A Devil in the Details (15 page)

It was apparently my lucky day. I was the only patient there.
Oh joy, glee and rapture, even.
Even in my head, I have to be sarcastic.

“Hey, Jesse.” Dr. Bridget is one of those women who makes “heavy” look damn good. I didn’t know enough about fashion to figure out why the plum-colored blouse and tailored gray skirt looked so great on her. Whatever it was, her clothes accented all the right curves. She was . . . What was the word? Voluptuous. Yeah, that’s it. And if I ever said it out loud, she and Mira would both thump me right between the eyes for it. Did I mention that she’s Mira’s best friend from college? Yeah. Awkward much? Hell yeah. Especially when you consider that I dated Bridget first.

Realistically, I should have picked a different doctor. But as I said, Dr. Bridget cuts me lots of slack in important areas. I doubt another doc would have.

A lock of dark hair had come free from her neat bun, and she brushed it out of her eyes with a frazzled grin. Her white lab coat was tossed over an empty chair, and there were about fifteen files scattered about, presumably in some order unfathomable to the layman. “Nice shirt.”

The T-shirt slogan of the day, IN TOUCH WITH MY INNER PIRATE, was emblazoned across a rustic skull and crossbones.

“Rough day already?” I found a clean, and therefore safe, place to perch and observe the chaos.

“Kim’s out sick today, so I’m a little behind already.” She glanced around, looking for something, then threw up her hands in exasperation when it failed to leap to her attention. “Where did I put that file? I just had it. . . .”

Yes!
“We can cancel. I can come back another time.” I edged toward the door, tasting freedom.

“No, no, you’re a quick one. Just head on back to the grape room and get the pants off. I’ll catch up in a second.”

Dammit.
So near, and yet so far. And for the record, there is something very wrong about your wife’s best friend ordering you to get your pants off, doctor or no. “The grape room?”

She gave me a smirk. “I treat kids, too. It’s to make them feel comfortable.”

“I’m not saying a word.” Like a good little boy, I headed back to the examination room with the very purple door and shed my boots and jeans. That left me in an icy cold office in my SpongeBob boxer shorts (a Father’s Day present from Anna). Somewhere, there was a sheet thing she’d want me to wrap around myself for modesty. Now where was it?

“So, how’s Annabelle doing?” I could hear her shuffle papers out front as she called back to me.

“Oh fine. Y’know—too smart for her own good.”

“She excited about school this fall?”

“Oh yeah, driving us nuts about it.” Sheet, sheet . . . Where would I be, if I were a sheet?
Aha!
There was a cabinet under the exam table.

Of course, as I bent over to explore the cabinet, Dr. Bridget walked in behind me. “Nice boxers.”

I yelped—a manly yelp, I swear—and snatched up a sheet to hold protectively in front of me. She smirked.

“I’ve seen you naked, Jess.”

“Unconscious and bleeding does not count as naked.”

The new tattoo on my right arm caught her attention, and she turned my wrist this way and that, examining it. “New tattoo?”

“Temporary. Just trying it out to see if I like it or not before I commit.”

She rolled her eyes at me with that expression of supreme female amusement. “Hop up on the table, and let me see the calf first.”

I scooted my scrawny butt up on the crispy paper as instructed and arranged the sheet so she could get a good look at my right leg. The scars were almost perfect circles of shiny pink skin on either side of my calf, hairless and smooth. It looked like I’d tangled with a really big hole punch.

Bridget poked and prodded at me with cold fingers, making those “hmm” noises that doctors do. “Any tenderness?”

“Nope.”

“Any muscle weakness or spasm?”

“Nope.” Aside from what my workouts brought on, but she didn’t need to know that.

“It doesn’t look like the poison left any lingering tissue damage.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “I still don’t know how you managed to clear that out of your system so fast, when we couldn’t even figure out what it was.”

