Rivers of Gold (16 page)

“What about the Hippocratic oath?” Santiago demanded, growing more disgusted by the minute as the drag kept leaking onto the bricks. From behind him More made some kind of coarse glottal sound, while in front of him the ursine orderlies openly snorted and sneered.

“Can you at least tie him off so he won't bleed out while we take him down there?” Santiago asked through grinding teeth. But he could see it was a lost cause, the orderlies were bundling up the elderly patient and the nurse and carrying them across the street, and the resident was, like, I mean, y'know, see ya.

Santiago watched them leave, feeling very much like he was back in the waiting room of St. Vincent's, being told that Bertie Goldstein was basically toast and nothing in that great fortress of medical knowledge, technical wizardry, and pools of public and private funding could save her. Briefly he wondered if he could manage a head shot on the wired young resident at this range.

More's latex gloves snapped him out of it. All CAB cops rolled with gloves and masks in their kit, as standard as badge and cuffs. Santiago watched, fascinated, as More tied off and splinted the drag's arm in less than a minute using the drag's own belt and a ballpoint pen. “Damn, they teach you good knots in ESU, huh?” Santiago offered lamely, his earlier adrenaline rush ebbing.

More ignored him and pointed to the backdoor of the cab. Santiago opened it and started to reach for the drag's foot to heave him inside, but More snapped the latex twice against his wrist, and Santiago nodded, reaching for his own gloves. With infection rates where they were (current HHS estimates claimed one in three New Yorkers had herpes, while one in six was HIV positive), no chances were taken with bleeders, biters, or open wounds like this.

They managed to get the drag levered into the backseat with a minimum of cursing (More his usual silent self), then clambered into the front seats. Santiago called it in and left word with the ops dispatcher to tell the CAB duty sergeant to raise McKeutchen to get in touch ASAP, knowing there was little chance of that. The duty sergeant was an alcoholic wreck named Felch, who was marking his last thirty days before retirement and could hardly be bothered to sign his name. Santiago could hear the phlegmatic wheeze in Felch's voice over the radio, and wondered how sauced he already was.

Checking the clock, he smiled for the first time that night. There was one person he knew he could count on who could help him salvage this mess.

And she had just started her shift at Mount Sinai.

They just managed to roll the drag up on a gurney next to the nurse's station in time to catch Esperanza Santiago chewing the ass off some nitwit nurse somewhere. “You'll like this,” Santiago told More, who ignored him as usual.

They awkwardly carried the unconscious drag between them, each with one hand on the back of the drag's belt and one on his frayed collar, since putting his arms over their shoulders would probably soak them in blood (never mind killing the drag). There were of course no gurneys or staff available anywhere, so they just propped the drag upright in a chair in the waiting area, More looking around for someone to deal with the imminent pool of blood while Santiago filled the pass-through section of the Nurse Triage Unit with his bulk. On the other side of it stood his sister, Esperanza, in her starched whites, a stethoscope around her neck, a blood-pressure cuff in one hand, a clipboard in the other, with the phone cradled against her neck and an expression of annoyed determination on her face. Santiago knew the look, and the conversation in which she was involved, quite well.

“ …
no debe ser más de doce horas. Asegúrese de que el paciente tiene un montón de líquidos. Si pulso y la temperatura son constantes, después de doce horas que usted pueda cumplir. Asegúrese de que todos los funcionarios que entran en contacto con el paciente use guantes y mascarilla en todo momento, y se han ordenado en un modo en espera, con las restricciones en caso de
DO NOT INTERRUPT ME WHILE I'M SPEAKING
en caso de que el paciente recaídas. Usted me llamó para solicitar ayuda debido a que no saben cómo manejar este paciente, no me interrumpan mientras. Estoy dándole instrucciones sobre cómo hacerlo. Estoy tratando de explicar cómo se puede salvar el culo y las de sus compañeros de trabajo, no necesitan más retrasos. Si usted tiene un problema con eso, pruebe con otro NTU. Tres del CC, doce horas, del médico y comprobar que la puerta
.” She slammed down the phone. “What?”

