Wheels In Motion Ch. 02

Officer Green took a look at my face then turned to the other patrolmen. "Guys, she's a woman's legal aid attorney. Her job is helping women like this victim. She's the victim's attorney." She turned to me, "You didn't see who shot her and no one else was here when you came in?"

"No! Can I go please?"

"I'll take you, but you ride with me and you talk to me the whole time, okay?"

"Fine, can we please go!?"

She turned back to the other patrolmen as she started to escort me out, "I'll take responsibility for her. Tell the detectives they can catch up with us when we're ten-ninety-seven at the hospital."

The ride to the hospital was a blur. I answered Officer Green's questions while she drove, and was startled when she pulled into the emergency bay; it felt like the trip had taken seconds. I jumped out of the car and ran into the hospital with Officer Green on my heels. The receptionist recognized me and buzzed us in, with a shocked expression on her face.

"Addison, are you alright?!"

"They just brought in Keisha Coates, GSW, where is she?!" I yelled.

"You're covered in blood!" she replied.

I looked down. My pink pantsuit had blotches of scarlet up and down.

"It's not mine, it's Keisha's! Where is she?!"

"I don't know! There was a GSW that came in maybe three minutes ago, maybe that's her? I think they're back in O.R. One."

I wasted no more words and sprinted away from the reception desk towards the operating rooms. I frantically scrabbled my hospital badge out of my purse, and was both surprised and relieved when it opened the hallway door to the operating rooms for me.

A nurse was going into O.R. One as I arrived and I tried to push past her into the room. She grabbed me, and stopped me just after I entered the operating theater.

"Whoa, you can't come in here!" the nurse said.

I took in the scene in front of me. Keisha was on the gurney, her shirt cut off and a paper drape laid over her with a circle in the middle exposing the bullet wound. There were eye-searing bright lights streaming down from a bank of lights on a movable arm above her. A doctor I didn't know was on the far side of the gurney, and Liz was on the side closest to me. Several nurses were quietly and efficiently doing unfamiliar medical tasks I couldn't identify. Everyone was in a full surgical gown and mask. There was a short, sturdy-looking platform with a small ramp someone had pulled next to the bed which let Liz get her chair up to a height that would let her work on the patient without lowering the bed so the other medical staff wouldn't have to lean down. The nurse started trying to push me out of the room, saying, "Come on, you have to go."

"Liz! Liz, she's my client! I found her in her apartment! What's going on, is she going to be... Let me go! I am not leaving! Liz, what's..."

Liz barked in a tone of voice I'd never heard her use before, but one that instantly commanded everyone's undivided attention. "Miss Wagner, shut up. Nurse Hayden, she can stay if she stands right there and doesn't talk. Get a mask on her. Nurse Navarro, hang two more units of o-neg, stat. Dr. Andrews, scalpel, right now."

I belatedly realized that the nurse who was holding me near the door was Kat. She grabbed a paper mask from a nearby cabinet and helped me get it on, putting the elastic loops over my ears.

The other young doctor handed her a shiny silver-handled blade and said, "Should we wait for Dr. Salvatore?"

"Dr. Salvatore is in O.R. Two trying to stop an MVA who went through his windshield from bleeding out." She leaned forward over Keisha, and poised her scalpel.

"Residents aren't supposed to perform surgery unsupervised," he said, a worried look in his eyes above his mask.

"If we wait, this woman is dead. If any attending or surgeon answers their page while I'm working, they can take over or supervise then. Now, please get your head out of my light, and everyone... Shut. Up."

The room went silent except for the insistent beeps and alarms coming from the machines hooked up to Keisha, the rhythmic hissing from the oxygen mask over her face, and the sound of my own ragged breathing. Dr. Andrews reached up and adjusted the light while Liz was leaning over Keisha, making tiny movements with the scalpel I couldn't see from where I stood.

She said "Retractor," and reached out without looking. Someone took the scalpel from her and slapped some sort of surgical grasping tool into her palm. She clamped the edges of the cut with it, and pulled the skin back. She repeated the move with several more retractors, making a grotesque looking hole in Keisha's abdomen, then said, "Forceps." Another tool was slapped into her hand. "Vitals?" she asked, as she gently probed into the hole with the tool.

"BP eighty over forty-five, pulse one-ten pulse-ox seventy-eight," Nurse Navarro said.

