3

Bullshit call

Double shifts could be a tedious affair, and were definitely not improved by phone calls of impending doom. What did improve this one was the fact that it was a rather busy night, which both kept Hesam from expecting Peter to tell him about powers, and served to keep Peter's mind from wondering what Angela had seen in her dream, at least most of the time. Still, by ten p. m., he had indulged in imagining the more ridiculous possibilities of coming to harm that the day had presented – contracting toxaemia from a violent toddler that had bitten his finger was a favourite, with being buried underneath a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound man they had to carry down from the fourth floor in a stair chair coming a close second. He wished he could have shared those with Hesam. It was the kind of in-joke that would have been just right on a day like this. But that would have meant telling him that his mother had an ability, too, and Peter wasn't quite ready for that yet.

"I guess I'm getting old," Hesam groaned, rubbing his aching back, after they had taken their patient into the hospital. "I swear we were able to carry that woman last fall a lot easier." He shot his partner a suspicious glance. "Unless that was somehow your doing."

Peter didn't look up from his run report. "You know what? I wanna put everyone living higher up than second floor on a diet. Just in case they need an ambulance one day – which they will – and the elevator is out of order."

"Sounds good. Where do I sign?"

"Here, actually." Peter pushed the report over for Hesam to sign.

Hesam scribbled his signature on the back of the run form and pocketed his pen again. "Ten thirty, and I feel like midnight already," he said with a sigh. "I'm off to the candy machine. I need some sugar."

Peter arched an eyebrow at him. "Don't think I'll ever carry you down from the fourth floor if you keep eating that stuff." He took up the run report to drop it off at the reception desk, and followed Hesam out.

"No worries. I'll find an apartment at ground level."

"I can't believe you can bear to eat any candy now. Patients like that always leave me with a craving for salad."

They were still bantering as they exited the doors to the ambulance bay, and neither of them initially saw One Union coming towards them way too fast, with lights but no sirens, or they might have been forewarned.

Hesam shouted a warning and pulled Peter back from the curb as the ambulance flashed past them by no more than five inches, coming to a halt a few feet away.

"Are you out to lunch, Doug?" Hesam yelled at the car.

Douglas Richards jumped down from the driver's seat and raced around the side of the ambulance, shouting back a breathless "Sorry!" as he opened the back door and helped his paramedic partner, Shannon Kemper, to unload a collared and boarded patient. Peter remembered them being dispatched to an MVA not half an hour previously.

"Someone's not keen on their end-of-year driving bonus," Hesam grumbled, then cast a look at Peter. "You OK?"

"Yeah." Peter drew a long, steadying breath as they watched Doug and Shannon wheeling their patient to the trauma room, and wondered whether his mother had dreamt of him being run over by an ambulance. He couldn't quite decide on whether this was a particularly poetic or a particularly stupid way to go for a paramedic.

There, Mom, he thought. I've been careful. Or at least Hesam was. That ought to have taken care of it, don't you think?

As they sat back in the truck and cleared, Peter felt a lot better than he had.

Rain was drumming on the windshield as Peter and Hesam finished a late night snack of packaged sandwiches in the car. It was four-thirty AM, and it was a slow night, as weekend nights went. The calls were different at night than they were at daytime. You usually got about the same amount of bullshit calls, but during the day, these tended to be minor cuts to fingers or a cough on a toddler that would have warranted a scarf around the neck rather than an ambulance (plus, the scarf around the neck wouldn't mind being bitten so much). At night, the bullshit calls were rather heavy on the drunk side, especially on weekends.

"Unknown on Eldridge," a call came in over dispatch, and Peter and Hesam exchanged a glance. Unknowns in that area, at this time of night, usually translated to drunks.

"I'd volunteer us, but we're just too far out," Hesam said smugly, eyeing the radio.

"This is Two Queen, you want us to check it out?" they heard Karen O'Neill's voice over the radio.

Peter laughed. "God, their night must be even slower than ours if she volunteers for something like that."

"What you wanna bet she does it to annoy Nicholas?" Hesam said with a grin.

"Yeah, must be it."

"One of our frequent flyers, do you reckon?"

Peter pondered this. "Could be Tommy."

"Too late for Tommy. He always goes down before 1 AM. He'll be sleeping it off by now."

Dispatch sent Four Charles, a basic car. Just three minutes later, Two Queen got their own BS call – for a coughing child on Forsyth.

"They do that at night, after all," Hesam remarked. "Nick's gonna love it."

