MISTER WRONG
by ardavenport
Dorrie heard a new siren.
"Is that the ambulance?" The cop pressing down on Mark's bullet wound looked up with a mixture of hope and very un-cop-like panic. Mark moaned another 'I'm gonna kill'er.' But his outrage was losing steam and blood. The plush carpet was dark and wet with it.
Soaked. Enough so that it made squishy noises when the cops were careless. There were bloody footprints on the thick tan, floor-to-floor. Why wasn't Mark dead?
Things were bad enough already. What would the cops do with her if he died? She could smell the blood. Taste it. And the gunshot was so loud. Her ears were still ringing.
"I'll go check." The other cop, the colored one with the deep voice, patted her on the shoulder. "You'll be all right, Ma'am." She nodded and then flinched from the stab of pain in her cheek. Her hand clinched on the towel carefully pressed to her face. An ice cube fell out from the plastic bag in it, bounced off the leather couch cushion and onto the carpet. She pushed it away with her foot and her white sandal came loose off her heel.
She wanted to put her shoe back on. She wanted to get that ice cube up before it melted.
Dorrie stayed hunched on the couch. It hurt to breathe. She was desperate for a deep breath, but her ribs stabbed her every time she drew air.
"Paramedics are here." Colored-Deep-Voice-Cop ushered in two short-sleeved bright blue shirts. One went to the nervous cop holding the towel to Mark's crotch.
Black pants, blue shirt, badge and name plate cut off her view of the bloody carpet by the dinner table.
"Ma'am? Ma'am? What her name, Vince?"
"Dorothy Blosset. Looks like he hit her pretty good. All we've been able to get out of her is that she didn't mean to do it."
Something changed. There was a pause.
"Dorrie?" Hands clasped her shoulders, lifted her head, pulled the towel away from her face. The bag of ice slid down onto her leg, spilling cold cubes next to bare leg where her mini-skirt evening dress had ridden up. More thumped onto the floor.
Black hair, brown eyes, long face. About her age.
She knew him.
She didn't.
She knew him.
She didn't.
"Dorrie, can you hear me? It's John Gage. Can you tell me where you're hurt?"
Wasn't that obvious?
"M-my face." She sucked in air and put her hand on her side. "My side. It hurts."
"Does it hurt when you breathe?"
She nodded and winced again. There was a cut on her mouth; her lip was swollen. The whole left side of her face was swollen, the skin hot and stretched, even more without the ice. And . . . oh, no. Was that a loose tooth? Her tongue shrank back from exploring further and the dentist bills it would cost to fix. The health insurance from work did not cover dental.
"Johnny, I need Rampart." The voice behind him belonged to the other blue shirt.
"Right away."
Brown-Eyes-Long-Face hoisted a red box up onto the coffee table, opened it and clicked dials and held a black telephone receiver to his ear.
Something about his profile registered as he talked into his radio box.
Oh, no. Johnny Gage.
The guy she dumped when she started dating Mark.
The face and hair were the same, but he looked different in a uniform. A lot better than he did in those crummy sports jackets and loud swinger pants he wore on dates.
The other blue shirt called out numbers and injuries. Blood pressure, blood lost, clammy skin. Gunshot to the penis and testicles.
The itinerary of the damage jolted her awake from her stupor.
Did I do that?
No, it was the gun.
No, it was HIS gun. HE hit me. HE hit me with his gun. She didn't even know he HAD a gun. Someone with a temper like Mark's should not even be ALLOWED to have a gun. She'd been hit by her father, when she was a kid, when she deserved it, but never that hard and he never, ever got out his gun.
There was another siren. Johnny abandoned her and the red box to go to the other blue shirt. They pressed white bandages that immediately stained bright red to Mark's crotch, wrapping them around his body and legs so it almost looked like he was wearing his underwear outside his black pants. The water was running at the mini-bar where the nervous cop was scrubbing his hands.
