that okay,» she said to herself. «All things considered.»
The door to the lounge opened, and Dubois poked his head in. «Coast clear?»
«Yup. And I'm heading down to the chute.»
Dubois pushed the door wide and strode in, his crocs making no sound on the linoleum. «I don't
know how you do it. You're the only one who doesn't need smelling salts after dealing with
him.»
«He's no problem, really.»
Dubois made a chuffing noise. «Don't get me wrong. I respect the shit out of him, I truly do. But
I don't want him pissed.»
She put her hand on her colleague's shoulder. «Pressure wears on people. You lost it last week,
remember?»
«Yeah, you're right.» Dubois smiled. «And at least he doesn't throw things anymore.»
Chapter Seven
The T. Wibble Jones Emergency Department of the St. Francis Medical Center was state-of-the-
art, thanks to a generous donation from its namesake. Open for just a year and a half now, the
fifty-thousand-square-foot complex was built in two halves, each with sixteen treatment bays.
Emergency patients were admitted alternately to the A or the B track, and they stayed with
whatever team they were assigned until they were released, admitted, or sent to the morgue.
Running down the center of the facility was what the medical staff called «the chute.» The chute
was strictly for trauma admits, and there were two kinds of them: «rollers» who came by
ambulance, or «roofers» who were flown into the landing pad eleven stories up. The roofers
tended to be more hard-core and were helicoptered in from about a hundred-and-fifty mile radius
around Caldwell. For those patients, there was a dedicated elevator that dumped out right into the
chute, one big enough to fit two gurneys and ten medical personnel at one time.
The trauma facility had six open patient bays, each with X-ray and ultrasound equipment,
oxygen feeds, medical supplies, and plenty of space to move around. The operational hub, or
control tower, was smack in the middle, a conclave of computers and personnel that was,
tragically, always hopping. At any given hour there were at least one admitting physician, four
residents, and six nurses staffing the area, with typically two to three patients in-house.
Caldwell was not as big as Manhattan, not by a long shot, but it had a lot of gang violence, drug-
related shootings, and car accidents. Plus, with nearly three million residents, you saw an endless
variation of human miscalculation: nail gun goes off into someone's stomach because a guy tried
to fix the fly of his jeans with it; arrow gets shot through a cranium because somebody wanted to
prove he had great aim, and was wrong; husband figures it would be a great idea to repair his
stove and gets two-fortied because he didn't unplug the thing first.
Jane lived in the chute and owned it. As chief of the Trauma Division, she was administratively
responsible for everything that went down in those six bays, but she was also trained as both an
ED attending and a trauma surgeon, so she was hands-on. On a day-to-day basis, she made calls
about who needed to go up one floor to the ORs, and a lot of times scrubbed in to do the needle-
and-thread stuff.
While she waited for her incoming gunshot, she reviewed the charts of the two patients currently
being treated and looked over the shoulders of the residents and nurses as they worked. Every
member of the trauma team was handpicked by Jane, and when recruiting, she didn't go for the
Ivy Leaguer types necessarily although she was Harvard-trained herself. What she looked for
were the qualities of a good soldier, or, as she liked to call it, the No Shit, Sherlock mental set:
smarts, stamina, and separation. Especially the separation. You had to be able to stay tight in a
crisis if you were going to W-Z the chute.
But that didn't mean that compassion wasn't mission-critical in everything they did.
Generally, most trauma patients didn't need hand-holding or reassurance. They tended to be
drugged up or shocked out because they were leaking blood like a sieve or had a body part in a
freezer pack or had seventy-five percent of their dermis burned off. What the patients needed
were crash carts with well-trained, levelheaded people on the business ends of the paddles.
Their families and loved ones, however, needed kindness and sympathy always, and reassurance
when that was possible. Lives were destroyed or resurrected every day in the chute, and it wasn't
just the folks on the gurneys who stopped breathing or started again. The waiting rooms were full
of the others who were affected: husbands, wives, parents, children.
Jane knew what it was like to lose someone who was a part of you, and as she went