Dr. Knox (22 page)

Yossi answered the door in El Segundo with a big automatic held down along his thigh. He scanned the street as we stepped inside.

“Everything copacetic?” Sutter asked.

Yossi nodded. “Five by,” he said softly.

Shelly was sprawled on the sofa, in cutoff sweats and an oversized Dodgers jersey. Her legs were thin and white, and there were old scrapes on her knees, and yellowed bruises. Her hair was tied back, all but a faded blue forelock that fell across her cheek. She looked at Sutter.

“Dude, you got something against entertainment? No Internet here, no TV—you trying to turn us into Mormons or something?”

Sutter smiled. “Mormons watch TV, little sister. You're thinking of the Amish.”

“So you say. How about a cell phone?”

He shook his head. “You shouldn't be texting anybody yet, or e-mailing.”

Shelly scowled. “There're gonna be people wondering about me.”

“Yeah—people like Siggy,” Sutter said. “I'll hook you up with some cable, and if you're really nice, maybe a book.”

Shelly raised her right arm, to flip Sutter the bird, and winced. I took a knee by the sofa. “How's the shoulder?” I asked.

“Crappy,” she said.

“Let's have a look,” I said, pulling on a glove.

Shelly gingerly snaked her arm out from under her jersey, and looked away as I touched her.

In fact, Shelly's shoulder wasn't crappy at all. Her wounds looked okay—no signs of infection, and the sutures still nice and neat—and Shelly herself had no fever and said her appetite was good.

“Let me see you move it,” I said. “Nothing too aggressive: just roll your shoulder a few times, and stretch your arm out. Stop if you feel anything pop, or tear, or if it hurts too much.”

She looked skeptical. “What's too much?” she said, but went through the motions with only a wince or two. I helped her back into her shirt.

“Try doing that every couple of hours,” I said.

“Sure—it's more fun than I'm having now.”

“I get that you're going stir-crazy, Shelly, but—”

“Hey, I'm all good here, doc—I know what the other option is, and I don't mind the rest. But how long can we do this? A few days? A week? And then what happens? Siggy won't forget about us too fast, and who the fuck knows about those douche bags after the kid? I got family up in Portland I guess I could see, but Ellie and the kid—where're they supposed to—”

“Nobody has to go anywhere yet. We're going to figure this out.”

“Yeah, definitely
figure it,
doc,” Shelly said. “I just hope what you come up with involves greasing Siggy and as many of his shitbags as you can. And in the meantime”— she looked at Sutter—“some cable would be good.”

Elena and Alex were in the back bedroom, cross-legged on the double bed. A copy of the
Times
was open before them, and their heads were together as they read it, as if they were trading secrets. They looked up at me. Alex smiled. Elena's face stiffened, and she nodded.

“How're you two doing?” I asked.

Elena and Alex looked at each other. She put her hand on the back of his neck. “Yes, okay. I think maybe he is hungry.”

“I'm pretty sure we can do something about that,” I said, and smiled back at Alex. “Come out here and we'll get you fed, and in the meantime I'll see how your mom is doing.”

Alex exchanged another look with Elena and rolled off the bed. He followed me into the hall and stopped when he saw Sutter.

“You need some mess?” Sutter asked him. Alex grinned.

“Nothing with—”

“No nuts—I know, doc. C'mon, little brother.”

Alex followed him, and I returned to Elena, who was folding the newspaper. Her movements were deliberate. “How about you?” I asked. “How's your appetite?”

Elena shrugged, and put the paper on the floor. “I should lie on bed?”

I nodded, and pulled on a clean pair of gloves.

Elena was unmoving as I examined her, and terse and without affect when she answered my questions. Pain is less, breathing okay; no fever; yes, eating and drinking; yes, passing water; no bowel movement yet. Her small white body still read like an atlas of violence, but, like Shelly, she seemed to be healing nicely. Her several wounds showed no signs of infection, and though her newer bruises were yet ripening, the older ones continued their yellow fade. She rose when I was done, tugged her sweatpants over her narrow hips, and tied the drawstring carefully below the dressing on her belly.

“So far, so good,” I said. “You're doing okay.”

Elena looked at me as if I was selling magic beans. She nodded vaguely and sat on the edge of the bed, her feet together, her white hands in her lap. “Okay to travel, then? To go on plane?”

“We have to be careful about the lung, but, yes, health-wise it should be okay for you to travel pretty soon.”

“So we go home pretty soon, Alex and me.”