"Suction please, Dr. Andrews."

Dr. Andrews reached into the hole with a plastic tube that immediately filled with thick, red blood.

"Get another unit of o-neg on board, please. I'm going to need four-oh PDS on a seven gauge in about thirty seconds, make sure it's ready. Okay, everyone... hold onto your butts."

Everything in the room seemed to freeze, except for Liz and the excruciatingly deliberate motions of her forceps. She paused, adjusted her grip slightly, then slowly withdrew the tool out of the hole. There was a small, brass-jacketed bullet covered in blood clutched in the jaws of the forceps.

She held it up to the light and inspected it briefly, before dropping it into a pan held by one of the nurses with a little 'clink'. "Save that for the police, please," she said quietly.

She held the forceps out to a nurse who took them and handed her a tiny, curved pre-threaded needle, held in the jaws of another pair of forceps. Taking a second pair of forceps from the nurse, she started making deft movements with both her hands, twirling the noses of the forceps inside Keisha's abdomen. I noticed that people in the room seemed to have started breathing again, tension draining out of the air.

"What's happening?" I whispered to Kat, who was still holding me in place.

"I've removed the bullet, and I'm suturing a laceration on her liver," Liz said in a matter-of-fact voice without looking up, moving her hands in quick, precise looping motions. "Dr. Andrews, flush that for me please," she said quietly. Dr. Andrews reached in with a small pitcher of saline and rinsed off the area she was working on. "Looks like there's another bleeder over here," she muttered. "Vitals please?" she asked.

"BP coming up, ninety-five over fifty-five, pulse eighty-five, pulse-ox eighty-three" Nurse Navarro said.

"What does that mean?" I asked Kat. Liz answered me again.

"It means that because she happened to get shot with a twenty-two instead something bigger like a nine-millimeter, and since she got here when she did instead of ten minutes later, she's probably going to live. Nurse Navarro, how's that blood doing?"

"I've got the fourth unit on-board, about half-way in."

"Let's hang one more unit to be safe. Miss Wagner, you said you found her?"

"I was checking up on her when she didn't show up for a hearing. I found her in her apartment, lying on the floor. I called nine-one-one and put pressure on the hole like you told me you're supposed to do when someone's been shot."

Liz's cheeks moved, hinting at a smile under her mask. "Well, then you're pretty much responsible for this woman being alive right now. More PDS please."

Just then a short, swarthy man brushed into the room past me. "What have you gotten up to in my absence, eh Dr. Charles?" he asked in a heavy Spanish accent as he grabbed a mask and covered his face. "Gown and gloves, please," he said to one of the nurses who proceeded to assist him in donning the sterile garb.

Liz answered him without looking up from her work. "Late thirties African-American female, small-caliber gunshot wound to the posterior intercostal. I started a central line, and removed a twenty-two from the cavity intact, no fragments or spalling. I'm currently suturing. There's a heavy laceration on the liver in the right lobe, but it was a graze, not a through-and-through. Just missed the gallbladder." Liz kept quickly working the two pairs of forceps inside the incision. "Four units o-neg on-board, just started a fifth. BP is...?" She added questioningly.

"One-oh-five over sixty-five and still coming up. Pulse seventy, pulse-ox ninety," Nurse Navarro supplied.

"Pardon me, Dr. Andrews," Dr. Salvatore said, as he took Dr. Andrew's place and peered into the cavity to inspect Liz's work. "So, Dr. Franks didn't answer his page in time and you couldn't wait for me, eh?"

"She was maybe a minute or two from cardiac arrest due to blood loss. I figured I'd rather take the heat from the Dean than for someone else to have to shock her or crack her chest." She reached for a pair of scissors being held out by the assistant nurse, and neatly clipped off the thread. She leaned back a bit and looked up at Dr. Salvatore.

He leaned a little closer and peered down "Mmm, yes, very nice. Your third and fourth are maybe a tiny bit close, but... no, there's that vessel there. Bien! Excellent job, Dr. Charles. Good thing I was supervising you for this procedure, eh?"

"Good thing, Dr. Salvatore," she agreed. She turned and winked at me.

"Okay, I think you can go ahead and close then, yes? You've done an excellent job so far under my close watch so I think you should complete the job, eh?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. He turned a bit more somber. "Then we get this señora up to the ICU and we wait, eh?"

