The Victims Game
Part Six - the Crunch
By Scott J. Welles
scottjwelles@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMERS:  Hi. We've got some legal stuff to wade through before we can jump into things. Mostly the usual prerequisite jazz: ER and all related characters are the property of Warner Bros., ConstantC Productions, and Amblin Entertainment Television, a bunch of really swell, understanding guys who won't sue me if I mention that the aforementioned characters and institutions are being used without their permission, but only for entertainment purposes, and that no form of profit is being made on this work. For the benefit of the content-conscious amongst you, I'll assure you that there's nothing here that you couldn't see on the show, anyway. Except maybe some language, I'm not sure yet. Depends what kind of day I'm having as I write. Beyond that, I make no promises about what's in store. Could be silly, could be scary, could be sexy, could be sad. I'm not telling. Come on, live dangerously...

And, before anyone points out the inaccuracies in my descriptions of hospital financial structures, or that there's no such thing as the Medicinal Standards & Practices Commission (is there?), allow me to invoke the Author's Credo: when in doubt, make something up.



There were very few patients in the ER when we arrived, but the tension couldn't be cut with a diamond-tipped chainsaw.

Randi Fronczak wasn't behind the desk, but I recognized the guy who was. He was a large, heavyset guy named Jerry Markovic, whom I had met before. He couldn't spare the time to greet us, as he was arguing desperately with someone on the phone, while two other lines were ringing insistently.

Mark Greene was on another phone, the finger of his free hand stuck in his other ear to cut the noise while he fought his way through a similarly fruitless argument. When he saw Kerry Weaver, he quickly broke off the conversation and hung up, approaching us and thrusting a handful of printed pages into Kerry's hands. "Here's a copy," he said, "Read it fast, the Board wants us upstairs immediately."

"I'll bet they do," she returned absently, scanning the pages without slowing her pace. She and Mark had fallen into a practiced stride, as had Carter, I noticed, as he and I trailed behind them.

"They're going to have some harsh questions for you. Just be honest and don't let them rattle you..."

"I don't need you to defend me, Mark," she snapped, her eyes never leaving the pages. She made her way through the halls without seeming to look where she was going. Clearly, she could walk the place blindfolded, and I was willing to be that any obstacle, animate or otherwise, would sense her coming and get the hell out of the way. She radiated that kind of vibe.

"Whoa, slow down." Mark stopped and turned to face her, bringing her gently to a halt with a hand on her arm. She looked up at him, irritated at the gesture, but he didn't back down. "I'm just trying to warn you, they're going to be looking hard at all of us. If we react with anger, it won't make us look any better. Just take a breath and keep cool-"

"WEAVER! GREENE!" The voice, much louder than necessary, came from a compact, balding man in blue scrubs and lab coat, standing by the elevators. I took one look at him, and immediately thought of M*A*S*H's Larry Linville. Only shorter. He approached us like a miniature pit bull, snapping, "Let's go! They're waiting upstairs, and I don't want to waste any more of my time on this crap than I have to! And for God's sakes, you two get your story straight! Hey!" The last exclamation was addressed to me, the guy's body language having dismissed Mark and Kerry without giving them a chance to reply to his orders. "Who are you?" he snapped. The implicit continuation of the question being, 'and what do you think you're doing here?'

A host of smart replies sprang to mind, as they usually do. I'm Paul McCartney. I'm the Aga Khan. I'm Rocky the Flying Squirrel. But it was a legitimate question, under the circumstances, so I just said, "Daniel Fox, I'm from Los Angeles," and left it at that.

"He's the one who rescued Kerry, last April," Mark put in, adding, "Danny, this is our ER Chief, Dr. Romano."

"Call me Rocket," Romano added, automatically. He didn't offer to shake hands. "So you're the peeper, huh? Well, nice you could drop by, but we don't have time to play 'This is Your Life.' Carter, you on or off?" He shifted his attention to John Carter, visually shutting me out, just as he had done to Mark and Kerry a moment earlier. I had known him for all of ten seconds, and I already didn't like him at all.

"No, I'm off..." Carter began.

"Now you're on. I need Greene upstairs with me, trying to save our collective butts. Clock on and keep an eye on the ER. Greene, Weaver, with me, now!" He spun on his heel, and stabbed the button for the elevator, which opened immediately.

"Dr. Romano, what's going on?" Carter spoke up.

