WHO WAS THAT GUY?
by ardavenport
- - - Part 3
Roy yawned as he walked into the office. It wasn't too late but he was tired. Johnny had done the last three and he didn't want to leave the log for the morning, especially if they got another call.
He sat down, flipped the book open, took his pen out and clicked it. He frowned down at Pete Gregory's entry and the empty space under in. But there wasn't really anything to add about what happened at Rampart at the end of the last run.
Incident: Man injured, stabbed (mgged behind a bar)
Location: At the bar
Time out: Twenty-One-Oh-Four
Transported: Rampart . . . .
The police were already there, red lights flashing and Officer Tim Foster waved them around to the back. Another officer knelt by the victim in the shadows by the dumpster behind the bar. Male, about six feet tall, mid-twenties, a hundred and sixty pounds.
"Looks like a mugging. His wallet and watch are gone and he got beat up pretty bad."
"Sir? Sir?" Johnny leaned over him.
The victim moaned, his head rolling from side to side. Johnny took his chin and checked his pupils. Uneven and sluggish. Under the pen light, the dark blotches on his face in the shadows turned to bright red blood, his skin pale against his longish black hair. There were bloody wounds on his arms as well and they bandaged them.
Johnny kept trying to talk to him, but the man seemed to only be conscious enough to know that he was in pain. Roy asked Stan, the officer kneeling with them, for more information, but he didn't know anything more. Tim came out with a couple of people from the inside the bar. One of them thought he recognized their victim, but didn't know him. Roy asked Tim to get a flashlight and Stan went back in with the bar patrons to talk to more people and try to get a name. Dr. Brackett at Rampart told them to start an IV D5W.
"Ooooooh, wha' 'appened?" The victim moved his arms and Roy hastily jerked the IV needle away from the vein he was aiming for.
"Hey, hey." Johnny got him to look at him. "Hey, don't move around. Hey, hey. We're paramedics with the LA County Fire Department. You're going to be fine, but you've got to lie still. Can you tell me where you're hurt?"
Johnny had to ask him three times before he finally seemed to get the message and lie still enough for Roy to finish the IV. And they got a name. Ned Warinsky. He had a little too much beer and went out for some air with a girl he'd met. And someone jumped him. He didn't see who it was, but it was a man's voice that demanded his wallet. He didn't want to give it up. The man who wanted to take his wallet had a knife.
"Hey, don't move around." Johnny felt around on his back where Ned said it hurt. His hand came back bloody. Roy handed him a pressure bandage. They heard the ambulance siren approaching.
"Hey!" Johnny grabbed Ned's shoulders when he tried to get up. Roy grabbed his arm with the IV. Apparently Ned suddenly remembered his date had gone inside just before he was attacked. It was a singles bar and he had just met her and she seemed like a nice girl. They told him they'd have the police tell her where he was, and he didn't look like he was in any shape to talk to her anyway.
He kept still for them as they lifted him onto the gurney and he asked Stan about his girlfriend when the police officer returned. But Stan just shook his head. He hadn't seen her and only the bartender and waitress knew his name. Roy went with him in the ambulance.
Roy told him to keep still and he did, but Ned talked about this girl the whole way to Rampart. She had blond hair and blue eyes and a great figure and they had everything in common. She liked the same books and magazines that he did and she liked sports and camping. Roy let him talk. As long as he was lucid, his head injury probably wasn't getting any worse.
When they got to Rampart, Ned told Dr. Brackett about this perfect girl as well. He just told Ned to be quiet while he examined him. Brackett didn't like the wound on his back at all and thought that Ned might need exploratory surgery, but the head injury was a problem, too. Roy left him when the x-ray technician arrived, but he promised to ask the cops if they found his girlfriend, if he saw them.
Johnny was re-stocking the drug box at the Rampart base station. He shook his head when Roy told him about Ned's girlfriend.
"The cops told me that they've been looking for a couple who've been mugging guys at singles bars. She meets the guy and gets him drunk and when he staggers outside, her friend robs him. Was she a pretty blond with blue eyes?"
Roy nodded and repeated what Ned had been saying about her. Johnny shrugged and put white packets of sterile pads into the drug box. "Definitely not my idea of the perfect girl."
