Emergency Room Part 12

It looked like a squirt gun.

But Anna Maria knew dealers, and this was a dealer who had become an addict. Not a good sales plan. She knew the odd staring blaze in his eyes, the off-center confusion that would make him do anything without warning. She knew the gun would not squirt water.

Anna Maria prayed to the Lord Jesus not to let Jose cry or throw his bottle again. She had had her chance to run and she had screwed up. Nothing could be done now.

The thing was not to move. Like a little animal when a hawk flies overhead, the thing was to freeze, and not be seen.

The cops were also frozen. They saw the flutter in Dunk's brain and muscles and knew they were not dealing with sanity. Anna Maria saw the cops spreading their minds as well as their hands, trying to think about her and Yasmin and Jose and all the other kids in the Waiting Room at the same time they thought about armed dealers.

They didn't call it "hopped up" for nothing. The man with the gun was hopping around, his wires crossed so that his feet moved whether he meant them to or not.

Dunk kicked the double stroller.

Cal slept on, but Val awakened with a scream. It was the kind of scream that makes parents crazy; the kind of scream that turns a cute kid into the most annoying, obnoxious creature alive.

Dunk's nerves split like pieces of wire about to be spliced; he came apart at the sound of the screams and jerked Val out of the stroller to silence her.

The patients and families packed into the Waiting Room had a lot more to worry about now than just waiting. Waiting looked pretty good from here.

The Waiting Room 8:08 p.m.

HIS HANDS WERE TOO full. He did not know what to do next and everybody knew it. He was going to drop something, either the baby or the gun. Or he was going to shoot somebody, either the baby or whoever else the gun happened to be pointing at. He wasn't aiming. He was just holding.

The cops needed to give him choices, help him figure out what to do with those arms that were too full. "Now, sir," said the police. "You don't wanna mess with no baby. Babies are a pain. Let's just put the baby back in the stroller and talk about this."

The other dealer had sat down. Carefully. He was as afraid of the gun as everybody else. He held himself pointedly, like a rocket about to blast into s.p.a.ce and leave this mess behind.

Dunk had no secure grip on anything - not the gun, not the baby, and certainly not himself. He was about as hopped up right now as the mother eating the cracker packages. Fear and adrenalin had pushed him even farther than the drugs.

The baby he held under his arm like a newspaper flopped back and forth. It never stopped screaming, its sweet little face all peeled back like an orange into one great shriek.

The police had to shout over the baby's racket, just when they wanted to be all soothing and friendly.

"So, sir," they yelled, as if Dunk deserved a t.i.tle of respect, as if when they thought of Dunk, they thought "sir."

Sc.u.m, thought Anna Maria. Very good thing Dunk had not grabbed Jose, who was a biter. If Jose had bitten a drug dealer, he would get shot.

The cute little teenage mother did not seem to fathom the situation. She got up from her toddler chair, and stood right between the pointed gun and the police. "May I have my baby please?" she said, like somebody from a suburb, like somebody wanting the grocery boy to get a can off a high shelf.

The gun and the hand holding it went back and forth as if Dunk were playing Ping-Pong. But it was no soft little white ball that would go bang.

The mother looked like a high school girl.

She dressed the way Anna Maria wanted to dress when she was in high school. She held out her arms as if she actually thought Dunk would just give her her baby back.

Dunk stepped back, and then stepped back again. Anybody would have shifted anyplace for him, but people were sitting down and had nowhere to go. He pressed up against the black woman whose son had the broken bone.

Any semblance of control and power had vanished. Whatever the drugs and the nervousness might be doing in Dunk's system, they had turned him into total panic; total consuming panic.

"Now let's not get all excited here," said one of the cops. He was trying to keep his voice slow, but he had as much adrenalin pumping in him as the dealer, and his voice ripped as frantically across the room as the baby's. "Let's just not get ourselves all worked up."

This was absurd. The cops and the dealers were so worked up now they were practically on the ceiling.

The cop edged forward. "You wanna let me hold the baby? How about you let me hold the baby?"

Yet again, Diana listened to somebody tell somebody else where to go. It seemed to be an Emergency Room favorite, this sentence, consigning people to h.e.l.l. It struck Diana that the creep holding the baby, like the girl in CIU, already lived there.

The dialogue did not sound like anything in a movie. The cops forced themselves to back off physically. They were panting, as if they had been working out in the gym for hours, been on the StairMaster and the treadmill and lifted weights. All they had done was face a gun for a few seconds.

None of the cops did much. One of them actually took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and opened a stick for himself, chewing noisily. "Want a stick of gum?" he said to the guy with the baby.

Gum? thought Diana incredulously.

The ploy worked, unfortunately, with the wrong person.

"I do," said Yasmin, getting up.

Yasmin loved gum. She, too, walked right between the gun and the police. The cop gave the Juicy Fruit to her, smiling as if this was what he had had in mind. "Honey, you go sit over by the nurse, okay?"

The Waiting Room 8:12 p.m.

