Silent Pledge

“—woke up no telling how long after that. I called my daughter, but before—”

“Hey! Get away from that set! I wanna watch—”

“—and you can imagine how she felt when she came in and found—”

Tex walked into the room. “I called the police, Dr. Bower. They’re busy with a break-in down at a dock and can’t come right away.” She glared over her shoulder at the noise. “If I had a stun gun…”

Mrs. Flaherty reached up and touched Lukas’s arm. “Dr. Bower, do you think I’m having a stroke or something?”

Lukas glanced over at the lady’s middle-aged daughter, who sat in the far north corner of the exam room, hands clasped at her knees.

“Mom was just lying there when I found her, Dr. Bower. I couldn’t wake her up for at least five minutes. When I did I just brought her in. I didn’t wait to call an ambulance or anything. Do you think it’s her heart?”

Lukas studied his patient’s chart—or that part of it Tex had managed to fill out before leaving to call for backup. There were no security personnel at this hospital. Mrs. Flaherty had managed to walk in assisted by her daughter, and she showed no muscle weakness. A quick finger-stick glucose check had revealed normal blood sugar.

Another shout of raucous laughter reached them, and Mrs. Flaherty flinched. She didn’t look bad now. Her color was pink and healthy, and perspiration no longer beaded her skin. Lukas would put her on a monitor.

Another shout. And from the exam rooms where Catcher and his friend were sleeping came loud snoring.

Lukas knew trying to listen to Mrs. Flaherty’s chest right now would do no good. He wouldn’t hear anything above the noise. This town needed military intervention. He took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on the tray table, then took a deep breath. He was stuck with Catcher and friend until they sobered up, but he would not allow their crowd of troublemakers to endanger the lives of other patients in this facility, not while he was in charge—or at least not as long as he was alive. How long that would be after he’d voluntarily thrown himself to the wolves…Oh, well, time to get tough.

“Tex, keep an eye on Mrs. Flaherty. Get her on a monitor, do an EKG, check electrolytes, and if you can hear above the noise, get a history. If I’m not back in five minutes, call the county sheriff. Or maybe the ambulance…No, wait a minute, Quinn’s still on duty. Forget that.”

Anger. Work with the anger now. He wrenched open the door that separated the waiting room from the E.R. proper and flung it back so hard it crashed against the wall. Then the door bounced back and slammed him in the shoulder and shoved him sideways. He felt the pain, which only served to make him angrier. As he stomped into the battered waiting room, he saw at least ten pairs of eyes directed toward him. Silence fell for just a moment, and he made his move.

“Everybody! Out of here! Now!” he shouted in his deepest, most fury-filled voice, but just then a commercial blared on the TV, negating the effect. He continued anyway for a few seconds, taking advantage of the shock on their faces and the impetus his anger gave him to overwhelm the terror he knew was in his mind somewhere, seeking an outlet.

“Look at this mess!” He gestured toward the chairs toppled onto their sides and the pages of newspapers scattered across the floor. The coffeepot was empty, and it looked as if half the coffee had spilled onto the carpet.

He marched over to the TV and ripped the cord from the socket, plunging the room into complete, blessed silence this time. “I said out of here! This isn’t your own personal nightclub.” So much for patience and compassion.

The partiers stared at him as if he were an alien being. Then three of the biggest, meanest-looking men exchanged nods and slowly moved toward him.

Lukas swallowed and forced himself not to back up or turn and run. Lord? I could use some help here!

“We’re not goin’ anywhere till Catcher and Moron can come with us!” a woman shouted back.

What was her road name? Birdbrain? What a weird bunch. He glanced at the three men who continued to move toward him, one step at a time, from three different areas of the room, as though they were stalking a wild animal. He just hoped the end wasn’t too painful.

He cleared his throat and tried not to flick a nervous glance at the stalkers. Don’t act afraid. “I’ll gladly release them if any one of you is sober enough to sign them out and take care of them until they can take care of themselves.” He looked from face to face—three women, seven men, with grubby, not-quite-in-focus faces—and didn’t get a volunteer. “Fine, then. I’ll keep them here.”

“Fine, then. We’ll stay, too,” the woman shouted.

“Then you’re a brave bunch,” Lukas said.

“Why’s that?” she taunted.

“When Catcher finds out you left his bike alone down by the lake for anybody to carry off, nobody will be able to save you.”

“My bike!” The loud, gruff voice came from the E.R. entranceway, and at the sound all attention pivoted in that direction. Even Lukas’s stalkers halted their steps to turn and see Catcher, all six feet four inches, two hundred fifty pounds of him, glowering from the threshold, his clothes splattered with drying blood.

He took a step forward, and Lukas wondered if the rest of them could see how unsteady the movement was.

“You left my baby down there all alone!” he thundered, then groaned and hunched forward. Lukas rushed over to grab him before he fell. But Catcher straightened himself and sent Lukas a warning glance. He raised his good arm and pointed toward the door. “Get out of here! All of you, get out of here! Boots, you’re walking, and I’m taking your bike. If my baby has a scratch on her when I get there, I’ll take it out of all your hides!”

