Spitting Image Read online

  Spitting Image

  Patrick LcClerc

  Ink and Bourbon Publishing

  Copyright 2016.

  The right of Patrick LeClerc to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act of 1988.

  Cover design copyright FerineFire.com.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or commerce, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN-13: 978-1532753626

  ISBN-10: 1532753624

  Chapter 1

  THE AMBULANCE AIR CONDITIONING was fighting a losing battle against the summer heat as we sat, parked in the shade of a three decker near the river, the idling diesel motor lulling us toward sleep.

  At least it would if the radio chatter didn’t keep us awake.

  “So,” said Pete, “explain this to me. Diesel is like, what, four bucks and change a gallon?”

  “Thereabouts,” I replied.

  “And we need to keep the truck running for the AC, so the patient compartment doesn’t overheat and put everybody into respiratory distress and the drugs don’t boil in the vials, right?”

  “Seems like we do.”

  “And there’s a nice, cool garage back at the base, along with an air conditioned day room with couches and a TV, and other various creature comforts. Which is nicely located in the middle of the city.”

  “There is indeed.”

  “So why the hell are we sitting out here posting in the heat of the day when the damn city is only three miles across?”

  “Fearless Leader explained that,” I said. “We need to improve visibility for FirstLine Ambulance. Show the flag. Let the good people of Philips Mills know we’re here to serve them. The contract is up this fall. Can’t let Tri City move in on our territory.”

  “OK, but, first off, there are no good people in Philips Mills, and we’re not showing the flag, we’re lying low, hiding in the shade, and how is it going to boost the image of FlatLine when all people see is two sweaty medics sleeping in the truck in some nasty alley? Pretty soon the whores and junkies are gonna start complaining about the diesel exhaust.”

  “Ah, now you ask a question that is beyond me. I am but a simple street medic. A humble pawn in the EMS system. The answer to that question requires us to think like a manager.”

  “So when I actually get heat stroke and become delirious it’ll all make sense?” he asked.

  “That might do it.”

  “Shoulda got a real job,” he muttered, leaning his head back and pulling the brim of his hat down over his eyes.

  I turned back to my paperback. I had a hard time sleeping in the truck. I did hope the heat would break soon. When it got bad in the city, the hot, heavy air would make breathing a chore for even healthy people. Everybody with a respiratory problem living on the top floor of a poorly ventilated three decker would start calling. Then the heat would set tempers on edge, and the unemployed young men who fought the heat with beer all day would start fighting one another all night. It would be too hot and stifling to sleep, and every little mundane daily annoyance would fester and churn until it erupted.

  There would be no rest for us tonight.

  And none now, even when we should get a rest in during the afternoon lull, since we had to go out and show the flag so that the managers in their air conditioned offices could boast of our Heightened Visibility in the Community when bonus time came around.

  The radio cut into my thoughts.

  “Paramedic 20, P 20. Respond to 53 High Street for the chest pain.”

  “Twenty,” I said into the mic. “53 High Street for chest pain.”

  Pete cursed, flipped on the emergency lights and pulled out of the alley. High Street was the old rich section. Where the mill owners had built their mansions. Now some of the old stately houses stood vacant, some were run down shells inhabited by the descendants of the rich and powerful fallen on hard times. Many were divided up into apartments.

  The one we stopped at was one of the latter. The Fire Department was already there, all of them inside, no doubt saving the day, but one of them had thoughtfully propped the door open for us.

  We hauled the gear up an old, steep, poorly ventilated staircase, reached the top sweating and out of breath.

  “Hey guys,” I panted at the firefighters in the room. “Watcha got?”

  “Sixty two year old female complainin’ of chest pain,” said the lieutenant. “Has a history of heart.”

  “Anything besides heart, Loo?” Pete asked.

  “I think she has sugar,” said the officer.

  I turned to the patient before Pete teased out any more profound medical insights from our esteemed colleagues and started my assessment.

  I groaned inwardly. She was heavy, and her color was that awful gray cast that meant she was going to try to die on me. And with a history of coronary artery disease and diabetes–excuse me, heart and sugar– complicating things, she could go bad very fast.

  “Let’s get the line and EKG up here,” I said. “She looks a little pale.” She looked horrible, but one simply doesn’t say that in front of the patient. I figured that after we carried her down that stuffy, narrow staircase, she’d be even worse.

  As would I. Better we start treating her here, while her heart was still beating and my hands still steady, rather than fishing for a vein with sweat running into my eyes and my breathing ragged and my arms shaking from carrying her down that narrow nightmare of a staircase.

  “She does look sick,” Pete agreed. “You guys get a pressure?” he asked the firefighters.

  “120 over 80,” said the fireman kneeling by her chair. I believed him like I believed the check was in the mail.

  “Heart rate of 80?” asked Pete. He can do that with a perfectly straight face.

  “76.”

  “Outstanding,” he said. “Anybody got a med list from her?”

  “Right here.” A fireman handed him a plastic Market Basket grocery bag filled with prescription bottles.