ANNA MARIA COULD TELL THE cops hated having kids around. It terrified them that they could not protect the kids; that the most likely to get hurt, as always, were the smallest and weakest.

Yasmin went over by the nurse, where she was scooped up and removed. Good. Anna Maria's only responsibility now was Jose. She was sorry about the baby girl, but Val was not her problem.

The police tried to talk the gunman into setting the baby down.

They tried to talk the young mother into backing off.

They tried to talk the dealer into getting his buddy to hand over the gun and the baby.

The other dealer claimed he'd never seen the guy in his life.

Dunk's eyes, flared wide with terror, flew toward Anna Maria, and she realized that she was the only one in the room who could actually name him.

Well, she wasn't dying that way.

In school tomorrow they had Art, and Anna Maria loved Art. She would take her crayon drawing in to show the Art teacher. He had promised they would make papier-mache, and Anna Maria thought those were such pretty words: papier-mache. What pretty things would they make out of papier-mache?

Dunk began backing up again, waving his weapon.

He was going to get himself pinned in the narrow corridor at the back of the Waiting Room.

That was fine with Anna Maria. She would grab the stroller, go out the other way, grab Yasmin, and beat it for home.

The gun went off, tossing its hot sh.e.l.l back against the baby's back while the bullet itself spun harmlessly across the room. The baby girl screamed horrifically when she felt the burn. The whole Waiting Room took this as a signal to start screaming, and the place erupted in howls of fear, one of which, Anna Maria was sure, was Dunk's own scream.

But he had the baby, and nothing else mattered.

He leaped backward down the corridor, ripped open the door that said STAIRS and was gone. The police launched themselves after him, yelling into their walkie-talkies, b.u.mping into each other and leaping over sprawled legs. As television went, it looked more like a football game than a cop show.

The Waiting Room 8:13 p.m.

THE BULLET HAD GONE into the wall.

The boy whose leg was broken said, "Wooo-oooo! Ma, let's dig it out! I want it for a souvenir."

"Boy, you crazy," said his mother. She was fanning herself with exhaustion and relief that the gunman was out of the room. Her son hobbled over, disregarding his pain, and used his penknife to dig out the bullet.

"Don't do that," said a grumpy patient. "The police will need that for the trial."

Street-smart people laughed. "Ain't never gonna be no trial. That man, he got off before, he get off now."

The young mother scooped up her remaining baby, staring at her little son with wonder; as if they had never met; as if the baby were some strange and wondrous creature from Mars.

The volunteer sat with her jaw hanging open, as if she had never seen anything like this in her life.

Anna Maria grabbed the stroller and beat it.

The Waiting Room 8:19 p.m.

MY BABY GIRL, THOUGHT ROO.

She could not move. She could not even go to hold Cal.

I'm no good, she thought. A good mother would run after him, screaming and beating on him. A good mother would shoot him dead or break his kneecaps.

She tried to figure out who in this Waiting Room was a good mother. That addict, coming down, her whole body and mind collapsing into one big, trembling, chaotic mess? But who knew enough to know her baby needed a doctor? Was she a good mother?

No.

n.o.body that far gone could be a good mother.

But she loves him, thought Roo. She loves him.

Roo was swamped with needing love: needing to see it, needing to feel it. Needing to hold the two people on earth who loved her: Callum and Valerie.

I forgot that part of it, thought Roo. They love me. No matter how much they drive me crazy, I don't drive them crazy. They go right on loving me. There is plenty of love in my house.

She found that she had peeled Cal out of the stroller, and draped him on her shoulder where he lay in that heavy clingy way that babies had, melding right onto Roo, his little hot cheeks one with her neck.

She found that she was sobbing, but not talking.

She found that the police were telling everybody to stay calm, especially her.

She found that the black woman was pulling her down. "Here, honey, here's what we'll do," said the woman. "You hold your little one, and I'll hold you, and we'll wait, and I just know the other baby will be fine." Roo lay deep inside the blessed comfort of somebody else's hug. Somebody else's unjudging love. "Just fine," said the woman. Singsongy, crooning a lullabye. To Roo. "Ju-uu-st fine," she repeated, rocking and comforting.

City Hospital: Subbas.e.m.e.nt 8:21 p.m.

SETH TOOK THE STAIRS down from seven, for no reason except the pounding of his hard shoes on the hard stair treads seemed to empty some of his embarra.s.sment. Instead of walking through the public areas of the hospital to get back to the ER, he would take the tunnels.

Of course, now when he was angry and felt stupid, he ran into three men who remembered him - they were in patient transport - and said, "Hey, man. How ya doin'?" and he in return had to say, "Not bad, man. Gonna live."

They slapped palms and slouched on.

Seth did not actually feel as if he were going to live. He felt supremely stupid, and it was a feeling Seth rarely had. What with Diana rubbing him as raw as the pavement had rubbed that kid on the bike, and his being a total uncoordinated jerk with that asthma mother - Seth wanted to go to the gym and hit a punching bag about seven hundred times.

He hit the bottom of the stairs and turned into the yellow tunnel.