William Kienzle - Deathbed

“Actually, the riot just got under way. So there isn’t much more to tell just yet. We know there will be demands made. But so far, we have no intimation of what they’ll be.”

“Is the entire prison population involved—all the inmates?” Lennon was feeding Dunnigan’s information into the CRT.

“No. Just the ones who were in the Big Top at that time. That would exclude those inmates restricted to their cells, the ones in solitary, and the ones in the ‘dog ward’—the most violent ones.”

Lennon liked that. Readers would relish getting acquainted with prison jargon like the “dog ward.”

“No,” Dunnigan continued, “not everybody. Maybe from 85 to 90 percent of the inmates are in on it. There’s talk that the prisoners themselves want to exclude three of their fellow inmates from the riot. None of us can figure that out yet. The word is that these three are born losers, considered jinxes by the others. If this is true, those three jerks must be the crap de la crap. It may make a good side-bar. I’ll get into that later. Right now, we’re waiting for the mayor, who’s supposed to be on his way over. I’ll be back to you.”

The connection went dead. Concise, factual, interesting, current, with a possible side-bar—everything you’d need to begin an important, breaking news story. Lennon had no sooner completed feeding the CRT when the phone rang again.

“Pfeiffer. This you, Lennon?”

Pat shook her head. Mark Pfeiffer was close to being the antithesis of Bill Dunnigan. Where Dunnigan was careful, factual, inclined to understatement, Pfeiffer was careless, and often inaccurate, with a massive ego—built up to defend an equally massive inferiority complex—that crowded out all consideration of others. Pfeiffer’s creed seemed to be: He that doth not tooteth his own horn the same shall not get tooted. Finally, Dunnigan was respected and liked by his peers, while Pfeiffer was neither respected nor generally liked.

“Yes,” Lennon responded wearily.

“Listen, this place is a madhouse. Everyone’s running around like their ass is on fire. Which reminds me, what are you doing tonight, Honey?”

Silence. Lennon knew of several News staffers who would willingly contribute to Pfeiffer’s severance pay just to get rid of him.

“Okay.” Pfeiffer was undaunted by Lennon’s stony silence. “We’ll pursue that and you later. Back to the dull stuff. Right now, nobody knows nothing. Seems some inmates got steamed and rioted at lunchtime. Nobody knows for sure whether they’re armed, but I’d lay you five-to-one they probably broke into the arsenal and got guns. Now that I think of it, I’d lay you for free gratis.”

Silence. Come to think of it, she’d contribute to a fund to have Pfeiffer castrated. Thank God for staffers like Dunnigan. From long experience as well as just the tone of his voice, she could tell Pfeiffer didn’t know what he was talking about. If she hadn’t had Dunnigan, she would have had nothing. She certainly wasn’t going to share a by-line with a nincompoop like Pfeiffer.

“Wait a minute, Sweetie,” Pfeiffer continued, “the mayor just got here. He’s being surrounded by the TV and radio creeps, and he’s got his usual entourage of bodyguards. But I’ll get to him. I’ll be right back with you, Honeypot.”

Not if I can help it, thought Lennon. The problem was, for this story she could not help it. She would have to listen to him, but she didn’t have to use anything he called in. And she was fairly certain she would use nothing of his. It wouldn’t make any difference. He wouldn’t recognize that— despite having his by-line with the others on the story—nothing that he had called in had been used. Lennon would have to rely on the dependable Bill Dunnigan and whoever the third reporter might prove to be.

The phone rang.

“Dunnigan. Pat?”

“Yeah.”

“The mayor’s here. Says it’s too early to comment; he’ll have to hear the demands before he can make a statement. The governor’s on his way. But right now, Mayor Cobb is the authority of record. It’s his jurisdiction and he’s not one to slough it off.

“Pat, this is gonna be a step-by-step procedure. We’re going to have to take one comment at a time. So stay with me and I’ll give you the developments as they happen. One thing: From everything I’ve been able to gather so far, this place is going to be shut up tight as a drum even after the riot’s been settled. It’ll be a long, long time before any of these guys get another visitor from the outside world.”

* * *

Father Koesler wondered why it had taken him so long to find the doctors’ lounge. It was an almost perfect place to wait for the bereaved when there had been a death in emergency or the operating room. The lounge was comfortable, some unseen hand kept the coffee brewing, and it was near the “quiet room” in that area of the hospital where the chaplain and the bereaved would meet.

Koesler was, indeed, waiting for just such an event. An elderly man had suffered a heart attack while shoveling snow. He was dead on arrival at St. Vincent’s emergency room. His next-of-kin had been contacted. Koesler was awaiting them.

In the lounge with Koesler were the members of an OR team, consisting of two surgeons—one of whom was Dr. Lee Kim—an anesthetist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. They had informed Koesler that they were waiting for a “hand.” Someone had put a hand through a pane of glass and, judging by Dr. Kim’s blood-spattered tunic, the wrist had bled quite a bit. One of the nurses commented on Kim’s stained tunic.

“Wrists bleed,” the principal surgeon observed laconically. He introduced himself to Koesler as Dr. James Meyer.

“She really did a job on herself,” said Kim, who had treated the patient in the emergency room, thus the blood. “Wrist is almost completely severed.”

“Oh. God!” Meyer said, “that means three or four hours.”

Both nurses winced. The anesthetist showed no emotion.

“I was home,” Meyer said. “We were just getting ready to go skiing at Pine Knob when the damn call came.”

“Yeah.” The anesthetist smiled. “You said good-bye to me in OR.”

“Well, hello again.”

“You keep referring to the patient as a ‘wrist,’” Koesler addressed him.

“That is all we will see,” Kim said. The rest of her will be draped. All that will be exposed will be her wrist. You get used to that after awhile. All you deal with in OR are appendages of one sort or another.”

The nurses’ expressions seemed to register a silent protest.

“Do you know what happened to her?” Koesler asked.

Kim shook his head.

“Didn’t you talk to her?” Koesler could not imagine treating a conscious injured person without inquiring what had happened.

“I used to ask people what happened,” Kim said, “but it was always the same story. Nothing unexpected. Just walking down the street. Just washing a window. Just opening a door. When the glass broke, or the piano fell, or my boyfriend shot me. Always the same. So, I stopped asking.”

Koesler thought that an odd explanation.

“What’s the status?” Meyer asked.

“I put a pressure pack on it,” Kim said.

“What time is the hand scheduled?” Meyer asked.

“Four-thirty,” a nurse replied.

The principal surgeon consulted his watch and sighed. “It’ll go right through dinner.”

The intercom squawked. Koesler was not expecting the voice nor was he attuned to it. He needed a short period to grasp part of what he’d heard and put it together.

There had been an announcement of a trauma. About that he was sure. A trauma case had just entered the emergency room. A motorcyclist had been hit by a car. There were multiple head injuries. There was more to the announcement, but that was all Koesler was able to decipher. He thought that must be the substance of the matter.