Kerry and Romano entered the elevator, the former still perusing the mystery documents, but Mark turned to say, "I don't think we should go into it right now, Carter, until we get a handle on things. I know you're off, but I could be tied up with this for a while. Can you come on shift and keep an eye on things down here?" Apologizing for Romano's brusque manner while upholding his instructions. I liked Mark's style nearly as much as I disliked his Chief's.

"Yeah, no problem," the younger doctor responded immediately, though you could see he was dying to know what the big crisis was.

As the elevator doors closed, Romano added, as if an afterthought, "And see if anyone's located Hathaway yet!"

When it was just the two of us, Carter turned to me and said, "Okay, it doesn't look like we're gonna get any answers right now. Look, Danny, I've gotta get to work, but I don't know if there's any point to your waiting around, if you want me to call you a cab..."

"Thanks, Carter, but I think I better stick around," I told him. I was getting some pretty disturbing signals off of all this. Why did Romano ask about finding Carol Hathaway? Wasn't she supposed to be on maternity leave? Someone else would be covering her duties as head nurse, right? Could be plenty of reasons unrelated to my investigation, I supposed, but my gut told me it wasn't. There is no such thing as coincidence.

Carter left me alone, and I found a bench out of everyone's way and sat there, waiting. There didn't seem to be anything I could do to learn more at the moment. Carter knew nothing more than I did, Jerry was overwhelmed by the phones and didn't need me adding to his confusion, and every other familiar face I saw seemed too busy to stop and talk. Fox's First Rule of Cooking applies equally well to hospital crises.

Two hours passed, then three. At one point, I saw a patient rushed into a Trauma room by Carter and the usual compliment of nurses. The patient was a young black man in sweats and high-tops, with what looked like a two-foot section of 3/4-inch pipe impaled through his abdomen. Ecchh. Watching Carter go to work on him, I made a mental note: lay off the junior jokes. The blood starts flowing, this guy doesn't diddle around.

A tall black man whose name I couldn't recall joined them in the Trauma Room and joined in the efforts. Surgical resident, I thought, remembering our brief meeting six months ago.

Later on, I saw Mark Greene come down the stairs, not looking any happier than before. If anything, just the opposite. Jerry Markovic approached him, saying, "Dr. Greene, Carol's not answering at her place. I talked to her mother, but she doesn't know where she might be, either."

Mark rubbed at his neck, and said, "Talk to the nurses, see if Carol mentioned anything about going out of town, or visiting anyone, or if there's any other friends or relatives we might try."

"I've already asked, but they haven't-"

"ASK 'EM AGAIN, JERRY!" The outburst took Jerry by surprise. Me, too. Mark was sitting on a powderkeg of stress, no doubt. When he moved away, leaving the big desk clerk in his wake, I got up from the bench, and followed him. He went into a Men's room, and I gave him a few minutes before going in after him. Trying to give him a bit to collect himself.

Inside, I saw Mark leaning against a sink, staring at his reflection, six inches away. He looked like a haunted amnesiac, desperately hoping for some sign of familiarity in the face of a stranger. When he caught sight of me in the mirror, he said, "Get out of here, Danny," and looked away.

"This is about the clinic, isn't it?" I said, throwing out a guess.

He looked up at me, sharply, and I knew I'd hit the mark. As it were. He pulled me into the Men's room, shutting the door behind me, and said, "What do you know about this, Danny?"

"Not nearly enough," I said, truthfully, "but I've been talking to former patients for the last week, asking them about the clinic's operations." Without naming my clients - or mentioning Randi Fronczak's help - I told him briefly about what I had been doing. "Now, what do you know?" I asked him when I had finished.

Mark had stared straight into my eyes as I spoke, and now he held the look, making up his mind about me. Then he let out a breath, and said, "Two auditors from the Medicinal Standards and Practices Commission came in a few hours ago. They had a signed statement with the signatures of some two dozen clinic patients, declaring that the clinic had sold them illegal narcotics, and in some cases, recruited them to distribute them on the streets."

That little bud of concern I had been nursing blossomed into full-blown dread. Two dozen? That number sounded awful familiar...

"The auditors had a warrant to check our computer files, and what they found was appalling. Records had obviously been falsified, dates had been altered, and the clinic's budget was entirely missing."

"The budget records...?"

