Jane faced him. "So you've heard."

"In here. Now." He punched open the door to the surgeons' lounge.

As she went in with him, Priest and Dubois, two of St. Francis's best GI knives, took one look at the chief, scrapped their vending-machine cuisine, and beat feet out of the room. In their wake, the door eased shut without even a whisper of air. Like it didn't want to catch Manello's attention, either.

"When were you going to tell me, Whitcomb? Or did you think Columbia was on a different planet and I wasn't going to find out?"

Jane crossed her arms over her chest. She was a tall woman, but Manello topped her by a couple of inches, and he was built like the professional athletes he operated on: big shoulders, big chest, big hands. At forty-five, he was in prime physical condition and one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country.

As well as a scary SOB when he got mad.

Good thing she was comfortable in tense situations. "I know you have contacts there, but I thought they'd be discreet enough to wait until I decided whether I wanted the job-"

"Of course you want it or you wouldn't waste time going down there. Is it money?"

"Okay, first, you don't interrupt me. And second, you're going to lower your voice." As Manello dragged a hand through his thick dark hair and took a deep breath, she felt bad. "Look, I should have told you. It must have been embarrassing to get blindsided like that."

He shook his head. "Not my favorite thing, getting a call from Manhattan that one of my best surgeons is interviewing at another hospital with my mentor."

"Was it Falcheck who told you?"

"No, one of his underlings."

"I'm sorry, Manny. I just don't know how it's going to go, and I didn't want to jump the gun."

"Why are you thinking about leaving the department?"

"You know I want more than what I can have here. You're going to be chief until you're sixty-five, unless you decide to leave. Down at Columbia, Falcheck is fifty-eight. I've got a better chance of becoming head of the department there."

"I already made you chief of the Trauma Division."

"And I deserve it."

His lips cracked a smile. "Be humble, why don't you."

"Why bother? We both know its the truth. And as for Columbia? Would you want to be under someone for the next two decades of your life?"

His lids lowered over his mahogany-colored eyes. For the briefest second, she thought she saw something flare in that stare of his, but then he put his hands on his hips, his white coat straining as his shoulders widened.

"I don't want to lose you, Whitcomb. You're the best trauma knife I've got."

"And I have to look to the future." She went over to her locker. "I want to run my own shop, Manello. It's the way I am."

"When's the damn interview?"

"First thing tomorrow afternoon. Then I'm off through the weekend and not on call, so I'm going to stay in the city."

"Shit."

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in," they both called out.

A nurse ducked her head inside. "Trauma case, ETA two minutes. Male in his thirties. Gunshot with probable perforated aorta. Crashed twice so far on transport. Will you accept the patient, Dr. Whitcomb, or do you want me to call Goldberg?"

"Nope, I'll take him. Set up bay four in the chute and tell Ellen and Jim I'm coming right down."

"Will do, Dr. Whitcomb."

"Thanks, Nan."

The door eased shut, and she looked at Manello. "Back to Columbia. You'd do the exact same thing if you were in my shoes. So you can't tell me you're surprised."

There was a stretch of silence then he leaned forward a little. "And I won't let you go without a fight. Which shouldn't surprise you, either."

He left the room, taking most of the oxygen in the place with him.

Jane leaned back against her locker and looked across to the kitchen area to the mirror hanging on the wall. Her reflection was crystal-clear in the glass, from her white doctor's coat to her green scrubs to her blunt-cut blond hair.

"He took that okay," she said to herself. "All things considered."

The door to the lounge opened, and Dubois poked his head in. "Coast clear?"

"Yup. And I'm heading down to the chute."

Dubois pushed the door wide and strode in, his crocs making no sound on the linoleum. "I don't know how you do it. You're the only one who doesn't need smelling salts after dealing with him."

"He's no problem, really."

Dubois made a chuffing noise. "Don't get me wrong. I respect the shit out of him, I truly do. But I don't want him pissed."

She put her hand on her colleague's shoulder. "Pressure wears on people. You lost it last week, remember?"

"Yeah, you're right." Dubois smiled. "And at least he doesn't throw things anymore."

Chapter Seven

The T. Wibble Jones Emergency Department of the St. Francis Medical Center was state-of-the-art, thanks to a generous donation from its namesake. Open for just a year and a half now, the fifty-thousand-square-foot complex was built in two halves, each with sixteen treatment bays. Emergency patients were admitted alternately to the A or the B track, and they stayed with whatever team they were assigned until they were released, admitted, or sent to the morgue.

Running down the center of the facility was what the medical staff called "the chute." The chute was strictly for trauma admits, and there were two kinds of them: "rollers" who came by ambulance, or "roofers" who were flown into the landing pad eleven stories up. The roofers tended to be more hard-core and were helicoptered in from about a hundred-and-fifty mile radius around Caldwell. For those patients, there was a dedicated elevator that dumped out right into the chute, one big enough to fit two gurneys and ten medical personnel at one time.

The trauma facility had six open patient bays, each with X-ray and ultrasound equipment, oxygen feeds, medical supplies, and plenty of space to move around. The operational hub, or control tower, was smack in the middle, a conclave of computers and personnel that was, tragically, always hopping. At any given hour there were at least one admitting physician, four residents, and six nurses staffing the area, with typically two to three patients in-house.

Caldwell was not as big as Manhattan, not by a long shot, but it had a lot of gang violence, drug-related shootings, and car accidents. Plus, with nearly three million residents, you saw an endless variation of human miscalculation: nail gun goes off into someone's stomach because a guy tried to fix the fly of his jeans with it; arrow gets shot through a cranium because somebody wanted to prove he had great aim, and was wrong; husband figures it would be a great idea to repair his stove and gets two-fortied because he didn't unplug the thing first.

Jane lived in the chute and owned it. As chief of the Trauma Division, she was administratively responsible for everything that went down in those six bays, but she was also trained as both an ED attending and a trauma surgeon, so she was hands-on. On a day-to-day basis, she made calls about who needed to go up one floor to the ORs, and a lot of times scrubbed in to do the needle-and-thread stuff.

While she waited for her incoming gunshot, she reviewed the charts of the two patients currently being treated and looked over the shoulders of the residents and nurses as they worked. Every member of the trauma team was handpicked by Jane, and when recruiting, she didn't go for the Ivy Leaguer types necessarily although she was Harvard-trained herself. What she looked for were the qualities of a good soldier, or, as she liked to call it, the No Shit, Sherlock mental set: smarts, stamina, and separation. Especially the separation. You had to be able to stay tight in a crisis if you were going to W-Z the chute.