Chapter 9 - The Blood on the Marble
Out in the fourth-floor corridor, the silence that followed the departure of the gurney was absolute, broken only by the low, dying whir of an abandoned floor polisher down the hall.
Grant Wexler remained rooted to the exact spot where the doctor had shoved him.
His back was pressed flat against the wall, the rough texture of the wallpaper biting through the fine wool of his jacket. His breathing was shallow, rapid, rattling against his ribs. Slowly, with an agonizing lack of coordination, he looked down at his feet.
Across the pristine white vinyl floor, stretching from the nurses' station all the way to the swinging doors of the surgical wing fifty yards away, lay a jagged, discontinuous trail of blood and fluid. Near his own shoes, a small puddle had settled in a depression in the floor. Reflected in the crimson-tinted liquid was the distorted image of his own face—the face of a man who owned judges, who decided which businesses survived in the city, who had believed himself entirely insulated from the fragility of human consequence.
A sound broke the quiet—the wet, rhythmic slap of a mop against the floor.
Grant’s head jerked up.
One of the maintenance men, an older Black man with gray hair and eyes that had seen forty years of Chicago’s cruelty, was standing five feet away. He held a long wooden mop handle, dipping the heavy cotton head into the yellow bucket, preparing to wipe the trail away. He did not look at Grant with fear anymore; he looked at him with an ancient, blistering disgust that made Grant’s stomach violently heave.
“Don't touch it,” Grant croaked out, his voice a broken, dry husk.
The janitor paused, his hands resting on the mop handle. He didn't drop his gaze. He didn't back down.
“This is a hospital, mister,” the old man said, his voice flat, heavy with a dignity that made Grant feel microscopic. “People die here while other folks are trying to save 'em. You got no business standing in this blood.”
Down the hall, the two security guards who had stood silent during the confrontation slowly stepped forward. They did not draw their batons, but their postures were no longer deferential. They stopped six feet from Grant, their faces set in hard, unforgiving lines.
“Sir,” the older guard said, his hand resting on his belt. “You need to leave this floor. Now.”
Grant looked at the guard. For a split second, the old instincts flared—the urge to drop a name, to make a single phone call to the hospital’s board of trustees, to have this entire security shift terminated by five o'clock. But the words withered on his tongue before they could form. He looked at the nurses’ station—at Hannah’s abandoned charting binder lying open on the desk, at the half-empty paper cup of cold coffee she had been drinking before he arrived, at the small framed photograph of a smiling firefighter in turnout gear tucked beside her computer monitor.
May you like
Grant’s hands began to shake violently. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his linen handkerchief, and looked down at his shoes. There was a smear of her blood across the toe of his right oxford.
Without uttering a single word, the most feared man in Chicago turned his back on the nurses’ station, his broad shoulders hunched forward as if bearing an impossible weight, and walked slowly toward the elevators, every step echoing through the corridor like an indictment.