“We need to talk about that,” I said, “about how we get that to happen.” And I told her about Sutter's idea: money and passage home from the Brays in exchange for silence; criminal prosecution and devastating embarrassment otherwise. When I finished, Elena frowned.

“I used to think about something like this,” she said, “but then I learn a few things. About money the Brays have, and what they do with it.

“Why they gonna care what I say, or who I say it to? Why they give a shit what people think? They don't—it doesn't matter to them. They have money, so it doesn't matter. Brays want people to think something, Brays tell them what to think. They don't want you to hear something, forget it—you won't hear about it. Like it was never there, like nobody ever said anything. Things they want, happen; things they don't want, don't.” She shook her head some more, and color rose in her cheeks. “Your friend's idea is no good.”

“No one's saying it's certain, but they do have a lot to lose. They're a very high-profile family, with—”

“I know them, doctor,” she said coolly. “I know them better than you.”

“Then you know how much people like them value control. What we'd be doing by making your story public is taking some of their control away. Once your story is out there, they can't control it, can't know what the consequences might be. It makes their money and power maybe not irrelevant, but at least less of a guarantee.”

Again there was the magic-bean look. “You don't know what they did to me in my own country—in the town where my grandmother lived most of her life. Every door was closed to me—everybody deaf and blind all of a sudden. People get some money in their pockets, it's like I'm a stranger. You think this place is different? Maybe it's worse here. Here I know nobody—I am nobody—but this is where they live. Yeah, here is worse.”

“You know a few people here.”

Elena smiled bitterly. “Yeah, I meet nice guys here. Real great.”

“I wasn't talking about Siggy and his customers.”

Her gaze softened minutely. “Okay, you been good to me and Alex, doctor—you and your friends. But you're not Brays. You don't have their money, or their…
influen
ţă
?”

“Influence.”

“Yeah—influence. Sorry, doctor, but you're almost nobody too.”

“The Brays can't control everything. They have enemies here, and if your story gets out it will give their enemies power. The Brays won't want that.”

Elena rose from the bed and paced—from the door to the windows that looked out on the backyard, from the closet to the small white desk, around the perimeter of the bed. She moved carefully but was steady enough on her feet, and I could almost see gears turning furiously in her head.

“You have a better idea?” I asked.

She looked at me and shook her head. “How we would do this?”

“It's not like I've got a blueprint,” I said, but I laid it out for her as well as I could. I explained about having an attorney take down her story in an affidavit, and about getting it on video. When I got to the part about a DNA test to prove that she and Alex were in fact mother and child, she went stiff and her voice quivered with anger.

“What—you don't think I'm his mother?”

“I didn't say that. But the Brays might try to tell that story. They tried to tell it to me.”

“And you believed?”

I shook my head. “But I've seen you with him—how you are with him, the two of you together. Other people won't have seen that, and it's better if we don't give the Brays even a chance to try that bullshit.”

Elena's mouth was like a seam in a stone. “
Other people
—what
other people
? Who else I need to worry about?”

“If the Brays aren't scared, or scared enough, about you going public with your story, then we need to be prepared to follow through. That means, at a minimum, the cops, child services, Immigration, the FBI, maybe even the press. You'll be talking to a lot of people.”

“And they're gonna believe me?”

“You tell it to them the way you told me and they will. The DNA will make it easier.”

Elena nodded slowly. “You take it from me and him both?” I nodded back. “It hurt?”

I shook my head. “Just a cheek swab. I can do it right now if you want.”

She crossed the room. “So once we have all this—this video and this test—then what do we do? What happens?”

“We meet with the Brays, show them a sample, and make our pitch.”

“Pitch,” Elena repeated. She looked through the window into the yard and spoke the word softly, over and over. Then she turned to me. “Who you make the pitch to? Who you will talk to?”

“I don't know yet.”

“To Kyle?”

“Probably not.”

Another bitter smile. “No, not Kyle. The father wouldn't let him. Wouldn't trust him.”

“Kyle has a cousin. Maybe her.”

Elena's brow went up. “A girl? No. No, the father would not trust a girl.”

“Maybe somebody else—I'm not sure. Why?”

Elena returned to the bed and sat at the edge. She tucked one bare foot beneath her and dangled the other. She reached down and scratched the top of her foot, her ankle, and then she pulled the leg of her sweatpants up to her knee. She touched her calf and studied her white leg for a while, and then she looked up at me. And suddenly, as if a switch was thrown, there it was again—the crackling, electric charge of her sexuality. I'd felt an attenuated version when she'd first appeared in the clinic, but this was something else. Bruised and battered as she was, with chunks beaten and carved from her, still it was an insistent, relentless thing, like a riptide. Like gravity. She pursed her bow lips and lay back on the bed until she was propped on her elbows. I took a slow breath and a step backward.

