Do No Harm (53 page)

"What about the phones? The cops can't get the paperwork through to trace calls for a few days. Can you get a tap on the line?"

"Yeah. As soon as I go back in time to the 1950s." Ed picked up one of the Nextels and punched in a number, shaking his head. "Nobody uses taps anymore. I have a Lucent technologist on the inside." He changed his voice to a drawl. "Yeah, hey there. Your baby brother calling. Listen, I'm trying to find mom's new phone number. Here's her old one: 310-555-4771." David's telephone number. "I'm gonna stay with her about a week. . . . No, to be safe, I'd like to stay with her a week--twenty-four hours isn't enough time for us to catch up. . . . Thanks, bro." He hung up and smiled at David. "Your number's red-flagged for seven days."

"Shouldn't we let the police know we've done this?"

The smile left Ed's face instantaneously. "Absolutely not. This is an inside guy I'm using. I have to keep his ass covered. We're trading legality for speed, here." Ed screwed the keypad into the wall behind the ficus and slipped into his stilettos with a pained grimace. "If Clyde calls, let me know immediately and we'll be able to trace the location he called from."

"Thank you," David said. "I . . . thank you."

Ed nodded at him on his way to the door. "I'll send you a bill. You'll send me a money order."

"How much?"

Ed turned, touched two manicured fingers to his lipsticked mouth, and blew David a kiss. "Honey, you don't want to know."

David retrieved the morning paper, sitting in his leather chair and reading the two front-page articles on "The Westwood Acid Thrower." He noted with amusement that they'd selected a less-than-flattering photograph of himself, captured mid-sentence during his speech at the resident meet-and-greet, to go along with Clyde's.

For the first time in several months, he turned on the television, but news updates of the manhunt cut into the programming every fifteen minutes and he finally turned it off and gazed at the blank space where his mother's de Kooning used to hang. His exhaustion was too charged to give way to sleep.

He sat quietly, snipping and removing the stitches from his healed knuckle. When the phone rang, it nearly startled him off the chair. He dashed back to his bedroom so he could record the call if necessary. After taking an instant to catch his breath, he picked up the phone with a trembling hand. It was only the dry cleaner calling to remind him he'd had clothes ready for pickup since last Monday.

He hung up, gazing at the light swirl of fingerprint powder on the plastic receiver. After trying to sleep, then disconsolately flipping through the latest New England Journal of Medicine, David called the ER. Carson still had not come in.

David couldn't rest. He was well on his way to his first glaring professional setback, and Clyde was still on the loose. At least there was one thing David could fix. People stared at him from their cars as he drove up to Carson's building; he wondered why until he saw his car's reflection in a store window, ashole lettered across the side in red. He couldn't help but laugh at the expressions of pedestrians and other drivers.

The newsman on the car radio cheerily announced, "Dr. David Spier's position as UCLA ER division chief has become tenuous. Apparently, the board convened this morning over allegations that he attacked a fellow physician. The hospital has not issued a statement. Spier has been at the controversial center of . . . " David's lack of irritation and unease about the report surprised him pleasantly.

He managed to find Carson's apartment easily this time. Wearing boxers and a ripped T-shirt, Carson opened the door. His face, unshaven and darkened with exhaustion, showed little reaction. David followed him inside wordlessly, and they sat on the floor of the living room again, facing each other. Near the window stood a large bong, which through some tacit agreement, he and Carson pretended not to notice.

"When are you coming back?" David asked.

"I don't know that I am," Carson said softly. "I'm not sure I'm cut out for this." He looked away, his face striped with the shadows of the cheap venetian blinds. "Who's gonna want me to work on them now? If they knew, if patients knew, they'd never want to be in my hands. Under my care." His fingers slid up into his mop of blond hair, disappearing. He held his head and studied the light filtering through the window.

"Forgive me for being harsh," David finally said, breaking the silence. He brought his hands together and laced them into a temple. "But you need to pull your head out of your ass."

