Dr. Knox Page 14

“We’ll sort this out, Lyd,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t throw that word around, doctor. And even if we do get through this, what about next time? And the time after that? What about the rent, and the next paycheck? Is another magic cash deposit gonna take care of that? And when the lease is up—then what? We’re living on borrowed time here.”

  I didn’t have answers to her questions, and Lydia didn’t wait for any. She grabbed a stack of patient folders from the in-basket and carried them to the file room. In a moment I heard angry tapping at a keyboard. Lucho looked at me and shook his head. He took another stack of folders from the basket and rolled a chair over to the computer.

  “I don’t like this domestic shit,” he muttered, and started updating records.

  I took the remaining folders to my office and banged away for I don’t know how long. I typed and clicked and tried not to think about Siggy Rostov or the bull-necked PRP men, or Lydia’s accusing looks, or Alex, or Elena. Still, they swam up at me from the depths of the monitor.

  My cell phone rumbled in my pocket, and brought me back. It was Sutter, with traffic sounds behind him.

  “Go out to your car,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your crappy Honda—go out to the alley and open it and check the glove box.”

  “What the hell are—?”

  “Humor me. I’ll hang on.”

  I rubbed my eyes and pushed back from the desk and headed down the hall. A blast of hot air shoved me as I opened the back door. The alley was dim and smelled like a burnt skillet. I opened the Honda’s passenger door and flipped the latch on the glove box. On top of the owner’s manual and the gas receipts were two identical plastic boxes, shiny black and slightly larger than my iPhone. They were featureless but for a large adhesive square in the center, and a tiny column of Korean characters along one edge.

  “You still there?” I asked Sutter.

  “Yep.”

  “What are these things?”

  “I took one off Lucho’s car and one off Lydia’s while you guys were working. There was one on your car too.”

  “What the hell are they?”

  “Trackers. South Korean models. Kinda crappy, really. The GPS units are okay, but the power units are unreliable.”

  A cold knot tightened in my stomach. “GPS trackers? On our cars? Where the fuck did they come from? And how long have they been there?”

  “They’re courtesy of PRP, and they’ve only been there a few hours. I watched one of those bristle-heads plant them this morning, while you were dicking around with the inspectors.”

  “You hung around?”

  “I figured firemen were just the opening act.”

  I shook my head. “You said there was a tracker on my car too.”

  Sutter laughed. “Yeah—I put that one under the bumper of a tourist bus—you know, one of those double-decker nightmares—See All of L.A. in a Day. Right now I’m at the Farmers Market, watching some confused-looking PRP grunts follow it around in a Suburban.”

  “Jesus. They haven’t figured out you messed with their stuff?”

  “Not so far. I guess they’re too lazy to run a proper tail—they’re just relying on what the GPS says instead of using their eyes. I tell you, this has really lowered my opinion of these guys. Substandard equipment, sloppy tails—this is definitely not the A-team.”

  “You think trackers are all they did? Could they have put something inside the clinic?”

  “You mean mikes and cameras? No—they wouldn’t have sicced the building inspectors on you if they’d done that. You might want to stay away from the landlines for a while, though.”

  “Shit. And out front—what am I going to find there? More Suburbans? Maybe they’ll just pull an RV up and move in.”

  “You should be okay. The only PRP clowns I saw in your neighborhood were the ones I’m watching now, and they were parked three blocks away.”

  I looked at the trackers and sighed. “Small favors,” I said. And then I heard myself speaking Lydia’s words. “How long can this go on?”

  Sutter made a clicking noise. “Until they find the kid, or Bray calls off the dogs.”

  “Well, let’s hope the former doesn’t come to pass—but God only knows how we get the latter to happen.”

  “Figuring out why they want him would be a good start,” he said.

  “Any bright ideas about how?”

