Dr. Knox Read online

  I went back to the exam room, and Lucho and Arthur followed. I checked the boy’s pulse. Nice and steady.

  “That was fucking scary,” Lucho said.

  “Kids always are,” I said.

  “He’s really going to be okay?” Arthur asked.

  “He should be. Either of you get a name for him or his mom?” They shook their heads. “You know what she’s speaking?”

  “Arabic?” Lucho offered.

  Arthur shrugged. “Sounds like a neighbor lady we had when I was kid, and she was Romanian—but that’s just a guess.”

  “Somebody went at her pretty good,” Lucho said.

  I nodded. “She’ll be lucky if—” There was a metal shriek from down the hall, followed quickly by a solid thunk. I looked at Lucho. “Was that the—?”

  “Back door,” Lucho said, and he sprinted down the hall. In a moment he returned, shaking his head. “She bolted, doc. Down the alley and gone.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said softly.

  From his deep sleep the boy muttered something, but none of us could make out the words.

  CHAPTER 2

  “He is not a goddamn puppy, doctor,” Lydia Torres said. Her voice was an angry whisper; her square face was dark and clenched, and her many smile lines were invisible. “You cannot keep him just because he wandered into your yard.”

  I looked from Lydia to Lucho, who said nothing, but stared at his shoes and backed slowly from the waiting room. I understood his caution. At five and a half feet tall, Lydia was built like a bull terrier—a solid cylinder of muscle and, just then, menace. Her hair, a thick, natural black despite her fifty-five years, was pulled in a tight bun, and her heavy brows were gathered in a squint. Her shoulders were squared for a fight. Still, I held my ground.

  “I’m not suggesting anything permanent. I’m saying we look out for him until his mother comes back.”

  Lydia’s face grew darker, and she counted on rigid fingers. “First, you don’t even know if this woman was his mother. Second, mother or not, you don’t know she’s coming back. And, third, don’t be giving me this we crap—it’s me you want looking out for him. We got to call the cops, doctor, them or DCFS.”

  “Child and Family Services? You can’t be serious, Lyd—it’s one shit storm after another with them. You remember that series in the Times last month? They can’t find their asses with both hands. I wouldn’t trust them to look after a cup of coffee.”

  “It’s their job, doctor, not ours.”

  I shook my head. “And besides, she is his mother—they look alike, and you don’t get that kind of scared unless you’re a parent.” I turned to Lucho. “You were there—tell her.”

  Lucho put his hands up and shook his head. “I learned young not to correct my tía, doc. I’m gonna check the kid.”

  “You’ve got your nephew intimidated,” I said.

  Lydia sighed. “Him, but not you. Piss-poor mother, if she is his mother—running out on a son like that.”

  “She said she’d be back.”

  “From the bathroom, doctor. And she said it right before she abandoned him.”

  “She didn’t abandon him. She was afraid of something. I think she was on the run.”

  “And this you get from what—a few bruises?”

  I had a professor my fourth year of med school, a white-haired internist who’d told me: Your nurse sees more patients than you do, and spends more time with ’em. She talks to ’em about things you don’t, and knows ’em in ways you can’t. Not listening to your nurse is like watching TV with the sound off—you might figure out what’s goin’ on eventually—but chances are you’ll miss something, and in the meantime somebody will die. So—you can listen to your nurse, or you can be an asshole. Try not to be an asshole.

  Even when I was twenty-six, and still very much an asshole, it had struck me as sound advice, and I’d tried to follow it. Certainly I listened to Lydia—she was smarter and more experienced than any nurse I’d worked with, had more clinical sense than most of the doctors I knew, and was tougher by far than any of them. I listened to her even when she spoke to me as if I were an errant child, and made doctor sound somehow ironic. I listened, but didn’t always agree.

  “It was more than a few bruises, but it’s not just about those. Take a look.” I beckoned, and she followed me to the file room, a narrow space lined with metal cabinets. Arthur was sitting at a desk at the back, looking at a laptop. His tanned face went pale when he saw Lydia’s expression.

