patient X52. You didn’t make any.”

“Nobody made notes. This place was chaotic.”

“They asked if you knew that Patient X52 was really named Silas Nasar?”

“Silas who?”

“Certainly you did. That’s the name written on the discharge papers you signed.”

“That’s crazy. I never signed discharge papers.”

“You want to know what else?” Brown was trembling, the shaking that rage created. And Gabriel was trembling, too; it was the same rage. Brown said, “They took your personnel records.”

“Don’t tell me you let them do that?”

“Of course I did.”

“Those are private, really private.”

“So what?”

“Did they have a search warrant?”

“Search warrant?”

“They can’t just take my records.”

“Why not? What are you now? An ACLU lawyer and not just the Angel of Life?”

Gabriel stepped backwards, wanting to put enough distance between Brown and himself so that he didn’t follow through on the urge to punch or push him.

“Tell me, Brown, what is it about me that you hate?”

“Just about everything.”

“Why are you lying? Why did you tell a reporter that I refused to work on Sunday?”

“Why was the guy with the birthmark the guy you ran to first? Silas Nasar? The cops wanted to know that. Why was Silas Nasar so special to you?”

“What bullshit is that? He was the first hurt person I saw. Everyone else was dead.”

Brown, too, stepped back, widening the gap between them. He now had the familiar sardonic look. “I’m e-mailing the board of the hospital to ask for an immediate suspension of your privileges. I want you out of my hospital. Angel of Life. What unmitigated crap.”