Carson blinked several times in rapid succession.

"This self-indulgent wallowing is for lovesick schoolboys. You're a physician. Your job is and will be to make difficult calls in the face of life and death and to live with them. I've seen hundreds, maybe even thousands of young doctors, and I know who's cut out for this and who isn't. If you walk away, you'll grow to hate yourself by small, vicious increments."

Carson's lips quivered, ever so slightly.

David continued, "When we spoke the other day, you expressed ambivalence about your return. I've decided I'm not going to leave that decision to you. You need to come back. It's your responsibility to the division and to yourself. Recent events have forced me to learn anew that the world can be a miserable, difficult place. We can't afford to lose a good physician. Not ever, but especially not this week."

Carson looked at him, his eyes moist.

"I'm taking a few days off, starting now," David continued. "I want to know that you're in the ER in my absence." He stood up and dusted his hands. "I'm not leaving until you get dressed, get in your car, and start your drive to the hospital."

Carson stared at him for a very long time. Then he rose and headed back to his bedroom to change into scrubs.

DAVID sat in the still of his bedroom, back against the headboard, files and papers scattered across his lap. He watched the palm frond shadows wave across the newly scoured blood-tinged wall at the base of his bed, and knew with a sudden and vehement certainty that the telephone was about to ring. He watched the bobbing shadows of the plants and waited, breathing softly, as the clock ticked on.

The phone rang and he set aside Connolly's abstract, which he'd been rereading. His voice was surprisingly calm when he answered. "Yes, Clyde?"

The voice, low and sloppy, rattled with phlegm. "You saw. You saw what I left you?"

David's voice was entirely calm. "I did. And?"

A confused pause.

"If you think sneaking into my house and killing a canary are gonna get me upset, you have another think coming. You're gonna have to do a lot more to scare me, Clyde."

Some murmuring: "Back from the door. Three, two, three, two. From the door." Clyde fell quiet. The silence stretched itself out and out, and just as David was certain Clyde had hung up, he spoke. His voice came low and growling. "I'll make you quiver," he said. "I'll make you beg."

"Try it," David said.

The sound of Clyde spitting came through loud and clear. When he spoke again, his voice was eerily calm. "It's gonna get worse. A lot worse."

A chill ran through David's body from his scalp to the soles of his feet. Good, he thought. Then let's play.

The line had gone dead.

His heart was pounding--good competitive bursts of adrenaline.

When Ed returned David's page seconds later, David simply said, "Bingo." Ed called back three minutes later and said, "Pay phone at the Chevron at Venice and Lincoln. Clyde's old stamping grounds."

"What? He hasn't left the area? I've got to head over. I'll call Yale now."

"And say what? Based on an illegal phone trace, you have reason to believe that an escaped felon placed a phone call from a gas station? Don't bite the hand that's dealing you, Spier. That's our deal."

"So what do we do?"

"First, we slow down. We figure out what new information we've gleaned from the phone call."

David started to protest but held his tongue, remembering the last time Ed walked him through this exercise and the helpful information it yielded. "Okay. . . . He's probably hiding in an area near the pay phone."

"Why?"

"His face has been on the cover of the LA Times six times in the past week, plus there's an APB out on his car. It's daytime, so there's no way he'd risk a big trip. The farther he travels from his hiding place, the higher risk he runs of being spotted."

"Unless he knew the call was being traced and is purposefully misdirecting the investigation."

"You're right," David said. "That's an option."

"What else?"

"He was no longer slurring when he spoke. That means he probably hasn't been taking lithium, just as we hypothesized, so his blood level is dropping. That makes him more menacing physically, because his balance problems will disappear. He'll be able to run and drive more effectively, as we already surmised. Plus, it makes him more menacing psychologically, because whatever benefit the lithium was providing in reducing his violent tendencies--if it did at all--is now gone."