“I got something else I want from them—besides their money and a ride home. I want something else.” Her voice was soft. Intimate.

“What else?” It was an effort to get words out.

“I want to see the old man—face-to-face. I want that bastard to apologize for everything they did to us. To my face, I want him to beg forgiveness.”

“I don't think that's a good idea, Elena, and I doubt they'd agree to it, anyway.”

Elena smiled. “This is not bargaining, doctor. I am not asking—I am telling.”

Yossi was relieved by a cheerful Brazilian kid named Franco, who wore his blond hair in a ponytail and had the stars and shield of the São Paulo Football Club tattooed on his forearm. He looked more like a rock climber than a soldier, or maybe like a bike messenger, but beneath the chuckles and easy smile he was as watchful as Yossi, and at least as well armed. He unloaded two black semiautomatics from his backpack, along with spare clips, a pair of throwing knives, a six-pack of Red Bull, and a bag from a dim sum place out in Rosemead. He and Sutter spoke in low tones, in a mix of English and Portuguese, and then Franco put his food in the fridge and took up station in the living room. Shelly winked at him and he winked back. It was ten when Sutter and I left.

As he drove, I told Sutter about my conversation with Elena. When I got to the part about Elena's demand of a personal apology from Bray senior, he laughed.

“Style points, definitely,” he said. “It'll never happen, but you gotta like her balls.” Things loosened in Sutter's voice and shoulders, and I felt the relief too. I still had no great confidence in this plan, but I was glad Elena was willing to try it. Direction—any direction—was better than drift.

“You want to get a drink?” he asked. It was nearly eleven, and I had that jumpy, gritty-eyed post-call feeling.

“Maybe more than one,” I said.

He punched up some music—Laura Mvula singing “Green Garden”—and we drove to Venice Beach. Sutter said nothing to me as we went, but sang along and drummed lightly on the steering wheel. I put my head against the window and closed my eyes, and when I opened them we were turning into the alley behind his house.

The passage was a gray tunnel, and the streetlights and security spots only made the shadows deeper. The alleyway looked empty to me, but Sutter must've seen something, because he stopped fifty yards from his place, killed the music, the engine, and the lights, and pulled a black semiautomatic from somewhere.

“Hang for a second,” he said softly, and slipped from the car into the dark.

I was wide awake now, the post-call raggedness banished by the hammering of my heart on my ribs. I gripped the door handle and stared into the night for some sign of Sutter, or of anything at all. I saw nothing. After five minutes—or maybe it was an hour or two—I took a deep breath, opened my door, and stepped into the alley. Adrenaline was coursing through me, making my knees quiver. I heard nothing but my own breath, the pulse that rushed like a tide in my ears, and my suddenly loud sneakers. I moved slowly toward the back of Sutter's house, still peering ahead. I was at his back fence, at the gate that opened to his carport, when the lights came on around his patio.

“I thought you were waiting in the car,” Sutter said. He was in the threshold of a sliding glass door. The gun was in his belt, and his voice was flat and exhausted.

“I got bored. Everything okay?”

Sutter sighed and shook his head. “Not so much,” he said, and walked back into the house. I followed. He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. I stopped in the living room.

“She tells me her name is Ingrid,” Sutter said.

She was crouched on one end of the sofa, a frightened girl of maybe nineteen, slender and pale, with long black hair and darting blue eyes. Her dress was little more than a silk slip that fell off one shoulder and didn't reach her knees. Her legs were white and flawless but for the purple scars of what looked like cigarette burns on her calves, and a handcuff locked around her slender ankle. There was a yard of shiny chain running from the cuff to a steel ring that had been sunk into the stone of Sutter's floor. The girl shrank back when I looked at her, as if she wanted to bury herself in the sofa cushions. The chain was loud across the stone.

I nodded at her. “You okay?”

She nodded back. “I…I guess I am.” Her voice was wispy and sweet, like cotton candy.

I looked at Sutter. “What's she doing here?”

He came out of the kitchen carrying three bottles of Lagunitas IPA. He handed one to me and one to the girl. “Tell him, Ingrid.”

Her eyes bounced from Sutter to me to the beer to the floor and back to me again. Finally, she took a sip. “Vicky brought me—Vicky O—him and two guys that work for him. I don't know their names. They brought me over and…left me here.”