  Sutter was quiet for a moment, and the traffic sounds grew louder in the phone. “You gotta wonder why they haven’t called the cops,” he said finally. “I mean, they’ve shown you how well connected they are—why haven’t they called their pal the police chief, have him send a few tactical units down to your place? Why wasn’t that the first call they made?”

  “Yet another in a long list of questions I can’t answer.”

  “Ask the PRP guys,” he said. “It won’t be long before they come around for another talk.”

  “Fuck.”

  Sutter laughed loudly.

  “What’s funny about that?” I said.

  “I’m not laughing at you. My tour bus is circling the block again, and I’m watching these dumbasses follow it. It never gets old.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Arthur’s sister, Danni Silva, lived in Echo Park, at the top of a small hill, on a dead-end street off Lemoyne. I could see a dome of white light off to the east—a night game at Dodger Stadium—as I pulled to the curb, and I could smell a charcoal fire somewhere, and grilling meat. I checked my rearview yet again. It was dark and empty, as it had been for many blocks.

  Danni’s house was a green clapboard shotgun-style, with white trim, a gray Prius in the carport, and a camellia climbing along the chain-link fence. The front door was open, and I heard a woman’s voice from inside. A chocolate Lab barked once and blocked my way as I came to the threshold, and I stopped. Danni was in the middle of the long, open space. She had a phone to her ear, but she smiled widely and waved me inside.

  She was thirty, dark and compact, with big brown eyes, quick, vivid features, glossy black hair razored short, and four silver rings in her left earlobe. She wore black shorts and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off, and she had ink on her right forearm—a mermaid with a cigarette and a naughty smirk—that was new since the last time I’d seen her. She winked at me, put up fingers in a two minutes sign, and walked to the back of the house trailing rapid, irritated Portuguese.

  Even at night, her little house was bright. The walls and floors were white, and the sofas and chairs were rumpled and comfortable-looking. She was a graphic artist, and most of the place was her studio. There were long drawing tables along the walls, easels, white metal files and supply carts, and a pair of Macs with giant screens.

  Alex was on a stool before one of these, his small hands poised over the keyboard. He wore a red Azul tee shirt, black track pants with a white stripe, and white socks. His dark eyes were fixed on me, and I waved. He smiled minutely.

  I closed the door, and the Lab circled me and sniffed at my jeans. I knelt and put out a hand and he backed up, barked at it, then gave it a sniff and a lick. I scratched him behind his ears, and his tail gyrated wildly.

  “What’s his name?” I asked Alex.

  He looked at me for a while before he answered. “Joe,” he said finally. “It’s her boyfriend’s name.”

  “Ex,” Danni said, returning from the other end of the house and pocketing her phone. “And he was way more of a dog than this cutie.” She slipped into flip-flops and dug through her purse.

  “Thanks for coming, doc—there was just no way I could get out of this thing tonight. The network’s been my bread and butter for a while, and when they say show up at our party, then show I must.”

  “Can’t afford to piss off the paycheck. I really appreciate you letting Alex hang out.”

  “This dude?” Danni said, grinning at him, “He’s the best, but I think I talk too much for him—no, gato?”

  Alex smiled and made a low wh
istle. Joe trotted over to him and dropped a big paw on his leg. Alex turned back to the monitor, which was filled with video zombies in a vegetable garden. Danni caught my eye and flicked her head at the door.

  “See you in a few, gato,” she called, and headed out. I followed.

  Danni looked up at me when we were outside. “I don’t know shit about kids,” she whispered, “but I’m worried about that guy.”

  I nodded. “He’s been through a lot,” I said.

  “Artie told me. You know, he was crying last night—in his sleep. He stopped when I woke him. He’s really quiet too—most of the talking he’s done is to Joe. Plus, he’s a nervous little dude. I see him tense up every time I move quick.”

  “Is he eating?”

  “When I put food in front of him. Otherwise, he doesn’t ask. He hasn’t had dinner yet.”

  “Does he ask for anything?”

  “Not a thing,” she said, and she vanished into her Prius.

