บททั้งหมดของ He Accused Me During Code Blue: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

The Code Blue tone cut straight through Arthur Grant's quarterly report.He didn't hesitate for even a second. His eyes came up off the page and landed on me. "Marcus. Go."I was already turning before he finished the word. Diane Keller caught up with me in the hallway and gave me the handoff at a jog."Frank Delaney, fifty-four. Chest pain for an hour, arrested before the medics got him here. Looks like a big anterior MI."The corridor to the procedure suite isn't a hundred yards. It felt like the whole distance between a man being alive and being dead.I was halfway out of my white coat when someone stepped into my path. A young man, a wrinkled pharmacy printout in his hand.Noah Grant. First-year resident, three months on the job."Dr. Hale." He'd pitched his voice so the whole corridor could hear it. "Your department signed out sixty ampoules of controlled anesthetic in March, and the count doesn't reconcile. Did you take them out and sell them?"For a second I thought I'd

"I'm standing here because I'm sick of watching people in this building treat a hospital like their own cash machine and treat patients like cattle," Noah said. "Somebody has to show every patient you've kept in the dark what's actually going on behind these walls, and it's going to be me."The whole corridor went still. Even Robert was caught flat-footed.And the families who'd been standing there for the entertainment of it — their faces changed completely. The president's own grandson turning on his own house. That single fact settled the question for them. There was rot in this hospital, and now it was proven.A few of them, worked up, started pushing forward. Their bodies made a wall across the last few steps between me and the doors."He's the president's grandson. No wonder he's got the nerve.""We can't let this crook in there to destroy the evidence."Noah's introduction had detonated the corridor, and the shouting came from every direction at once."Don't let him in!"

My voice came out flat and level."Don't drive it with your fingertips, you'll make it whip. Use your wrist. Picture it already through the lesion, and it'll find its own way."On the other side of the glass Robert took a breath and went back to the screen. Under his hands, the wire crept toward the vessel that had almost entirely closed itself off.The whole team had stopped breathing."Good. That's it. Hold it there." I kept it quiet, and my eyes never came off the numbers on the monitor. "Pressure's starting to drop. Anesthesia, start a dopamine drip."You can pick up the pace. We don't have time to spend."Maybe the push did something, because Robert got decisive after that.Everything was running the way it should.Out beyond the observation glass, Arthur was trying to read something off my face. He was going to be disappointed. There was nothing on it but fatigue. What's happening on a table has never once been written on the surgeon's face."Balloon's positioned. Ready

I hadn't raised my voice, but every word of it landed clean.Every person in that corridor was looking at one thin piece of paper.Cole's eyes went hard. He sent his partner off to pull my old signatures for an on-the-spot comparison.The sweat at Arthur's temple had gathered into a bead and was running down the deep line beside his mouth. He finally found his way back out of the shock."That's a fabrication. Marcus, you are publicly slandering the leadership of this hospital. You want to move everyone's attention with some hearsay about handwriting? It's a joke.""Whether it's a joke, you'd know better than I would," I said. "In this entire building, apart from you — who's only just moved into the president's office — who else could go around me that easily and requisition anesthetics in bulk under my name?"You've probably forgotten. You walked me through my first major case yourself, and afterward you laughed at my signature. You told me my finish was too flat. You showed me t