Verdict in Blood - By Gail Bowen Page 0,50

of my life. I followed behind as Hilda was wheeled through the E.R. The medical people exchanged information. Most of it was indecipherable, but the fragments I understood were terrifying: estimated 30 per cent blood loss; thready pulse; pupils sluggish to light; extremities cold.

A nurse stopped me at the double doors that opened into the treatment rooms. Her words were diplomatic, but the message was clear: the experts were taking over; I would just be in the way. I turned back and, for the first time, I took in the scene in the waiting room.

It was Sunday night, and the place was filled with the pain of other people’s lives: a filthy, wiry man with the crazed eyes of a prophet or a solvent-drinker; a terrified father with a feverish little boy; two uniformed police officers with a young woman who was very drunk and whose arm hung at an unnatural angle from her shoulder; a teenaged couple with a croupy baby; and a dozen other soldiers in the Army of the Sick and the Unlucky. I found a chair facing the doors behind which Hilda had disappeared. If she needed me, I’d be close at hand.

There was a pile of magazines, soft with age and use, on the table next to me. The magazine on top was titled Southern Bed and Breakfast. The prospect of losing myself in a world of magnolias, overhead fans, and silver filigreed holders for iced-tea glasses was seductive, but try as I might, I couldn’t close the curtain on the human comedy playing itself out around me. An orderly was leading the wild-eyed man down the hallway; the feverish boy had begun to whimper and cry for his mother. The young woman with the hanging arm had turned against the police who had brought her in. All she was interested in now was getting patched up so she could leave. With her good arm, she was pounding on the chest of the younger of the cops, and saying, “What kind of fuckin’ doctor are you, anyway?” He bore the assault with patience and grace.

Time passed at a snail’s pace. Whenever the intercom crackled or a man or woman in medical gear appeared in the room, my heart leapt. But the name called was never mine, and as the minutes ticked by, panic threatened to overwhelm me. When Detective Robert Hallam came through the emergency-room door, my first thought was that he had arrived as backup for the police officers with the abusive woman, but although he nodded to them, he kept on coming until he got to me.

In his canary-yellow button-down shirt and Tilley slacks, he seemed an unlikely candidate for knight in shining armour, but, as it turned out, he was able to rescue me. He sat down in the chair next to mine.

“I’m sorry about Miss McCourt,” he said.

My words came in a torrent. “Have you heard how she is? No one’s said a word to me since I got here, and by now someone should know something.”

He sighed heavily. “You’re right,” he said. “Someone should. Let me go over there and see what I can find out.”

Detective Hallam walked over to the desk that separated the ones who feared and hoped from the ones who knew. When he showed the nurse his badge, she picked up the phone and made a call. Almost immediately a young man in surgical greens came through the door behind her. The three of them bent their heads together, then Detective Hallam came back to me.

“It’s not good,” he said. “They’ve done a CT scan. She has a bad concussion, but they’re waiting for someone who specializes in head injuries to come in to see if she needs surgery. She’s also seriously dehydrated, and she’s lost a lot of blood. I don’t think any of her conditions are life-threatening in themselves, it’s the combination, and of course there’s her age to consider.” Unexpectedly, he smiled. “If you should happen to speak to her, don’t tell Miss McCourt I mentioned her age.”

“I won’t,” I said. Then out of nowhere, the tears came.

Robert Hallam waited out the storm. When I was finished, I blew my nose and turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s the not knowing that makes you crazy,” he said simply. “But they have promised to let us know as soon as they decide about surgery.” He gazed at me assessingly. “Are you up to a few questions?”

I shook my head. “I told the