Dr. Knox Read online

  “Just them.”

  I tapped the pictures of the two men. Los soldados. “How about these guys? You see them around?”

  Scotty shook his head. “Nah, these aren’t them. I never seen these guys.”

  “What do you mean, these aren’t them? Them who?”

  “These aren’t the guys who were here, asking about your girl.”

  Gary coughed, and his face reddened dangerously. He spit a slug of phlegm on the floor and glared at Scotty. “You didn’t say anybody was in asking questions.”

  Scotty shuffled his feet. “They didn’t come inside. I had the bay open and they were out in the street. They had a picture of her—but not like yours, doc. She was wearing a bikini top in theirs, and she wasn’t all beat up.”

  “What did they want?” I asked

  “Same as you—they asked if I’d seen her around. Said there was money in it.”

  “How much money?”

  “I didn’t like the way they looked, so I didn’t ask,” Scotty said. “Fucking creeps—I didn’t tell ’em anything.”

  Gary grinned and clapped Scotty on the shoulder. “See, doc, kid may be dumb, but he ain’t stupid.” Scotty blushed again.

  “Any idea who these guys were?”

  “They didn’t say and I didn’t want to know. They gave me a piece of paper with a phone number to call if I saw this chick, but I tossed it.”

  “This was what day?”

  “Thursday, in the afternoon.”

  “And you hadn’t seen them around before?”

  Scotty shook his head. “Not before or since. A good thing too—guys like them give the neighborhood a bad name.”

  —

  Big and bigger, Scotty had said. And ugly and uglier. And scary.

  I scanned the streets as I walked from Gary Fleck’s shop to the Hotel Harney, and though I saw people who fit that general profile, I didn’t see any that matched the specific descriptions Scotty had given, of a hulk with blond cornrows, and another with a tattoo of a heart with a dagger through it on his chin. It was hotter on the street, and there were large dark patches on my tee shirt by the time I made it to the hotel.

  I didn’t think the Harney had ever been much in the many decades of its existence—a backdrop to some crime-scene photos, maybe, and a not-infrequent stop for the EMTs or the coroner’s van—but now it was even less: five stories of faded brick and bad karma, a boarded-up coffee shop on the ground floor, and a threadbare awning. It was a toss-up as to which would offer a more certain death—a fire, or the fire escape that was made mostly of bird shit and rust. There was a clutch of working girls wandering listlessly out front, but none that I recognized. I paused on the threshold and thought of bedbugs, drug-resistant staph, a smorgasbord of STDs, and wished I’d worn long pants and maybe a hazmat suit.

  The lobby was small: a dim stairwell going up, a pay phone kiosk with wires where the phone used to hang, an elevator the size of a coffin, and the front desk, huddled behind a plate of wired glass that was smudged, chipped, and cracked in many places. The man behind the desk was smudged, chipped, and cracked too, and bony, grizzled, and red-faced from too much drink. He was topping off his tank when I came in.

  The deskman looked up and put aside his Olde English forty-ounce. “You need somethin’?”

  “A minute of your time.”

  “Don’t bother tryin’ to sell me anythin’.”

  “I’m not selling,” I said.

  The deskman drank again. “Then you’re buyin’. People pay for time around here.”

  I took out my pictures. “I just want to know if you’ve seen these two—if they stayed here recently.”

  The man squinted at the photos, and tapped a slot in the glass. “Pass ’em through.” I did, and the man looked at the stills for a while. “I don’t know ’em,” he said eventually. “But I’m not here all the time. You want, I could ask the other guy.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  The man held up a hand and rubbed his grimy thumb slowly against his grimy fingertips. His blue eyes were watery and sly. “Twenty,” he said. I sighed and pulled my wallet out. I passed a twenty through the slot.

  “Where’s the fuckin’ phone?” he grumbled, and dug through the debris before him. He came up with a cell, and fished a piece of paper from his back pocket. He swiveled in his chair and rolled away from the desk. I looked at his sunburned neck as he muttered into his hand, and counted the moles that might become malignant. Four, maybe five. Or maybe that last one was just dirt.

