The Mob Boss's Nurse

My fiancé reads the charge against me off a pharmacy printout, loud, in front of the whole emergency department.

"Twelve vials of fentanyl," Dr. Ethan Prescott says. "Pulled under your login. Between three and four-thirty this morning. For a patient who doesn't exist."

Seven-ten a.m. Day shift is coming through the doors. Nobody's moving.

"Hon, I ran the count twice," says Brooke from pharmacy. She holds the printout like a diploma.

Mr. Lindqvist, the chief operating officer, signs a clipboard without looking up.

Here's what Ethan doesn't know. The patient who doesn't exist is five foot eleven, Greek, and bled through two of my gloves at three this morning. I took a bullet out of him. It's in a specimen cup in my left pocket, with the time written on the lid.

"Did you read that printout," I ask, "or did Brooke read it to you?"

"Noemi." The voice he uses on families. "You're a night nurse from Humboldt Park. Who did you think they'd believe?"

The whole department hears it. A resident has his phone up.

"I need the ring back," Ethan says.

Fourteen months. He proposed by that vending machine. I take it off. It's his grandmother's.

I drop it in the sharps container by bay two.

"That's sealed," Brooke says.

"I know what sealed means, Brooke."

Analyn at the desk says something in Tagalog that would get her written up if anyone here spoke it.

Ethan doesn't look at me. He looks at Brooke. And I know it the way you know a rhythm's wrong before the monitor says so.

Darnell from security walks me out through the ambulance bay, my locker in a trash bag. He says sorry twice.

Four hours earlier.

Ten to three. Two men in black coats come through the ambulance doors with a third man between them. He's walking. That's the first thing I notice, because men with that much blood on them don't usually walk.

"Bay four," I say.

The big one with the shaved head puts him on the gurney like he's done it before. The young one stays by the doors and watches the corridor instead of the patient.

The patient looks at me. Dark eyes. A face the colour of the sheet.

"No police," he says.

"You've got a bullet in you."

"Then take it out."

"I'm a nurse. Surgeons are upstairs."

"Tonight you're whatever I need."

I turn for the phone on the wall. His hand closes on my wrist. Cold, and stronger than a man that colour should be.

"Let go of my wrist," I say, "or I let go of your artery."

He lets go.

"What's your name?" he asks.

"Patients don't get my name."

"I'm not a patient. I'm not here."

"Then who's bleeding on my floor?"

"Someone who'll find it out."

Ethan comes in. He reads the patient in one look and reads the blue bank bag the young one sets on the counter in another.

"Local and a pack," he tells me. "It's under the skin at the back. Take it out, dress him, lose him. I'll do the chart."

Which is how a nurse ends up holding forceps. That's a line. I crossed it.

I pull the fentanyl. Twelve vials over the next hour, because he's a big man and he doesn't make a sound, and that's worse. Analyn witnesses the first two. After that, Ethan's badge does.

The bullet comes out at seven minutes past three. It isn't round anymore. It comes through my glove and the meat of my palm on the way, so I bag my blood with his. I write on the lid. Three-oh-seven. Bay four. No name. My initials.

He watches me do it. He doesn't ask what I'm writing.

Four-thirty. The two coats walked him out the way they walked him in. Bay four on the board says nothing. Not discharged. Nothing.

"When's Area Four coming?" I ask Ethan at the counter.

"For what?"

He's wrapping my hand himself. Gentle. He's good at it.

"The gunshot."

"What gunshot, Noemi?"

I stand there with his gauze going round my palm and take it in order, like vitals. The bag. The board. The question.

There's an evidence locker for the cup. I walk toward it. Then I don't.

I put the cup in my left pocket, where the pens go. They teach you one thing in nursing school before the drugs. Write it down, and never let anyone tell you it didn't happen.

Which brings us back to the trash bag.

Outside, Chicago is doing November. A black car comes off the hospital lot behind me and does eleven miles an hour for four blocks. I know, because my bus does the same.

My abuela's two-flat. She's at seven-thirty mass at Saint Sylvester's. She'll light a candle for Ethan, because she's never liked him and she's fair.

The back door is unlocked. I locked it.

He's at the kitchen table. Grey. Upright. My packing under the white shirt, my tape on his side, the black coat over all of it like he's dressed for a funeral.

"You kept something of mine," he says.

"Your blood's on my shoes. You want those too?"

"The bullet."

"Is somewhere you can't reach without me."

The shaved head is on the back porch, pretending to be a porch.

"Do you know who I am?" he asks.

"I know what you are. You're the patient who doesn't exist." I put the trash bag down. "I got fired for you an hour ago. Twelve vials. My login. A man who was never there."

"Then you know what it's worth," he says. "To me."

"I know what it's worth to Ethan. He took a bag of cash off your friend and a chart off the board, and that cup is the only thing in this city that says either one happened."

He sits back, slow, a hand on his side. "What do you want?"

"My name back."

"Then you'll need mine."

"I don't have yours."

"Aris Vlahos."

Everybody on the Northwest Side knows it. It's painted on the ambulances in our bay all night, and nobody says it above a whisper.

"And yours," he says. "You didn't give it. At three."

"You weren't there at three. You said so."

"I'm here now."

I take the cup out and set it on the table between us, and keep my hand on it.

"Noemi Delgado. You asked my name twice. Say it right the first time."

"Noemi Delgado," he says, and gets it right.

"Here's what my fiancé did this morning, Mr. Vlahos. He fired the only nurse in Chicago who can say you were ever shot."

"And the nurse?" he asks.

I close my fingers round the cup.

"She kept the bullet."