The ice cubes threatened to slither down under her hem between bare skin and the sofa cushion and she forced her hand almost under her leg and out to push them away. The gold lame of her mini-skirt evening dress was as rough as sandpaper. But it looked great on her; narrow waist, lots of cleavage. She clutched her side again and stared down at her knees.
Two men came in. White uniforms, a long rattling white surface between them, led by the colored cop. When had the colored cop gone out? All four of them lifted Mark onto the gurney, white and bright blue shirts lifting together. Belatedly, she recognized the two new men as ambulance attendants; who else would wear white outfits like that if they weren't selling ice cream?
They carted Mark out the door. The other blue shirt followed.
Johnny knelt before her again - - -
"No, no, no, what are you doing?!"
"It's all right. It's all right! I just want you to lie down."
Tense, she let him lower her to the couch. What did she think he was going to do? A sweaty, grabby cuddle session on Mark's couch? Now? She could see the cops were still there behind him. Black uniforms, white and blue helmets. Guns.
He lifted her legs onto the couch and opened a black box.
She half-listened to the list of symptoms. Heavy bruising and swelling on the face, possible bruised ribs, concussion.
Wait? Is he talking on Mark's phone?
Possibly bruised? Weren't they broken? It felt like it, pain stabbing her with every breath. And only bruised? If they were broken, if she was hurt enough, would the cops believe her instead of Mark?
She hoped they were broken.
A little, unintelligible voice from the phone receiver warbled back to him. She stared up at the pristine un-water-stained ceiling of Mark's up-scale apartment. She closed her eyes; this was a nightmare.
"Hey, keep your eyes open."
"Ugh!" She shrank back again from his touch, but he did not back off.
"It's Okay, it's okay. Did he hit you in the head, Dorrie?"
"Nooo." Only if you counted the face. Where the damage would show the most.
"Okay. Well, just stay calm. I'm gonna start an I.V. . . ."
Dorrie turned her head away, but kept her eyes open. Why did he have to keep touching her? What did he want? Just because it was over with Mark didn't mean she wanted to get back together again with him.
Another siren arrived? Where did that come from? Something white moved past her head and she tilted it back to see.
"Hey-hey-hey, don't move!" She jerked her head back and Johnny Gage was leaning over her again, his hand gripping her arm tight. Her eyes stared at the light glinting from the clear plastic bag he held up with his other hand and then followed the tube hanging from it to . . .
He stuck a needle in me? ! ! !
She had not felt a thing.
"Now just relax and let us do all the work."
Two new ambulance men, dressed in white, grabbed her legs and shoulders.
"Watch out for her ribs. They're bruised pretty bad." Johnny backed up, holding up the clear bag high with a loop of tubing.
Hands slid under her back. She grit her teeth, her whole body going rigid on reflex as they lifted her up and onto the gurney. A blanket was thrown over her, then a strap tightened over her middle. Under the blanket, she pressed her free arm against the side of her chest and the stabbing pain in her ribs; it did not help much.
"Can you drive the squad into Rampart for me, Vince?"
"Sure thing Johnny. We'll send the detectives to the hospital. They'll want to talk to both of them."
Then they were moving, the furniture, the door, Mark's apartment gliding by. Dorrie flinched; there were people standing around in the hallway, looking down at her. She had met some of them at Mark's parties. She wouldn't be seeing any of them again.
She caught an unpleasant whiff of car exhaust as they loaded her into the ambulance. Then the doors slammed shut. There were inside lights and golden sunset light coming in through the small windows. The siren started up and Johnny protectively held his hand over her arm. The clear bag swung when the ambulance accelerated and turned. When had he put the needle in?
Her eyes found a neutral place to stare at during the ride, a corner near the ceiling of the ambulance; it was a moving cramped mini-room that she was trapped in with two men. One of whom she had dumped last year. The ambulance guy was not too bad looking, with blond hair and broad shoulders, like a football player. But she doubted that ambulance guys made any more money than firemen did.
She knew that this was Johnny's job, fireman, paramedic. He certainly talked about it enough. It was one of his three topics; sports, camping and being a fireman. And heaven help you if he took you on a date to a movie art house that wasn't up to fire codes. The date was ruined and you'd never hear the end of it.