Roy agreed. He helped finish and Nurse Stebbins, who was working the night shift, signed them out.
"Hey, let me go! You can't keep me here!"
Both paramedics turned at the sound of a scuffle. Down the hall by the elevator, a security guard had a man in a hospital gown by the arm. And a girl in a short green dress tugged on the security guard's arm. They recognized Pete Gregory, the man who got heat stroke after running all day in the sun. He was wearing a short pink, ladies coat over the hospital gown. Roy and Johnny went to help, but two nurses and Doctor Early beat them to it.
"It's not him. Let him go."
The guard reluctantly obeyed Early. The girl detached herself from him and reattached to Gregory who stopped yelling, but he still wanted to be released. Early told him that he was recovering well, but they didn't release people in the middle of the night. The office was closed and he was just a doctor and couldn't do anything about that. Gregory sneered, but Early's mild-mannered common sense won out.
"He really doesn't like hospitals." The woman from the park leaned toward Early and spoke with a loud whisper that everyone in the hallway could hear.
"Dorie, that's not it. I just don't want to have Dan and Barry and that dippy girlfriend of yours picking me up tomorrow so they can give me the Indian chief routine again." Pete replied with the same over-loud whisper.
"Pete, you're so sensitive about that! Just don't let them get to you like that - - "
"I am NOT sensitive - -"
"Hey, hey." Johnny stepped forward. "Doc, can you give us a minute?"
Early, the nurses and the guard moved away.
"Can I just have a minute with him?"
Pouting suspiciously, Dorie stepped away from them. Johnny motioned Pete closer to the wall and further away from the others and started talking to him in a real whisper. Pete glared back at him at first, but apparently whatever Johnny said connected and soon they were having an animated, but very quiet conversation.
The nurses moved on, but the guard and Dorie stayed. Roy watched his partner talk to the wayward patient in the hospital slippers, gown and his girlfriend's coat. Obviously, Johnny had to be telling him about his own experiences with someone ribbing him about being a half-Indian. That had been a problem (in the form of Chet Kelly) during their first few months at Station Fifty-One until his partner had, for reasons unfathomable to Roy, just decided to ignroe it. But Roy wasn't sure that Johnny was the best guy to counsel someone else about not being too sensitive.
Roy's eyes shifted to the people on his right. Doctor Early. Dorie, the pouting girl in the green dress. The security guard frowning at the runaway patient.
"Hey, Doc, what did you mean earlier when you said 'it wasn't him'?
"Oh, we had a guy get out of the psych ward. He's tried before and looks like the third time was the charm, but we think he's still in the hospital."
"Oh." Roy frowned. "Well, what does he look like?"
"Oh, about six feet tall, dark hair, brown eyes, about a hundred and fifty-five pounds; he's twenty-four. He's not violent, but he could be dangerous, though mostly to himself."
Roy nodded. "I'll keep my eyes open."
Johnny patted Pete's arm, the signal that the friendly advice was done. Doctor Early got a nurse's attention and she came back with a wheelchair, which was good since the pink coat wasn't quite long enough in the back to cover up everything left exposed by the hospital gown.
Doctor Early thanked Johnny and Roy told him about the escaped mental patient. They both unsubtly scanned all the people in the area as the left but they didn't see anyone who obviously didn't belong there. Roy didn't ask his partner about his advice to Pete until they got in the squad.
"So, um, what did you say to that guy back there?" He sat behind the steering wheel, the key in his hand. If Johnny didn't want to talk about it; if it was too private, he was happy to let it drop, but he was curious.
"Huh? You mean Pete? Oh, I was just telling him that if Dorie was willing to help him sneak out of a hospital in the middle of the night, then he was crazy not to ask her out." He tilted his head. "He said they were just friends and she'd never go out with him and I said, 'You gotta be crazy.' A girl who's gonna hang around all afternoon watching you get heat stroke is practically begging for you to ask." His tone rose to a high pitch for emphasis.
Roy stared back at him. "You were talking to him about his girl friend?"
Johnny looked confused by his reaction. "Well, yeah. What else would I be talking to him about?"
Shaking his head, Roy wasn't sure that Johnny was the best guy to be giving out dating advice, either, given the number of girlfriends who dumped him.
He put the key in the ignition started the squad.
- - - End Part 3