"He probably will, too," Peter said with a shrug. "With a coughing child, he's in less danger of getting puked on."

"And the drunk might just as well have bitten him too."

"See. Everyone wins."

They settled back to wait, and Peter was just starting to fear that, if this pause dragged on for any longer, Hesam might decide it was a good moment to get some answers from him, when the voice of Anne Kraszewski came in over the radio, sounding panicked.

"Dispatch, this is Four Charlie. We need a medic here. Cocaine intoxication, patient not breathing."

Peter's hand was on its way to the mike when the dispatcher came in, "Two Victor, to Eldridge for the respiratory arrest. On a one."

Peter acknowledged as Hesam hit the lights and sirens and pulled out. "Not as BS as we thought, huh?" Peter said with a sidelong glance at his partner as they raced though the nightly Lower East Side.

It took them almost fifteen minutes to get on scene, but there simply hadn't been any other car near. "Two Victor, ten eighty-eight," Peter said into the mike, announcing their arrival on scene. He jumped out with the airway kit and nearly collided with a wildly gesticulating man talking to him in Chinese. Peter clapped the man's shoulder, told him to move aside and let him do his job, and arrived at the red brick wall where Anne Kraszewski and Simon Blumenthal were bagging a man lying on a stretcher on the ground. He, too, looked Chinese.

Simon looked relieved when the two paramedics arrived. "He was still talking when we got here," he told Peter as Hesam crouched to get the tube, swearing as he moved his knee out of a puddle. "Pupils dilated, tachycardia, hyperthermic. He was really violent too, jabbering in Chinese. All I could understand when he was talking English was 'They're coming to get me.' He dropped unconscious about twenty minutes ago."

Peter nodded. He wasn't overly worried about the 'they're coming to get me' part – it was the sort of paranoia you got from cocaine abusers all the time. "Get those people away from here, OK? We'll see what we can do."

The man had a rhythm, but an irregular one, and wasn't getting much oxygen through the bag valve mask. As Hesam went in with the laryngoscope to intubate him, he suddenly pulled back. "What the hell?" Not looking back, he said, "Peter, I need the… whatsitsname."

"Different size blade?" Peter asked.

"No, the… M thing, you know…" Hesam shook his opened hand several times, as if that could speed things up.

"Miller blade? Mackintosh blade?" Peter tried again.

"Damn!" Hesam said in exasperation, until it finally came to him. "Magill forceps."

Peter unearthed it from his bag and handed it to his partner.

With the laryngoscope and the forceps, Hesam scooped up a white and soggy little packet wrapped in plastic that had been wedged in the man's throat. Peter bent closer to look.

"Damn," he whispered. "How many of those did he swallow?"

"Bag him again," Hesam told Anne, as he examined the packet of cocaine between his gloved thumb and forefinger, wiping vomit off it. "This one held, but if he chewed on one of them and it got torn, he's a good as dead. Doesn't matter how many others there are."

"God," breathed Anne. "How did we miss that?"

"It was too deep down for you to find," Hesam reassured her as he went in again to pass the tube. "You really couldn't have done anything for him." He had barely finished when the man went asystole.

Hesam cursed as he got out two milligrams of epinephrine to slam through the tube. "Peter, get a line. We need diazepam, and paracetamol for the temperature. More epi and atropine, lidocaine if necessary. – My partner's gonna ride with you," he told Anne, exchanging a quick glance with Peter, who nodded his consent. "Get this guy to the hospital as fast as possible. I'm gonna call the cops."

Hesam went back to Two Victor to put their stretcher and monitor back, and to get on the radio. In the meantime, Anne did CPR on their patient, while Peter had great difficulty finding a vein. The man must have been using for years; his veins were knotted and hard, with long track marks. He finally managed to insert a twenty-two gauge, a very small size catheter, into the back of the man's hand, which he knew wouldn't be nearly enough.

"I'll get in a second line in the rig," he told Anne, pushing rain-slick hair out of his eyes and rising to his feet. "Let's load him and run. Keep doing CPR." He hooked up the drug case.

Simon got into the driver's seat as Peter and Anne pulled up the stretcher to take the man into the ambulance, Anne going up the ramp backwards with the head end, Peter pushing from below.

There was a screaming of tyres from around a corner, and a battered old pickup truck came racing towards them, rainwater spraying up behind it. As it went past, a window on the passenger side was rolled down, and someone fired. Two, three, four, five times.

Peter stopped counting after the third.