  There were clacking footsteps behind me, and a blur of color—bleached blond, blue, pink, and yellow—and I turned to see Shelly go past. Shelly was a streetwalker who came into the clinic now and then—bladder infections and STD tests, mostly—and she stopped in the doorway and squinted at me before she stepped into the glare. When I looked at the deskman again, he was rolling back to the wired window.

  “My pal says he don’t know about a girl staying here with a kid,” he said, returning my photos. “You want to leave a number, I could call if they turn up.” He smiled and rubbed his thumb across his fingers again. I suppressed a shudder and took out a card and another bill. I fed them through the slot.

  The deskman looked at the card. “This that clinic over by Carmen’s?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Chick stiff you on a bill?”

  “Something like that,” I said, and walked out.

  The heat was battering now, and I paused under the Harney’s awning to put on my sunglasses. A figure waved from across the street, from the shade of a ratty sweet-gum tree. I crossed over, and Shelly nodded at me. She was somewhere in her twenties, small-boned, fair, and jumpy. Her peroxide hair was streaked blue in front, and her pink-and-yellow striped tube top was split at the seam. She looked at me over the top of massive white sunglasses.

  “You’re not buds with that prick Troop, are you, doc? You know he’s a douche bag.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t even know his name till just now. I was asking him some questions. I’m looking for somebody.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Hear from who?”

  She shrugged. “You know that guy’ll say anything to scam a buck off you. Really, he sucks.”

  “I’m getting that impression. Maybe you’ve seen this girl around, or the little boy.” I proffered the photos, but Shelly had stopped looking at me. I followed her gaze across the street to Troop, who stood in the doorway of the Harney, staring at us. Out from behind his desk, he was bigger than I would’ve guessed, with bowed legs and a jutting gut. He shaded his eyes with a meaty hand, and I turned back to Shelly in time to see her disappear around the corner.

  CHAPTER 7

  I was in front of the clinic, showered and wearing a clean tee shirt and jeans, when Sutter rolled up in a BMW convertible. It had racing wheels, white leather, and a paint job the color of a new penny—flawless but for what looked like a bullet hole in the passenger door. I threw my bags into the vestigial back seat.

  “New ride?” I asked as we pulled from the curb.

  Sutter tapped on a touch screen in the dash and music came on—something Brazilian and propulsive. “Got it today,” he said. “Used.”

  I ran my finger around the edge of the bullet hole. “Not gently.”

  Sutter smiled. “Guy I did something for was short when it came time to settle up. He threw in the paper on this and we called it even.”

  “What kind of something?”

  Sutter smiled wider. “The kind you don’t want to know about. How’d your day go? You earn your missing-persons merit badge?”

  We were eastbound on the 10, and warm air rushed over us. I pushed the seat back. The wind ran through my damp hair.

  “She’s still missing,” I said, and told Sutter of my wanderings. As I spoke he frowned, and when I finished he shook his head.

  “You look like you bit a lemon,” I said.

  “Walking around, showing her photo—that isn’t the smartes
t tactic. Unless you want to be the goat.”

  “The goat?”

  “The staked goat. Bait.”

  “I’m not—”

  “You’ve got one, maybe two sets of guys looking for your young mom, and one set at least is walking around with pictures, offering cash money to people. You don’t think somebody’s going to mention to somebody that you’re looking for her too?”

  “Nora said the same.”

  “That’s ’cause she’s smart—except for hanging out with you. Have you thought about what you’ll do if these guys come around?”

  I shrugged. “Play it by ear.”

  Sutter shook his head some more. “From what I see, you’ve got no play, brother—but I think you know that. I think last night with Teddy was too tame for you, and you’re looking for action.” I said nothing, but watched the flow of traffic on the 10. Sutter laughed. “Well, maybe tonight will be more like it.”

  “Why? Are we headed for a room full of guns?”

  Sutter shrugged. “The guy who called didn’t say, but it definitely won’t be the Hollywood Hills.”

  We stayed on the 10 until we crossed into San Bernardino County, and the San Gabriels were large and dark ahead of us and the land began to rise toward them. We got off in Ontario, at the Fourth Street exit. The airport wasn’t far, and blue light from the runways shimmered in the sky. A FedEx jet flew low across our path, and dropped a curtain of exhaust over us.

