Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(38)
She rolled her chair to a cabinet, pulled out a chemical cold pack, thumped it on the edge of the counter to activate it, and handed it to June. “Hold that on your lip.”
Then she turned her attention to June’s shredded arm, again scrubbing harder than June liked, although she did dab on a topical anesthetic where she needed to use tweezers to take out embedded shards of glass. “Mostly scrapes and scratches,” she said. “A few more stitches here on this nice cut right below the elbow.”
She pulled a suture kit from a cabinet, dabbed on some more anesthetic, and began to sew with a steady, practiced hand. June watched curiously as the curved needle passed through her skin. There was no pain, only the strange tug of the thread as it pulled the skin together.
When the needle came toward her lip, she had to close her eyes.
“All done,” Sandra finally announced, then applied some kind of goo to the worst areas, wound June’s arm with gauze from the forearm to the armpit, and wrapped it with a stretchy strip like an Ace bandage. “Take that off for cleaning every day, then apply fresh gauze. When everything’s scabbed over, you’re done, two days, maybe three. The stitches will dissolve in two weeks or so. The lip we’ll just leave open, no dressing. Those stitches you’ll need to have removed in three or four days. If things get red or inflamed, you may have an infection. You’ll need to see another doctor.”
“I’ll do that.” June took the woman’s hand in her own. “Thank you.”
Sandra gave her a gentle hug. “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said.
“Thank you,” whispered June, returning the hug, absurdly grateful.
? ? ?
SHE MADE HER WAY through the maze of exam areas to the waiting area, but Peter was gone. The young woman at the reception desk told her that he was with the doctor, which June took as a good sign. “Would you like someone to walk you back to his exam room?”
“In a few minutes,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She went out to the car and got her bag, then walked back to a covered bench in the parking area outside the ER and opened her laptop. The first thing she did was turn off the cell modem and the Wi-Fi. It was killing her to stay off the Internet, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a few notes about what had happened that day.
As she began to type, a notification popped up, announcing that the cell modem was now connected. She turned it off again, but it began to show the little circle icon that meant the computer was working on something. Then the cell modem notification popped up again.
That was a weird little bug, she thought. Her laptop was getting peculiar in its old age.
She shut down the laptop and put it back in the car, then returned to the reception area.
“Is there a place for patients to get online?” If she could use a public computer, she could set up a new anonymous email account, type up her notes, and send them to herself.
The woman directed her down a long hallway into the main hospital, where an alcove off the cafeteria had three small workstations, each with a computer and monitor. The far desk was occupied by a too-skinny teenage boy with a shaved head wearing a medical bracelet, sweats, slippers, and enormous headphones. He was engrossed in what appeared to be an elaborate role-playing game. June sat with the empty chair between them and logged on to the Web. The long bandage on her arm made the familiar motions difficult.
She’d cut back on work because of the death of her mother, but she still needed to make a living. She was chasing an active story—she’d gotten a tip that a supposedly anonymous hookup app was selling user information to information brokers—and was waiting for verification from secondary sources. Leaving her phone back in the redwoods was harder than June had thought it would be.
She used her phone so much she often had to charge it three or four times a day, and it was killing her not to be able to call, text, email, or do research. Much of her professional and personal life took place on the Web. She hadn’t been online since she’d abandoned her phone that morning. It felt like forever.
When the technology arrived for permanently implanting a modem directly in her brain, June would be first in line.
Short of that, a public computer seemed like a safe place to check in. She wrote about electronic privacy, so her security protocols were pretty good. She had serious multilevel passwords on everything, and she always entered them manually. Even if they’d hacked her phone—hell, if they’d hacked her laptop—she felt confident that whoever was chasing her hadn’t made their way through those passwords into her email accounts. She clicked through, looking for signs that she had been compromised, but there was nothing obvious.
Of course, some asshole could be capturing every click and keystroke and she’d never know it. That could be true on any given day. It didn’t change the fact that she had work to do.
June thought of herself as fairly disciplined with only four email accounts. One was work only, another was purely personal. A third was the account she used when buying things online—she thought of it as her spam account. The fourth was her college email address, somehow still live, which some of her climbing friends and other goofballs from the old days still used.
No answers yet to the emails she’d sent from her work account that morning, before Peter had shown up in the tree. Although it sure seemed like much longer ago than that. She’d set an autoreply on her work account saying she’d had a death in the family but that she would check email daily. Her personal email was full of further condolences from friends in the Bay Area and Seattle, and kind invitations to coffee or drinks or dinner when she was up for it. The spam account had the usual useless promotional bullshit that she always deleted without reading unless she was waiting for a package from Title Nine or Backcountry.com.