Free Deadly Diversion: A Medical Thriller by Eleanor Sullivan Page B

wrong?”
    “I was wondering if it was too much. This is what he worried about, that we might not be able to resuscitate him.”
    “We did all we could, Monika. The damage had been done. His brain was fried.”
    “I know,” I said with a sigh.
    I checked the night-shift report.
    “Something else?” Tim asked.
    “Could Bart had given him morphine, too, and not charted it?”
    “What makes you think that?” Tim asked.
    “Uh, he’s not always as accurate as he could be,” I explained, equivocating.
    “I don’t blame him if he missed something,” Jessie said, coming through with a wash basin. “What with all the work we’ve got...” Her voice trailed off as she headed into Huey’s room to help Laura, who had started cleaning up Huey’s body for the morgue.
    “Nah, Bart was gone before,” Ruby said. “With that Lisa.”
    “Lisa? Was she in here?” I asked.
    Ruby sat down, creaking the springs in her chair. “Yep. She came in right behind me and she saw him in the med room, but I stopped her. No, sir, I weren’t having her in there with all them drugs, not in my med room.”
    “Then what happened?”
    “She just followed him out.”
    “So she never got into the med room? Or in a patient’s room?”
    “Nope. I didn’t take my eyes off her until she left.”
    “Jessie,” I said as she came out of Huey’s room with a wash basin, “did you and Bart do the narcotic counts this morning?”
    “He got away before we could do them,” she said over her shoulder.
    The same nurse’s aide who’d thought a blanket was the treatment for a reaction to a transfusion came out of Huey’s room carrying an IV bag, the PCA pump still attached, and the tubing dragging behind her on the floor.
    “What are you doing with that?” I asked her.
    She looked at the almost-full bag. “I thought maybe you could, like, reuse this.”
    Ruby rolled her eyes and looked at me pointedly.
    “We never reuse anything that’s been used on someone else. Never.” I squinted at her name badge. “Josie.”
    “I just thought, like, save some money...” Her voice faded away as Ruby and I stared at her.
    “Take it back into the room. Laura or Jessie will tell you what to do with everything.”
    “They hiring people with no sense now,” Ruby said, shaking her head.
    I sighed. Poor training and too little of that was to blame. Not the nurse’s aide.
    The phone rang and Ruby told me it was E.R. Wanda filled me in on the patient, and I told her to hold up until we could have the room cleaned. She agreed but complained about having to keep other patients waiting in the hall.
    “Yeah? Well, we got a dead one,” I said louder than I intended. A man waiting for Serena to finish with his mother looked up. I lowered my voice. “Sorry, Wanda. We’re all stressed out, I guess.”
    “Just hurry,” she answered. “We got them piled up down here.”
    The morgue attendant had left the special gumey we use to stash bodies so it can be moved through the halls without anyone realizing it is anything but an empty stretcher. The obvious effort it takes to maneuver it, though, belies our subterfuge. After Jessie and Laura had cleaned up the body, taped the dangling tubes to the body, slipped a tag on Huey’s toe and another around his neck, I had helped them lift the body onto the shelf that was stowed beneath the plain top, and we had pulled the gurney out into the open area to be picked back up by the attendant.
    I was on the phone to housekeeping trying to convince the supervisor that we needed the room cleaned stat when the attendant came through the door.
    “’Bout time,” Ruby said.
    “No hurry, is there?” he asked, popping the wad of gum in his mouth.
    “For us, they is. Now you git moving.”
    He grabbed the cart and pushed it toward the entrance. He glanced back at Ruby and as he did the gurney hit the swinging doors with a bang.
    I cringed.
    He backed up and the doors swung open and hit the gurney again.
    Mavis came