Dorrie felt more awake, her shock wearing off.
That just made it worse. Thinking meant worrying. She shot Mark. He hit her, and she grabbed the gun to keep him from hitting her with it again, but she still shot him. He had looked so surprised, his gray eyes wide. But them it turned to rage ten times worse than when he was shouting at her for being late. Even when he went to his knees, grabbing his crotch, red blood squeezing out from between his fingers, he was shouting, cursing at her.
She darted a glance toward Johnny Gage, but he was all business. It was like he had become another person. A grown-up.
At least when she ended it with him, the worst thing he said was, 'I guess you can't handle a relationship.' That had really made her mad at the time, being told that she was the one with the problem from a guy who hadn't graduated from high school when it came to dating a girl.
But their relationship looked so harmless, so innocent now. The most physical thing he ever did when they fought was wave his arms around and his voice would go high. Then he would drive her home and except for a hopeful look about a goodnight kiss that would not be getting, that would be it.
The siren sound seemed to slow. The ambulance slowed, turned and backed up.
Johnny Gage was up and ready when they stopped, out the door and helping to take her out. Her brief glimpse of darkening blue California sky turned into a hospital corridor and fluorescent lights flying by overhead. In, around a corner, down a hall. The gurney thumped on a door as they went into a small room with bright lights and shiny metal cabinets. It smelled like a dentist office.
They were nice to her, the doctor, the nurses, but lying on their table under bright lights that made it hard for her to look back at them, she still felt like she was just a body that they had come to fix.
A nurse with a clipboard asked her questions about her name-address-age-doctor-insurance.
A thrill of panic went through Dorrie when she realized that she had left her purse in Mark's apartment. She could see it sitting in one of his dining room chairs. Purse-wallet-ID-money-keys. She would have jumped up, but the pain in her side and the needle in her arm kept her down. The doctor assured her that the police would bring it to her. She did not believe him, but she meekly accepted his reassurance.
There was talk of X-Rays and questions from the doctor while he prodded her pains, and they said there was a dental clinic upstairs when she told them about her tooth.
A hand touched her shoulder.
"They're going to take good care of you, Dorrie." Johnny Gage gave her a little squeeze. He had nice brown eyes, and beautiful thick hair. And not an ouch of fat on him.
"Okay." There was the briefest pause, her looking up at him. There had to be more. "Thank-you. For helping. I - I really appreciate it."
He gave her one of his crooked smiles. This new mature side of him suited his good looks very well. It was just a shame that this improved, adult version of Johnny Gage wasn't a doctor, instead of a paramedic.
If he were a doctor, she would have stuck around with even the high-school-date version, who wasn't that bad, after all, especially compared to Mark. Doctors made good money. Maybe not as much as lawyers, but still a lot more than firemen.
"Hey, just doing my job."
Then he was gone.
A burly man in white came in before the door could close with a hulking, moving machine. It looked like something that was used to crush things, but it turned out to be a portable X-ray machine with its technician. The doctor left. One nurse remained to take out the IV needle and then helped the technician position her and the X-Ray plates. She grit her teeth through the pain. The doctor had assured her that if she only 'thought' her ribs were broken then they were not, but they were taking X-Rays of her chest and head 'just in case'.
The ordeal finally ended . . . . . . . . . . .The next ordeal walked through the door just as the X-Ray machine left.
His name was Detective Sargent, LAPD. The involuntary laugh that his name inspired was fortunately choked off by a moan from the pain in her face and chest. With thinning hair and a bit of a gut, he did not look like he had much of a sense of humor. But she had to wonder what he would do if he got promoted.
His expression was actually sympathetic. And even though one of the nurses had assured her that she 'did not look that bad', Dorrie could see from his reaction that she did. Her face was swollen and one eye was half closed.
Good.
