Night Shift

Chapter 28

Wednesday, December 8, 2:50 p.m.

Ronnie woke up with a start, worried that he’d overslept. He snatched up his phone, clicked it on, and then sighed with relief when he saw the time. He’d not overslept. Tossing his phone back on his night table, he lay back on the pillow and tried to relax while he bemoaned the state of turmoil his life had become because of one meddlesome doctor. At the same time, he had to congratulate himself for having managed to deal with the situation so far with such admirable dispatch, even though the episode with Cherine Gardener hadn’t been as smooth as he would have preferred. As he thought back to the struggle he’d had with the puny nurse, he couldn’t quite believe how strong and defiant she’d been despite her size.

When he’d gotten home the previous evening, he’d been so worked up knowing the problem wasn’t quite over that he had to go out to calm himself down. He’d driven over to a sports bar and had a few beers and mindlessly watched a replay of the Knicks game, all the while thinking about Jack Stapleton and how big a threat he might turn out to be. Ronnie also congratulated himself for having cleverly learned that the medical examiner had been told of Dr. Passero’s serial killer worry but hadn’t been told why. When Ronnie combined that with his mentioning to the man that the MMH’s mortality ratio had been trending downward, he felt relatively confident the crisis wasn’t super critical, just critical, meaning he was reasonably safe as long as he got rid of the man that afternoon. What was going to help was that Stapleton was expecting Ronnie to call today to set up a meeting. It was Ronnie’s plan to arrange the meeting that afternoon.

After closing the sports bar around 3:00 a.m., Ronnie had gone back to his apartment in Woodside. Still somewhat keyed up, he didn’t try to sleep. Over the years, he’d become totally adapted to working the night shift and normally didn’t go to sleep until around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. Instead of sleeping, he used his laptop to google Jack Stapleton and learn as much as he could about the man, particularly where he lived and where he worked, and, most important, getting confirmation that he used his bike to get around New York City. Ronnie couldn’t believe his luck. Such a habit made it seem as if Stapleton was asking to be killed.

By 5:30 Ronnie had made himself some eggs and bacon, and by 6:15 he was back in his beloved Cherokee heading for Manhattan. To facilitate his plan, he had to be certain about Stapleton’s habits. Accordingly, well before 7:00 a.m., Ronnie had pulled over to the side of First Avenue just shy of 30th Street, where he could see the OCME building to his right as well as west up 30th Street to his left. Like a lot of buildings in the city, the OCME was surrounded by scaffolding without any evidence of any construction, making him wonder why it was there.

Not too long after sunrise at 7:07, Ronnie had been rewarded by seeing a bicyclist appear in the distance up 30th Street sporting a lime green helmet and dressed in a corduroy jacket with scarf and gloves. As he watched, the man had come streaking toward him, outpacing the vehicular traffic, and then came to a stop at the traffic light. At that point, Ronnie pulled a car-length forward such that the bicyclist would have to cross within feet of him, giving him a chance to make absolutely sure it was Jack Stapleton.

When the light had changed, the bicyclist pedaled across the avenue, and Ronnie had gotten a good look at him. There had been no doubt whatsoever: It had indeed been Stapleton. Satisfied with his accomplishment, Ronnie had driven back to his apartment in Woodside on 54th Street just off Northern Boulevard. The main reason Ronnie lived where he did was because the apartment came with a detached garage reached by a rear alleyway. Once the car was safely put to bed, Ronnie had gone inside and done the same for himself.

“Okay!” Ronnie said as he tossed off his covers and stood up in the chill of his bedroom. He was ready for his day to begin and had a lot to do before he called Stapleton. He didn’t want to call too early, as he wanted to control where the meeting happened and limit Stapleton’s options. It was Ronnie’s intention to insist on meeting again at the MMH back in the ED MD lounge, although the exact location didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the meeting would be not at the OCME but at the hospital. Ronnie’s plan was simple. He intended to make sure Stapleton did not to make it all the way to the MMH but instead would have a terrible, fatal accident on the way.