  I focused on the patient, tuning out the rest of the room so that I didn’t say something career limiting. “Hi, ma’am. I’m Sean, one of the paramedics. How’s that pain right now?”

  “It’s bad,” she gasped. “Like somebody sitting on my chest.”

  Great. “Is it just in your chest or does it go anywhere?”

  “Down my left arm and up to my jaw,” she replied.

  Classic.

  I squatted down by the chair, taking a quick pulse.

  Huh. It really was around 80. And while she was still a scary shade of pale, she wasn’t clammy, which was odd.

  I decided to err on the side of caution and started an IV while Pete snapped EKG electrodes onto the leads and applied them to the patient. She surprised me by flinching when I put the IV in. Most people are so distracted by their crushing chest pain that they don’t even notice the needle.

  I looked at the screen on the cardiac monitor. Perfect. The EKG of an eighteen year old Olympic swimmer.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Ma’am,” I asked, “on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt, how bad is your chest pain right this second?”

  “Twelve,” she gasped.

  Of course it was.

  Drug seeker? I wondered. But how do you fake that deadly pallor?

  “OK,” I said. “EKG looks clean. Vitals seem fine. Allergic to any medication, ma’am?”
<
br />   “No.”

  “Alright, I’m going to ask you to chew these.” I handed her four baby aspirins. “Then we’ll run you up to the General and they can check you out.”

  “Oh, no,” she shook her head. “I need to go to Riverdale Valley.”

  I blinked. “PMGH is like a half mile away, ma’am. And they have a cardiac cath lab. The Valley isn’t really a good choice.”

  “I need to go to the Valley,” she insisted, getting more agitated.

  Pete shrugged. “Her EKG is fine and her vitals are OK. She seems pretty stable.”

  “And the Valley can fix that for her,” I whispered.

  He shrugged and pointed to his watch: the International Sign for “we’ve wasted enough time, it’s her funeral.”

  “Alright, ma’am–actually, what’s your name?”

  “Phyllis,” she said, after what might just have been an instant of uncertainty. “Phyllis Constantine.”

  “Alright, Mrs. Constantine, we’re going to have you sit in this chair and we’ll carry you down to the ambulance. Please don’t reach out. I know it’s a strange feeling, but if you reach for the banister, you’ll throw off our balance and we’ll fall and then we’ll need three more ambulances. So keep those hands on your lap. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  We got her down stairs and into the truck. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. She was heavy, but not as heavy as she looked.

  In fact, she wasn’t as anything as she looked.

  I ran another EKG, which still looked fine, and gave her a spray of nitro under her tongue. I rechecked her pulse, pushing my senses deep into her cardiovascular system as my fingers rested on her wrist.

  That’s something I’ve been able to do for a long time. I can sense a person’s injuries. And usually heal them. It’s not something I advertise. That’s one reason I like EMS. People usually don’t know how sick they are and you can fix them up before tests can prove it.

  Miraculous cures make people suspicious, and suspicious is never good. It has been a long time since anybody was hanged for witchcraft in this state, but old paranoia dies hard.

  Like I said, I’ve been able to do this for a very long time.

  I opened my senses and scanned deeper. Nothing. Clean as a whistle. No blockage, no narrowing, no vasospasm restricting blood flow.

  So why was she grey? I’d seen enough sick people to associate that pallor with a lack of blood perfusing the surface, and it usually meant a bad, bad outcome. In Phyllis’ case, the presentation just didn’t jive with the vitals or the monitor or even my special sense.

  Well, that would be something for the doctors at the Valley to figure out. That’s why they get paid the big bucks.

  We dropped Phyllis off at the ER and got back in the truck.

  “So why’d she want to come here?” Pete asked.

  “Didn’t say.”

  “If she had nontraumatic back pain, I’d say drug seeking and maybe the General has shut her off, but chest pain isn’t really a big fake diagnosis.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, better to stick with the vague complaint that nobody can disprove and hope the ER doc just writes a script to get you out of there. Chest pain means tests and needles and all kinds of hassle.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “Gets us out of the loop for a while. We can get a decent iced coffee at Heavenly Donuts and take a long, slow cruise back to the city.”

  As we drove, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. That uneasy prickle on the back of my neck. “Something wasn’t right about that patient,” I said. “She looked like crap, but nothing else jived.”

  “Dude, I stopped caring five minutes ago. Patient presented with atypical chest pain, we provided stellar prehospital care and transported her to the shitty ER of her choice. And I’m sure before this shift is over, we’ll transport even more fat patients from their third floor walkups and I’ll have stopped caring about them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Let’s just go get a decent cup of iced coffee. There’s a bunch of hot girls who work at Heavenly.”

  “There are worse things than pretty girls and good coffee.” I settled back in my seat. “Speaking of pretty girls, you still dating Katie?”

  He shook his head. “No. Never had the feeling that was going to be much of a long term thing. Katie’s not really Miss Right. More like Miss Right Now.”

