"Damn it, Jimmy, how dare you-"

"Why, in all the years I've been here, I never once saw you up on the floors visiting with any of the people you saved."

Earl felt he'd been gut-punched.

He stood behind his desk as a tiny prickle of sweat dampened the back of his shirt despite the chill of cold air pouring over his head from a ventilation duct in the ceiling.

The black of Jimmy's eyes increased its hold on him. "If you'd had any inkling at all for that part of the game, Earl, now and then I would have found you on the wards where it plays itself out. And maybe, just maybe, when you came across wretched souls with barely days left to live, bellowing like wounded beasts, you might have acquired the same compassion for them that you found for the likes of Artie Baxter when you made sure he didn't suffer in ER."

With that, the priest released him from the tractor-beam grip of his stare, quietly opened the door, and disappeared into the darkened corridor.

The head nurse slid her glasses to the tip of her nose, peered at him, then let them drop on their silver chain. "Dr. Garnet! We don't usually see you up here."

"Here" referred to the Palliative Care Unit, or "terminus," as some of the more callous residents called it.

"Then it's about time," he answered, straining to read the woman's name tag. "Mrs. Yablonsky, would you be so kind as to grab the chart cart and accompany me as I see the patients?"

Crinkles at the corners of her eyes lessened. "See the patients?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"Yep."

"Now?"

He nodded.

"But why?"

"I want to check their pain medication."

The visible portion of her face corrugated itself into a frown. "You mean without their doctors knowing?"

Jesus, he'd be here all night answering her questions. "We're going to be doing an audit on pain management throughout the whole hospital. Dr. Wyatt himself will be chairing it. I thought I'd get a head start."

The far smoother foreheads of two younger nurses who had approached from behind her scrunched up in amazement.

"Dr. Wyatt knows about this?" the supervisor asked.

Earl smiled in response.

"Well, it's most peculiar…" She pushed herself out of a swivel seat, surprising him with her height. With eyes nearly at the same level as his, she also possessed the big shoulders and sculpted build of someone who swam laps across Lake Erie.

While he waited for her to prepare the charts his gaze drifted along the polished, barren corridor, and he shuddered at the thought of being stuck here to die. Just park him under a tree with a nice view and a bottle of whisky when his time came.

He'd never admitted it to anyone, but deep down he hated hospitals, felt claustrophobic in them. As a patient, he'd loathe every part of surrendering to any regime that a place like St. Paul's would impose on him, especially with his butt hanging out the back of a tie-up gown.

Through windows at the far end of the unit he watched the sun as it slipped behind a column of thunderheads that had been piling up over the lake. Immediately the passageway darkened, and everything became cast in a thin yellow light. Low rumbles sounded outside, and a crackle of static interrupted the quiet music from a radio on the work counter.

"Storm's coming," said one of the younger nurses, reaching up and snapping the off button.

Only then did he hear the weak moans and wailing. Mere wisps of sound that floated out from the semidarkness of the hallway, they were the kind of noises that, once gotten used to, could easily be ignored- with the help of a radio. "Are they always crying like that?"

"Oh, this is nothing," Yablonsky said. "Sometimes they get to screaming so loud you can't hear yourself think." Oblivious to her own callousness, she never paused in pulling out charts and placing them on a pushcart.

A twist of anger turned his stomach.

In the first room they stopped in, he found an old man curled in bed, as withered and emaciated as a mummy. His skin had yellowed with jaundice, and, either comatose or sleeping soundly, he didn't respond when Yablonsky called his name or slipped the mask that had fallen off his face back into place. Earl let him be.

Next door to him lay an elderly lady in similar shape.

In the third room, a gaunt, gray-faced woman with the wisps of her remaining hair combed neatly into place sat in a chair and stared out at the approaching rain clouds. Her upper face brightened as soon as she saw him. "How nice, a new doctor."

A glance at her chart before coming in revealed her name to be Sadie Locke and that she had metastatic cancer of the breast that neither chemotherapy nor radiation could halt. As he stepped up to shake her hand and introduce himself, the sleeve of her housecoat slipped up her arm to reveal a swarm of florid red blotches where the tumor had seeded itself to her skin, and a sniff of decay floated down the back of his nose.

"I love a thunderstorm at the end of a hot summer day, don't you?" she said after assuring him she felt comfortable most days on her current drug regime. "It's so refreshing, and the air smells wonderfully clean afterward."

"Yes, I know exactly what you mean," he said. Her pleasant manner put him at ease. Normally having nothing to offer a patient but small talk made him feel awkward. "Do you have family?" he asked after a few seconds, mostly to reassure himself she knew someone who cared enough to keep her company. He couldn't imagine anything worse than being confined to a room, with no prospects of a visitor.

"Yes, one son. Donny. He owns a restaurant in Honolulu. I don't see him much, but next week he'll be here- a business trip to New York. And he taught me how to use e-mail." She pointed at a turquoise laptop sitting on her night table.

Pretty lonely, he couldn't help thinking, and tried to come up with something else to say. "Do you know the hospital chaplain, Jimmy Fitzpatrick?"

Her eyes beamed. "Father Jimmy? Of course. He's wonderful. Always says just the right thing to pick up a person's spirits."

Oh, does he now? Earl thought, still shaken by the hiding he'd received.

"Cracking jokes the way he does is wonderful," she continued, "but he can be serious when he wants to be."

"Tell me which you like best about him, jokes or serious." Maybe she could give him some pointers about the man's technique with the patients here.

"That's easy. He never wastes my time. No rubbish about doctors all at once finding a cure or me somehow getting better through a miracle. There's a relief in hearing a person tell bad news honestly and make no bones about what can't be done. It leaves him free to help me in ways he can."

"What are those?"

"Listening, talking about ordinary things, keeping me interested in the world- you know, making me feel I matter to him. Not that he's got a lot of time to do it in. There are so many others who depend on him as well."

Earl started to thank her, not much the wiser about specifics that made Jimmy so great at his job, but she laid a hand on his arm. "Know what's his real secret, now that I think about it?"

Earl waited.

"It's the way he looks you in the eye and says, 'I'm sorry you're going through this.' Twenty seconds face-to-face like that, and I feel he's given me twenty minutes."

The next dozen visits went a little quicker, but he found them no easier. Patients raised questions he couldn't answer and expressed fears he didn't know how to console.

"Why me?" some asked when he inquired about their pain.

"I'm afraid to die," others said.

Not that he hadn't heard those words thousands of times in ER. But there the confused hurly-burly of a resuscitation or the rush to line and intubate whomever he was working on allowed him to get away with brief reassurances. Here people looked him in the eye and expected his undivided attention along with a detailed response.