The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Page A

lot going on.”
    I made myself busy then, taking pages of meaningless notes, and I looked at his back, since that was what he had come in for. It seemed normal enough – tender when I prodded around, but he still had pretty good range of motion. He turned when I talked to him from behind, turned enough so that I could see that he was turning his head, not his whole upper body. Usually, the pain will stop you if anything’s been torn in there.
    â€œSpine’s fused,” he said.
    I looked, but there weren’t any signs on his back that he’d had surgery – no scars, not even a stitch here or there. Sometimes scars can fade to quite fine lines, but nobody’s perfect, and you almost always see a loop or two, a place where a stitch has gone too far before being pulled tight. So, spinal fusion? Not possible.
    I was beginning to think – hell, I already knew – the guy was psychotic, or at least delusional. Didn’t know any more about the speci fics, because it wasn’t really an emergency room thing – but I thought if I could get past him, I could at least rally the troops andget him sent upstairs for a psych exam. Or at least I could get a few of the bigger guys to pin him down so they could get the knife.
    â€œHow about we get an x-ray of that back, have a look and see what’s exactly going on in there?” I moved towards the door.
    â€œI don’t like x-rays,” he told me, his hand reaching across the sheet. “Doctors don’t know how to read them.”
    Then he said he had been left alone in the examining room the first time he hurt his back, with the x-rays up on the big light box in front of him.
    That he had turned the light on, and had seen everything the doctor had missed.
    â€œInside my ribcage, you know, there’s a calci fied fetus,” he said, his eyes wide. “Never even knew it was there, but clear as can be on the x-ray. And under my shoulder blade, there’s a fishhook – just a plain fish-hook, and I got no idea how it got in there.”
    He dug his fingers in under his armpit – “I can’t even feel the bugger. But the doctors didn’t see any of it. It’s like they can’t see what’s right in front of their faces.”
    There was a singsong quality to his voice, a sort of hypnotic rhythm. Sometimes a person’s voice gets that way when they tell a familiar story, one they’ve told many times before. Like the one where you drive your suv head-on into someone else’s car because you’re driving too fast and you’re way too tired. And you’re the only one in your family who even gets to walk away, and you go over it and over it with thecops and the lawyers and your parents and your wife’s parents, too.
    Like that.
    It was really hard to pay attention to Miller. Hard to focus on what he was saying about police of ficers following him, about the cab company’s owners wanting him to deliver liquor, about everything else. The words were just blurring.
    I couldn’t help it. I was tired.
    Hell, I was already tired when I came on shift.
    See, I live in an apartment right now and in apartments, you’re always at the mercy of the neighbours. You can complain when they’re noisy, of course, but that often makes things worse, and most people just can’t seem to fathom what a 24-hour emergency room shift is like.
    Sometimes, that kind of shift is a whole night of next to nothing – picking broken glass out of tumbledown drunks, and sprains that need nothing more than ice and pressure bandages. You get a fair amount of sleep, and only get woken up occasionally to write a prescription for strep throat or for painkillers.
    Other times, it’s flat out from the moment you get to the hospital, and every time you turn around, there’s another car crash or a great huge knife wound where you have to spend a couple of hours just