“So what does a pain nurse do? I’ve never heard of a pain nurse.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing.”
“Never spent a day of my life in the hospital.”
Cheryl Beth glanced across the seat at Detective Dodds. He stared ahead, one big hand on the steering wheel. He drove across Central Parkway and through the dense, narrow streets of Over-the-Rhine.
“Then it’s your good luck,” she said.
“So what does a pain nurse do?”
“You keep asking that question.” Cheryl Beth stared ahead, too. She made herself put her hands flat on the tops of her thighs. It was a posture she had learned to keep calm.
“I’m just curious,” he said. “My daughter has talked about going to nursing school.”
“Well, we need good nurses. Now pain management is a recognized specialty. You have nurse practitioners doing it, too. She could look at the American Society for Pain Management Nursing…”
“Is that what you studied in school?”
“No. It took a long time for pain management to get respect. A lot of doctors didn’t think pain was a critical issue. But I scrubbed in with a fabulous surgeon. What a character! He was a tyrant. Every day he would scream at me, ‘Had enough?!’ I would scream back, ‘I like you!’” She looked at Dodds to see if he was capable of a smile. His face stared ahead like the bow of a battleship. “But he was a big patient advocate and really cared about pain. I would check on his patients the day after surgery. He taught me a lot. I worked in the OR for eight years. Then I worked in a hospice for three years. They were doing cutting-edge stuff. Eventually, I ended up doing pain management seminars and Memorial hired me.”
“But why pain?”
“It really matters. I hate to see people suffer.”
“So this is personal. You had some experience with this in your life?”
“Yes,” she said, her mouth dry. “Someone I loved.”
They rode several minutes in silence before he spoke again. She didn’t like being alone with her thoughts and the silence.
“Where do you work?”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Do you work in a ward, in the recovery room?”
“I work all over.”
“So you have the run of the hospital. Interesting.”
The way he said it made her uncomfortable again. He wasn’t just making conversation.
“Detective…”
Just then something dark raced across the windshield and shattered on the roof of the car. She visibly jumped. Around them were lovely derelict buildings and an empty street, no sign of an assailant.