Santiago pointed to the drag in the chair, his jury-rigged arm sling listing badly, a small stain on the floor beneath him slowly spreading. Esperanza took in the sight at a glance, then rolled her head in a three-quarter circle coming to rest with her eyes fixed in exasperation upon Santiago, a trait common among all the women of his family, which had been demonstrated to him countless times over countless meals. He heard her slap on the gloves, heard her page the attending, heard her shouting commands to someone, but as usual, all he saw was the scar on her right temple, just above and to the left of her mole.

The scar was barely visible to anyone other than Santiago anymore, Esperanza having learned to artfully conceal it with makeup and hairstyle. Cosmetic surgery, even for someone in her profession, was an inordinately expensive luxury that she could not justify to herself, preferring instead to wear it as a reminder. Though they had long since stopped talking about it, Santiago was secretly proud of her for retaining it.

The scar's giver was a piece of shit named Nestor, who'd been in the tenth grade heading for trouble when Esperanza came into the eighth. She was just beginning to form then, with budding curves and glowing skin punctuated by a mole near her right eye that gave her a look that seemed to set boys' teeth on edge. Nestor was in a loose confederacy of loud, reckless boys that everyone, including a much younger Santiago, could see was destined for prison or early death. They roughed up younger students, disrupted classes, and threatened teachers with violence (making good on at least one of them, although no arrests were ever made). By the time Esperanza was unlucky enough to catch Nestor's attention, he and several others in his group were openly using drugs, and a few were suspected of selling them as well. Not that anything was done about it, not in a school where students outnumbered teachers forty to one and the only security came at the beginning and the end of the day, when NYPD school squads were deployed (and which, in down years, were the first units to be cut when budgets were slashed). Really, it was better just to stay out of the way of boys like Nestor and his ilk, until graduation or something else took you away from the zoo that was George Washington in the waning years of the crack wars.

Nestor was really the worst of the worst, the dynamic of coalitional aggression embodied in a punk. He wasn't even the gang's leader—that title definitely belonged to Alejandro Zayas, a vicious brute in his own right who was silently regarded by the student body as a rapist, probably responsible for at least two girls' quitting high school with burgeoning bellies. Nobody came for Alejandro, which emboldened him into progressively more brazen behavior. And if Alejandro could do it, then runner-up Nestor, with chips on both shoulders, just had to outdo him, to prove himself even more of a badass and thereby keep himself from being eclipsed by Alejandro's shadow.

The fledgling Santiago had warned his sister about the looks and leers she was getting from Nestor when she was unfortunate enough to pass by him in the halls or cafeteria, where the close proximity of so many enervated young bodies made the air a viscous soup of pheromones and tension. The slightest provocation, real or imagined, could set off an explosion. Santiago had memorized his sister's class schedule that semester, and tried to follow her between classes. But he couldn't always be where she was, and she had to tell him for years afterward that there was no way he could blame himself for not being there the day Nestor dragged her into a bathroom and tried to rape her. Tried, because Esperanza kicked his kneecap hard enough for her to get out from under him and flee, though not before he'd connected a solid right to her cheekbone, one of his rings tearing the flesh near her mole. Esperanza staggered but did not stop. She ran and ran, all the way to her father's machine shop, where Victor hugged her to his chest and smoothed her hair and told her everything would be fine, all the while glaring over her shoulder at his youngest son, who had seen her from a school window running like the devil himself was chasing her, and who unbeknownst to her had sprinted behind her all the way from school and now stood panting in the shop's office doorway, reading a new meaning in his father's silent scowl.

It took about three weeks. Santiago shadowed Nestor around school and beyond, learning his habits, watching for patterns. He knew he would not stand out in a crowd. Nestor wouldn't think twice about him, might not even know him at all. Still, Santiago was careful not to let himself be seen while Nestor was in the company of Alejandro and his cronies.

Three weeks.

