The Delilah Complex

Sixty-Two

Ronny White watched the silver Mercedes SUV pull into the parking lot of the emergency wing of the Greenwich Hospital and noted the license plate.

The hospital was well staffed, well appointed, and catered to the inhabitants of the town’s population of 60,000, who were among the most wealthy in the United States. He liked his job. The hospital never got crazy busy like a big-city hospital. Great doctors worked there, imported from large cities to cater to the needs of the well heeled. Most of all, Ronny liked the visitors and patients who tipped him lavishly for watching their six-figure cars.

The driver who had just turned in to the lot was handling the car erratically, a sure signal to Ronny of an emergency. He called the front desk and told Lucie to send out some staff. “There’s a problem coming in.”

This was one of the things he could do: watch who was coming and going in a way that you never could in one of those giant hospitals in a metropolitan area.

“He’s having a heart attack!” the driver shouted at Ronny as the car came to a stop in front of him.

Ronny nodded. “Don’t move him. They are on their way out and-” He didn’t have time to finish when two orderlies and two nurses arrived with a stretcher.

As soon they got the man out of the car and onto the stretcher, the driver threw the car into Reverse and screeched out of the parking lot.

Ronny stared at the retreating Benz, trying to memorize the plates. He thought he had it, but he wasn’t sure. The car had been moving too fast. Who leaves someone in that condition at the hospital and then drives off? A criminal, Ronny thought. Or a drunk. Either way, he should call the police.

The man was on the stretcher now. They were rushing him into the E.R.

Jeeze.

He’d seen a lot in the four years he had been working in Greenwich. Rich folk cried no different than poor ones. They sat down in the parking lot in the middle of the afternoon and curled up in a little ball and just wept. He’d seen kids, no older than his sister’s kids, riding up in fancy cars, stubbing out their cigarettes, running in to pay a visit to Mom or Dad and coming back out jabbering on their cell phones. He’d seen mothers bring in babies turning blue and ambulances delivering patients with every ailment and injury there was.

But he had never seen a man, stark naked, with restraints on his ankles and wrists, wheeled into the emergency room at four o’clock in the afternoon. Hell, at any time.

And he hoped that he never would again.