White Sister

Chapter 24.

IT WAS AFTER eleven p. M. and the trauma ward was still filling up. The sobbing mothers of gang-bangers held the hands of slack-faced relatives as their half-dead teenage sons were wheeled past. My head was throbbing. I left my mobile number with the trauma nurses telling them I was going to sleep on a sofa in the hall. The rest of the night was fitful. Nobody called me, but I kept dreaming that my cell phone was ringing. In the dream someone was trying to give me critical information about Alexa's condition over a bad line. I strained to hear a transmission that was always garbled and unclear. The next morning at seven a. M. after checking on Alexa and getting the usual guarded description of her condition, I treated myself to a sponge bath in the hospital men's room. While I was in the middle of this, my cell phone actually did ring. Luther Lexington was on the line. "We're moving her at ten a. M. I'm going to use a helicopter because it will cut the transport time and limit her exposure to only fifteen minutes or so. I'll ride over with her in the chopper. I want you at UCLA Neurosurgery on the fourth floor when we arrive around ten-thirty." "How is she? They still aren't telling me much, Lex." "There's really nothing to tell. That's the way these things often go, Shane. She's stable and in an induced coma. Until we try and wake her up, we won't know much. I've been studying her brain CTs. There's quite a bit of foreign matter still in there. Some of the bullet fragments look like they might be restricting blood flow to her temporal and occipital lobes. If those areas don't get sufficient blood supply, then brain cells will die. We may need to consider another surgery soon. I'll make that evaluation along with my vascular guy later today. But you need to know, I wouldn't move her if I didn't think I could pull it off." Next, I called Chooch and gave him the news. After I finished, he said, "I'm coming over there now." "I'm gonna need you over at UCLA to stay with her, so go there. I've got to get working on who really killed Slade. I need to disprove all this nonsense they're spreading about her on TV." The problem was, I was unsure of exactly how to do that. The Academy photos proved Alexa and Slade had certainly been friends. But that didn't mean their relationship was more complicated. I believed in Alexa. She had saved me more than once. Now it was my turn to save her. The Medivac flight went off as scheduled. I caught a glimpse of Alexa as her stretcher was wheeled into the elevator for the quick trip up to the helipad. She was covered with green hospital sheets, her head wrapped in gauze. A drip trolley rode a bed rail above her, feeding fluids. She looked vulnerable and small. Moments later, I heard the blades of the chopper rev up, whining loudly on the roof above. I watched through the window as it headed west, flying low across the skyline carrying Alexa's unconscious body away from me. I made it to UCLA in less than forty minutes. I parked in a red zone, leaving my handcuffs on the dash, and ran inside, taking the elevator up to neurosurgery. Luther met me thirty minutes later and reported that Alexa was stable. Everything had gone as he had hoped. He asked me to be back here at seven that evening to meet the team of doctors he'd picked to be on her surgical and treatment teams. It was a long morning until Chooch arrived. I told him he would need to stay all day, and about the meeting at seven. Then I gave him a hug. "Dad, I don't know what to tell some of these guys at practice. With everything on TV, they're starting to look at me funny." "Tell them Alexa's your mom and that you love and believe in her." As I said this, my mind flipped back to the plastic container buried in my barbeque, with Alexa's taped confession inside. I didn't know why I was so sure it was false. I just was. I left Chooch and headed back to the main entrance. As I was coming out of the hospital, I ran into a cluster of news camera crews and field correspondents who had been alerted that Alexa had been moved to UCLA. "Detective Scully, CNN. Can we have a word with you?" one of them shouted. "No." "Detective Scully? Channel Four. Would you talk to us, please?" "No." I pushed past them as they turned on their cameras and chased after me. I knew I looked like one of those creeps they ambush on 60 Minutes. I ran past the cameras to my car, trailing a flurry of No Comments. Husband of Lieutenant Scully flees reporters' questions. My next stop was the Glass House. I needed to pick up Stacy Maluga's pager, which I hoped was back from ESD and on Sally Quinn's new desk. As I drove into the underground garage I noticed at least ten news vans parked out in front of the police administration building. I took the elevator to five. I was hoping to just pick up the pager and get out. But coming off the elevator, I ran straight into Captain Calloway. "What are you doing here?" he asked, startled to see me. Cal was about five feet four with a shaved, black, bullet head, and Mighty Mouse muscles. He was not a guy anybody took lightly. When I didn't answer, he said, "Hey, Shane, I want you out of here, now. Did you see that circus out front? You need to be invisible." "Lemme pick up my briefcase and I'll get lost." I pushed past him and got to my cubicle. There was a message slip in Cal's scrawled handwriting in the center of my desk saying that Dr. Lexington had called yesterday, along with the yellow sheets on Stacy and Lou Maluga that I'd requested. There was also a sealed envelope from ESD waiting in Sally's In-basket. My desk was a clutter. She hadn't used hers yet, so it was without a scrap of personal paraphernalia. I snatched up the ESD package without opening it and turned to leave. As I did, my cell phone rang and with it, my heart froze. Something new on Alexa? But it wasn't the hospital. It was Rosey. "Hey, Shane, I think we may have a line on this Bodine character." "Where are you?" "Meet us at Pepi's Mexican Diner on the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street in Echo Park?" "Now?" "This place is a grease pit. You wait too long, we'll all be in the can, fighting for toilets." I ran to my car and sped out of the underground garage. All the way there I wondered what they'd found in Echo Park. Suddenly it hit me. If you were so down and out that you had no options left, if you were willing to sleep in a cave with rats the size of house cats, if you could endure the damp reek of the ungodly, then you would go to the old Belmont Tunnel near the corner of Lucas Avenue and Emerald Street. That abandoned subway tunnel was the lowest rung on the human ladder. The last stop for lost souls in L. A.