Coma

“Seven hundred fifty. This won’t be so easy.” Easy? It was going to be a breeze. D’Ambrosio thought that he should really be paying.

“Six hundred.”

“You’re on.” D’Ambrosio hung up the phone. He was immensely pleased.

He checked the night flight schedule. The last departure for Chicago was 11:45 TWA. D’Ambrosio thought he could get his little kicks and still make that one. He descended to the baggage area and caught a cab. He told the driver to take him to the corner of Longwood and Huntington avenues.

By seven-thirty the ebb and flow of humanity slowed to a trickle at the Memorial. Susan entered through the main entrance. In her nurse’s uniform no one even gave her a second look. She first went up to the lounge on Beard 5 and left her coat. Then she checked McLeary’s office on Beard 12. The door was locked as she expected and the lights were off. She checked all the nearby offices and labs. All were empty.

Susan returned to the main entrance and walked down the corridor toward the emergency room. Unlike the rest of the hospital, as evening fell the ER became more active. There were a few gurneys with their respective patients parked in the corridor. Susan turned left just before the ER and entered the hospital security office.

The office was small and cluttered. The entire far wall was a bank of TV screens, about twenty or twenty-five of them. Displayed on each screen were images of the entryways, corridors, and key areas of the hospital, including the ER area, televised to these monitors from remote control video cameras. Some of the cameras were stationary; others repeatedly panned over an area. Two uniformed guards and one plainclothes security officer occupied the room. The plainclothesman sat behind a tiny desk, seeming even smaller next to his obese hulk. The skin on his neck overlapped his shirt collar. His breath came in audible gasps.

All three men were oblivious to the TV monitors they were paid to watch. Instead, their eyes were fixed on the screen of a small portable TV set. They were engrossed in the furious combat of a televised hockey game.

“Excuse me, but we have a problem,” said Susan, addressing the plainclothes officer. “Dr. McLeary left tonight without returning some charts to 10 West. And we cannot medicate the patients without the charts. Can you people open his office?”

The security man gave Susan a tenth of a second with his eyes, then returned to the power play in progress. He spoke without looking up.

“Sure. Lou, go up with the nurse here and open the office she needs.”

“In a minute, in a minute.”

All three watched intently. Susan waited. A commercial came on. The guard leaped to his feet.

“OK, let’s get this office open. Let me know if I miss anything, you guys.”

Susan had to run a few steps to catch up with the great determined strides taken by the guard. En route he began sorting through an immense collection of keys.

“The Bruins are down by two. If they drop this one too, I’m movin’ to Philly.”

Susan didn’t answer. She hurried along with the guard, hoping that no one would recognize her. She felt a slight sense of relief as they entered the office area. It was deserted.

“Goddamn, where’s that key?” cursed the guard as he had to try almost every key on his ring before finding one which would open McLeary’s door. The delay made Susan rather nervous, and she began to look up and down the corridor, expecting the worst at any moment. As he opened the door, the guard reached in and flicked on the light.

“Just pull the door closed when you leave. It will lock by itself. I’ve got to get downstairs.”

Susan found herself alone in the outer room of McLeary’s office.

Quickly she entered the inner room and turned on the light. Then switching off the light in the outer room, she closed herself in McLeary’s inner office.

To her dismay, the charts were no longer on the shelf where she had seen them in the morning. She began to search the office. The desk was first. No sign of them. As she closed the center drawer, the phone immediately under her arm began to ring. In the silence the noise seemed earsplitting and it startled her. She looked at her watch and wondered if McLeary often got calls in his office at a quarter of eight in the evening.

The sound stopped after three rings, and Susan recommenced her search. The charts were of sufficient bulk so that they could not be hidden in many places. As she pulled out the last drawer of the file cabinet she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hall. They grew louder. Susan froze, not daring to push the drawer back into the file cabinet for fear of the sound.

To her consternation she then heard the footsteps, and a key go into the lock in the outer door. Susan looked around the room in a panic.