Dr. Knox (15 page)

I shut the bedroom door and moved down the hall, trying to regulate my breathing. Adrenaline grabbed at my throat and arced through my limbs. I came to the rear door, looked through the glass, saw nothing. I listened but, besides Joe's snuffling, heard nothing. Dire scenarios—PRP thugs bursting through the back door while Siggy's boys battered down the front—raced through my mind, and I pushed them out before they gained a beachhead. I adjusted my grip on the flashlight and unlocked the back door.

Outside, the sky was the color of tea. The air was soft and smelled of blossoms, earth, damp fur, smoke, and something else. Wood smoke? Cigarettes? Both. My pupils dilated, and the darker masses resolved into a small deck, a low rail, bucket-sized terra-cotta pots, a charcoal grill, shrubs, a short gnarled tree, a high wooden fence, a gate to the alley. A small breeze threw whispers into all of it. I drew a shaky breath, slid the knife from my pocket, and switched on the flashlight.

I ran the dim beam around the deck and then beyond, around a small patch of grass and dirt. And then there was thrashing in the bushes along the fence, hissing, and a scrabbling in the dirt. A dark shape broke cover, and scuttled low to the ground along the back fence. I caught it for an instant in a yellow cone of light, and saw a burglar's mask above bared fangs, a fat gray body, and a thick gray tail with black rings.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and the raccoon hissed at me and disappeared under a gap in the back gate. “Fuck,” I said again, and laughed with relief.

I locked the back door behind me and turned on the light to find Alex and Joe side by side in the hallway.

“So much for waiting in the bedroom,” I said. They looked at me. “It was nothing,” I said, “just a raccoon looking for food. Everything's fine.” They kept looking at me. “You okay?” I asked. Joe wagged his tail and let his tongue loll. Alex was less expressive, though I thought he nodded. Then he took my hand and the three of us headed toward the front of the house. I was about to ask Alex about dessert when he stopped in his tracks. His hand gripped mine and his nails dug into my palm. He was white and shaking, and his eyes were wide.

“Alex, it's okay,” I said. “There's no one outside.” But he wasn't listening, and his eyes were locked on something over my shoulder. I turned to follow his gaze, to the Mac I had been using, and the image I'd left on the screen: a gala at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Mr. and Mrs. Harris Bray and their son in evening wear.

“I don't know why he was scared of them, Lyd—I just know he was. The kid was freaked out.”

Lydia leaned in the doorway of my little office, Lucho looming behind her. It was just 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, and we were about to open the doors. The blood pressure clinic had gone late the night before, and they were bleary-eyed. I was worse. Danni hadn't gotten home until nearly two, and found Alex, Joe, and me on the sofa. Alex and Joe were sleeping, and I was awake, and more or less a pillow. Joe had his snout on my thigh, while Alex was curled next to me, his hand in mine and his head against my arm. It had taken nearly an hour for him to stop shaking, and afterward he'd fallen fast asleep. Danni made up a chaise with pillows and blankets for him, and I carried him over and tucked him in. Joe had followed, and settled himself on the floor alongside.

“You didn't ask how he knew them?” Lucho said.

“I asked if he knew who they were. He didn't answer—I'm not even sure he heard me—and I didn't press. The guy's been traumatized enough.”

Lydia shook her head slowly. “And these people he was scared of—they're the ones who sent the
soldados
to threaten us, and those fire inspectors.” She made a face as if she wanted to spit.

“Christ knows what they'll do next,” Lucho added. I thought about the trackers in my glove box, but said nothing.

In truth, I'd been up most of the night wondering the same sorts of things about the Brays. I switched on my computer when I returned from Danni's house, and Googled Bray Consolidated again, and scanned page after page of articles about Bray—the company and the family—and looked at countless pictures of them, but found nothing that suggested a connection with Alex or his missing mother. I did find several references to a Bray subsidiary in Romania, but there seemed nothing remarkable about it—Bray Consolidated had subs in many countries, nearly every country that had any sort of oil industry. There'd been a pale ribbon of light in the east when I stretched out on my bed, and my alarm went off about a minute after my head hit the pillow. It was like being a resident again. Coffee was keeping me going—though just barely—and I was hoping that the only visitors we had that day were patients.

As it happened, they were, and in large numbers. There was a norovirus going around, so in addition to the usual complaints—injuries of various sorts, and the collateral effects of substance abuse, mental illness, poverty, or a questionable immigration status—we had a half-dozen people with some combination of diarrhea, vomiting, muscle aches, and low-grade fever. All were miserable, though only one—a badly dehydrated man who dragged himself in at the end of the day—needed hospitalization.

Lucho was lining up a ride for him to County-USC, and I was trying to figure out if I had enough juice to make it upstairs or if I should just lie down in one of the exam rooms, when Lydia appeared at my office door.

“Can you do a house call?” she asked.