Lukas’s stalkers were the first ones out the door, followed by Birdbrain and the other women. Catcher turned to bring up the rear of the procession. Lukas let him go.

Chapter Four

A t two o’clock Sunday morning Mercy stood on the front step of the Richmond Clinic and watched the taillights of Buck Oppenheimer’s big red pickup disappear into the cold darkness. Kendra’s condition was stabilized. She had recovered, clinically, from the carbon monoxide poisoning and now sat between Buck and Clarence on her way to four days of forced hospitalization in Springfield.

This was the right thing to do; Mercy knew it.

So why did it hurt so badly to remember the look of betrayal in Kendra’s eyes when the men placed her gently into the cab of the truck? Mercy shivered at the wind and stepped back inside the waiting room, though she didn’t shut the door.

As she watched tiny flakes of snow glitter in the light from the front step, other memories haunted her—of seeing her daughter terrified and in danger, and being unable to help; of feeling frightened herself by her own father’s alcoholism. She’d lived with past pain for so long she frequently had trouble enjoying the present.

Another gust of wind scattered tiny flakes across her face, and she finally closed and locked the door behind her. “Lord, help Kendra to see the truth of Your love,” she whispered. “Heal her, Lord. And please complete the healing in me.”

Mercy had begun, in the past few months, to put her patients in God’s hands as quickly as possible when her worry for them began. All she had to do now was learn to leave them there, to stop trying to control every situation.

She went into the front office and e-mailed the final pages they would need at Cox North for Kendra’s admittance.

The telephone rang beside her as the information was posted, and she picked up quickly.

“Hi, Dr. Mercy, this is Vickie over at Knolls Community. I thought you might still be in your office. I just wanted to let you know that Crystal and Odira are both settled in, and Crystal was already asleep when I left the room. We’ll keep a close eye on both of them tonight.”

Mercy felt a little easing of tension at the nurse’s reassuring tone. “Thank you, Vickie. I’ll be over in the morning to check on Crystal.”

After hanging up, Mercy walked back into her office.

She stepped over to her desk and plopped down into the leather chair for a moment. She stretched out her arms and flexed her shoulders, rolled her head around and took a few deep breaths. Odira hadn’t looked healthy tonight. Maybe in the morning Mercy could check her out.

Time to go home, but right now she was too tired to move. Would she ever again get a whole eight hours of sleep in a row? Should she consider getting a partner to take part of the load? At one time she’d hoped Lukas might stay around and help her with the influx until the E.R. was complete. She’d even dropped a few hints on several occasions, during those rare times the two of them had been together in the past three months. He hadn’t caught the hint. She hid her disappointment, telling herself that he was, at heart, an emergency physician. Family practice would probably bore him.

But deep down she found herself wondering was he, for some reason, avoiding her?

She knew he cared for her. She knew it. She could see tenderness in his eyes when he looked at her and hear gentleness in his voice. He cared a lot about Tedi, as well, and the two of them spent hours together laughing and talking and working on homework assignments when Lukas was in town.

Mercy couldn’t help the doubts that surfaced, memories of last fall when Lukas had told her he couldn’t see her anymore. But hadn’t all that changed? During the explosions at the hospital, Mercy experienced a more powerful explosion in her own life—she’d realized she could no longer deny God’s power or her need for Him. She had accepted Christ and had announced her newfound faith to a congregation of people at the Covenant Baptist Church. Since then she had witnessed the power of her new faith in many ways. The most obvious was her sudden ability to get along with Theodore—not with perfect ease and not always without resentment, but enough to make Tedi comfortable when they met together.

She glanced at the framed snapshots she kept of Tedi on the credenza—baby pictures, and then school pictures from kindergarten to the most recent sixth-grade shot. Tedi was the joy of her life. Just spending time with that bubbly, outspoken child renewed her, made her laugh and gave her courage. After everything Tedi had been through, from the divorce nearly six years ago to the near-death experience last year, she was recovering and growing every day. No parent could be more proud.

And then Mercy’s gaze drifted to the unframed snapshot of Lukas, the only picture she had of him. She still remembered the day she’d snapped it. He was covered in mud from a hike in the rain. His glasses were steamed up enough to camouflage the blue of his eyes, but not enough to hide the smile that radiated across his face, relieving a habitually serious expression. In the picture, his light brown hair was darkened to coffee. His well-built five-foot-ten frame carried him well, and somehow the way he stood and looked at the camera revealed his affection for her. Or maybe his demeanor had impressed itself upon her so much since last spring that she automatically saw it when she looked at him.

She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She would never forget their first hike together in the Mark Twain National Forest in August last year. The spiderwebs were thick across the narrow, overgrown logging trail they followed. Lukas had insisted on walking ahead of her, watching for snakes, knocking down the webs for her, even though he hated spiders. His thoughtfulness was one of the many traits about him that endeared him to her. She didn’t have the heart to point out that she’d been hiking those trails for years and was used to the spiders and the snakes and the ticks and the chiggers. She let him help her over the rough spots, as he had been doing in her life since April. But she was in another rough spot now, and he wasn’t here.

Did he know how much she needed him?