After making himself some breakfast, it was still too early to call Stapleton. Ronnie wanted it to be late enough to claim there wouldn’t be time for him to meet and get from the OCME to the MMH before the start of his shift at 7:00 p.m. To fill the time, Ronnie decided to reaffirm his avowed crusade of saving people from the clutches of the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, both of which selfishly profited mightily from abusing and torturing mortally ill patients. To do that, he got a step stool out of his closet and a screwdriver from his tools and sundries drawer in the kitchen. After placing the stool under the HVAC vent in his apartment’s hallway, which connected his kitchen and bedroom from his living room, he climbed up and removed the sheet metal screws. Allowing the grille to rotate downward, he was able to reach up inside the duct and retrieve a dog-eared ledger. Leaving the grille open, he carried the ledger into the kitchen and sat at the built-in table. Along with the Cherokee and the SIG Sauer pistol, the ledger was a favorite possession, which he perused regularly to celebrate his accomplishments.

Over a period of almost six years, which included two years at a hospital in Queens, where he’d first worked after getting his nursing bachelor’s degree before moving to the MMH, he’d kept a careful record of all the mercy killings he’d been able to accomplish. It had started out slowly, as the opportunities had been few and far between, but then had sped up once he’d become a nursing supervisor. The pace had magnified dramatically once he’d become a solo supervisor. Over the last year, he was impressed with how many people he’d saved from an ongoing frightful existence. Each entry had the name, the diagnosis, the horrid treatments they’d endured, the date, and the agent he used, which was usually just an overdose of a medication the patient was prescribed.

As Ronnie’s eyes went down the list, he could recall just about all the patients quite clearly. He could even remember conversing with many of them, hearing their sad stories of the tortures they had endured and commiserating with them. All at once, he came to Frank Ferguson, whom he remembered distinctly since his case was a mirror image of Ronnie’s foster mother, Iris. She had been a nurse and a stimulus for Ronnie to become a nurse. She had also been a chain-smoker who had developed throat cancer. At the time, Ronnie had been an impressionable preteen and had been horrified when she was transformed from an attractive woman into a ghoulish caricature of herself, both physically and mentally, such that she could have starred in a gruesome anti-smoking campaign advertisement. It also marked the time that Ronnie and his younger foster brother started becoming chronically sick, requiring innumerable hospitalizations, which Ronnie was later to realize had been caused by Iris plying them with inordinate amounts of salt, which ultimately killed his brother. Ronnie had been able to escape by aging out of foster care and joining the navy.

The last two entries in the ledger were from four days earlier, when Ronnie had used insulin to put an end to the tortures of two men, one with colorectal cancer and another with prostate cancer. Both had had metastatic disease and multiple surgeries. They were numbers ninety-three and ninety-four. It was a comfort for Ronnie to know they were now in a better place.

For a few minutes, Ronnie toyed with the idea of adding the names of Sue Passero and Cherine Gardener to the ledger entries, as their deaths added to the crusade by making sure it continued. But ultimately he decided against it, for the same reason he had never added to the main section of the ledger any of the inadvertent deaths that had occurred when he’d failed to save a patient whom he’d put in jeopardy to get the credit. Instead, he added their names at the back of the journal, where he’d merely listed the inadvertent deaths.

Feeling totally rededicated to his cause, Ronnie closed the ledger and returned it to its hiding place in the HVAC duct. After repositioning the grille and replacing the sheet metal screws, he checked the time. There was still a half hour before he believed it would be appropriate to call Stapleton and adequate time for him to prepare the Cherokee for the afternoon’s activities. With that job in mind, Ronnie went out the back door, unlocked the garage, and entered. His first order of business was to remove his license plates, which he stored in the back of the Cherokee, and replace them with old, outdated New York plates that he’d found in the garage when he moved in. Once that was done, he opened a can of water-based black paint and painted over the orange flames radiating from behind each wheel well. He hated to do it because they added so much to the SUV’s allure, but he was confident it would wash off easily. He didn’t want his car to stand out that afternoon. He also had a lever inside the car, which, when switched, would redirect the entirety of the exhaust into the car’s mufflers, significantly reducing its growl. He intended to flip that lever well before making any contact with his target.

When he was finished with the Cherokee, Ronnie went back into the apartment and returned to the kitchen table with his phone and Stapleton’s business card. It was now quarter to four in the afternoon, around the time when he’d deemed it appropriate to make his call. For a few minutes, he just sat there and tried to imagine what kind of argument Stapleton might try to make to insist on having their conversation at the OCME. Ronnie could remember telling the man that he was off Wednesday and Thursday, so that information might resurface, but if it did, Ronnie meant to tell him that had changed. In order to get Sarah Berman to agree to come in last night on the spur of the moment, Ronnie had to offer working both Wednesday and Thursday for her. Of course, he was not going to say anything to Stapleton about having made a trade.