I lifted my head from the desk. “You're kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “I'd do it, but it's Maria Ruiz, and she says she only wants you.”

“Which Maria Ruiz?”

“The older one, with COPD and the bad hip.”

“I remember. What's her problem?”

“Sounds like another norovirus, but she says she can't make it over here.”

I sighed. “You got another iced coffee for me?”

Lydia smiled. “It's on my desk.”

“Where does she live?”

Maria Ruiz was on Crocker, just off Fifth, in a walk-up that looked like a sagging bale of hay: faded yellow, raggedy, a gust or two from breaking up and blowing away. There was no buzzer on the front door—perhaps because the door had no lock—and there were no names on the mailboxes. A step across the threshold took me from baking sun to catacomb darkness. The urine stench didn't fade as I climbed the pitted stairs, and I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulder and breathed through my mouth.

The Ruiz apartment was on the second floor, in front, and a girl in cutoffs and a wifebeater answered my knock. She was young—maybe fifteen—with dark skin, peroxided hair, a blue glass stud in her nose, and sloppy tattoos on her neck and hands. Her arms and legs were without fat or muscle, and her knees and elbows were chapped and swollen. I could see her nipples and ribs through the faded fabric of her tee shirt. Her face was bony, and her teeth were gray and soft-looking—the beginnings of meth mouth.

She turned a feral eye on me, and then past me, into the hall and down the stairs. “Where the fuck is Toodie?” she said.

I clenched my jaw. “No clue,” I said. “Where's Maria?” I didn't wait for an answer, but stepped around her into the apartment. It was a dim room with a pocket kitchen along one wall. The furniture was old, mismatched, dying or dead, and the place smelled of cigarettes, old food, and vomit. There were bedsheets hanging from clotheslines in two corners—the walls of makeshift bedrooms.

The girl looked into the hall again, then closed the door. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Maria's doctor. Where is she?”

A thin voice called from behind one of the bedsheet walls. “Here, doctor.”

I crossed the room and pulled aside a sheet, and the vomit smell hit harder. Maria Ruiz was in a camp bed, beneath layers of dirty blankets. Only her face was visible—flushed, drawn, and full of pain. She was in her middle sixties, but that evening she looked about a hundred. There was a cardboard box beside her, doing duty as a table, and a plastic bucket beside that, overflowing with vomit.

“¿Qué tal, Maria?”

She shook her head. “Not good, doctor. My stomach—nothing stays down. And my arms and legs—it feels like somebody's been kicking me.”

I knelt beside her and found gloves in my backpack. “There's a lot of that going around.” I put fingers to her neck. Her skin was dry, and her pulse was racing. I found a strip thermometer in my pack and pressed it to her forehead; 101, high for a sixty-seven-year-old. Her lips were cracked, and crusted with dried vomit. I tore open a packet of wipes and cleaned them off. There was a shadow behind me. The girl was there, her thin arms crossed, her eyes on my backpack.

“When'd she call you?” she said. I ignored her. “You really a doctor?”

“How about you get her some water?”

The girl snorted. “How about you kiss my ass?”

I stood, and she took a step back. “Either be useful or go away.”

She put up her hands. “Who the fuck are you, coming into my place, acting all fucking bossy?”

“The water,” I said, “in a clean glass.”

The girl snorted again, and went away, muttering.

“I'm sorry about her, doctor,” Maria Ruiz said in a whisper.

I shook my head. “Who is she, anyway?”

“Mona. She's my niece—my grand-niece—my sister's granddaughter. She's up from Chula Vista. She was supposed to stay a week, but that was a month ago.”

I took a blood pressure cuff from my pack and folded back the blankets. A humid wave rose up—sweat, body odor, vomit, urine. Maria Ruiz shivered when the cooler air hit her skin. I found her arm—a reed, a feather—and her hand, a stubborn knot wrapped around a cell phone.

“If I let go of the phone, I won't get it back,” Maria whispered. “But I didn't want to call the police, and your number was the only one I could remember.”

“No problem.” I slipped the cuff on. She winced, and I saw the bruise on her forearm. “She giving you a hard time, Maria?” I asked.

Maria managed a tiny shrug. “She's a greedy girl—she always was—and kinda stupid. She has people in here all hours.”

Her BP was low. I took the cuff off, carefully, and covered her again. I flicked on a penlight and checked her eyes and her throat. There was a bruise on her neck. I turned around. Mona was there again, with a glass.

“It's clean,” she said. I took it from her. She pointed at my backpack and made a sly smile. “You got anything good in there?”

I shook my head. “When's the last time you emptied that bucket?” I said.

The girl scowled. “Echh—that thing? Never.”

“Well, give it a try now.”

“Fuck you,” she said, and went away.

I knelt by Maria Ruiz again and held the glass to her lips. “Just a sip,” I said. “Not too much.”

“I can't keep it down.”

“Just a little—you need fluids.”