I knew how. The doctors in Bethesda ran every test they could think of to identify the toxin in my system, with no luck. In fact, more than half the samples were misplaced or destroyed. At first, the hospital staff joked that I was the unluckiest patient ever. When I kept getting worse, with no antidote in sight, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

Enter Mira, her herbs, and her magic. They flew her out, quietly telling her she may need to say her good-byes to me. For three days in the ICU, she snuck me her own brand of medicine and prayed to her goddess while my right calf turned dark and sent ominous red streaks up my thigh. I don’t know how high they had the morphine drip set, but I was pretty much a vegetable for the really fun parts. All I could remember of the intense fever was being so very thirsty. And just when the doctors started mumbling about amputation, the infection receded, my skin pinked up, and I started to heal. The doctors congratulated themselves for a job well done, all the while wondering what the hell they did that finally worked.

The secret of it always made me smile. It wasn’t a modern medical miracle. It was an ancient one. I always wondered what the doctors would think of that if they knew.

“You still doing the exercises?” Bridget, oblivious to my wandering thoughts, continued groping my leg.

“Yep.” She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me. “I am, I swear! Ask Mira.”

“Okay, slide down. Let me see the hip.”

This was the tricky part. In order for her to see the hip to her satisfaction, the boxers had to go. It was an interesting dance to accomplish that without losing the sheet, and of course she wouldn’t make it easier by leaving the room. She did turn her back, though. Hurray for professionalism amongst friends.

She made me do a few runway walks across the room, and a couple deep squats, just to prove I could. “You want me to balance on one leg and juggle torches next?”

The good doctor ignored me. “Looks like your range of motion is almost back to normal. You might have some pain in cold or rainy weather, though.” She leaned against the sink and gave me that thoughtful look. I hated that look. Nothing good ever followed
that
look. “That’s a helluva scar collection you have going, you know.”
Crap.
It was
this
conversation.

I glanced down. My legs, aside from the most recent acquisition, were unscarred. There were, of course, the lovely claw marks down my left side from armpit to hip, a constant reminder that I was most definitely human. There were also the other minor ones I’d collected over the last few years. They were nothing grossly disfiguring, but they were probably not the kind of scars a security consultant should have. Since no one was actually sure what a security consultant
did
, no one called me on it. “Chicks dig scars, right?”

Bridget shook her head, the friend gone and the doctor firmly in place. “The older you get, the more your body is going to hate you. Maybe you ought to think of slowing down some, while you’re still healthy.”

“I’m thirty-two, Bridge. Not a hundred thirty-two.”

“You want to live to see thirty-five?”

Of course I wanted to. The odds of it, though? Not good. I accepted that a long time ago. The samurai fears not death, only a bad death. “You know, Cole’s a cop, and no one gives him this shit.”

“Cole doesn’t have four ICU stays under his belt.”

“I’m not going to argue this with you again, Bridge.” She was a friend, yes. But even friends have limits.

“Mira and Anna—”

“Mira and I have talked about it,” I said in my best end-of-discussion voice. In fact, we’d talked and screamed and thrown things. . . . Yeah, it had been discussed—at length. “And they will always be taken care of.”

Her jaw clenched, and I could hear her teeth grinding. I have that effect on a lot of women. “Fine. But as your doctor, I’m obligated to tell you to slow down.” She threw my pants at me, smacking me in the chest. Trying to catch them, I dropped the sheet, and there was a scramble to cover myself with something, anything. Bridget smirked. “And as your friend, I’m reminding you that Mira says not to forget your mom’s birthday present.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered, dressing after the doc left the room. Was there anyone Mira
hadn’t
told? This was getting ridiculous.

I wandered back out to the front to find Bridget at the receptionist’s desk again and three people in the waiting room. The doc glanced up at me once. “I’ve got you down for another checkup in a month, Jess. Keep doing the therapy; maybe get some swimming in this summer.”

That earned a grimace. I don’t swim. I do sink rather well, though. “I’ll see what I can manage.”

She grabbed my hand when I went to leave and lowered her voice. “God watches out for you, Jess. I firmly believe that. But you can’t keep testing him this way.” She had that look in her gray eyes, the one that said she truly believed. How my wife the witch and this devout Catholic became best friends, I will never know.