At the end of the third, Santiago knew what time Nestor would be by himself, under the stairs on Fort George Avenue just behind the school, smoking a blunt and sucking on a bottle of Cobra, tripping on the raindrops falling from the crosshatched beams of the overhead trestles. Santiago knew by now how long it would take Nestor to finish his smoke and a good part of his bottle, how long it would take for him to sink into a righteous daze. He knew exactly where the light reached up under the stairs at that time of day, even when the sun was out, so he knew where to crouch just a little beyond that, in the dark, watching Nestor get his lift on. Watched and waited for thirty-two minutes, holding a seven-and-a-half-inch length of three-quarter-inch cold-rolled steel pipe he'd brought along from his father's shop.

Nestor had scarred his sister's face on the plane of her right temple, just beyond the zygomatic arch. Which was where Santiago began, proceeding downward across the jaw hinge and the outer edge of the mandible, across the right clavicle and scapular acromion, down the humerus to the lateral epicondyle at the outer elbow, the ulna and carpals, the ribs, sternum and xiphoid process, then crossing to the right iliac crest of the pelvis, hammering the femur until he felt it crack, then pounding on the patella until Nestor's right knee was concave. Santiago did not bother to conceal his face, but even then he doubted Nestor would have recognized him. The pipe was easily disposed of in a nearby storm drain; Santiago had not been away from his scheduled detention long enough to be missed. Not that he would have been. After all, what was one absent sixth-grader more or less?

Santiago had seen Nestor once, years later. He'd been on his way from CUNY to his parents' house for dinner, was checking his messages to see if he'd have a date lined up later that night, when he caught sight of a misshapen form beneath the subway stairs on Nagle Avenue by West 213th. Gingerly peering through the slats, he made out Nestor's misaligned face, his body slanted at an impossible angle over a cardboard pallet, a plastic bottle of Fleischmann's in his one good hand. One eye was closed; the other was white and dead and permanently half-open, seeing nothing.

Santiago went to dinner.

Esperanza got the drag stabilized and into the rotating OR queue. Since the formation of the Nurse Triage Unit during the riots, all incoming patients were sorted by severity of condition and assigned a numbered bracelet, which could be monitored anywhere in the hospital. Mount Sinai's image had been tarnished somewhat over the years, as the number of suicides, assaults, and overdoses mounted following the crash and the riots. Since the hospital's foundation had largely been wiped out by the massive Jagoff fraud at the end of 2010, and with city and state funding nonexistent by 2011, the staff (caught between the demands of the City Council for free treatment and the screams of the unions for full compensation for those sidelined by budget cuts) was left to cope as best it could. Things had peaked when a woman admitted for the removal of two precancerous moles on her back wound up having both legs amputated instead. The ensuing public outcry and investigation made for a fierce crackdown throughout the hospital hierarchy. Which meant greater-than-usual reliance on the midlevel managers who ran the daily routines of the hospital, making sure the little things checked out (little things like screening the ever-dwindling blood supply for HIV, double-checking the time clocks on the donor organs, and making sure the residents weren't raiding the pharmacy for recreation or commercial gain). On senior NTU nurses, for instance. Like Esperanza Santiago.

“
Coño
, you think this is your own private clinic?” she growled at her younger brother, her words punctuated by the snapping of latex as she peeled off her gloves and slammed them into a wall-mounted container marked
BIOHAZARD
.

Santiago recounted their Waterloo outside of Cardinal Cook. Esperanza shut her eyes, shook her head, and exhaled loudly through her mouth. “That kid should be strung up.”

“Or become a patient there. I can arrange it.” Santiago smiled in spite of himself. His sister had always been his best friend, and being around her made even the most ridiculous drag haul a little more bearable.

Esperanza, however, did not share his levity. She grabbed him by the elbow and steered him inside behind the NTU desk, away from More, who slouched in a chair in the waiting area looking blank. He fit in well among the patients on the queue, many of whom looked like they'd just been brought in from sleeping on the streets or dragged bleeding and vomiting from barroom floors. Those conscious enough to take notice of his presence, however, seemed to slink away from him. The seats immediately behind and on either side of More stood empty, even though the room was two-thirds full. “Is that the new guy?” she asked quietly.