looked like, the rich alto sound of her voice, the warmth and sweet fragrance of her on those rare occasions lately when they’d seen each other. The thoughts he was having only made things worse.
A shouted epithet echoed through the room once more. He turned from the window and glanced toward the open break-room door. All he’d heard for the past ten minutes was the arguing of the bikers who’d engaged in a brawl down the road at the apartments—if the rickety string of rock buildings by the lake could be called that.
The shouting grew louder. Lukas grimaced. Should he call the police to come and stand guard? With a population of about three thousand, Herald, Missouri, was only about a third the size of Knolls, and the police force had the same number of personnel. This was a rough town.
He walked back into the small five-bed E.R. to see if the X-rays were back on the patient who was shouting the loudest. They weren’t. Brandon Glass, the Saturday night tech, had to take care of both X-ray and lab, and sometimes he couldn’t keep up. He never attempted to disguise his resentment when Lukas gave him more orders.
“I’m not done with you yet, Moron,” one of the bikers muttered to the other through the thin curtain. “If my baby’s got a scratch on her, I’ll take it out of your hide.”
The privacy curtains were open, and Lukas turned around to glance at both men. The mouthy one held an ice pack to his nose, and the skin around his eyes had already begun to darken. Blood matted strands of his brown hair and stained his black T-shirt. Thanks to his running monologue, everybody within earshot knew that his “baby” was his Harley-Davidson. Thanks to his temper—and that of his antagonist in the next cubicle—and a broken beer bottle, his left forearm had just been prepped for suture repair.
Lukas sniffed. The room even smelled like motor oil and alcohol…and pot.
The other biker, who wore black jeans and boots and a black leather vest with nothing else, lay with his head turned way from his adversary. His name was Marin—from which, obviously, his biker buddies had hung the moniker of Moron, like little kids taunting one another. Marin’s antagonist attitude had apparently dissipated with the dwindling effects of the alcohol and other drugs coursing through his veins. His eyes gradually closed as Lukas watched. Good. They were winding down. Maybe the police could concentrate on breaking up barroom fights tonight. And maybe they could spend some time searching for that little girl who had disappeared from the Herald city park last week—if that acre of rusted swings and overgrown grass could be called a park. Lukas had overheard a conversation about that yesterday morning between a couple of policemen who were waiting for their prisoner to be X-rayed. Rumor said it was a kidnapping, and she apparently wasn’t the first child to disappear lately in Central Missouri. It made Lukas sick to think about it.
“Dr. Bower, the films are back,” came a strong, deep female voice behind Lukas.
He turned to see Tex McCaffrey—no one ever called her Theresa—hanging the X-rays up on the lighted panel.
“I had to do them myself. Godzilla’s in a bad mood tonight.” She cast a glare toward the open door that led directly into the radiology department. “Can’t get good help around here anymore.”
Lukas wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing with her. Tex was the paramedic-bouncer in this joint, and she served as the E.R. nurse on Saturday nights and quite a few weekdays, from what Lukas could pick up from the nursing schedule. If something came in she couldn’t handle, she could call for a nurse from the twenty-bed floor—not that Lukas had heard of that happening. He couldn’t imagine efficient, self-assured Tex getting anything she couldn’t handle. In just the short amount of time he’d worked with her, he’d been very impressed by her skills…and her size. He didn’t have the nerve to ask how tall she was, but he had to look up at her to make eye contact, so she was taller than five-ten.
Lukas checked the films, nodded, returned to the sink. Nothing broken. “Ready to help me with the sutures?” he asked.
“Got it all set up. I cleansed it, then irrigated it with five hundred of saline.” She paused and grinned in the direction of the glowering patient in question. She blew a couple of stray strands of curly dark blond hair from her face. “Care to guess his alcohol level? Three-twenty.” She almost sounded proud of him as she stepped in his direction. “I put the suture tray out of his reach.”
Broad-shouldered Tex was in her early thirties and could probably throw the whole biker gang on their kickstands if they got too rowdy. She was also Lukas’s next-door neighbor in a duplex at the edge of town. Her first cousin was Lauren McCaffrey, who was once one of Lukas’s favorite nurses down at Knolls—until she got him involved in this mess.
Lukas pulled on a pair of sterile gloves as he followed Tex’s athletic form to the curtained exam cubicle. She had set out 5.0 nylon for the suture and the requested lidocaine for anesthetic. Good. He glanced at the patient’s name on the chart again, hoping he could pronounce the last name properly. Proper name enunciation helped raise the patient comfort level, and he really wanted this particular patient to be comfortable.
“We’re ready to start, Mr. Golho—”
“I told you when I came in, don’t call me mister,” the muscled, tattooed man growled from beneath the ice pack on his nose. “Nobody calls me mister when I’m on the road.”
Oh, yeah. Lukas glanced at a note Tex had penciled in on her chart. So much for proper name enunciation. How could he have forgotten? “Catcher.”
“Ha!” came a voice from the other side of the curtain. Apparently Catcher’s antagonist hadn’t fallen asleep after all. “Why don’t you tell ’em where you got the name?”
“Shut up.”
“You want to know where it came from, Doc? They called him that ’cause he used to ride without a shield, and he caught bugs in his teeth.”
“I said shut up!” Catcher came halfway off his exam bed before Tex grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back.
“How do you feel about another tattoo, Catcher?” she asked, giving him a leering grin as she eased him back onto the exam bed. “Dr. Bower, here, is gonna test your pain tolerance.”
While Lukas cringed at her choice of words, Catcher repositioned the ice pack on his nose and laid his head back against the pillow. “No prob. Go to it.” He closed his eyes.
Lukas nodded. “Okay, Catcher. Have you ever had an allergic reaction to any anesthetic in the past?”
One eye came open. “Why?”
“Because I’ll be injecting lidocaine into the wound.”
“No, you won’t.” Both eyes were open now, and their dark brown-gray gaze held Lukas in a hard stare.
“Excuse me?”
“No ’caines. Can’t do them.”
No lidocaine? No anesthesia? Lukas did not want to hear this. He did not feel safe sticking a needle and Dermalon into the flesh of an already combative drunk. “You mean you’ve had a reaction in the past?”
“I mean I’ve been busting a cocaine habit, and I’m not going back to that.” Catcher took a firmer grip on his ice pack. “Just do it.”
Lukas looked at Tex and shrugged. Coming to work in Herald had been a big mistake. Oh, Lord, let my fingers be