  “Play the security video again, will you?” I asked. Arthur nodded, tapped at the keyboard, and turned the laptop around for us to see. Two windows opened on the screen.

  “This is from the front-door camera,” Arthur said, pointing to the window on the right, “and this is from the one mounted on the second-floor corner.”

  The window on the left showed an image of an empty sidewalk and a storefront, viewed from above. The angle was oblique, but the clinic was plain—the big front windows, the glass door in between. Security grating aside, it still looked like the hardware store it once had been.

  “See the time in the corner?” I said. “Seven-nineteen—that’s when we were in the thick of it with the kid. Not five minutes after he and his mom came in.”

  Lydia interrupted. “You don’t know that she’s his mother.”

  “Just watch.”

  “I’m watching. All I see is—”

  And then two men appeared on the screen, in the left-hand window, walking quickly. They looked big in their dark suits, and they moved in unison, with a precise, tight gait. They stopped in front of the clinic and scanned the street. Then they spoke to each other and stepped to the front-door vestibule. Their hard white faces and crew-cut scalps filled the right side of the screen. The men squinted, bent to the door glass, put meaty hands to meaty brows, and peered in. They tried the door, but found it locked. They didn’t ring the bell, and after a while they walked away.

  Arthur tapped keys and the two windows blinked, and displayed a live feed of the empty street and the empty doorway. Lydia looked at me. “Who were they?”

  I shook my head. “Not the usual neighborhood types. And they seemed to be looking for someone.”

  “Those suits and the hair…They could be cops.”

  It was my turn to look skeptical. “You think so?”

  “Some kind of cops,” Lydia said. “La Migra, maybe—who knows? Anyway, how do you know they were looking for the woman?”

  “I don’t—not for sure. It’s a guess based on observation, like a preliminary diagnosis.”

  “Don’t patronize me, doctor.”

  “I’m not pat—”

  “Sure you are. We should call the cops or DCFS, and you know it.” Her mouth was firm, frowning. I sighed and closed my eyes.

  A few years back—it seemed like a hundred sometimes, sometimes last week—in another life, quite far from here, I’d watched too many kids wake up on gurneys or stretchers, sick, maimed, always in pain, to find that everything they’d known—parents, siblings, homes, schools, villages, the ground beneath their feet—was gone. More than gone: hacked apart, scattered, annihilated. I’d never forget the vacant, blasted look in their eyes as the new facts of life beat against them like a horrible tide, and incomprehension, denial, and raw terror swept them away. I’d had little to offer any of them besides a hand to hold for a few minutes, some empty words, and sometimes space on a truck that would carry them into a mostly well-meaning, sporadically competent, and always overburdened refugee bureaucracy. I never knew where they wound up—a proper hospital, maybe—one with actual walls, or a camp or orphanage. The next wave was always coming in, and I never had time to find out. I didn’t know what this kid’s story was, but I didn’t want to put him on a truck—and especially not to DCFS. Not unless I had to.

  “The boy’s going to wake up confused and scared,” I said. “He’s going to want his mom and she won’t be around and he’ll be terrified. You want to turn h
im over to a bunch of people he’s never seen before?”

  “We are a bunch of people he’s never seen before.”

  “You really want to hand him to Family Services, Lyd? On a weekend? We won’t even get the A-list idiots on a weekend.”

  Lydia sighed massively. “You know the shit we could land in?”

  “All we’re doing is waiting for his mother to come back for him. She said she was coming back—”

  “From the bathroom.”

  “She said she was coming back, and there’s no crime in waiting. If she doesn’t turn up by Monday—if I can’t find her by then—we’ll call whoever you want to call.”

  “Find her? You said she’d come back for him—now you have to find her? You moonlight as a detective now?”

  “I’ll ask around the neighborhood, see if anyone’s seen her.”

  “While I babysit.”

  “You had big plans this weekend?”

  “Never mind my plans. You think ’cause I’m a woman I don’t mind taking care of kids?”