Even better, he had her purse and he put it on the metal tray next to the examination table she lay on. Then he took out a little notebook and took notes as she told him her side of what happened. She tugged the sheet covering her a little higher up over her middle and spoke carefully, her words a bit slurred as she tried to move her face as little as possible.
She had been late getting to Mark's place. It wasn't her fault that the girl at the beauty parlor took so long. Mark was angry. The banquet was a big deal, hosted by his law firm. He was going to look bad; they were so late there wasn't any point in going now. He was supposed to introduce someone giving a speech and they could not get there in time. He'd lose a promotion. Mark started yelling, called her a stupid bimbo. He smacked her in the face. Then he punched her, hard, in the ribs.
Then he pulled out a gun.
She did not know where he had got it from, just that suddenly he was holding it when she looked up from the floor. After he told her to get up, he hit her with it. She put her hands up and tried to stop him and they struggled over the gun and she got it away from him . . . . .
'You won't do it.'
Dorrie remembered that cold, dead look in Mark's eyes, even when she was pointing the gun at him. His grin turned feral when he took a step toward her and she backed up into the coffee table. Of course, she couldn't shoot him and she lowered the gun. But when he lunged, her finger must have twitched on the trigger . . . . .
"We struggled over the gun and it just went off."
The detective dutifully wrote down her version of what happened.
"Humph, he's a lawyer, eh?"
The tone, the look, the response of the detective ignited hope in her. He believed her.
"Yes." She gave him Mark's law firm's name. And then she realized she had forgotten something.
"Um, is Mark, okay? Do you know?"
Is he dead? Will you charge me with murder?
Detective Sargent did not look up as he continued to scribble. "Upstairs in surgery. He'll live." He shrugged. "Though some guys might not call it living with that kind of injury." He looked at her with one blood-shot eye. "I'd say you got your pound of flesh out of him for what he did to you." He flipped the notebook closed. "I don't think you have anything to worry about, Miss. Looks like a pretty cut and dried case of self-defense. There'll still be a hearing about it and you might want to get your own lawyer for that." He also recommended that she press charges against Mark with the District Attorney when his office contacted her, but Dorrie didn't know if she wanted to go that far.
And that was it.
He excused himself and she was left alone. She stared at her purse. Mark had paid for it and the dress and her shoes and her jewelry; the necklace had a real diamond in the pendant. He had said he wanted her to look good. What girl would say no to that?
The door opened again, one of the nurses returned; white dress, white cap. Her name was Dixie and she was obviously in charge.
"How are you doing?"
Dorrie mumbled a subdued 'okay'.
"Will I have to stay in the hospital?" She did not want to. Not if Mark was in the same building, even if he was unconscious.
"We'll see, after the doctors have a look at your X-rays." She was a bit older that Dorrie, who sincerely hoped that she could look that fabulous when she got to be her age. "You used to go out with our Johnny, didn't you?"
"Uh, yeah. Last year. But I broke it off after I met Mark."
"And you've been going out with him since then?"
Dorrie nodded.
"Has he done this before?"
Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. She sniffed and dabbed at them with the edge of the sheet. This woman knew what it was like, Dorrie was sure of it.
"Not this bad. He was never this bad. I didn't even know he had a gun."
"Well, I don't think you'll have to worry about him anymore. I don't that cop likes lawyers."
Despite her efforts, the tears came faster. "I know. But - but, what am I going to do now? What am I going to do?" Her voice went high, like she'd suddenly turned into a little girl, but she couldn't stop it. "I mean Mark was supposed to be the one. He's smart and strong and he makes over fifty-thousand dollars a year! Ooooh." She touched her swollen face; in the corner of her eye, she could see skin darkened to purple.
Dixie leaned toward her, the confidence in her eyes never wavering. "You're going to heal. You're going to get better. And you're going to get back out there.
"And you're going to leave that worthless, no-good louse behind."
Dorrie sniffed. She would have hugged this woman if it wouldn't have hurt so much.
"At least Johnny never hit me."
Dixie's eyes widened. "You bet he never did! John Gage is a good man. A girl could do a lot worse than go out with our Johnny."
