“…mortals, who come out like leaves in summer and eat the fruit of the field and presently fall lifeless to the ground.”
-Homer

“Glory to fill the world…”
-Ovid



Chapter 1

“482. 140 Scarborough Street. Shooting to the head. On a one.”

“Scarborough Street?” Troy said. “No gang-bangers in that neighborhood.”

“Where’s Scarborough?” I asked.

“Take Broad down to Asylum, bang a left. I’ll show you.”

I hit the lights and sirens on. Our red and white ambulance surged north on Broad, then swung west up Asylum.

“It’s got to be a barrel for breakfast job,” Troy said. “I don’t think the Latin gangs have quite extended their territory into the West End.”

Troy was twenty-eight, a broad shouldered six foot three, with a smile that said he owned the world, or at least could have his way with it. I hadn’t known him an hour, but already I wasn’t keen for him. Maybe it was the New York Yankees hat he wore or the bullet-proof manner he’d explained he was the paramedic and I was the EMT. My job was to drive and act only on his command. I didn’t show it, but I didn’t take that well. I had a good sixteen years on him and, coming from Maine, I preferred the Red Sox.

“404 to dispatch,” a voice on the company radio frequency said, “I’m turning onto Scarborough now. I’ll be there in one.”

“Seurat,” Troy said with disdain. “He’s always jumping my calls. Step on it.”

I switched the siren to wail. Ben Seurat was the chief paramedic. I’d met him only briefly that morning. When he assigned me to Troy as his temporary partner, by the way he’d smiled and Troy had grunted, I sensed there was bad blood between them.

“Time’s a ticking,” Troy said.

I ran the ambulance hard on the center line parting traffic to the sides of the road. We crossed Woodland. The road dipped and then curved.

“404 out.”

Troy cursed under his breath. “Take this right up here.”

I swung around a stopped city bus and then turned right onto Scarborough. It was a long flat street lined by giant maple trees. Large, stately homes were set well back from the road, many behind hedges or iron gates.

“Keep going. It’ll be down toward the Albany end on the right hand side. We should see the cars in the drive. There they are -- down there.”

A Capital Ambulance fly car, its red lights still whirling, was parked behind three police cars in the circular driveway of the white columned brick house. I shut off the siren as I drove through the entrance.

We wheeled the stretcher across the damp recently cut lawn. A police officer met at us at the front door. “You’re not going to need that. It’s a 78. In the library. I hope you have a strong stomach.”

We walked through a living room, where moving boxes were piled. The walls held only picture hooks.

Ben Seurat stood by the French doors open to a brick terrace. A man in his mid-thirties, he had the red complexion of someone with high blood pressure. He wore a white supervisor shirt with a gold badge over the left breast pocket. He nodded solemnly to us. “C-MED 404,” he said into his portable radio, “a patch to Saint Fran with med control, please.”

“Med 8 and stand by.”

Brahms played from an unseen source. There was a Persian rug in front of a large marble-faced fireplace. Empty bookcases lined the high-ceilinged room. A man sat in a chair behind a massive mahogany desk. I looked at the face. There was nothing there. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. Just torn bloody flesh. Bits of tissue, blood, hair and bone stuck to the ceiling. You could still smell the acrid discharge of gunpowder.

On the desk was a single photo of a man and his family. Taken in front of a ski lift, the man stood with his arm around the waist of a pretty smiling woman, two teenage girls stood in front of them.

A policeman took pictures of the shotgun that lay on the floor by the man’s feet.
Ben’s heart monitor was on the desk, still attached to the corpse. A green flat line with occasional complexes scrolled across the small dark screen.

“He’s still got a rhythm here,” Troy said.

“Agonal,” Ben replied. “I’m just waiting for medical control for permission to presume.”

“Go ahead 404, Saint Fran’s on.”

“Hey!” the officer shouted at Troy. “This is a crime scene.”

Troy had the man out of the chair, lifting him like he was a doll and laying him down on the floor.

“No, it’s a resuscitation scene,” Troy said. “I could use some help here.”

“The man’s dead,” Ben said. “He doesn’t have a face.”

