Lindsay Longford - Dead Calm

By four in the afternoon, the turkeys had yielded to plain white. She’d meant to save the jingles until midnight. No sense rushing the season, but she’d run out of her white socks. It was going to be a five-sock-change day before she could get out of here, thanks to Billy Ray, the barfing good ol’ boys and the teenager from the motorcycle accident.

Dumb kid. No helmet. No sense. She straightened and felt the pop and crackle of every vertebra in her back.

Billy Ray dunked his mop into the cleaning solution, wrung it dry. “I’m cleaning this mess up, Doc, I am. Don’t worry.”

She gentled her voice and tapped his arm. “You’ll handle it.”

“Yep. Getting it done. Billy Ray’ll stay on top of it.” The slap-slap of his mop erased the spill of water, the spots of blood. “Busy night.” He nodded toward the examining rooms, scratched his nose. “Busier than last night. I like busy nights.”

“It’ll get busier before morning.”

“I liked that pumpkin pie you brung us, too. Real good pie. Whole lot better than cafeteria pie.” He dipped his head, peering at her from beneath his hair.

“Glad you enjoyed it.” She shook her head and, bells jingling, headed toward the last examining area of the observation room.

Like the scrape of fingernails across a chalkboard, a shriek ripped from one of the treatment rooms down the hall and halted her in her tracks. The eerie keening lifted the hairs on the back of her neck. She grimaced. “That the gunshot?”

“Nah.” Billy Ray shifted uneasily, lanky arms and legs in constant motion. “The woman. You know.”

“Right.”

Shattered and broken beyond recognition, the woman had been found earlier in the evening by the Poinciana cops.

Sophie had stitched and bandaged. She’d listened to whimpers in a language she didn’t understand.

She understood pain, though. No translator was needed for that language.

Billy Ray sent her a quick glance, then concentrated on his mop. “Real bad, huh?”

“It is.” Sophie heard the melancholy jangle of her bells as she shifted, half turning away from Billy Ray to check out the treatment room.

She’d put casts on the woman’s frail, small arms. Taped ribs. Sutured the long gash that cut whitely through hair matted with blood and sweat. Under different circumstances, Sophie imagined that the woman’s hair would have been a swath of glossy black, a source of pride. Maybe she’d been pretty, this small Asian woman who kept calling for something that Sophie couldn’t provide.

The woman sure as hell hadn’t deserved this.

Nobody did.

Now, still unconscious but moaning and calling out, the woman waited for an empty hospital bed upstairs. Sophie had done what she could. Nothing more she could do now.

From the first, the plaintive wails in an unknown language had pierced Sophie. Horrible to be unable to ease the pain. Worse to be powerless to answer the woman’s anguished cries.

Sophie balled her hands into fists inside her pockets. Not in her hands any more. In someone else’s.

Maybe the start of the holiday season would be a good omen for the woman. Maybe she’d get a miracle.

Probably not.

Over the doors to the waiting room behind Billy Ray, Christmas lights mingled with leftover paper pumpkins.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men? Right. Well, she could damned sure use a little goodwill toward women.

“I hope she’s gonna be okay. She gonna be okay?” Not meeting Sophie’s eyes, Billy Ray continued to work the strings of his two-foot-wide mop back and forth.

“It’s anybody’s guess, Billy Ray. We’ll find out. Who’s checking on her?”

“Ms. Cammie.”

“That’s good.” Sophie sighed and risked a glance back at the entrance to the emergency room, to the doors that led away from here, away from this mingled tragedy and comedy.

Outside the glass panels, red and green bulbs glittered along the swaying fronds of palm trees, reflected in the dark puddles underneath. Then the doors slid open and sweet-scented night air floated to her with a promise of escape, of air free of disinfectant and alcohol and despair.

That air teased her with the hope of fleeing this place where laughter was coming harder and harder these days, and when it did, it had an edge of desperation that crept insidiously into her spirit, stealing energy and joy with it. Silly socks weren’t much of a Band-Aid.

The curtain at the far end of the hall billowed, flattened.

Jerked back into the moment, Sophie shrugged and strode off, her muscles tight across her shoulders, the cuffs of her wet socks clammy against her ankles. “Gotta go.”

Another wail shivered through the hall.

Billy Ray plopped his mop on the cart and scurried down the hall. His raspy voice trailed behind him. “I’m keeping an eye on things.”

The desperate keening of the beating victim still ringing in her ears, Sophie shoved open the far curtain and glared at the newest patient.

In front of her, Santa sagged on the examining-room table. Blood dripped from his shoulder onto his seen-better-days polyester fur trim. His belly drooped over a cracked plastic black belt, and he clutched his fine acrylic beard with a lean, callused hand. A nurse had already cut him out of part of his suit, and a saline drip snaked down over his smooth tanned shoulder.

For a second Sophie paused, puzzled by a faint sense of familiarity. Something about the tilt of Santa’s head.

The reek of liquor filled the room.

He snugged the beard closer to his face, his long fingers disappearing into the crisp curls. Chilly blue eyes met hers impatiently. Warily.

Santa with an edge.

Not dying.

Just drunk and damaged.

Sophie shook her head and picked up the chart. Three wise men with frankincense, gold and myrrh would come waltzing through the door next. And they’d probably be two-stepping with the Easter bunny.

“Hey there, Mr. C. Rushing the season a little, aren’t you?” She flipped open Santa’s chart and scanned the nurse’s notes.

“Look, sugar, I don’t have all night.”

Sophie snapped the examining-room curtain shut. The rings rattled and skittered along the dividing rod. “Incidentally, that’s Dr. Sugar to you, Claus.”

Santa tugged at his beard, adjusting it around his face. Shifted one black-booted foot irritably. “I’ve got things to do, places to be.”

“Of course you do. And all before midnight, I’ll bet.” She smiled sweetly, acid etching her words. No sidewalk Santa reeking of gin was going to give her grief. Not tonight.

“Nah,” he grunted as she brushed by him and reached for the blood-pressure cuff. “No midnight curfew until the end of the month. Just working the elves overtime tonight.”

“Working’s what they call it these days, huh?” She pumped up the blood-pressure cuff and watched the numbers. One-thirty over eighty. He was in better shape than he looked.

From behind the beard and the cloud of white hair, his unfriendly eyes met hers.

Eyes that were almost sober. Their hostility caught her off guard.

Once more that sense of the familiar teased her brain.

Snapping on gloves, she inspected the jagged red line that began at the edge of his neck and disappeared under the ratty faux velvet of his suit. “Knife?”

Santa nodded, grunted a second time as he shifted uncomfortably on the table.

She touched the wound. A long, shallow cut. “Nasty bunch of elves you hang with, Claus.”

“Yeah, they can get testy. Like a lot of people.” His gaze held hers, and some emotion she couldn’t name stirred in the pissed-off blue depths.

With a flick of her hand, she stuck a digital thermometer in his mouth.

As her hand fell away, his gaze still held hers, and he tightened his mouth around the thermometer. It rose slowly, toward the ceiling.