“Unless you are family, you can’t go in.”
“Listen, Linda, is it?” I begin, pasting on my smooth tones of calm and control.
“During working hours, her family entrusts me to keep her safe. I am the one responsible for her care. Please disclose her room number, and I will be in contact with her family, if you haven’t already done so, to keep everyone updated on the situation.”
“Family or police only at this point in time. I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s not, sir, it’s Mercer. Mason Mercer. Does that name ring a bell, Linda?”
Linda blinks up at us from behind her partition. “Let me beclear about my intention in the hope that you will understand. How many Mercer millions fund this fucking hospital? Now, if you could be helpful and direct us to Ms. Sabrina Broe, we’d be grateful, Linda.”
“My apologies, Mr. Mercer. She is in curtain seven.” Her head swivels, searching. “Yoon, Yoon! Please take these gentlemen to curtain seven. Thank you.”
Trystan and I eat up the corridor in competing strides, around portable monitors in the hallway, past the moans of agony and uncooperative patients fighting the care they need. Security hover just beyond the pulled curtain, their heavy boots and bulky black pants were a dead giveaway as nurses fought to check vital signs. The curtain in area seven is wide open, where two police officers sit or stand around a nurse busy with cords to a machine. On the bed, Sabrina is a shell of herself. Her ripped-down coat lay at the end of the gurney, frayed edges a mirror to my own.
“What happened?”
A police officer looks up from his notes, taking me in. “She was mugged. They took some valuables. The positive is that Sabrina looks to be okay, just some superficial wounds as you can see.” He indicated her face and neck with the end of his pen before it returned to his incident pad.
“They? As in more than one?”
“Two from what we can tell. One distracted her while the other snatched her bag and phone. We have what we need for now.”
He turns his attention back to my EPA, frail and mute with the light that dances in her eyes absent. “Remember to call me if you can think of anything else.” His thick fingers tap the card resting on the bed next to her trembling thigh.
Both detectives leave, and the nurse continues to apply some kind of gauze sponge to Bri’s swollen eye. Her face hasthe beginning of purple bruising around her eye socket and down the side of her nose. Dried blood cakes the corner of her bottom lip, hanging open and slack. Is she still in shock? How did she communicate with the police? Trys recovers first and moves to her side, throwing a cautious arm around her shoulders, the other hand covering her quivering one.
“Shhh,” he soothes, and I’m rendered an onlooker. How he can soothe and calm her post-assault and continual trauma. Other than white-hot rage fermenting behind my eyelids, I can’t offer comfort. Mercers don’tdosoft. We aren’t coddled or cared for, and we lack the gene to offer it to anyone else.
“I want a head CT scan,” I bark to the nurse readying a blood pressure cuff. “And plastics consult for her eye and lip.”
“We don’t offer either of those for a simple assault, sir,” she replies with a smile, effectively dismissing my request. It's no doubt some cost-saving protocol, but it doesn’t sit well with me. “We’d like to have Ms. Broe discharged immediately and under the care of physician Dr. Glen Sator. I’ve already messaged him; he will be in touch to facilitate patient handover.”
“Yes, sir,” she says. Professor Sator’s reputation needs no introduction.
“Is that everything?”I ask, my finger tapping the rim of my whiskey tumbler.
“Yep, everything she’ll need in the interim. We can go back and grab anything else tomorrow, or once she’s been given the all clear by Sator, maybe she can come with me to pick up the last of her stuff?”
Sabrina is sleeping in the secondary bedroom after being examined by Glen. A cursory glance over the CT results tells me it was unnecessary, but good to rule out any tiny brainbleeds or skull fractures. All the tourist brochures on assault and muggings advise you to offer anything the perpetrator demands. Life over limb and all that. Only Sabrina didn’t get the memo and fought like a front-line soldier to keep the work cell and designer satchel out of the hands of thugs. Inside the bag was a laptop and some communication; nothing confidential or strategic, thankfully. Losing the work phone and the photos from the Bahamas were her chief complaint, other than the pain around her eye and lip. Sator took care of both, but the swelling and bruising will need to run their course.
Trystan flops down opposite me on the sofa, a large, flat bag next to him. He’d been blunt with me before she was attacked. I’m certain he’s about to give me a piece of his mind.
As he stands to head to the bar for his own scotch, I down the last of mine and offer the glass for a refill.
“Another?”
“Please.”
“You blame me for forgetting her birthday. And I’ll wear that. I saw her Gmail had the suffix 1101 and at the time knew it was most likely her birthday and filed it away in a box to reopen later.”
“Oh, the old filed away in a box to open later.”
He turns to scowl at me, bottom lip pained. “Do you want another drink or not?”
“Fine, continue.”
“I’ll wear me not joining the dots and dropping the ball with that. I apologize, and I will speak to her once she wakes up. It’s what we were talking about when the phone was snatched away. That’s when I tracked her location.”