Three hours later I was sitting in a chair in the waiting room, knee bouncing nervously up and down. I'd finally let Kat take me out of the operating room when they'd transported Keisha up to the ICU. Kat found me a spare pair of sneakers and scrubs to change into, since the police had wanted to take my blood-soaked suit as evidence. MJ had shown up and was sitting next to me, trying to keep me calm with small talk while we waited for someone to come tell us if Keisha was going to be okay.

I sat up as Liz rolled into the waiting room. Without preamble, she said, "She's going to make it. She's awake and talking to Officer Green. They've put out an APB on her husband."

"Oh my god, thank you!" I knelt next to her chair and threw my arms around her. "Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was so worried."

She ruffled my dreadlocks. "You're as responsible for her not dying as I am. If she'd gotten here five minutes later, she'd be dead. If you hadn't kept pressure on her until the paramedics got there, she'd be dead. You kept your head. You did good."

"I guess I'll stop telling you how to do your job," MJ told me. "Next time you feel like you need to check on a client, you go check on your client."

"Tomorrow, I am going to treat you like the queen you are, Liz!" I said, "Our day just went from a casual day out to something special. You've earned some pampering."

"Well, like I said, you were as important to this story as I was. But if you want to spoil me I won't say no to that."

~~ Waterfront Neighborhood, Washington, DC, April ~~

"When you said you would pamper me, I had no idea it would be this nice." Liz sighed, then moaned appreciatively as her masseuse worked into the muscles of her shoulders.

After leaving the hospital, I'd gone home and started making plans. It took me a couple of hours of calling around but I'd finally found a spa where I could get appointments for the two of us the next morning. I'd gulped a little at the cost. L'Occitane was a high-end spa, but it was the only nice place I'd found where I could get us both in for full spa treatments on short notice, and I really wanted to treat Liz.

We'd already gotten manicures and pedicures while enjoying complimentary mimosas. I wasn't able to book two separate massage appointments but they'd had the couple's massage room available, which didn't seem like it would be a problem for two friends doing a spa day. At least at first.

When we'd gone from the dressing room to the massage room, Liz had asked me for help in getting from her chair to the table, as it was a little higher than convenient for her. Her masseuse and I had both offered her an arm and lifted her to the table. I'd gotten an eyeful of her naked back as she'd laid down and I wrapped her towel around her. There was a thick scar along her spine starting six inches above her waistline and dipping down below her towel, likely from a surgery to stabilize her injury after her crash, but the scar wasn't what got my attention.

Her back and shoulders were just... beautiful. I'd never seen another woman with such well-defined muscles in her back and shoulders. Her skin was almost flawless, a creamy pale white. As I lay down on my own massage table, I had a hard time drawing my eyes away from her exposed skin.

I was surprised when Liz asked the masseuse to start off working on her legs.

"Just because I can't feel my legs anymore doesn't mean the muscles can't get knotted up," she said. "You can't easily tell if your legs are in some slightly awkward position when you can't feel them. Sometimes I get a good muscle spasm out of nowhere. The first couple times that happened to me I freaked out. 'My leg is moving!' Kind of caused me some unwarranted optimism."

I was having a slightly awkward moment of my own.

I didn't know what it was, exactly. Maybe it was the life and death situation the day before. They say that confronting mortality can raise the sex drive, sort of a life-affirming desire, but the way she'd taken charge in the operating room... and that unshakable confidence. Her air of authority. It had been so compelling. So... attractive.

I hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since that moment.

The situation in the room wasn't helping me put a damper on those thoughts either. The sounds she was making as the masseuse worked her shoulders were very distracting. Every time she moaned in pleasure, I pictured myself trying to draw those sounds out of her.

I tried to distract myself from Liz by thinking about Vivian, but that quickly turned into imagining Viv taking the place of my masseuse. Her hands working on my thigh muscles, caressing and kneading me. That little change skyrocketed my excited discomfort, making every little moan or sigh coming from Liz hit me that much harder, and soon I was alternating thoughts between doing naughty things to Liz then Viv then back to Liz again. By the time our massage was over, I was about to go crazy. I couldn't even enjoy my massage as I was spending every ounce of my self-control not to let my excitement show so my masseuse wouldn't think I was some kind of pervert. In the dressing room afterwards, I changed quickly back into my clothes and told Liz I'd meet her outside.