  Inside, Alex was throwing video vegetables at the zombies, Joe the dog at his side. They both eyed me suspiciously as I shot the deadbolt and crossed the room, but neither spoke.

  Danni’s kitchen was an alcove off the hallway. She had a lot of coffee and yogurt, some skim milk, and some oddly furred mangoes, but nothing in plain sight that might be dinner. With more rooting I discovered pasta, sauce in a jar, and a bag of frozen vegetables. I read the labels carefully for any mention of nuts, and finding none, I heated things. Along the way I tried to talk to Alex. It was slow going.

  “You like spaghetti?”

  “You like broccoli?”

  “You like video games?”

  “You like dogs?”

  Most of these elicited no more than a shrug, though the last one earned a tiny, considered nod and the whisper of a smile.

  I put pasta in a bowl, topped it with sauce and broccoli, and placed the bowl, along with a glass of milk, on one of the long tables in Danni’s studio. I pulled up a stool for Alex.

  “TV?” I asked, as he climbed up. Alex tilted his head, which I took as a yes, and I rummaged on the coffee table for Danni’s remote.

  It had been a long while since I’d watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night. Alex and Joe squinted at me as I surfed.

  Deep into the triple-digit channels I came upon some cartoons, but Alex seemed uninterested. I pressed on until I found a nature show—three polar bear cubs with their mom. Alex’s eyes locked on the screen and he nodded slightly. I put down the remote.

  I fixed a bowl of spaghetti for myself and leaned on the kitchen counter, watching Alex as he ate. His gaze flicked between the polar bears and Joe, and only occasionally went to the pasta, a significant percentage of which might’ve ended up on Danni’s floor if not for the dog. Alex smiled at the antics of the bear cubs and at Joe’s midair catches. It was the happiest and most relaxed I’d seen him.

  I wound spaghetti around my fork and thought about Lucho and Lydia. They were volunteering at a quarterly blood pressure screening clinic that Lydia had organized two years back. It always drew a crowd, possibly because of the snacks, and if tonight’s event was like the last one, they’d be there past midnight.

  I hadn’t told Lucho or Lydia about the tracking devices on their cars. I’d thought hard about it, but ultimately couldn’t see the point. They already knew the crew-cut guys were watching us, and they were already looking out for them. I didn’t see anything to be gained by inflaming their paranoia, or making their skin crawl with the idea of someone creeping around underneath their cars and tracking their moves on a laptop. It was bad enough that I was trying to wrestle down those images.

  I washed my bowl and put it in the dish rack. The polar bears were gone from the TV, replaced now by a family of prairie dogs. Alex and Joe were rapt. Their eyes, identically large and chocolate-colored, followed the darting images across the screen. I heard Ben Sutter’s voice in my head: Figuring out why they want him would be a good start. I sighed, and rolled a chair over to one of Danni’s big screens and put a keyboard in my lap. I typed Bray Consolidated into Google, and hit return. Many pages came back.

  The first dozen or so covered the same ground Sutter had when he told me about PRP and its only client, though in much greater detail. There was a long list of companies under the Bray Consolidated umbrella, many more than the ones Sutter had recited, and most in energy and energy-related businesses. There were Bray’s numerous charitable contributions, mainly to high-profile cultural and medical institutions. And there were Bray’s many political investments—truckloads of cash to feed a lunatic menagerie of right- and ultra-right-wing causes, from expelling immigrants, combating mythical voting fraud, and denying global warming, to privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and public schools, dismantling every regulatory agency of the federal government, dissolving the Federal Reserve, and pulling out of the UN.

  Commentary on Harris Bray and his politics was also plentiful, with much more of it coming from his detractors than from his supporters. To the left, it seemed, Bray was more or less the unclean offspring of a demonic three-way between Ayn Rand, Robert Welch, and Dick Nixon; and he and his political foundations were the bogeymen under every progressive bed—the dark engines driving every imaginable conspiracy, from Ford’s Theatre to the grassy knoll to hanging chads in Florida. It was fascinating stuff—for the plausibility of some of it and the paranoia of the rest—but there was nothing that shed a photon on why Harris Bray might be interested in Alex.