  “And she dumped you?” I asked. “Unbelievable.”

  “Katie’s not looking for long term. She’s still in Baskin- Robbins.”

  “What?”

  “You never heard that one?” He laughed. “Juan and I figured this one out. Ok, long story. Katie’s like, what, twenty? Twenty-one?”

  “Somewhere around that.”

  “So, she’s just recently discovered dick. And she really likes it.”

  “Still following you.”

  “Now, imagine if you just tasted ice cream for the first time. Like, you were raised in a cave and then walked into Baskin- Robbins and tried it for the first time. Would you just say ‘it can’t get any better than this’ and eat vanilla for the rest of your life?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “So, figuratively, she’s just tasted ice cream. And if dick was ice cream, and EMS was Baskin- Robbins, Katie would want to try all thirty-one flavors. One day she’ll decide her favorite is Mint Chocolate Chip and that’ll be her go-to, but right now, there’s just so much left to try.”

  “You’ve put a disturbing amount of thought into this analogy,” I told him.

  “And, really,” he went on, “when you think about it, to a pretty young girl like her, EMS is the endless dick buffet. She’s cute, she’s fun to be around and she has a smokin’ body. How many of the cops, firefighters and medics she’s surrounded by every day are going to say ‘no’ to her?”

  “Good point.”

  “Some day, after she settles down, she’ll go get her nursing degree or whatever and find some guy with a stable job and walk away from this past like it never happened.”

  “You demonstrate new depths,” I told him. “Cynical depths, maybe, but depths. You’re not too broken up?”

  “Like I said, it was never gonna last. But it was fun. And I learned a lot about piercings.”

  I thought about it. While it was sexist and overly simplistic, it was a theory that fit Pete’s view of the world nicely. I could even relate, both to discovering ice cream and to moving on from a past. I wasn’t as sure as Pete was that Katie would move on as easily. I never found it quite so simple. Necessary, yes, for a man who never seemed to age, but simple? No.

  I like people. I get attached. I have a hard time keeping a relationship casual enough so it doesn’t hurt to move on before anybody connects the dots and notices that I don’t look as old as I should.

  Pete, though, he would probably be good at this whole immortality thing.

  Chapter 2

  I PAUSED AT THE TOP of the stairs and took a few deep breaths. The tall windows let the sun beat into the staircase, closed fire doors prevented any ventilation. The south facing glass was nice in the winter, but now it was a bit much. Especially after a long night working the truck. I opened the door onto my floor and leaned against the jamb, rubbing back and forth to scratch the itch between my shoulderblades.

  It would have been worse if I’d been wearing the old, horrible polyester uniform shirts FirstLine Ambulance provided. Sarah had found me some cotton shirts, almost the same style, and had Paramedic and company patches sewn on. It made a difference.

  I walked down the hallway, opened my door and went in. I reached down and scratched the cat on the top of the head, then went to the windows. The same tall, south facing windows let the morning light pour in. The building had been a textile mill back a century and a half ago, and the town was built to staff and feed it. Sunlight through the windows had illuminated the looms and spindles, and saved the owners a fortune on lamp oil. In the winter, the sun warmed the place, and in New England y
ou heated a building far more days than you cooled it.

  And when the industry moved away to poorer states, where the unions hadn’t fought for living wages and safety regulations, the mill stood empty until some enterprising contractor had turned it into apartments.

  I opened the top panes of the windows to let the heat boil out, and the bottom pane to let the morning cool roll in. I stripped off my sweaty uniform, pulled on some shorts and thought for a moment. I could put on a pot of coffee, which would make sense at seven thirty, but that would mean I’d have to stay up, and I had been awake all night.

  I shrugged and took a bottle of beer from the fridge. I decided that it counted as drinking after work as opposed to drinking in the morning.

  I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to eat first or sleep first when I heard a knock at the door. Curious as to who would be knocking at this hour, I walked over and opened the door a crack, holding my beer out of sight.

  I’m not above drinking before eight in the morning, but I don’t always feel like explaining it.

  I saw Sarah’s face sideways through the gap. Big green eyes, loose blonde curls and a crooked smile that made my heart beat faster and my blood start migrating south.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” she said. “May I come in? I brought bagels.”

  “Well, if you brought bagels,” I said, opening the door.

  She walked in and gave me a kiss. I’m sure she noticed the bottle in my hand, but if she made a judgment, she kept it off her face. “Tough night?”

  “Busy,” I replied. “Five runs after midnight, spread out enough so we got about ten minutes of sleep between calls. Nothing earth shattering. Those new shirts you bought me made a big difference. It’s like a hug from a cool breeze.”

  “Glad they help.” She placed a brown paper bag of bagels on the table. “It’s hot in here.”

  “It is since you came in,” I said, giving her a squeeze.

  “Be still, my heart,” she laughed. “But I can see why a cold beer looked better than a hot coffee.”

  “This place was closed up for a day with the sun beating in. Give it an hour with the windows open and the fan on, it’ll cool down nice. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”