Do No Harm (62 page)

David reached down and touched her face. Her wounds were closing over nicely, drying out and resolving themselves into faint scars. He felt himself brimming with emotion and knew it showed in his expression. Diane stood and her face softened, laying the foundation for a smile that had not yet come. Her eyes, cool and emerald, were vulnerable and deadly serious.

"I don't love you," David said, a smile touching his lips.

It took Diane a moment to find her voice and respond. "I don't love you either."

Guiding her face with his hands, he kissed her tenderly on the mouth. She leaned into him, and he inhaled the fragrance of her hair.

A loud knock on the door, then it swung open. Jill leaned into the room. "We have a thirtyish Caucasian male, GSW to the right shoulder, just hit the ambulance bay."

From David's embrace, Diane regarded Jill, who raised her eyebrows expectantly.

"Jenkins," David said. "Go."

Diane turned and headed for the door, grabbing a pair of gloves from a nearby cart. "Don't go anywhere," she said over her shoulder.

David sat on the examination table fighting the pain, which was proving to be an exhausting job. He removed the wire from his chest, wincing as he pulled off the tape, and dropped it on the floor.

A gurney swept past the open door on its way to the trauma room, a cluster of shouting nurses and doctors surrounding it. Diane was hunched over the front of the gurney, backpedaling, adjusting the placement of the bell of her stethoscope and shouting orders. Through the flurry of bodies, David saw Jenkins's face, drawn and unamused, but fully conscious.

David wondered about himself. His career at UCLA was likely over. He would receive plenty of opportunities to work elsewhere, he was sure of that. The chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai had been pressuring him for years to come run their department. Switching hospitals seemed appealing, but David thought he'd take a few months off first, for the first time in his adult life.

Bronner came in next, walking unevenly but under his own power, pressing a bloody bandage to his hand. A uniformed cop escorted him. They walked past the open door of David's exam room without noticing him. Peter's gurney followed shortly afterward, surrounded by ER staff. Peter was stirring, but still seemed groggy. David couldn't get a good look at his face, but he saw the braces against his bare legs. Peter straightened his leg, and a patch of cloth fell from the metal joint at his ankle to the floor. Hospital blue. A torn piece of Clyde's scrub bottoms.

One of the doctors pulled up, letting Peter's gurney continue up the hall, and turned to face David through the doorway. He wore a white coat, outdated eyeglasses, and a Zantac pocket protector. His peppery black hair, collected in tufts, was matted down around his skull. The mousy, red-rimmed eyes were magnified through his thick lenses, and David was stunned to realize that he was looking at Ed's latest persona.

Ed's tongue shot out from his mouth, small and pointy, and moistened his lips. He blinked a few times in rapid succession, a perfect imitation of a facial tick, then flipped something up like a coin and caught it. The digital transmitter from Peter's brace. Ed raised two fingers and tapped them to his forehead in a salute. Before David could react, he turned and vanished.

David leaned back on the exam table and focused on breathing evenly. He found the jarring sounds of the ER oddly soothing--gurney wheels on tile, scalpels clinking on trays, monitors beeping as they traced hills and valleys.

An orderly left a covered body on a gurney across the hall from David's room, and shouted into the CWA, "Someone call morgue for a pickup!" before disappearing back down the hall.

David stared at the dark, lumpy body bag. The cadaver inside was obese and tall, like Clyde. The pain in David's side flared when his feet hit the floor. He shuffled to the gurney and leaned over it, taking a deep breath before unzipping the bag.

The face of an elderly black man peered out at him. David let his breath out in a rush. Though the cadaver was fresh, a bitter, medicinal smell wafted from the fabric of the body bag. Just like the odor he'd noticed emanating from Clyde in Peter's office. He bent over slowly, though it pained him, and picked up the swatch of fabric from Clyde's scrubs. He pressed it to his nose, and inhaled.

The stench of formalin.

At once, David knew with the same gut assurance that came when he pulled a cluster of symptoms together and produced a diagnosis. He trudged slowly down the hall, past the frenzied trauma room, back into the heart of the hospital.