I heard the door open, and voices—Mona's and a new one, a man's. The bedsheet wall was pushed aside.

“You really a doc—like the kind can write me a 'scrip?”

The man was about thirty, large, and without a neck. He was white, with close-cropped bleached hair, close-set blue eyes, a three-day beard, and a stray-dog meanness. He wore baggy shorts that came halfway down his calves, and a baggy Lakers jersey with brown stains in front. Mona was behind him, smiling nastily.

“Now
you
can empty the fucking bucket,” she said triumphantly.

“I guess this is Toodie,” I said.

The man squinted at Mona, his mean look somehow meaner. “You give him my name, bitch?”

Mona shrank back, scared. I put my hand up. “Don't get hung up on that, Toodie—she didn't mean anything by it. What you two want to focus on now is that Mrs. Ruiz needs to get to a hospital. She's got a viral infection, she's badly dehydrated, and somehow she's sustained suspicious injuries—contusions, cuts—the kind we associate with domestic violence.”

Mona made a squeaking noise. “Domestic what? I barely touched that old cow.”

“Shut up, girl,” Toodie said. “What the fuck you get me in the middle of?”

“The desire not to be in the middle of things,” I said, “now,
that
I understand.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Toodie said.

“I'm talking about the fact that I'm going to call
911
and get an ambulance over here for Maria, and that means cops and questions and a bunch of shit I'm sure you guys don't want any part of.”

“Fuck,”
Mona shouted, and she wrapped her thin arms across her thin chest.

Toodie was less intimidated. “So maybe you don't make that fucking call—and then I'm not into anything. Maybe instead you give me your phone, and your doctor bag there, and your car keys and wallet, and you write me up a few 'scrips for the road.” His smile was ugly as he took a step toward me. He stopped when I held up the scalpel.

I shook my head. “I guess that's one way it could go. The other is that I could call for two ambulances.”

He squinted. “You—that's bullshit. Doctors don't do shit like that.”

“They don't make house calls either, but here I am.”

Toodie got red and his nostrils flared, and he looked like he might paw the ground. Then he lifted the hem of his dirty Lakers jersey until it came to the waistband of his shorts and I could see the little automatic there. “Maybe it goes another way,” he said softly.

My joints locked up, and my chest got tight, and it was with much effort that I managed a shrug. I kept my voice soft and steady. “It's not the first gun I've seen, Toodie.”

“Yeah? Maybe it's the last.”

“Was that what you had planned for today—to lay out three people?”

“I only see one of you.”

“You're not worried about loose ends, then? Mona seems like a solid bet to you? Personally, I'm not so sure, and between her and me and Mrs. Ruiz, I count three. That's all of a sudden a busy day for you. Maybe busier than you had in mind when you got up this morning. Maybe it turns out you've better things to do.”

I tried to keep my breathing under control and my heart rate down below 180. Maria Ruiz coughed weakly, and I nearly jumped. Mona made a whimpering sound, and Toodie gnashed his teeth while steam rose from his head. He rocked on the balls of his feet and flicked his hand, as if he was shooing a fly.

“Fuck it,” he said finally, then looked at Mona. “We gotta be in the Valley anyway.” He turned and walked from the apartment. Mona grabbed a pair of flip-flops and a fraying cloth bag and hurried after him.

I let out a long breath, and knelt again by the camp bed. Maria Ruiz's dry cheeks were streaked with tears. “It's all right, Maria,” I said softly, and pulled out my phone.

The sky was a dusty plum by the time the ambulance took her. On the sidewalk, the air was heavy with exhaust, but it was spring water after that apartment. My car was across the street, and I got in but didn't turn the key. Adrenaline was still bumping and burning in my veins, and the thought of going back to the clinic, empty and dark now, didn't appeal. I thought about calling Nora, but knew she had meetings with her residents on Thursday evenings. I checked my watch and looked up at the street signs. I was just a couple of blocks from the Harney, and it would be another hour or so before Nora was free. I got out of my car, locked it, and went in search of Shelly.

It was busy in front of the Harney in the dusk—girls strolling, waving at the slow-rolling cars that flashed their high-beams, climbing in, climbing out, sometimes alone, sometimes with men, whom they led into the hotel. I scanned the block, but saw no sign of Shelly's bleached and blue-streaked hair. A couple of the girls approached me—a tall Hispanic girl in track shorts and a halter top, and a taller black girl in red plastic sandals and with an appealing gap-toothed grin. She hit me with it full-force, and bumped me with her hip.

“Dr. Knox, what you doin' out here? If you're lookin' for company, I got you covered.”

“How're you feeling, Franny? No more dizzy spells?”

“Nah, I'm good, doc—I can even wear my boots again. But what the hell you up to here?” Franny took my arm, and walked me down the block, out of earshot of the Hispanic girl. Her voice got low and urgent. “Seriously, doc, this is not a place you want to be.”