Read Blinded for Free Online

“It’s still there. It’s hard to stay in this position for so long, you know. I feel like Ray Bourque kicked me in the kidneys and he’s been standing on my groin for most of the third period.”
    “Yeah, that’s exactly what I hear it’s like,” she replied.
    I stole a glance at the hospital ID hanging around her neck. It indeed read “Snoopy.” Snoopy Lipner, R.N. I could tell she didn’t have a clue who Ray Bourque was and was more than content to go to her grave without learning why Sam Purdy would have an image of the man standing on his groin. I could’ve explained to her about hockey’s place in Sam’s universe and his peculiar love of traditional defensemen, but I didn’t think Snoopy really wanted to know that, either. I was tempted to ask her about her first name, but was guessing that just about everyone did and that she’d grown weary of the inquiries a long time before.
    She pulled a syringe from the front pocket of her tunic, uncapped it with her teeth, and had the needle in a port in Sam’s IV tube faster than Wyatt Earp could draw his six-shooter. She depressed the plunger and disposed of the empty in a sharps container in another blink of the eye. “This’ll make it easier for you. Just another hour or so, and we can take that thing off your groin. Hang in there, and I’ll be back to check on you soon.”
    “Can I have some more of those ice chips before you go?”
    She lifted a paper cup off the table and placed the edge against his lips.
    Sam tilted the cup and spilled a few slivers of ice into his mouth. Afterward he seemed to exhale for ten seconds as the medication from the syringe entered his bloodstream and the molecules started mating with the appropriate receptors in his brain.
    “What did you give him?” I asked.
    “Water, in the form of ice chips. Who are you?” Snoopy asked.
    “A friend.”
    “He’s the one who brought me in,” Sam said. “He’s a good guy, a doctor. Not a real doctor. You know, a Ph.D., a psychologist.”
    She eyed me as though she’d finally decided that she’d let me stay. She lofted the IV tubing. “That was fentanyl. For the pain. That position he’s in is a killer.” She returned Sam’s water glass to the bedside table. “You did good work yesterday,” she told me. “We got him early enough that we were able to bust his clot in the ER. Because of that he’s going to walk out of here with most of the heart he came in with.”
    She was gone in a flash.
    Sam mumbled, “Nurses are nice to cops. Don’t know why that is.”
    Gingerly, I placed the plastic heart on his rolling bedside tray and watched his eyelids grow heavy as the fentanyl continued its work and the inevitable sedation went along for the ride.
    His eyes suddenly popped open, and he said, “Marriage is a funny thing. Love isn’t enough, you know? People think it is, but it isn’t. Other things happen sometimes. They do.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked, honestly curious.
    He didn’t respond.
    I sat beside him for a few moments more and watched his breathing get into the uniform rhythm of narcotic semisleep.
    I was aware of an impulse to run home and make Sam an umbrella for his heart. Rigid foam rubber, plastic strips, some filament tape. That should do it. Something to shield his heart from whatever out there might want to bruise it. And to protect it from whatever he might be inclined to do to it, too.
    I whispered, “Nurses are nice to cops because most of the time the cops deserve it, Sam. That’s why.”
    I sat beside him for a few more minutes, silently rehashing what Gibbs Storey had told me that morning. In my mind I asked Sam what a cop like him would say to a story like hers. I asked him what the Boulder police were likely to do after the police in California informed them that they had a killer in their town.
    Sam slept through it all.

EIGHT
    In the dozen-plus years I’d been in practice in Boulder, I’d referred at least a dozen women-and one man-to