"Hey, Dr. Spier," a lab tech called out. "Get back to the room. Someone'll stitch you up in a sec."

David kept walking, drawing looks from patients and other physicians. Blood dribbled from his wound, leaving a vivid red drop every five or so feet--his spool of thread through the labyrinth. He headed down the quieter halls of the hospital.

Punching a four-digit code into the Omnilock, he stepped through the door into the back corridor. He walked slowly to the freight elevators used for hauling dead bodies up to the crypt. The elevator whirred and creaked on its way up, the bright light overhead assaulting his senses.

It halted with a definitive thud on the seventh floor, and the doors spread. David stepped out into the unlit corridor and walked to the anatomy lab. Another door, another four-digit code. The dissecting-table doors that closed up over the cadavers were all laid open, the units resembling hatched pods. The tables were bare and scrubbed clean. David noticed a ball of wadded cheesecloth at the head of one of the tables. Clyde had used it as a pillow these last days; he'd slept on the dissecting table like a vampire in a coffin. Beside the table was a mound of food that looked to be scavenged from trash cans--sandwich rinds, skins of oranges, bent yogurt cups. Next to that, a scattering of scalpels, scissors, and beakers. And, of course, a container of liquid DrainEze.

The light in the prep room was also off. David stepped through, approaching the mighty wooden door of the crypt. The door clicked loudly when he tugged the handle, then he was standing in the flood of light from the interior, the strong odor of formalin gusting around him. Row upon row of bodies hung from their heads, swaying ever so slightly on creaking chains and forcipiform clamps. Propped against the far wall, at the terminating point of a messy band of blood, was Clyde. A handcuff encircled one hand; the other was pressed to the gunshot wound in his side. He'd been crying.

He reached for David shakily, the loose cuff swaying beneath his wrist. No sensation of fear flickered through David; he felt only a steady, hardened calm. He propped the crypt door open.

Clyde's voice was jerky from his irregular breathing. "They don't . . . they don't look at me here." He gestured to the hanging bodies. "And they don't leave. They can't up and leave me." His face trembled, his lips down-bending and spreading in a guttural cry. "It hurts . . . it hurts a lot."

"I know," David said.

"I just wanted to be better. That's all I ever wanted." Clyde banged his head against the wall, sending a dull vibration through the room. "I took the pills, so many pills, but they didn't work. Nothing worked."

Still swathed in a blanket of veritable calm, David moved toward him.

"Don't take me to them," Clyde moaned. "Please don't let them have me."

David crouched over him, ignoring the hand Clyde curled in his shirt. Jenkins's bullet had left a neat hole in Clyde's right upper quadrant abdomen. The entry wound was just beneath the ribs, angled upward. The bullet had probably nicked the liver. Clyde gasped, sending a spurt of blood through the wound and across his spread fingers.

"God, don't let them poke and pry at me. I'm scared of them. S-so scared." His legs kicked dumbly against the blood-slick floor. "It hurts oh Jesus it hurts."

The top of Clyde's fist pressed hard into David's cheek. David shoved Clyde's hand away roughly, and Clyde whimpered. Panting and grunting, Clyde tried to slide himself up the wall to a standing position, but collapsed. David watched him with an angry calm. He thought of Nancy's distorted face, and Diane's cringing as he kissed her, and felt his anger intensify until it burned hard and gemlike.

Clyde slid away from the wall, using a hand to move his legs. He eased himself onto his back, trembling, the stray handcuff chattering against the cold floor. He reached gently for David, but, again, David pushed his hand away.

Clyde's voice was a hoarse, terrified whisper. "It's so awful out there. The cops and people who want to pry at me." He looked at David with a startling clarity. "I don't want to leave this room," he said. "Not ever."

Crouching, David slid his stethoscope from his shoulders and into position. He checked Clyde's heart rate. Tachycardic. His ER instincts flared. Call for a gurney, rush the patient down to the ER, get lines into him. "I need to get you downstairs," he said. "You need help."

