Critical Condition. Sandra Orchard

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      PROLOGUE

      Strange. Tara Peterson stepped out of a patient’s room only to be greeted by yet another call bell. Except this one blipped off as quickly as it sounded.

      It blipped again.

      A malfunction?

      Seeing no sign of the other on-duty nurse, she hurried down the hall to check on the cancer patient herself. Most days she loved being a nurse. But today, she would’ve happily traded in her orthopedic shoes for a pair of sling-backs and a plush leather chair behind a computer monitor. Eleven and a half hours of racing from one call to another, a stack of charts awaiting her attention, made it easy to forget she hated sitting still almost as much as she hated paperwork.

      She paused outside the room to ease a knot in her back and froze midstretch at the sound of something clattering across the floor, followed by a thud.

      Tara threw open the door. “Mrs. Parker, what’s wrong?”

      The frail young woman’s body stiffened, her hands contorting at an odd angle, her unseeing eyes rolling upward.

      A sudden shove propelled Tara across the room. She grabbed the bed rail, twisting her arm as momentum slammed her knees to the floor. Her head clipped the corner of the bed frame and stars exploded in front of her eyes. Biting back a cry of pain, she glanced over her shoulder in time to see the tail of a white lab coat whisk out the door.

      “Wait,” she shouted, a metallic taste filling her mouth.

      The bed rocked frantically, but a groan snapped Tara’s attention to the floor beyond, where a man lay sprawled on the cold tile. Blood spurted from a gash over his eye.

      He mumbled something Tara couldn’t make out.

      Gritting her teeth against the white-hot pain that shot up her arm, she grabbed a towel and pressed it to his cut. “Mr. Parker, you need to hold this so I can see to your wife. Can you do that?”

      Taking his grunt as a yes, Tara surged to her feet.

      Mrs. Parker thrashed wildly in the throes of a seizure.

      Tara pulled the code alarm, then checked Mrs. Parker’s airway. Clear—for now—but the woman was burning up.

      “You have to save her,” Mr. Parker croaked, his tortured gaze reaching out to his wife.

      Dr. Whittaker rushed into the room, his white lab coat flapping behind him.

      “Give her fifty c.c.’s of diazepam stat,” Whittaker barked.

      Alice Bradshaw, the other nurse on duty, shoved the crash cart through the door. “I’ll get it.”

      Dr. Whittaker steadied the patient’s arm, soothing her in the dulcet tones that had earned him the moniker Dr. Wonderful from more than one patient.

      As Tara tapped a vein to insert the intravenous, Mr. Parker cried out and clutched his chest.

      “Take over here,” Tara commanded the instant Alice returned with the diazepam. “I need to see to Mr. Parker.” Pulling a stethoscope to her ears, Tara knelt at his side. Parker’s breathing was shallow, his pulse thready.

      Dr. McCrae hurried in and glanced from Tara to the bed, where Alice was still struggling with the IV.

      “Help restrain the patient,” Whittaker ordered.

      Mr. Parker clutched Tara’s arm and muttered a desperate prayer.

      “It’s okay,” Tara soothed. “We’re taking good care of your wife. Don’t worry.”

      The man’s gaze shifted to the team around the bed. “You have to stop—” He gasped for air. “Stop the killer.”

      “The killer? I don’t understand. No one’s been killed.”

      Mr. Parker’s grip relaxed. And a moment later, his arm flopped lifelessly to the floor.