Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper Page B

the shattered collarbone. She sent the girl upstairs for X ray. She’d probably end up at Ortho, along with Jenks. When she turned around, an orderly was wheeling the dead girl away. There would be no autopsy. They’d stopped doing autopsies on gunshot victims three years ago. Why bother?
    Ophy cast a quick look around for waiting bodies, saw none that weren’t being tended to, took a deep breath, and went through the hissing doors into the waiting room. The air system was down again. The fans in the adjacent cafeteria weren’t working. The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee, hot grease and dirty diapers. One bench, near the door, was completely occupied by bag ladies, a row of them, haunch to haunch. For some reason, lately they’d begun traveling in flocks, or coveys, or whatever one might call it. A bevy of bag ladies? A burden of bag ladies? No, no, of course: a schlep of bag ladies! A whole bench of schleppelas.
    She grinned wearily to herself. She’d save that one for Simon. From across the room the bag ladies saw her watching them and beckoned to her. She waved, then raised a finger: A minute, the finger said. Give me a minute.
    The ambulance driver was talking to a bald, stocky man with bloodhound jowls. That had to be the cop. The woman sitting next to them had a lot of stiff, colorless hair pushed up on top of her head and was crying mascara streaks. Ms. Jenks, most likely.
    Ophy approached, breasting a wave of floral musk, civet gardenia. Jungle lust. Whatever the woman had soaked herself in did not help the overall aroma. The cop was fanning himself with a magazine, trying to find some clear air.
    â€œOfficer … ?”
    â€œPhil Lovato, Dr. Gheist. Hey, you remember me!”
    â€œPhil?”
    He chuckled. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
    She offered her hand, recognizing the chuckle if not the hangdog face or the shiny scalp.
    â€œWhat’re you doing down here?” She hadn’t seen him in … what? Three years? Closer to five.
    He shrugged, casting a sidelong look at the woman next to him, shaking his head just a little. Didn’t want to talk with her there. Ophy obligingly moved away, and he lumbered after her. When they found an empty spot, she asked, “Aren’t you still in Vice?”
    He shrugged again, hands palm up. She remembered the gesture, one he’d used often when he’d brought prostitutes into the uptown infirmary, where Ophy would stitch up their knife wounds, set their broken bones. It was a “what can you say” gesture, a “that’s life” gesture, one he used habitually. When he’d brought his wife to the hospital and she’d turned out to have a drug-resistant strain of TB, even when they’d finally lost her, he’d made that same gesture. An acknowledgment of the inscrutability of life. Go figure.
    â€œSo you’re not in Vice anymore,” she said.
    â€œYeah, well, when they legalized drugs, that cut prostitution way down. And with this AIDS thing, you know, jeez, there’s hardly any working girls left. No more illegal drugs, no more girls, damn little vice left. Me, I decided being any kind of cop was better than no kind. What else I got to do, huh? They got me back working nights.” As though for the first time, he looked down at himself with an air of surprise, shaking his head. “Who’da thought it, right?”
    He nodded toward the woman on the bench. “Anyhow, that there’s Ms. Jenks. It was her husband tried to, you know …” He pointed a finger at his head and cocked his thumb.
    The mascara-streaked woman saw his gesture. She shouted, “He didn’t do that! Don’t shoot your head, I said. Don’t. I saw my uncle, he did that, his face was all gone. Not in the head, I told him!”
    Ophy made a shushing gesture, then rubbed at the lines between her eyes as she and Phil rejoined the woman. “Your