"And perhaps he filled up his tank," Ed added, "which would explain why he was at the gas station. We're assuming he doesn't have any money, but if he does, you might look at new apartment rentals in the area."

"He's an addicted smoker. If he'd risk going out for gas, he'd probably also risk heading out for cigarettes. I'll go down there with his newspaper photo and ask around at 7-Elevens and Quickie-Marts. And the gas station too, obviously. First thing that yields, I'll call Yale. Then I'll have a concrete reason for red-flagging the area for the cops."

"And if you spot Clyde? What are you gonna do?"

"Talk him in."

"Oh that's right. I forgot how well versed you are in hostage negotiations and combat tactics."

"Sarcasm suits you better when you're in drag, Ed."

"I am not fucking around here, Spier. Watch your ass."

The small concrete storage unit stayed cold, so cold Clyde curled into the fetal position on the cigarette-burnt cushioning of the front seat of his car, his abundant rear end pushed against the driver's door, the cool Beretta pressed to his cheek. The ocean was far enough away that its hypnotic sounds were lost beneath the hum of electric lines and the whir of passing cars, yet close enough that the chill had crept off its surface last night and slunk its way through the streets of Venice, a malicious mist.

Clyde turned and grunted, adjusting his arms under his head. Frustration and then anger found their way into the small noises he made as he shifted. He got out of the car and circled it a few times in the enclosed space. He pulled two cigarettes from a pack of Marlboros in the glove box and smoked them until the cherries singed his lips. Using the tip of the pistol, he slid his dirty T-shirt up and gazed at the pattern of alkali burns across his chest. They looked fearsome, with white, dead skin flaking off around the edges, but they were healing well.

Opening the trunk, he gazed at the mix of oddities he kept stored there. Surgical tools, spare scrub tops and bottoms, a container of liquid DrainEze. Unscrewing the DrainEze cap, he sniffed the alkali solution, then set it on the ground. His hand, tumbling through tire irons and stained towels, found and clutched a Pyrex beaker. He slammed the trunk lid, then set the beaker and the DrainEze on it. Two thick metal runners for the roll-up storage door ran across the ceiling. Around one of them, he'd looped a length of rope. He'd left a makeshift gag dangling from the noose at the rope's end. A recipe for fear.

His call should have drawn David by now--a phone trace, or at least caller ID, would be in place after his last call. Retrieving the pistol from the passenger seat of the car, Clyde walked over to the roll-up storage door, inches away from the front bumper of his Crown Vic, and slid it up a few inches. Daylight streamed in like a gold twinkling river, pooling around his wide calves. He gazed down at the light for a few moments, transfixed and smiling, before taking a knee and peering out of the unit. Dangling from a hasp was the broken combination lock he'd smashed with a tire iron to gain entry to the unit. The lure.

Squinting into the bright light reflecting off the white quartz gravel, he peered down the row of boxy, garage-style units with bright orange metal doors. The strip of storage spaces terminated in the back of a 7-Eleven. A large cracked sign set up on posts--poppy's self-storage--angled toward the road to entice drivers-by. Across the street, cars crammed into lines at the Chevron station's pumps.

The loose skin of Clyde's face drew up around his eyes in a half squint, half scowl when he spotted the olive Mercedes, ashole lettered on the side. Right on schedule. It pulled over into the lot and Clyde watched it, his mouth pulsing slowly as if working a cud of tobacco, his hand tightening around the Beretta's stock.

David stepped out of his car and headed toward the 7-Eleven. He paused for a moment, his eyes sweeping across the storage units. Clyde bounced slightly with excitement. A family of four pulled into the parking lot about fifteen feet away from Clyde's hiding place and noisily began loading items into the storage unit next door. Clyde's bouncing slowed. Stopped. His meaty hand sneaked through the gap in the roll-up door and snatched the incriminating broken lock from the hasp. He eased the rolling door down until it tapped the concrete, then gripped the inside handle and set all his weight down against it.