"No, the actual funds! The hospital has separate accounts for different departments, and the account designated for Carol's clinic had been emptied. Every red cent, gone."

"Wait a minute, if the clinic's been closed, why does it still have an account?"

"They hold it over until the end of the fiscal year, and then the balance would have automatically been refunded to the Carter Foundation. Both parties agreed to that for some kind of tax reasons, I don't know exactly."

"How much was in the budget?"

He sighed. "Apparently, the Foundation had already made several advance deposits, and the total was nearly twenty million dollars..."

"Twenty mil-?! Are you serious?" There were parts of the world where you could build your own damn hospital for that much. It may have been chump change for people like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but certainly for a charity clinic's budget it seemed unbelievably excessive.

"I know. I didn't think there should have been that kind of sum, either, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. Records show that the money was transferred out of our accounts, into someone else's, about the same time that Carol Hathaway went on leave."

"Oh, Jesus," I said, "So they're going to think she embezzled it, somehow?"

"Well, nobody can locate her, so we can't get her side of things. There's talk of issuing a warrant for her arrest." He rubbed his neck some more. "It doesn't look good, Danny..."

There was a soft knock at the door of the restroom, and we opened it, to find Kerry Weaver, looking very subdued. She looked at me, then at Mark, and said, "You told him?"

He nodded, and we exited the Men's room to join her in the hallway. "He already knew it was about the clinic. I just filled in what we know."

"Kerry, I'm glad you're here, I want to ask you both something," I said, not feeling at all good about it. "I've only met Carol Hathaway a couple of times, you two work with her. I don't like asking this... Is there any possibility of truth to these allegations of embezzlement or drug dealing?"

"No," they said together, without hesitation.

The skepticism must have showed on my face, because Mark said, "Carol got suspended once, after she made an error that cost a patient's life. It was entirely accidental, at a time when she was under extreme pressure and adverse conditions, but she wouldn't let it be covered up when she had the chance. She's that honest. I cannot and will not believe she could have done this. Can you?" he added, glancing to Kerry.

She shook her head once, with finality. "Not for a heartbeat."

"Okay," I said. Pointing to the papers, still in her hand, I asked, "Is that the statement those auditors arrived with?"

"Yes," she said, lifelessly holding them out to me. I took them, and scanned the cover sheet. It said pretty much what Mark had said, though in Old High Legalese, accompanied by a couple of stamped seals of the department of something-or-other. I skipped to the photocopies of signatures, hoping against hope that they weren't what I knew they were. But, of course, they were.

My first thought was, oh hell, don't tell me I'm the cause of this...

My second thought was, oh sweet Mother Mary McCree, don't let me be the cause of this...

My third thought was, oh damnation, death rot, hell flame, ape stench, and goshall bloody-frickin'-hemlock, PLEASE tell me I am not the cause of this...

My fourth thought...well, you get the idea. In all, I think I cycled through about seventeen variations on the first three, each growing more vitriolic and desperate.

Sure enough, there were twenty-three names. And sure enough, I recognized them all. Leon Ramirez...Earl Pruitt...Theresa Coolidge...

"How'd it go upstairs?" Mark was asking, as I read.

Kerry replied, slowly, "Not well. The ER can't afford another scandal on top of the Ricky Abbott affair. It's still possible that they might close us down. Plus..."

"What is it?"

"Mark...I spoke to the Board of Directors in private, assuring them that I had overseen Carol as she set up the clinic, back when I was acting Chief. I told them I had never seen anything to indicate the kind of violations being described, and that I accepted full responsibility for this..."

"And what'd they say?"

She paused. "They said that they would accept my resignation."

I looked up at her in shock. "You offered to resign?!"

"No," she said, spelling it out for me, "They said. They would accept. My resignation."

"They fired her," Mark said, rubbing the back of his neck, "Politely. "

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh should melt, I thought, wishing I could just dissolve and ooze down into the bowels of the earth for what I had done to these people. Finding my voice, I said, "This statement's a fake."

"What are you talking about?" Kerry asked me.

"These people didn't all sign this statement," I said, "They signed individual copies of a completely different form, one saying how satisfied they were with the clinic."

"How do you-?"

"Because I'm the one who obtained their signatures. Look at this one. How many Hiram Grabscheids can there be in this city who sign their names in MY handwriting?"

"Where did you get the names of-?"

