“They’re what!”

Incredulous that they were going after the bullet in the ICU and not the operating room, Lou stared across at the man, who looked perfectly serious. Not possible, Lou was thinking. Even in the most ragtag level-two trauma center imaginable, no one would be fishing for a bullet while inside the ICU. Generally, what remained of the slug were fragments, and more often than not, the brain trauma caused by trying to remove them wasn’t worth the benefits. But no matter what, any procedure, whether an exploration or a decompression maneuver to reduce swelling, would be performed in the operating room.

“Going after the bullet,” Lou said. “Of course. Just like they do all the time in the movies. Usually, that’s when I snatch up my popcorn and leave.”

“Too gross?”

“Too absurd.”

The remark appeared to have sailed over the cop’s head. “What kind of doc are you, anyway?” he asked.

“Emergency. I work at Eisenhower Memorial in the city. Who’s going after the bullet?”

“I have no idea. I don’t live around here. I’m state police. We were called in to take over for the locals.”

Lou was about to grill the man for information when the glass doors to the unit glided apart and a trim, olive-complexioned woman in scrubs emerged. Tension was etched across her face. It took only a second for Lou to recognize her.

“Sara!”

Sara Turnbull and he went way back—almost to the beginning of Lou’s residency, when he was razor sharp, thrilled to be having his dreams come true, and enthusiastic as the Energizer Bunny—back to before his father’s financial implosion, and Lou’s subsequent moonlighting jobs, and the extra shifts, and the utter exhaustion; back to before the unstoppable downward spiral and the amphetamines, and the visits from the drug-enforcement people.

“God, am I glad to see you,” Turnbull said. “When they called from downstairs to say you were on the way up, I nearly jumped through the phone. They’re killing him in there, Lou. I don’t care what he’s done, it’s not our job to judge.”

CHAPTER 5

“Okay if I go in there, Officer?”

“Sorry to give you a hard time,” the cop said. “It looks like you have a boxer’s knuckle, there. I’m not used to seeing doctors with boxer’s knuckles.”

“I work in a really tough ER,” Lou replied.

Sara Turnbull was a crackerjack nurse—as smart and intuitive as she was compassionate. There was a time when Lou could have added passionate to her list of attributes, but those times were long past. The last he had heard from her was a get-well card forwarded to him in rehab.

“How long have you been working here?” Lou asked as they joined the crowd milling in the gleaming ICU.

“Just four months. My husband’s a nurse on med/surg. We have a one-year-old son. It’s not Eisenhower, but it’s a decent-enough place—at least it was. This is a mess, Lou. An absolute mess. I’m charge nurse today, and I can’t follow some of the things that are happening.”