  “It’s not the gender thing so much as the fact that you raised Lucho and his sister up from babies, and you did it by yourself.”

  “Now you’re blowing smoke at me, doctor. I’m supposed to take him home?”

  “My place isn’t child-friendly.”

  Lydia rolled her eyes. “God only knows what goes on up there. Does the kid even speak English? You weren’t sure the mother did.”

  “She understood it.”

  Lydia shook her head and sighed. “Just till Monday.”

  “Tuesday the latest.”

  “You should pay me overtime for this,” Lydia said. “Time-and-a-half at least.” She looked at Arthur. “And don’t think you two aren’t gonna help. I’ll make a list; you’ll go to the market.”

  “Nothing with nuts,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I got—” And then her eyes flicked to Arthur’s laptop and caught there. Her face hardened again. “Like we don’t have enough trouble already. What’s that pirate doing here?”

  I looked at the screen and at the lean, whippy figure in it, standing by the front door, smiling lazily for the camera. Then I went through the waiting room and let Ben Sutter in.

  “What do you say, brother?” Sutter drawled. “You up for a house call tonight?”

  CHAPTER 3

  The 101 was fucked, Sutter said, so we took surface streets north and west as the sky ripened from pink to purple, and lights came on all over town. San Pedro to First; First into Beverly; Beverly to Vermont to Franklin to Outpost and into the hills. Like everything about Sutter, his driving was fluid and nonchalant, and it was only on close inspection that you noticed the precision and speed.

  He was thirty-five, five years younger than me, and at six feet tall, an inch shorter. His heritage was an elusive thing—African, Asian, Scots, Native American, maybe Hispanic too. Sutter himself claimed not to know the precise recipe, but, whatever the mix, the result was striking. His features were sharp and angular, as if chipped from coffee-colored stone, animated by a nimble intellect and a sometimes merciless wit, and softened by laugh lines around his mouth and pale eyes.

  The rest was muscle. He was cobbled, plated, and wired together with it, and the first time I’d stitched him up it seemed amazing that anything could pierce that armor. But three bullets had, along with an ugly chunk of shrapnel. Even that torn up, he’d refused treatment until he saw that his wounded teammates and the children they had brought in—a boy and girl, both eight, pulled from the remains of a refugee encampment, and caked in ash and mud—were being looked after.

  That was six years ago, at a Doctors Transglobal Rescue field station in the Central African Republic, halfway between Bangui and Berbérati. I was running the place—little more than a tin-roofed shed with tarps for doors—and Sutter, who’d cashed out of the Special Forces by then, and cashed into the private security business, was babysitting some German geologists. The geologists were unscathed but full of complaint over detours and delays, and before I’d started pulling bullets from him, Sutter had threatened to shoot them if they didn’t shut up.

  He took a left on Mulholland, ran the window down, and hung his elbow out. The evening air was soft, and smelled of eucalyptus and dust. I drummed my fingers on the dash, and Sutter looked over. His gray eyes were bright.

  “Lydia seemed less happy to see me than usual,” he said. “Something going on?”

  I told him about the boy, his missing mother, and the men peering through the clinic’s windows. He squinted, and I told him about Lydia’s impulse to call child services and my desire not to.

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “She’s got a point.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t want to hand him over to those clowns unless I have to.”

  Sutter smiled. “You want help looking for the mom?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  We drove in silence for a while, along the twisting road. “Hard to believe she still doesn’t like me,” Sutter said. “After all these years.”

  “Lydia doesn’t like me that much, and I sign her paycheck.”

  “Which makes you part of the oppressor class. But me—I’m a workingman. Plus, I’ve got a way with people.”

  “And modesty too.”

  I looked out the window, at the shadowed hillsides and canyons along Mulholland. Then I unzipped the black duffel at my feet.