I stood on the sidewalk out front, soaking up the warm April sun and thinking about what had come over me. Was it just the idea of sex? I hadn't been with anyone for over six months now. Longer, actually. Making out with Viv the other night had primed my engine. I wanted more. Not to be too crude, but I really wanted to get laid.

I knew that was something that I could easily accomplish with Viv if I wanted to. She was a terrific kisser. And she was young, full of energy and funny. And she clearly wanted me. But...

That might be what my body wanted, but I wasn't certain that's what my head needed. I wasn't yet thirty, not for another eight months anyway. This was the time of life one wasn't expected to settle down, when chasing a good time was acceptable. But that's not what I wanted.

I wanted a partner. Yes, obviously someone I was attracted to, someone with whom I could act out the feelings that had rushed into me in the massage room, but also someone who would challenge me, would understand me, and who shared my goals in life. Someone I could see growing old with. And while I liked Viv a lot, I just didn't see her being that someone for me. It felt like such hypocrisy, after my big speech to her that I wasn't 'out of her league', but I didn't think I'd be satisfied with a girlfriend with so little life experience or drive to attain more. It wasn't just her youth. I needed something more...

Someone more like Liz, except Liz wasn't an option.

Was Amber right? Could I be subconsciously waiting around for Liz? Was that why I was messing around with a woman five years my junior, whom I found attractive but knew I didn't have long term desires for? Someone I could pass time with without getting tied down while I waited for the moment for when Liz might realize...

If that's what I was doing, I was doing Viv a disservice. Liz too, for that matter, if I was only being her friend under false pretenses. But was that it?

"Hey, ready to roll?" Liz called out behind me as she came out the door. I turned and looked at her as she glided towards me. Her brow furrowed when she saw me. "You okay?" she asked, tilting her head. "You look like you've got something on your mind."

I smiled. "Nope. Not a care in the world. Ready to head over to the tidal basin? I want to get some good photos. The sun's perfect today."

The cherry blossom festival was one of my favorite times to live in DC. The Japanese government had gifted two thousand flowering cherry trees to the United States government in 1912, which were planted all around the tidal basin, a sheltered pond off the Potomac River with the Jefferson Memorial sitting astride the split of land dividing the two bodies of water. There were web sites and news reports every year trying to predict when 'peak bloom' would be, and this year it seemed like Liz and I got lucky on our choice of days off. Every tree around the basin was full of glorious pink and white blossoms.

Photography had been a hobby of mine since college. My parents had bought me a Canon D-30 as a high school graduation present, and I had thrown it in my bag on my way out the door that morning. I'd made sure I had an empty camera card, which I put to good use, taking photo after photo while Liz and I meandered around the area, looking for good vantages to shoot from.

At one point, I turned and saw Liz sitting under a tree with the memorial in the background.

"Hey, hold still," I said and raised my camera.

She held a hand up in front of her face. "Addison, don't! I'm a mess!"

She wasn't a mess. I knew Liz got a little embarrassed about the way she dressed. Casual was her hallmark style. She was always complimenting me on my clothes, and saying I should take her shopping to help her class up her closet, but simplicity really worked for her. She just had on a pair of light khaki pants and sneakers, and a teal Dri-Fit t-shirt from some race she'd done. Her hair was back in her signature ponytail, with a scrunchy the same color as her shirt, and the sun was giving her cheeks a rosy glow. She looked perfect to me.

I pointed my camera and started shooting photo after photo. "Oh yes baby, work it, show me something," I said, putting on an exaggerated British accent. She stopped protesting, and played along, putting on comical poses as I snapped pictures. Soon we were both laughing so hard I could barely keep my camera on her.

After I stopped shooting I scrolled through the photos on my camera's tiny screen. I stopped with a gasp and said "That's the one. Here, look Liz."

She protested that she didn't want to see how awful she looked, but I insisted.

She was sitting in her chair, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees with her fingers laced together. Only the tops of the wheels of her chair peeked up at the bottom of the frame. Her prominent laugh-lines around her beautiful grey eyes drew attention to them as she gave the camera a full-throated laugh, with her perfect white teeth showing. She was framed almost entirely by cherry blossoms, and in the one space over her shoulder free of flowers, the Jefferson Memorial stood watching, slightly out of focus.