Page 1 of It Takes a Thief

CHAPTER ONE

MADISON

It all came boiling up at me from a dark pit of despair I hadn’t known since I was a kid.

My mind was a black hole, yet a vortex swirling full of writing. I had to calm my head so I could see the words at the edges of my vision. If I shook my head, all the letters jumbled like in a word puzzle.

“Get out,” some letters seemed to be saying.

“Connect the leads to John Doe’s chest,” said some more letters.

They got scrambled into a sort of pick-up sticks jumble. John Doe was having a massive heart attack, yet he was ripping the ECG leads from his chest every time I tried to stick them on.

“I’ll do it, Maddy,” said Winston, a fellow nurse. “You get the IV.”

John Doe wailed louder. “I was just having a good time! I was celebrating with my band! I wasn’t doing anything wrong!” Meanwhile he thrashed like a shark, kicking every doctor or NP who tried to help. His heart rate was an arrhythmic 120, sweat poured down his brow, and his look was about as frantic and wide-eyed as a silent screen bad guy.

I couldn’t get the lidocaine IV into that thrashing arm. How many times had I dealt with this? Ventricular tachycardia starts in the lower chambers of the heart, sometimes brought on by substance abuse. And those people are the most erratic of all to deal with.

“Hold his arm!” I told a subordinate nurse. But even two people holding his arm, pressing their weight to the table, couldn’t stop this ‘roided-out hulk from beating the shit out of us.

“I can’t!” cried Rozelle.

When Doe cracked me in the shoulder with his elbow, I threw up my hands, too. In the cardiac ER, we were supposed to make heroic efforts. But being beaten up by patients was too much for me that day.

I think it all started when someone stole my mother’s ashes from my sister June’s Jeep. Who the fuck would do something like that? We did not throw a lot of green toward her funeral, seeing as how she had no friends, so it wasn’t even a nice urn. June was parked in A Joint Effort’s parking lot, the medical cannabis dispensary where she worked as budtender and irrigation expert. The parking lot was supervised by a rent-a-cop! It had cameras on it! Yet we, the mighty Old Ladies of the supreme Bare Bones MC, had not been able to find the culprit who stole our beloved—well, not so beloved, but a mother all the same—mother’s ashes!

That’s what had started this whole downhill roll for me. Those fucking ashes. My mother was haunting me even from beyond the grave. Boiling tears stung my eyes, and my stomach clenched as though threatening to reject the three bites of melon I’d had for breakfast.

“Maddy, Maddy!” cried Winston, waking me from my stupor.

Win didn’t have to tell me Doe had finally passed out. His pulse rate dropped precipitously. The respiratory therapist began sliding the tube down his throat. Now we could get some shit done. I got the IV in like butter as Winston thudded manly chest compressions to the senseless Doe.

Then it all started to seem pointless to me. That had been happening with increasing frequency lately. I was overcome by the uselessness of everything. This guy had obviously been doing meth, or something equally speedy to cause the sudden tachycardia. How much amphetamine would you have to do to cause this? I’d seen it hundreds of times, both in the ER and out. Living with a motorcycle club, you pretty much have seen it all.

We’d save him, then he’d be back with his band the next week doing the exact same thing. We might even see him again here in the ER for the same reason. What goes around comes around, no?

Winston handed me the defib paddles, and the darkness swirled around me again. Like antimatter, a substance swooped in one ear and out the other, taking my mind with it.

I looked up at the wall, trying to see the words that would tell me what to do. Some synapses just weren’t making the correct connection in my brain. I was running on a kind of overload that was shutting down all the connections one by one. Soon even the swirling cursive words I was clinging to started to fade.

“Maddy!” shouted Winston urgently. “The paddles?”

“Nurse Illuminati,” came a faraway voice I recognized as Dr. Lee. “The paddles!”

It was one of those instances where your body reacts before your brain does. So I can’t explain my motivation for shoving the paddles at my dear Winston, mumbling something like, “you do it,” and clawing my way through the ER personnel toward a bright rectangle that I hoped was the door.

“Get out,” said the letters in my head.

And so I did.

Barging through several sets of swinging doors, I pieced together more helpful letters as they churned by. “Time to do something different,” yes, that’s what they were saying!

The encouragement gave me the guts to keep banging through more sets of doors. But there was something welling up in my chest that didn’t feel right. Despair. Hopelessness. Why the fuck had they stolen Iris’ ashes?

“What do you care?” I mumbled, striding past the cafeteria. People moved away for a nurse in her squeaky white shoes and crisp patterned scrubs striding down a hall. But this time, I think they cringed away because I was talking to myself. “Why do I care if her damned ashes were stolen?”

I knew it wasn’t all about the fucking urn.