“You worry too much, Doc.” No doubt, she would spend her next visit with Mira detailing just what kind of a worthless sumbitch I was. There were times when I wondered if she was right.

The sun was bright when I walked out into the parking lot. There wasn’t a cloud in the steel blue sky, and it looked as if that sky went on forever. Sometimes I wondered how the world could look so cheerful, knowing what horrible things existed there. Then I thought of people like Bridget—good people, with faith in a greater power, in absolute good. I hoped I wouldn’t let them down.

A
s I was clambering into my truck, my hip buzzed. I was learning to hate my cell phone. It never brought good news. There was some wriggling involved, but I finally got it out of my pocket. “Hello?”

“Dawson.” In just that single word, I could hear defeat in the old Ukrainian’s gravelly voice. My stomach tied itself in knots in anticipation of bad news.

“Hey, Ivan. What’s the word?” I rolled the window down and got comfortable. It wasn’t like anyone needed my parking spot.

“Is there to be any chance that you are to be hearing from Archer, of late?”

I frowned at the odd question. I’d met Guy Archer only once, and we weren’t what I would call close. He was a stocky man with black hair graying at the temples, stick-straight posture, a faint French accent. Stoic didn’t even begin to describe his expression. Ex-military, I thought, or possibly Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In plaid shirts, blue jeans, and worn work boots, he looked like a lumberjack, and he bore that impression out when I saw him pin a playing card to a tree trunk with a thrown hatchet. Lumberjacks did that kind of thing, right?

We had exchanged nods and not much else. I stuck to the United States mostly, and Guy sat up there in Toronto, doing his own thing. Miguel, yeah, I kept in touch with him, but Guy—not so much. “No, not for months. Why?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Ivan? You still there?”

“I was to be managing to receive one message from Grapevine. Archer was to be checking in last week. He has not.”

Ice ran down my spine, despite the rapidly warming day. “Maybe he just forgot.”

“Maybe. But I am not believing that. Neither are you.”

He was right. I didn’t believe it for an instant. You
always
made your check-in call. Always. Ivan drilled it into our heads from the moment he turned up on our doorsteps.
“In this day of technology miracles, there is no reason we are to be fighting alone.”
There was no acceptable excuse for missing a check-in.

Champions died. It was a fact of our existence. But in the last four years, we’d lost three total. To lose two, within weeks of each other? It was unthinkable. And these weren’t rookies, either. Both men were experienced fighters. “What the hell is going on, Ivan?”

“I am not to be knowing.” That baritone voice quavered. I think that was when I really knew it was bad. Ivan had seen it all. Nothing was supposed to shake him.

“Did you ever find Miguel’s weapon?”

He took a deep breath, causing static on the line. It gave us both a moment to collect ourselves. I was getting more scared by the moment. Ivan was our rock. If he was crumbling, the rest of us were in deep shit. “Ah . . . that. It is possible that mystery is to being solved. Miguel’s younger brother is to also be missing.”

That was supposed to solve the mystery? “And?”

“We are believing that Miguel’s contract was for the machete to be delivered to the brother. If Miguel has perished, perhaps he has taken it and gone in pursuit of Miguel’s soul.”

That made sense, in an incredibly stupid teenager kind of way. For Miguel’s family, demon hunting was in the blood. To hear Miguel tell it, they’d done it since before the Christians conquered the Aztecs.

Of course, the kid was also next in a family who had a history of getting eaten by demons. I might have bugged out, too, at that age.

“Shit, he’s what, thirteen?”

“Seventeen.” Easily old enough to get himself killed and have his soul stolen. Also old enough to know he didn’t want to die like that.

“And you still don’t know who Miguel worked for last?”

“There are leads I am to be tracing. It is being difficult, from here. Signals are bad, in the hills, and the power is not to being steady.”

“You gotta find that kid, Ivan. If he
has
gone hunting, he knows who Miguel was working for.” And he was about to be in way over his head.

“I am to be trying my best. I fear it is to be taking time we do not have.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Please, let there be something I could do. I hated sitting here, thousands of miles away, feeling useless.