"Good. Stay with him while we get set up."
They put Everett on a non-rebreather mask at fifteen liters. They cut his shirt off and hosed him down right there on the asphalt with a gentle stream from a bottle, his skin and his eyes, while Glynis held his hand and answered their questions. Metoprolol. Atorvastatin. Something for his prostate. And then, after a pause, she said the name of a drug that I knew, because we see it in our older patients, and it made something in my chest go cold and quiet. Donepezil. It's used to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.
The firefighter who was writing it down didn't look up. I did. Glynis was looking at me. Her eyes were swollen from the gas or from crying or from both, and for a second she didn't look like the woman who'd read my request aloud at the board meeting in a voice like a bake sale. She looked like somebody I'd seen in a hundred waiting rooms, at three in the morning, holding a plastic bag with someone's shoes in it.
"Since when?" I said.
"Two years," she said. "Almost two years."
The hazmat captain, a broad, gray-mustached man named Rashid Noorani who'd come with the second engine, walked over in full gear with his mask pushed up on his forehead and asked who'd made the call. I said I had. He asked what was in the pump house. I told him what I'd seen: twelve jugs delivered, some with printed hazard labels, some with handwritten labels that I thought said liquid chlorine, a man pouring two of them into the building. I told him I'd had video.
"Had?"
"It was deleted," I said, and I looked at Glynis, and so did he.
He didn't say anything to her. He looked back at me. "Most of those phones keep deleted stuff for a while," he said. "Don't touch anything. Don't try to recover it yourself. Hand it to the police when they get here. Okay?"
"Okay."
The ambulance took Everett at five forty-one, according to the run sheet. Glynis rode with him. Before she climbed in, she turned around at the back doors and looked at me again, over the shoulder of a paramedic, and opened her mouth as though she were going to say something, and then didn't. The doors closed. The ambulance pulled out with its lights going and no siren, which can mean a lot of different things, and I stood on the asphalt in my scrub pants watching it go, holding my phone, with the call still open. Keturah was still there. I'd forgotten.