Like me.
"Yeah, he's a good guy. But . . ." All those irritating little things about Johnny Gage flooded back to her. ". . . it gets a little old when he takes you out for hot dogs three dates in a row. Fireman don't make that much and I'm not going to live on that.
"Not that he's the kind of guy who's ever going to buy a girl a ring anyway.
"And he gets all whiny and defensive if he's wrong about anything.
"And I hate camping.
"And he drinks a gallon of coffee a day. There aren't enough breath mints in the world to cover that up."
Dixie just nodded. She knew him all right, though Dorrie doubted she had ever dated him. Guys like Johnny could never bring themselves to go out with a woman older than they were.
"So, you wanted to aim a little higher than just a fireman?"
"Yeah." She looked up at the older woman. "Is that so wrong? Wanting a husband with a good job? Who can afford to buy you jewelry and a mink coat?" Those were the kinds of things her mother talked about, especially when she complained about wasting herself by marrying a plumber.
Dixie did not seem to disagree. "Well, that depends. A girl's got to think about more things than they used to these days."
"What's that?"
Her eyes looked upward. "Like how many bruises a mink can cover."
*** / *** / *** / ***
Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto were still hanging around the base station when she returned. Doctor Early had found a couple of old articles in the medical library about hiccups and had been telling everybody about them all day. He even had two open volumes with him - "Granulated sugar as treatment for hiccups in conscious patients." New England Journal of Medicine, 1971; and "Hiccup Remedies." New England Journal of Medicine, 1972. Doctor Brackett just rolled he eyes upward.
The paramedics' and Brackett's attention immediately turned toward her. Johnny's gaze went past her to where an orderly was taking Dorrie Blosset to the waiting area in a wheelchair.
"Uh, how's she doing?"
Johnny's brown eyes were concerned and completely devoid of the usual eager hound dog expression he had toward women he went after.
"About as well as can be expected."
It was a shame Dorrie had to become a victim before he could take her seriously. Or that she had to learn the hard way that a man was more than a paycheck. At least, Dixie hoped she had learned that part. Going past the men clustered at the counter . . . . Dixie stopped herself from reaching for the coffee pot next to the supply cabinet.
"How's her boyfriend?"
Early put aside his hiccup articles. "Still in surgery. The cops want to talk to him, but he's got bigger problems than that."
Dixie raised her brows. "Really?"
"Let's just say he shouldn't expect to ever be starting a family." Kel Brackett's tone was low and humorless, as if the man who had pistol-whipped his girlfriend had terminal cancer.
"Not much of a loss, I'd say." Dixie glanced down at the files on her counter. The gory details of the gunshot injury would be in one of them. She would peruse them later. When she was not in the midst of a group of cringing men contemplating their worst fear.
"She was just looking for Mister Right. And got Mister Wrong instead."
Roy frowned at Dixie's assessment, the one happily married man in the group. "I don't think she could have found anyone more wrong than that guy." He looked toward his partner, whose moods went high and low depending on who he was dating and in love with, or who he was breaking up with.
"Well, if a girl's looking to settle down, and the guy she's dating isn't," she sympathetically glanced toward Johnny, "she's just going to move on. No matter what you do." For all the dozens of times Gage - - - or more often an exasperated Roy who was tired of hearing about it - - - complained about women leaving him, Dixie could not recall a single time when Johnny was angry or hateful toward them. Accusatory, petulant, sullen, selfish, childish. Yes. But not angry. Not even when a female cop injured him after he got too fresh.
Behind the men's backs and down the hall, Dixie glimpsed a man in a white coat stopping by Dorrie's wheelchair. He was one of many young doctors who went through Rampart; it was a teaching hospital. He took Dorrie's clipboard, forms and pen and leaned closer to talk to her.
"They just move on."
*** / *** END *** / ***
Disclaimer: All characters belong to Mark VII Productions, Inc., Universal Studios and whoever else owns the 1970's TV show Emergency!; I am just playing in their sandbox.