“Vicky O is Viktor Ostrow,” Sutter said from behind his beer. “Runs girls in Sherman Oaks. Middle management for Siggy.”

“Why?” I asked Ingrid. “Why'd they leave you?” She looked confused.

Sutter drank more, and knelt by Ingrid's ankle. “Tell him about the message,” he said, holding her foot and inspecting the handcuff.

She nodded. “Right, right—I gave him the message,” she said, pointing down at Sutter. “About lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Yeah. Siggy wants him to come to lunch. He wants his friend to come too. Some doctor.”

“Knox?”

“Yeah—Dr. Knox. Is that you?”

I nodded and looked at Sutter. “This is all to invite us to lunch? Couldn't he have just picked up the phone?”

Sutter drained his beer and got up. He crossed to the kitchen, rummaged in a drawer, and returned with a flat leather pouch. “Lunch isn't the message,” he said, kneeling again. He unzipped the pouch. “The message is:
Look how easy it is. Look how I come into your house and do what I want. This time I left one of my girls in there; I could just have easily left a body—this girl's; yours, maybe.
That's the message.”

My stomach clenched. “Where's the cat?” I said.

“She's okay,” Sutter said, and pointed behind me. “Plenty freaked out, though.” I turned and saw Eartha beneath a wrought-iron chair on the patio, her green eyes glowing. She looked at me, licked a paw, and retreated into shadow. Sutter selected a pick and worked it in the handcuff lock. Two turns and it opened.

Ingrid drew her legs up and rubbed her ankle. “You're…you're supposed to say about lunch—if you'll have lunch with Siggy.”

Sutter rubbed the back of his neck. “We'll do it.”

“Tomorrow? 'Cause that's what Siggy said.”

Sutter stretched his legs out and sat on the floor, his back against the sofa. He sighed. “Tomorrow,” he said.

“What if we said no?” I asked.

The girl's already pale face went paper white, and her lower lip began to tremble. “But you said…Siggy told me you
had
to come, that if you didn't…If you don't come he'll—”

“We'll be there,” Sutter said.

Ingrid took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I…I'm supposed to text when I'm done here. Am I done, or am I…are we gonna do something?”

“You're done,” Sutter said.

Ingrid nodded and produced a phone, possibly from her underwear. She tapped away, waited, and tapped again. “My ride's down the block,” she said.

“Don't let us keep you,” Sutter said.

Ingrid nodded, looked at me, and smiled tentatively. I smiled back. She placed the beer bottle carefully on the floor, headed for the front door, stopped halfway there, and spoke in her spun-sugar voice. “Sorry for the…Sorry.” And then she was gone.

The door closed and it was quiet in the house, just dry leaves scudding on the bricks of Sutter's patio, the low grind of distant traffic, and the muted, steady push and pull of the Pacific, like an endless freight train, endlessly passing. Sutter was motionless on the floor, looking down at the lock picks and Ingrid's handcuff. A wave of exhaustion swept over me and I swayed. I wanted to sit, but wasn't sure my legs would cooperate. Eartha broke the stillness with a leap from somewhere onto an arm of the sofa. She padded across the cushions and paused by Sutter's head and pushed at him with her nose. Then she leapt to the floor and followed the chain to the steel ring and the shattered slate.

Sutter shook his head. “Can you believe what they did to my floor?” he said. “I spent a shitload of time laying that.”

“What was the point of the chain?”

“Besides showing me he can fuck up my house? I guess it's another part of his message—something about property. That Elena is his property, just like Ingrid, that he keeps his property on a short leash. Who knows what goes on in his crazy Russian melon?”

“Is that all? Something about it seems a little more…”

“Personal?” I nodded and Sutter sighed deeply. “That's 'cause he means it to be. Back when, when he wanted me to soldier for him, he wasn't too happy when I said thanks but no thanks. If he hadn't had his hands full already, he might've pressed the point.”

“And now?”

“Now maybe he wants to press it, or at least remind me how much he's come up in the world.” Sutter shook his head. Eartha padded across the floor and onto Sutter's outstretched legs. She walked up them and stopped when she got to his lap. She looked at him, kneaded his crotch with her forepaws, and sat.

“You think he's done with his point?”

Sutter offered his beer bottle to the cat. She sniffed it and touched the rim with her small pink tongue. “I guess we'll see,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “About your floor. About Siggy.”

“You should be, brother,” Sutter said, looking up. “Knowing you is not an easy thing.”