Troy had the airway kit out. “Protocol says all medics must agree with the termination decision.” He snapped a curved steel blade on to the laryngoscope. “I oppose.”

Ben just shook his head.

Kneeling over the body, Troy stuck the blade into the goop. He peered down into the opening, and then passed the long plastic tube into the mess like a straw into Jell-O. “I’m in.” He looked up at me. “If you’re on the clock, I could use an ambu-bag and some compressions.”

I handed him the ambu-bag from Ben’s gear. I looked at Ben who still hadn’t moved as I got down on my knees and placed my hands on the man’s sternum.

“Go ahead, 404. Saint Francis is on the line,” Ben’s radio crackled.

“Disregard,” Ben said into his portable.

I started compressions.

“So what? He’s not dead?” the officer said.

Ben opened his IV kit. “No, I guess not, not for another twenty minutes anyway, and not here.”

Troy squeezed the ambu-bag he’d connected to the tube, forcing air into the man’s lungs.

Ben wrapped a tourniquet around the man’s arm, and then reached for a catheter. “This is completely wrong. He’s a suicide.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he changed his mind at the last minute, maybe that’s why he took his face off instead of the back of his head.”

“Maybe he just had bad luck.”

“Well, his luck’s changed.” Troy winked at me. “I’m here.”

“Oh, please,” Ben said.


The trauma center was little more than a mile away. While Ben and Troy did CPR on the man in back, I followed Ben’s directions and took a right on Albany, and followed the street down into the Hartford north end, passing a housing project, turning right down onto Homestead Avenue, where brick factories stood behind barbed wire.

“Check this out,” I heard Troy shout. “We have a pulse.”

“It’s just the epi talking,” Ben said. “It won’t last.”

I turned right onto Woodland. Potholes jostled the ambulance.

“Slow down,” Ben shouted.

At the hospital when I opened the ambulance’s back doors to pull the stretcher, Troy unwrapped the blood pressure cuff from the man’s limp arm. “180/100,” he said. “I’ll take it.” Ben, with a sour look, kept squeezing the ambu-bag. Troy laid the IV bags on the man’s chest and resecured the straps. “Okay, let’s get him moving,” he said.

The trauma team, garbed in green scrubs with surgical hats and gloves on, awaited us as we entered the trauma room off the main hallway. We lifted the man on the board from our stretcher to the trauma table.

“He was in ventricular asystole when I arrived,” Troy said. “Intubated with a number 9.0. He’s gotten two rounds of epinephrine. One of atropine. He’s in a sinus tack now with a BP of 180/100. He’s got a 16 in his right AC and a 14 in the left. Lungs sounds equal with good compliance.”

“My God,” Doctor Eckstein said. “How did you get a tube in that?”

“I wiggled it around a little bit till I found the right spot,” Troy said. He handed the ambu-bag to the respiratory therapist at the head of the gurney. A tech cut the man’s pants off with trauma shears.

Dr. Eckstein nodded for the therapist to give a couple squeezes of the bag as she listened for lung sounds on the left and right sides of the chest. The doctor was a tall woman with Buddy Holly glasses and a girlish face – I guessed her to be in her early thirties. “I don’t believe I’m even looking at this. What happened?”

“The police got a call for a distraught man,” Ben said. “They heard the blast when they were at the front door.”

She turned to the trauma team. “Let’s go people, what are you gawking at? I want a pressure, another line, get some x-rays, and let’s get him prepped.”


While I stood outside cleaning the stretcher, Ben and Troy argued in front of the ER doors.

Troy pointed to the patch on his shoulder with his bottle of Coke. “Paramedic,” he said. “I save lives.”

“Who are you kidding?” Ben said. “You didn’t do anyone any favors.” He turned and walked away.

Troy noticed me watching then. “A little excitement for your first call. I told you it was going to be a guy eating steel.”

I nodded without committing myself.

“All in a day’s work,” Troy said.

“Something like that.”

He raised his Coca-Cola to his lips and guzzled it empty. He tossed the bottle end over end toward the trash can fifteen feet away. It clanked in. He pumped his fist.

***

Next Chapter to be posted 6/12