  Sutter drove the streets around the airport, watching his mirrors, until he was satisfied that we were alone. Then he headed west on Fourth Street and north on Campus. We angled north and west some more, until we were in Upland, in a quiet neighborhood of ranch houses from the 1960s. They were small and tidy, with brown yards, and SUVs and pickups in the driveways. The hush on the streets, and the stillness and ordinariness of the houses were somehow ominous in the dusk, and it was easy to imagine bizarre and terrible things taking place inside the neat boxes. Easy for me, anyway. Sutter pulled to the curb and produced a phone.

  “I’m supposed to call when we’re close,” he said to the phone. “We’re close.” Then he dropped the BMW into gear and drove away. We took a right at the end of the street, and drove into a cul-de-sac.

  There were two houses in the little circle, both with overgrown yards and dark windows. We pulled into the drive of the one with a FOR SALE sign out front, and Sutter flashed the high-beams twice. They lit vertical gray siding, a gray front door, and the faded vinyl of an attached garage. Two men were in the front doorway, both big, both dressed in jeans and dark tee shirts, and both with handguns in their belts. Sutter chuckled.

  We climbed from the BMW, and the bigger of the men walked out to meet us. The night was quiet but for the ticking of the car’s engine and the crunch of gravel under his boots. He stopped and raised a hand.

  “Right there,” he said. “I gotta check those.” His voice was Texan. Under a blond crew cut, his face was wide, ruddy, and brutal.

  “Look with your eyes,” I said. “That stuff needs to stay clean.” I put the duffels down and unzipped them. The guy looked back to his friend in the doorway, who nodded. “Back up,” Tex said. He squatted, peered into the duffels, then opened the little cooler. He blanched when he saw the blood bags.

  “We good?” Sutter asked.

  “Seems like,” the guy in the doorway said. “Come ahead.” He was a handsome weasel, with black hair, olive skin, and a grin. He sounded like back east—New Jersey, maybe.

  “Cash first,” Sutter said.

  “Up front—since when?”

  Sutter sighed. “Since always. You guys should talk to whoever you talk to, and get the terms straight. That way you won’t have this problem with the next doc who comes out. If you can find a next one.” Sutter cocked his head, and I picked up the duffels and cooler and stepped toward the car.

  Tex didn’t like that. “What the fuck?” he said, and reached for his gun. And stopped midway when he saw Sutter’s weapons, two Sig Sauers, one pointed at him, the other at Jersey.

  “Let’s stay polite, fellas,” Sutter said, smiling wider. “Otherwise, even my friend won’t be able to help you.”

  Jersey put up his hands. “No need to get all pissy. I know the deal; I was just fuckin’ with you. I got your cash here, if I can take it out of my pocket.”

  “If you’d done that to begin with,” Sutter said, “you wouldn’t need to ask permission.”

  Jersey reached back slowly with one hand and held up a brown paper bag, folded over on itself. He tossed it, and it landed between Sutter and me. I picked it up and took out the cash—banded packs of hundreds, new and sharp-edged. I showed them to Sutter, who nodded.

  “We have to worry about these numbers being on a list somewhere?”

  Jersey was indignant. “Shit, no. Now, you guys want to come look after—”

  “We don’t need names,” I said.

  Inside, the house was dark—gray carpets, dingy walls, heavy drapes across the windows—and too warm. The air was moist and close and smelled of sweat, cigarettes, burnt coffee, car exhaust, and the clotted reek of old fast food: the fragrance of flight. Above it all was an odor unique unto itself—worse than a fish market gutter, or a landfill marinating in the August sun; worse than the ammoniac smell of the incontinent, or the sulfurous stench of a nicked intestine. It was the smell of old meat, when the sweetness has fled and only rot remains. The smell of a living body becoming a corpse.

  It strengthened as I followed Tex’s pointing finger past a kitchen, an empty bedroom, and a bathroom, to the end of the hallway. There was a blond girl there, reedy and wan, maybe twenty. Her long, straight hair was tied in a sloppy braid down her back, and her jeans were limp and slept in. Her eyes were shadowed from exhaustion and red from crying.