Clyde's entire face quivered. "No, no, no. Don't make me. I don't want to anymore. I don't want any of it anymore. Give me a pill to make me end in here."

"I can't do that," David said.

". . .please?"

"No. I will not."

Clyde watched him for a moment, his eyes beady and glinting in his wide head. "W-why?"

"I'm your doctor."

"Then let me . . . " Clyde's breath hitched in his throat, a hiccup of a sob. "Let me stay here." He broke down, weeping pitifully. "Please don't take me to them. Any of them."

David felt emotion welling in his throat, his eyes, his face. His voice was shaking. "If I don't get you downstairs right now, you will die," he said, with a slow vehemence. "Do you understand that?"

"Yes," Clyde said. "Yes."

David's fist tightened on the branch of his stethoscope. He should be irrigating Clyde's wound, paging surgery, pushing morphine. He felt something break inside him.

"I'm sorry," Clyde said. "For everything I've done. I wish I could take it back."

David watched Clyde through his thawing numbness.

Clyde's breath hitched in his chest several times. When he spoke again, his voice took on an eerie calm. "It hurts all the time. Into my head. Sounds and noises and such. Like a train. The only calm is around the edges, where there's quiet dark and no one to look at me." His eyes were watering, steady, silent streams of tears carving down his broad cheeks. He reached and clutched David's leg pitifully. David stood and took a step back, his stethoscope falling from his shoulders. Around him, the yellowed bodies hung and swayed.

David thought of the blood Clyde had lost, and the long and painful surgeries he'd have to endure if he hoped to survive. He thought of the slow, agonizing recovery, the grueling courtroom trial, vicious prison-yard tauntings and cell-block beatings, and he realized that the choice Clyde was making was not much of a choice at all.

"Hold me," Clyde cried. "P-please. Don't leave me . . . don't leave me alone." He gasped and bled, his eyes never leaving David's. He tried to touch David's leg again, but could not reach.

David watched Clyde writhing on the floor. After a few moments, Clyde's face blurred before him. David sat down beside him on the cold, hard floor.

He took Clyde's hand. It was warm and sticky with blood.

Clyde's breaths were growing more shallow. They were the only sounds to break the silent hum of the crypt. "You'll stay with me?"

David nodded.

"You won't . . . you won't leave? Until it's over?"

David shook his head.

Clyde squeezed David's hand, his lips trembling. "Okay," he said. "Okay."

He kept his eyes on David, his breaths jerking his chest. An expression of resignation settled across Clyde's features. His body loosened, then his head rolled up and to the side. The wrinkles smoothed from his forehead. David lowered Clyde's limp hand, bringing it to rest on his chest.

He closed Clyde's eyelids with a thumb and forefinger, and stood.

The freight elevator doors opened loudly down the hall. He heard a cavalry of footsteps, and Diane's worried voice calling out, "David, are you here? Where are you?"

He opened his mouth to speak, but was still too close to weeping, so he took a step back from Clyde's body and studied the floor, gathering the scattered threads of his emotions. His stethoscope lay on the tile, curved like a caduceus snake.

Diane cried out for him again, down the hall but growing nearer. Wincing through the pain, David crouched and picked up his stethoscope. He turned to the door, pulling the stethoscope across his shoulders, and began the painful shuffle down the hall to Diane.

"Here," he called out. "I'm here."

A LOT IS RIDING ON GETTING IT RIGHT: 

PerfectBound spoke with Gregg Andrew Hurwitz on June 10, 2002.

PerfectBound: Do No Harm is of a piece with Minutes to Burn [also published by PerfectBound] and your first novel, The Tower -- but they are also all quite different books. What went into the making of Do No Harm that differed from the other two?

Gregg Andrew Hurwitz: "Write what you know" is the advice that gets handed out to young writers, so I quite willfully do the opposite. Because writing for me is an excuse for continuing education, I often pick fields to research that have always fascinated me, but about which I don't know much when I start out -- psychological profiling in The Tower, Navy SEALs and evolutionary biology in Minutes to Burn.