  It was an ER in a hockey bag: surgical kits, anesthetics, pain meds, tranquilizers, antibiotics, sterile gauze, splints, rolls of tape, packs of surgical gloves, IV kits, bags of Ringer’s lactate, and bags of saline. I took another count of the surgical kits, then looked into the back seat. There was a matching duffel there, packed with a surgical stapler, a blood pressure cuff, a portable EKG, a portable sonogram, a laptop, and more gauze and gloves. Next to that was a small cooler filled with ice packs and three bags of O-negative blood. I opened them both and scanned their contents.

  Sutter was watching me. “This makes four times you’ve taken inventory.”

  “I’m a nervous guy.”

  He snorted. “If only.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I served with nervous guys and with eager guys, and I know the difference. I’d feel better if you got less of a charge out of walking into a room full of guns.”

  I sighed. We’d had this conversation before over the years. “I didn’t think tonight was that kind of gig.”

  “Any gig can turn into that kind of gig.”

  “Some rich-kid slacker in the Hollywood Hills—seriously?”

  “Any gig.”

  “Usually, the patients don’t shoot at me, because they need me.”

  “Until they don’t.”

  “Isn’t that where you come in—making sure I don’t get shot, and that I get paid?”

  “It’s easier when you’re less eager.”

  I shrugged.

  I’d been working these night jobs with Sutter for more than three years, since I took over the clinic from the ancient Dr. Carmody and discovered after the first month that I could make payroll or make rent, but not both. Sutter, ever the entrepreneur, had an answer. The arrangement was simple: house calls for cash, paid up front, and no questions asked beyond the medical ones. No paper filed—with cops or anyone else—about gunshot wounds or drug overdoses or STDs or patients who might be persons-of-interest in connection with…whatever. And no names exchanged—not theirs, not ours, not ever.

  Of course, for some people in the market for undocumented medical care, anonymity was impossible: their faces stared out from TV and movie screens, from magazine covers and billboards, from every corner of the Internet. What those patients wanted above all was silence, complete and absolute. After three years we had established a reputation for it among the lawyers, agents, PR flacks, crisis consultants, and the other breeds of handlers and fixers who rang in the middle of the night. Or Sutter had established a reputation for it. It was my fervent hope that I had establish
ed no reputation at all—that I was entirely unknown. With every one of these night calls, I bet my license on it.

  “This lawyer didn’t say anything about the wounds?” I asked.

  “You got what I got: multiple GSWs. End of message.”

  My knee bounced up and down in four-four time. “But you actually know this guy—the patient?”

  “Turns out I knew his pops. He’s a director. He makes these crappy, basic-cable action flicks—commandos versus monsters or aliens or some shit. I was his tech adviser on a few of ’em. Wanted me to show his starlets how elite special operators would grease zombies.”

  “SEALs learn that?”

  “Whole chapter on it in the counter-insurgency manual.”

  There were still cars in the dusty lot at the top of Runyon Canyon when we passed, and a couple of runners cooling down in the gathering dark. Five minutes later, Sutter turned the truck onto a brick drive that climbed around a hillside for fifty yards and then was interrupted by brick pillars, a wrought-iron gate, security cameras, and an intercom. We rolled to a stop by the metal box.

  “You order the Korean fried chicken?” Sutter said to the speaker. There was no answer, but the gates swept open.

  The drive curved upward some more, and ended in a brick plaza and a low-slung house of glass, red stone, and sharp edges. There were desert plantings around the house, and lights among them, and they cast jagged shadows over Sutter’s truck, and on the yellow Turbo Carrera, the black Lexus, and the battered green Accord parked out front.

  Sutter checked the load in his Sig Sauer, slipped it in a holster, and mostly covered it with his Ozomatli tee shirt. I hoisted the duffels from the truck, and he picked up the cooler, and we headed for the big front door. I stopped as I passed the Porsche and pointed my chin at dark splotches on the paving.

  “Somebody’s leaking,” I said.

  “And not oil.”

  The door opened before we reached it, and a pudgy young man with thin arms stepped out. He was short and flushed, with sweat in his thin blond hair and damp spots on his polo shirt. His khaki pants were too tight around his waist, and didn’t quite reach the tops of his boat shoes. He spoke in a quavering voice.