  I scrolled to the biographical stuff, and learned that Bray’s father, Garth, an oilman from Pennsylvania and before that Connecticut, was at least as politically zealous as his son. Garth was a Roosevelt-hating isolationist, who in his later years was a generous donor to any number of groups that touted white Christian supremacy, before finally coming out as a full-throttle neo-Nazi. He died in his late nineties at his home in Greenwich, wearing an authentic SS uniform, with an authentic Luger in his mouth.

  Harris himself was, ostensibly, less exotic. He went to boarding schools in Connecticut, to Harvard afterward, and to the engineering and business schools of Stanford after that, and he was—according to several magazine profiles—utterly single-minded in transforming Garth’s medium-sized pipeline company into a vast, privately held empire. There was nothing flashy in his business strategy—he bought often, and always on the cheap, and he rarely sold. His personal life was similarly staid: a marriage after B-school to the youngest daughter of a Kentucky horse breeder, the birth of a son, Kyle, a few years later. Relocation of his company and his family to SoCal followed not long after. As far as I could tell, Harris was still married, and Kyle Bray—by now in his early thirties—worked at Bray Consolidated.

  There were pictures too, from corporate reports, press profiles, and benefit red carpets, and they were mostly unremarkable. Despite his opponents’ vivid imagery, Harris Bray sported neither horns nor fangs nor cloven hooves. He was in fact a tall, stoop-shouldered man, with a square face, a fringe of gray hair around a great bald dome, and watery blue eyes behind rimless rectangular glasses. Maybe his teeth were overlarge, and his mouth was too wide and thin-lipped; maybe his eyes had a slight hyperthyroid bulge; still, the overall effect was of beige blandness, and if someone told you he was a senior partner at an accounting firm, you’d believe it. Mrs. Bray—Audrey—looked like an aging Barbie doll, though thicker and with a less natural
smile. Kyle’s was the only vaguely interesting face in the bunch.

  He had his mother’s blond hair, narrow head, and precise, molded features, though his mouth was too wide, like his father’s. His orthodonture had been better, though, so he wore his smile more handsomely, and his blue eyes were more sleepy than watery. In a few of the photos—the ones from the charity fests—he looked drunk, and maybe a little bored. Or was that anger?

  I glanced up at Alex. He and Joe had moved to one of the slouchy sofas, and had moved on from prairie dogs to tiger cubs. Their attention was total. Alex’s bowl was empty and so was his glass, and I put them in the sink. I dug around in Danni’s freezer again and found a bag of frozen strawberries and another of frozen blueberries. I pulled these out, along with a tray of ice cubes and a tub of vanilla yogurt from the fridge. There was a blender on the countertop, and I was thinking about smoothies.

  I looked over at Alex and cleared my throat. He looked up and so did Joe. I was about to ask about dessert when Joe’s ears lifted. A low growl came from deep in his chest, and he looked down the length of the house to the glass doors at the rear. Then he bared his fangs, leapt off the sofa, and ran barking toward the back door. He was just about there when a metallic clang came from the backyard, then a thud and the sound of breaking pottery. Joe’s paws skittered on the hardwood and he slid to a halt at the door. He growled and whined and glared at the door. His tail was down and the fur along his spine was stiff.

  My heart rate spiked and I climbed off the stool and peered through a side window. I saw nothing but my own reflection, hanging in darkness. Joe kept growling, and I walked down the hall, casting about for a flashlight. There was a tug on my shirt, and Alex was behind me. His face was white and his eyes were wide and terrified.

  I squatted down and put my hands on his shoulders. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said quietly. “You hang here while I check out back.” I led him into the kitchen alcove, then went to the hallway again. On my way, I slid a boning knife from the block on Danni’s counter into my side pocket.