buried in a towel, the towel firmly pressed against his knees.
Well, that would explain the muffled sound, Mac thought. But not what the boy was doing there in the first place.
Mac glanced again at his watch. Minutes were melting away and so was his safety margin. At this rate, there wasn’t going to be time for a shower. Probably the only thing he could manage would be to change his shirt. If he left now.
The debate whether to leave or to linger a few more minutes was over with in less than a heartbeat. There were more important things right now than getting a clean shirt.
“Hey partner,” Mac said softly, edging his way into the small area, “trying out our towels to see if they’re soft?”
The small, dark head jerked up, then down again, as if the boy had remembered something and pressed his face against the towel again. He said nothing. Mac could have sworn the boy was trying to disappear into the very weave.
Feeling the wall, Mac found the light and flipped it on, then closed the door behind him. He took a couple of more steps toward the boy, approaching him the way he might a frightened, wounded animal he didn’t want to scare away.
“Oh, I get it. You’re the strong, silent type.” Standing in front of him now, Mac crouched down before the boy, who seemed to physically shrink away even further. “You know, you’re going to suffocate if you burrow any further into that towel.” Mac addressed his words to the top of the boy’s dark head. “I’m Dr. Mac. They let me play here sometimes. What’s your name?”
There was no response.
Mac took it in stride. Shyness was not something new to him.
“Nameless, huh? Okay, Nameless, I know there’s got to be someone looking for you so why don’t we blow this Popsicle stand and get out where they’ve got a better chance of seeing you?”
Still holding the towel to part of his face, the boy raised his head, allowing one dark eye to warily look up at Mac.
There was a bloodstain slowly coming through the corner of the towel closest to the boy’s face. The boy was hurt. Had he come in with the balcony victims and had somehow been missed?
Mac didn’t think that very likely. The youngest person treated from the party had been a nineteen-year-old. This one didn’t look old enough to spell “balcony,” much less be on one while a bunch of so-called adults did their best to emulate a frat house prank.
Mac deliberately kept his voice calm, cheery, knowing that anything less would send the boy withdrawing even further into himself. A traumatized patient was just that much harder to deal with.
He thought about his nephew and pretended he was talking to Kirby. His sister’s youngest had always been more than a handful.
“Ah, I see an eye. Is there another one on the other side?”
Gently Mac began to coax the towel away from the boy’s face. The bandage that was barely resting against the little boy’s cheek had been applied by an amateur, very possibly the boy himself, and was about to come off any second. There was blood, both dried and fresh all along the small face.
Whatever had happened, Mac judged, had happened fairly recently.
When he reached for the bandage, the boy pulled back, his eyes wide, frightened. Mac waited a beat.
“C’mon, Nameless, let me see. I’m a better doctor than I look.” His eyes met the boy’s and his tone softened even more. It was soft, comforting. Questions filled his head, but they could wait for a little while. “I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
The boy whimpered again in fearful anticipation. He was shaking, Mac realized, but he didn’t shrink away this time and allowed himself to be examined.
It wasn’t pretty. There was a four-inch jagged laceration running along his left cheek. It had just missed his eye.
Mac felt like someone had stuck a red-hot poker in his stomach.
“You’re not part of the people who just came in, are you?” he murmured. It was a rhetorical question. The boy stared at him with wide eyes. “No, I guess not.” An urge to hug the boy swept over Mac, but he knew that would only frighten him even more. No sudden moves, no matter how altruistic. “Did someone do this to you?” The boy’s silence answered Mac’s question for him. Had it been an accident, he was certain that the boy, frightened or not, would have volunteered the information. “Okay, come with me. We’re going to make you good as new.”
Mac didn’t bother adding that the promise couldn’t be fulfilled immediately, that it would take some time and more than one operation to make things right, but those were details a frightened little boy didn’t need to hear right now. What he needed most was comfort.
He could do that much.
Very gently, he picked the boy up in his arms. Turning, Mac left the confines of the supply closet and walked out into the corridor.
The first person he saw was Nurse Icicle. It figured. But he didn’t have time to look around for someone else, someone he actually worked well with. The boy needed to have this tended to now, before an infection set in. If it hadn’t started to already.
Reaching out, Mac caught her by the shoulder before the woman could continue hurrying away to another trauma room.
“Jolene, right?”
She recognized the voice immediately. Shrugging him off, she squeezed out a terse “Nurse DeLuca,” between her teeth as she turned around.
And stopped dead.
Her eyes widened as she looked at the frightened little boy in Mac’s arms. Her mother’s heart twisted a little within her chest. A child in distress always got to her. “What happened to him?”
“Not sure,” Mac replied glibly, then looked down at the small being he was holding against him, his voice comforting as he added, “but we’re going to undo it, right, Nameless?”
Jolene stared at the world-class Romeo in front of her, torn between her readiness to dislike him and what she saw. “You don’t even know his name?”
She looked around to see if there was a worried parent hovering around somewhere close by, but there were only the same players she’d been seeing for more than the last three hours.
No one looked as if they’d lost anything but time and some skin.
He really, really didn’t care for her tone or the cool way she regarded him. As if he’d gotten his degree from the back of a comic book. But now wasn’t the time to put her in her place or to even find out just what her problem actually was.
“I know he’s bleeding and needs help. Anything else we can look into later.” He nodded past the regular rows of beds within the E.R. kept for standard cases and toward the trauma rooms. “Are there any beds available down here?”
Jolene thought for a second. “They just took two more up for surgery a few minutes ago. I think Trauma Room Two is free.” The victims had been doubled up by twos and threes, gurneys wheeled into the rooms serving as beds rather than just used for transport.
“Room