"Please don't ask me that, Mark, it's not important now. The point is, I heard nothing at all about drug dealing from any of these people, except the usual dispensing of prescriptions or over-the-counter stuff. And I didn't give their names to any Commission..." Or had I? If that wasn't really Millicent Carter I talked to, then who was it? Something was rotten in the State of Illinois. I can't speak for Denmark, I've never been there.

My thoughts were interrupted by the look on Kerry Weaver's face. She had remained silent during the last parts of the conversation, her eyes fixed on me, and her face had closed up like a fortress, revealing and allowing nothing. Now, she turned sharply away and limped down the hall.

"Kerry, wait!" I said, catching up to her, and putting a hand out to her, "I swear to you I didn't-"

She spun on me, throwing my hand off. "Don't touch me, Daniel! Just STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!!" There was a primal fury in her being that I had only seen once before, just after I came close to death at the hands of a sociopath.

I couldn't find the words to reply, and I let her storm off. Several people in the halls who had witnessed the outburst looked away uncomfortably and tried to act nonchalant about it. Going about their business.

"Look, she's angry..." said Carter, approaching me from the side.

"She's got a right to be, John. Don't apologize for her." I turned to him. "I know you're busy, but I need you to get in touch with Walter Montgomery and your grandmother for me. Something about all this is completely bogus, and I want to find out what it is."

"Danny, I..."

"Hey, Fox! You still here?" It was Romano, of course. He had just entered and was giving me a look like I was something he had just scraped off his shoe.

"Dr. Romano," I said, trying to be constructive about this, "I have reason to believe that those signatures you were given have been forged, somehow. All those patients-"

"Yeah, yeah, Greene just told me!" he broke in, getting too close to me. "I don't care if you saved Weaver's ass, or if you cracked the Lindburgh kidnapping, or if you killed JFK! Nobody drops a firebomb on my ER without answering to me! Now, you want to tell me where you got those names from before I have you arrested?"

I took a breath and spoke evenly. "What I want is for you to take a step back and lower your voice," I told him.

He did neither. "Why, am I violating your personal space or something? I hardly think you've got cause to bitch about it after what you've done!" He jabbed a finger into my chest. "You want to do anything else while you're at it, Sam Spade? Blow up the ICU, maybe? Burn down the recovery unit? Or how about you just go back to Hollywood and brag about how you blew the whistle on the crooked ER people on Daytime TV? I hear Linda Tripp's got a new talk show-"

Something white-hot flashed behind my eyes, and when I blinked, Rocket Romano's face was ten inches higher and turning a sort of purplish color. That was mainly because I had my fists knotted in the lapels of his lab coat, and was pulling them tightly together under his chin as I held him against the wall. I felt the toes of his shoes kicking at my shins as he clawed at my forearms and bulged his eyes.

"DANNY! Let him go!" I heard Mark yell, as he and Carter pulled at me from behind, grabbing an arm apiece.

I let them pull me back, releasing Romano to drop to the floor, clutching his throat. He choked and gasped for air as the two doctors pulled me away from him. I held up my hands, letting them know I was cool again. They relaxed a little, but didn't entirely release me.

"Marquez, call security," Romano gasped out, talking to a Latino nurse I remembered meeting. She didn't move, looking uncertainly from him to Mark and Carter and me.

"No, it's okay," I told everyone, "I'm just leaving."

They let me go, and I looked around at the faces of the staff who had gathered. Several of them were familiar to me, and under other circumstances, they probably would have been happy to see me. Now, however, I was the unpredictable invader who had just assaulted one of their own. Romano may have been a real prick, but he was a member of their community, and I wasn't. It just wasn't my day to win points with these people.

"Sorry," I said to everyone, and walked out. The worst part of it was that the pissy little bastard was right. Don't you hate when that happens?

I walked out into the night air, and wandered down the street, where I caught a cab back to Kerry Weaver's place and collected my rented car. As I drove, I ran over the evening's events in my head, trying to total up the damage I had somehow caused. Goddamn, what had I done?

I didn't know the answer to that. And I didn't know what I was going to do about it.

But I did know what I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to go back to Los Angeles in the morning.

I wasn't going anywhere until I set things right.

Somehow...



"I don't know how to thank you guys!"
--- Fozzie Bear, 'The Muppet Movie'
"I don't know WHY to thank you guys..."
--- Kermit the Frog, Ibid