  “You’re the doctor?” she whispered. Another accent, deeper south. I nodded. “Thank fuckin’ Jesus. He’s in here.” She turned to the door behind her and put a hand on the knob.

  “Just a sec,” I said. I put the duffels down, unzipped one, and took out disinfecting gel, surgical masks, and gloves. I washed, and slipped on gloves and a mask. “Hands,” I said.

  She squinted at me. “What for?” she said, but held them out anyway.

  I squirted gel into her palms. “Wash,” I said. “Then gloves and a mask.”

  Her eyes widened. “What the hell? He hurt his leg is all. It’s not like he’s got embola.”

  “It’s not Ebola I’m worried about,” I said. She put on her mask and gloves and opened the door.

  The smell rolled from the darkness in a noxious wave. I was ready for it, but still I gagged; the girl was used to it. We stepped inside. The only light was a dull-yellow wedge from the bathroom that fell on a side table, a wooden folding chair, and a double bed piled with blankets.

  “Lemme get the lamp,” the girl said, and she picked her way through the darkness. There was a click, and a dim light came through the singed shade of a standing lamp and lit the rest of the room. On the floor were backpacks, empty soda bottles, a nearly empty doughnut box, a sleeping bag, and a box of shotgun shells, but no shotgun.

  “Karl told me not to open the curtain or the window,” the girl said. She moved to the bed and pulled the blankets back from the unmoving form that lay beneath. When she did, the smell grew stronger.

  The man on the bed moaned. Breathing was hard labor for him, and his chest rose and fell too fast. “Callie,” he whispered. “Hey, baby.” His accent was like the girl’s. He raised a hand. It took all he had.

  “I’m here, Billy,” she said. “And I got the doctor. He’s gonna set you right, honey.” The man muttered and closed his eyes, and Callie swallowed a sob. “He’s in and out,” she whispered. “Last day and a half, mostly out. Last couple of hours, he’s worse than ever.”

  Under the bad light, under the sweat and gray pallor and shivering, it was hard to tell his age. Thirty, maybe. He was blond and bearded, thick with muscle, pierced several times in one ear, inked d
own both arms. He wore a tee shirt, soaked with sweat, and blue boxers that were stained and stretched tight around his right thigh, which was swollen and rotting from an infected, full-thickness burn.

  It was a trench across the width of his thigh, six inches above his patella and down deep into the quadriceps. There was a black eschar—a thick, leathery crust—inside and around the wound, which was cracked in spots and oozed a rank green pus. Radiating out from the eschar, his leg was webbed with red streaks—the visible tendrils of a spreading infection. I sighed, slipped a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and pressed a strip thermometer to his forehead.

  “What happened to him, and when?” I asked. Callie reddened, looked down, and stuttered. “I don’t need to know what he was doing at the time,” I said, “just what burned him, and how long ago.”

  “It was four—no—five days back now. It was a torch did it—an OA torch. Oxyacetylene.”

  Billy groaned, and turned toward me. “Everything was good…and then, outta nowhere, this guard…Karl was supposed to…”

  Callie put a hand on his cheek. “You don’t gotta talk, baby. Doctor don’t need to know that stuff.” She looked at me. “He’s burnin’ up again.”

  She was right—the strip said 103. “How long has he been running a fever?”

  “Three days, I guess. And last couple of days he says the leg is hurtin’ all up and down.”

  “It’s the infection.”

  “When it first happened, he said it didn’t hurt at all.”

  “That’s because the nerve endings were burnt away. Has he been passing water?” She looked puzzled. “Is he peeing?”

  “Not for a day, maybe more.” Callie looked down again and her shoulders shook. The BP cuff whirred and hissed and finished its work. I read the gauge: 80/70. Shit.

  “I’m going to start an IV,” I said. “You get some garbage bags. Then you might want to wait outside.”

  “Screw that,” Callie said. “I’m not waitin’. I’m gonna help.”

  A tremor went through Billy and he grabbed my arm. His grip was desperate and hot. His voice was choked. “Callie’s a good girl, doc—smarter than shit. Way smarter than me. I don’t tell her enough.”