When he felt he was as ready as he was ever going to be, Ronnie placed the call. As it went through, he relaxed as much as he could. The fact that the call was picked up on the second ring wasn’t lost on him. The man had obviously been waiting. That was a good sign, suggesting to him that he was in the proverbial driver’s seat.

“Thanks for calling,” Jack said. “I was getting a little nervous you might have forgotten.”

“Not a chance,” Ronnie said brightly. “Sorry. I slept longer than I usually do for some reason.”

“You must have needed it,” Jack said. “No harm done, but I’m looking forward to continuing our conversation, and the sooner the better. Are you available now?”

“Yes and no,” Ronnie said. “I was supposed to be off tonight, but I have to cover for one of the other night supervisors who was originally scheduled. Unfortunately, that means I have to be at the hospital around six. Sorry about that.”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “Of course, I understand schedules change. But it’s not quite four. There’s still a couple of hours. How about getting together before you have to clock in?”

“I suppose that might work,” Ronnie said. “But I wouldn’t want to risk meeting somewhere else and take the chance of being late because of traffic. If you want to meet up today, it will have to be at the MMH.”

“That’s not a problem for me,” Jack said without hesitation. “Where exactly and what time?”

“How about meeting again in the doctors’ lounge in the Emergency Department, say, at five-thirty? There’s never anyone in there late in the afternoon, so we’ll have the place to ourselves just like yesterday. And that should give us plenty of opportunity.”

“Fine with me,” Jack said. “Actually, I prefer the ED to the hospital proper.”

“Is it difficult for you to get there at that time of day?”

“Not at all,” Jack said. “It only takes about twenty minutes, traffic or no traffic. It’s on my way home.”

“How was your meeting today with Cherine Gardener?” Ronnie asked. He’d not planned on posing the question for obvious reasons, yet the idea of doing so suddenly presented itself out of pure curiosity.

“That didn’t happen,” Jack said.

“Oh,” Ronnie commented. “Why was that?”

“She has yet to call me,” Jack said.

Ronnie nodded. He was impressed with Jack’s speedy and appropriately vague retort.

“While I have you on the line,” Jack said, “let me ask you a general question about your role on the M and M Task Force, since I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me. When you get the mortality ratio from the computer, would it be possible for you to also get the monthly gross death rate?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Ronnie said, also speaking without hesitation despite alarm bells going off in his mind. The fact that Stapleton was merely asking the question underlined why Ronnie needed to get rid of the man. Seeing the raw monthly data was what had pushed Sue Passero over the edge and started the whole current ruckus. “Honestly, I don’t know because I’ve never tried to download the monthly gross death rate. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say no. The hospital admin is very chary about raw unadjusted data. The only person who might have access, if it is available, would be the senior vice president chief compliance and ethics officer.”

“Well, maybe you should just try next time you’re logged in,” Jack suggested.

“I’ll do that,” Ronnie said. “Now I better get a move on to get ready for work.”

“See you at five-thirty,” Jack said before disconnecting.

For a few minutes Ronnie just sat there, staring off at nothing. The whole situation reminded him of playing with dominoes as a child. You tip over one, and a whole line falls over until the last one tips. He hoped to hell that Jack Stapleton was going to be the last domino, and he could relax and get back to normal.

After checking the time and knowing he wanted to be in position outside the OCME before 5:00, Ronnie slid out from the table’s built-in bench seat and went into the bedroom. From his night table, he retrieved his cherished SIG Sauer P365. From habit, he checked the magazine despite knowing it was fully loaded. The mere act of checking made him feel more confident he was prepared for any eventuality. Although Ronnie was at peace with himself vis-à-vis his crusade, he was well aware that not everyone agreed with his methods, and he was a fatalist about what would happen if he were to be exposed. Long ago, he’d decided he’d never let that happen, which was why he’d prepared his hideaway in the Catskills, where he kept another identity that he’d fashioned with the help of the dark web. It included all the appropriate IDs of a former navy nurse his age who’d died a few years earlier. His general plan, if worse came to worst, was to flee first to his hideaway and then disappear completely, probably to Florida or maybe Texas.

When all was ready, Ronnie went out into the garage and revved up the Cherokee. A few minutes later, he was on his way along Northern Boulevard heading toward Manhattan.