John Saul: Black Lightning

The voices from the darkness cried out again, though, and with a great wrenching pang of anguish, Glen knew that he had to turn away from the light, had to make his way back into the darkness.

Those who awaited in the light were eternal, and would be there to welcome him when the time was right.

But behind him there was still unfinished business, still things yet unaccomplished, still deeds left undone.

Turning finally away from the light, Glen Jeffers started back into the darkness.

“Put it up to three hundred joules and hit him again,” the paramedic who was struggling to revive Glen ordered. The driver adjusted the controls on the defibrillator, and a second later Glen’s body jerked involuntarily as the flash of electricity shot through him. His heart stopped for a moment, then started up again. “That’s the way,” the medic murmured under his breath as he studied the display on the monitor. But a second later he saw his patient’s heart run wild again, the first fluttering pulse turning into a useless vibration.

“Try again at three-sixty,” he commanded, pressing the paddles against Glen’s naked chest.

Once again the defibrillator fired. The paramedic held his breath as he watched the monitor, then ordered a milligram of epinephrine, and resumed applying CPR. As the seconds ticked by and Alan Cline unconsciously held his breath as he prayed helplessly for his partner to live, Glen’s heart began to beat again, and a moment later he was once more breathing on his own.

Scrambling into the driver’s seat, the second paramedic jammed the ambulance into gear and pressed on the accelerator.

The siren wailed its mournful plea, clearing the streets ahead.

The back doors of the ambulance were thrown open. Even before Alan Cline could scramble out, two orderlies pulled the stretcher bearing Glen Jeffers onto a gurney and wheeled it through the doors to the Group Health emergency entrance on Thomas Street. His mind only starting to recover from the shock of what had happened at the top of the skyscraper, Alan followed the stretcher inside, but as it turned left through another set of double doors, Alan went to the right, toward a counter behind which several people were struggling to cope with the barely controlled chaos of the emergency room.

On a worn Naugahyde sofa a large woman sat with her arm curled protectively around the shoulders of a sobbing child; in a chair nearby, a teenage girl with stringy blond hair and a vacant expression was attempting to nurse a baby whose screams made it sound as if it was in excruciating pain.

A man with eyes that smoldered with fury clutched at the makeshift bandage that had been wrapped around his upper right arm. When a woman with an already purpling bruise on her cheek tried to help him, he shoved her roughly away. “Ain’t you already done enough, bitch?” he growled, and the woman instantly recoiled as if he’d struck her. A second later, as a policeman appeared, the injured man turned away from the woman, who immediately began insisting to the officer that nothing worthy of a police report had brought them to the emergency room.

The whole scene struck Alan Cline as coming from some alien planet he knew nothing about, and for a moment he felt completely disoriented. Then he remembered Glen, still unconscious — perhaps even dying — being rushed into the opposite wing.

“The man they just brought in,” he said, injecting himself into the midst of a conversation one of the staff behind the counter was carrying on with a distraught woman. “Where is he?”

“Can’t you wait your turn like everyone else?” the woman demanded, fixing Alan with a glare from her drug-dilated eyes. “You’re not the only person here, you know.”

“Just tell me where they took him,” Alan demanded of the woman behind the counter, who had already moved closer to him, as though she welcomed even a momentary distraction from the angry patient’s siege.

“The cardiac case?” the receiving nurse asked.

Alan Cline nodded, and the nurse immediately handed him a clipboard. “If you could just fill out as much of this as possible, I’ll find out where your …” She paused expectantly, waiting for Alan to identify himself as either a relative, a friend, or perhaps even the lover of the patient.

“I’m his partner,” Alan offered, then, remembering Seattle’s domestic partnership ordinance, whose passage had been a cause for celebration among at least half a dozen of his employees, he spoke again. “His business partner.”

“Whatever,” the nurse said. “All I really need is his name, if he’s a member of Group Health. I can pull the rest of it out of the computer.”

“Then why can’t you pull my prescription out of the damn computer,” the woman next to Alan complained as he wrote Glen’s name down for the nurse. When the nurse simply ignored her, the addict swore under her breath, seemed to consider the odds of convincing the nurse to give her whatever it was she wanted, then shambled out, after mumbling that she would report the nurse to the co-op’s board.

“Do that,” the nurse sighed, not even looking up from the computer screen she was studying. “See you tomorrow.” As the woman disappeared out onto the street, the nurse finally glanced up, shaking her head sadly. “She thinks we’re a methadone clinic,” she explained. “Comes in practically every day, asking for — Ah, here it is!” She studied the computer screen, then smiled at Alan Cline. “Mr. Jeffers is just being admitted to the cardiac care unit.” Just then, Jim Dover burst through the doors, spotted Alan and joined him at the counter.

“Where’s Glen?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

Alan shrugged. “He’s in cardiac care,” he said. “Find out where it is while I call the office.”

Leaving Dover to get the information from the nurse, Alan crossed to the pay phones that lined one wall of the emergency room, found one that wasn’t broken and dialed the number that would bypass the switchboard and ring directly at the desk of Rita Alvarez, Glen’s secretary. As briefly as he could, he told her what had happened.

Sitting at Glen’s desk, where she had answered Alan Cline’s call, Rita Alvarez glanced at the small television her boss had told her to set up in the office that morning in case his wife showed up on CNN. Now, as she listened to Alan’s disjointed account of Glen’s heart attack, she found herself gazing at Anne, who, along with the warden and the rest of the witnesses to the execution, had just entered a room filled with reporters, cameras, and lights. “Go find out what’s happening,” she said. “Just stay with Glen, and let me know what’s going on. I’ll take care of everything else.” Hanging up the phone, Rita Alvarez went to work, first making a list of the people who had to be notified immediately, starting with Anne and progressing quickly through clients who had appointments with Glen that day, the firm’s attorney, and some of his closest friends. Less than a minute later she was speaking to the operator at the prison where Anne had just witnessed Richard Kraven’s execution.

“It’s an emergency,” she explained. “I need to talk to Anne Jeffers right away. She’s there at the prison. She was one of the witnesses—”

“Everyone wants to talk to everyone who witnessed the execution,” the operator interjected. “And everyone says it’s an emergency. If you’d like me to add your name to the list—”

“I’m secretary to Mrs. Jeffers’s husband,” Rita interrupted. “He’s just had a very bad heart attack. He may be dying.”

Anne hung up the phone but lingered over it, her hand unconsciously resting on the receiver as if maintaining physical contact with the instrument could somehow keep her connected to Seattle and whatever was happening there. A heart attack? Glen? But how was that possible? He wasn’t even forty-five yet! And he jogged every day, watched his weight — both of them were the quintessential Seattleites, spending as much time as they could out-of-doors, skiing at Crystal Mountain and Snoqualmie in the winter, rowing on the lake and exploring the San Juan Islands in sea kayaks in the summer. People like Glen didn’t have heart attacks!