The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,108

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She found the pager and was trying to turn it off—where was the stupid switch?—when the dispatcher loudly gave the address of the call: only a few blocks away. Lucy took a deep breath. She should go to the call. Actually, she had to go to the call. She would prove to Gerald that she was a responsible adult if it killed her.

Lucy looked at her watch. Pollack had been up in the air about what time he wanted to talk to her, “Just sometime tonight” was the way he put it. He could wait a little while longer.

She was already shaking when she pulled up to the old mobile home behind the other emergency vehicles. Take a deep breath, she thought. You were trained to do this. Sort of.

She met Gerald Trujillo on the way in. He gave her his summary of the situation: “The patient is a seventy-six-year-old female named Phyllis Parker with respiratory problems,” he said without animation. “She’s perfectly fine, but we need to check her out.”

“Cool,” was all Lucy said. He could at least have smiled at her and said hello.

Inside, other paramedics were bent over an old woman in a La-Z-Boy. They were asking her questions, but she stubbornly wouldn’t answer.

One of the medics was yelling, “Look, we just need some answers so we can help you better.”

“Lucy, why don’t you get a blood pressure,” Gerald said. Hell. Was he trying to punish her?

She rooted around in the paramedic’s medical bag, looking for a blood-pressure cuff and stethoscope. After a few seconds of watching her futile search, Gerald opened the front compartment of the bag and handed her the equipment. Damn. She was trying. Honestly. She moved toward the woman to put the BP cuff on her, knowing full well that she had no clue what she was doing.

“Get the hell away from me,” the woman said sharply to Lucy. “Not you. I want one of them to do it.” The woman gestured toward the male paramedics.

Lucy stepped back, stunned. It took a second for her to realize what the old woman had said. For the first time, Lucy looked around the room. It was dingy and cluttered. The dark-paneled walls made it look cryptlike. The garbage can in the kitchen was overflowing and a dog was yapping behind a closed door. In the corner were stacks of Capital Tribunes. Next to a half-filled ashtray on an end table was a police scanner.

“Lucy,” she heard Gerald say from somewhere across the room. “Lucy,” he said again. Why was he yelling? She turned and saw that he was standing right next to her. “Earth to Lucy. Let’s focus here,” he said. She took a deep breath to steady herself. She gave Gerald the stethoscope and blood-pressure cuff, her hand shaking. He noticed, but he didn’t comment. He probably just thought she was freezing up again. She took a few long, hard breaths as she watched him fasten the Velcro on the BP cuff around the woman’s flabby upper arm.

Lucy stepped back toward the old woman and said, “Hi. You might remember me from the Capital Tribune. I’m Lucy Newroe. And you must be Scanner Lady.”

It was almost six thirty P.M. by the time they had transported Scanner Lady to St. Vincent for treatment of chronic emphysema and bronchitis. Mrs. Parker wouldn’t talk after Lucy told her that she was an editor at the Capital Tribune. But Lucy didn’t need to hear her speak again. She was sure. She knew that voice.

During the ride to the hospital, Lucy busied herself with putting away equipment in the ambulance so that she wouldn’t have to think. If she thought, she might explode. Or more likely implode. She felt nothing. And she wanted to stay that way for as long as possible. She needed a drink. Hell, she needed a keg.

Lucy was in the hospital hallway, putting clean sheets on the gurney—making a bed, finally something she knew how to do—when she heard someone call her name. She looked up to see Gil limping toward her.

“Gil,” she said, “what are you doing here? I was just going to call you.” She watched him walk for a second before saying, “You’re limping.”

“I rode in with the paramedics. We brought Ron Baca in.”

“Great, you found him. What happened? Did you beat him up?” She smiled as she tucked the sheet under the gurney’s mattress.

“He’s dead. His mother shot him.”

“Oh my God,” Lucy said. She stared at nothing on the tea-colored wall.