Father On The Brink. Elizabeth Bevarly

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       One

      It was a blizzard of unprecedented proportions, even by northeastern standards. Cooper Dugan tried his damnedest to squint through the splashes of white that pelted his windshield, pressed his foot against the clutch and down-shifted into first. The cold March wind whipped easily through the plastic doors and windows of the four-wheel drive Jeep, chilling even more thoroughly his already frozen nose, seeping through his leather gloves to numb his fingers to the bone.

      He fumbled for the thermos of coffee he’d been clutching between his knees for most of the ride and unscrewed the lid, then sipped carefully from the lip without bothering with the plastic cup. The liquid was hotter than he’d expected it to be, and he burned his tongue, dribbling a good portion of the dark brown brew down his chin and throat, under his wool muffler and into the neck of the sweatshirt he wore beneath his leather college baseball jacket. Uttering a vicious and colorful oath, he scrubbed a hand over the bottom half of his face and growled low.

      “Hell of a way to spend a Saturday night,” he muttered to no one in particular.

      He was supposed to have been off this weekend, he reminded himself mercilessly. He was supposed to have been out on a date, at this very minute, with that new nurse in cardiology—the big brunette with the heart-shaped fanny, and breasts that just begged a man to cushion his head upon them and rest for a while. He was supposed to be enjoying himself a little bit after having worked eighteen days straight without a break. Instead, he was playing Good Samaritan to the City of Brotherly Love, responding to a cry for help from the mayor, who wasn’t even paying Cooper for his time.

      Hey, it wasn’t his fault the weather guys had overlooked and underestimated what had become the biggest and most crippling snowfall in Pennsylvania’s history, was it? It wasn’t his fault they’d all said, “No, don’t worry, it’s going to go way north of us.” It wasn’t his fault the snowplows hadn’t even had a chance to make it out of the city garage. And it wasn’t his fault—or his problem, for that matter—that a bunch of local citizens were having trouble getting the medical attention they required on a day-to-day basis.

      Hey, he didn’t even live in Philadelphia. He was a Jersey boy, born and bred, the Pennsauken apartment he lived in now virtually a stone’s throw away from the house where he’d spent his childhood.

      So what the hell was he doing out here freezing his butt off, battling a temperamental Jeep to keep it on the road, eating stale Twinkies, and spilling coffee down his shirt?

      “No rest for the wicked, I guess,” he complained to himself. “Or for paramedics, either.”

      He jotted down a mental note to himself: Hey, Coop, next time something like this happens, and the city across the Delaware River gets buried under snow, and some public official makes a public appeal to any citizen possessing a four-wheel drive vehicle and even the most rudimentary first-aid skills…the next time something like this happens, be in Barbados, okay?

      “Cooper, honey, you still out there?”

      The crackly voice buzzed over the radio he’d tossed onto the passenger seat earlier that evening, and, reluctant to take his eyes off of the road—what little he could see of it— Cooper groped around for a minute before finally finding it.

      “Yeah, Patsy, I’m still with you,” he replied after squeezing the Talk button.

      “Where you at?”

      Cooper chuckled and tried to see some kind of vague landmark through the snow. Finally, he lifted the radio to his mouth again and said, “I have no idea.”

      “Well, give me a rough estimate.”

      Cooper sighed, slowed the Jeep to a crawl and noted a row of orangey-looking town houses edging the tree-lined street. “I think I’m in Chestnut Hill,” he told Patsy. “Looks like Chestnut Hill anyway, and that’s the way I was headed. Sorta. There are trees. Where else in downtown Philly am I going to see trees?”

      He heard the dispatcher expel a sound of relief. “Sounds like Chestnut Hill to me. Okay, that’s great, Cooper. I’ve got another run for you.” A pause, then, “I can’t read Don’s handwriting very well, but it looks like you’ve got a kidney patient—a sixty-seven-year-old male—who couldn’t make dialysis this afternoon. You better get over there right quick.”

      “Quick,” he mumbled to himself. “Yeah, right.”

      He knew the dispatcher, like everyone else scrambling to work through this situation, had been pressed into duty when she had other things to do—like keeping herself and her family warm and safe. But Cooper’s patience was shrinking as his tension and need for sleep increased.

      Already today, he’d ferried a four-year-old with a broken ankle to the hospital, cringing at the little guy’s pain-filled howling all the way. He’d resuscitated a major coronary after the eighty-year-old woman had tried to keep ahead of the snow in shoveling her driveway. He’d run a batch of prescriptions from a local pharmacy to four very needy people in utterly opposite corners of town. He’d even rushed a golden retriever to a veterinarian.

      Organization at the dispatch source, it seemed, was the biggest casualty of the blizzard so far.

      He pressed the Talk button again. “Patsy,” he began as patiently as he could. “‘Right quick’ isn’t an option at the moment. At this point, with the snow coming down like it is, I’ll be lucky if I can get to the old guy by daybreak tomorrow.”

      “Just get there,” she snapped back, obviously stretched as thin as Cooper was. She rattled off an address that he hoped like hell he would remember, because there was no way he was taking his hand off the steering wheel long enough to write anything down.

      It took him nearly half an hour to reach the street that wound up being only a block from what had been his location when Patsy had assigned him the duty. After his sixth pass up the block in question, Cooper finally found the town house he was looking for. At least, he thought it was the one he was looking for. He parked in the middle of the street, unconcerned that anyone was going to hit or strip the vehicle. After all, only idiots like him were out on a night like this, right?

      Automatically, he reached behind the passenger seat for the well-stocked first-aid kit he always carried with him. Then he pushed the Jeep door open, pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, tucked his body in as well as he could against the wind and snow, and jogged toward the house.

      * * *

      Katherine Winslow had been packing for a very long trip to Anywhere-But-Here when her water had broken. She’d gasped when she’d felt the warm rush of fluid slide down her legs and soak the pants of her maternity overalls, then had stared down at the clear liquid pooling around her feet with much dismay. It had been a troubling development, to say the least, coming as it did three weeks before her due date, in the middle of the worst blizzard in Pennsylvania history, and right on the heels of her discovery that her husband wasn’t who he claimed to be—including СКАЧАТЬ