Do No Harm (56 page)

David chewed his lip, trying to bring his thoughts back into focus. Out in the hall, an orderly pushed an empty gurney. "I guess we don't have a choice," he said.

For the first time, David couldn't read Dalton's eyes. David stared at the detectives positioned at the foot of his gurney. The room seemed charged, a triangle of intensity moving between the three men.

"Well?" David said. "What do you say?"

Dalton looked over at Yale, clearly waiting for him to make the call. Carson finished the last suture, pulling the excess through until the last segment of the wound was brought to a close.

"All right," Yale said. "I'll run it by the Captain, and we'll flesh out a plan once you're . . . intact."

David offered a weak hand and, at last, Yale stepped forward and took it.

LYING on the gurney in the empty room, floating on a post-morphine mist, David surveyed the tools and equipment around him. A wall suction unit, lead aprons, otoscope and ophthalmoscope hanging on the walls. Casting his mind back over the past seventeen years, he tried to think about how many accident victims he'd seen wheeled in this very room, how many family members he'd consoled, how many he'd reassured. People left in wheelchairs and gurneys, they left walking and limping. Sometimes they left in bags.

He tried to figure out why he had been so fortunate. Why the wood hadn't struck half a foot to the left and perfed his intestine, or a foot higher and pierced his heart. He would have liked to think it was because of fate--that he was a divine instrument whose usefulness had not yet been depleted--but he knew that was not the case. He would live for the same reason that a three-millimeter embolus had lodged in Elisabeth's basilar artery and killed her. Brute chance.

David recognized the last couple of years for what they'd been--his period of mourning, his time withdrawn. He'd been letting go of Elisabeth in small, meaningful steps, savoring each part of her before relinquishing it. The soft skin of her nape. Her cold feet pressed against his legs beneath the sheets. The cant of her smile--slightly left. The last memories of his wife, lingering in his half-closed hands like hourglass sand.

A flash of Nancy lying upstairs, her mouth moving in a chant. I wanna die I wanna die I wanna die. Clyde's flat, senseless eyes: illness incarnate. They'd all retreated into their respective agonies--why had David been left a road back?

A knock on the open door drew his attention. Diane.

She did not advance. Her face was unbandaged, and her wounds looked raw and healthy. She propped a shoulder against the doorjamb and regarded him for a full minute. A tear swelled at the brink of her left eye, then dropped.

"I wasn't worried about you at all," she said.

"Nor I you," David said.

"I don't think you're fucking insane," she said.

A little boy walking by in the hall stopped to stare at Diane's face until his mother whispered an apology and tugged him along. Diane raised her eyebrows at David, a gesture of mild amusement. "We're like Beauty and the Beast without a Beauty."

"You can be Beauty," David said.

"You're sweet when you're wounded." She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them. "Plastics checked me out. I'm again free to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of the paparazzi." She smiled, but sadness found its way through.

They stared at each other across the distance of the room.

"Are you going to come over here?" David asked.

"No." Diane shook her head, tilting it back slightly so she wouldn't spill more tears. "No."

Snapping her cell phone closed, Sandy turned into the doorway, almost colliding with Diane. She stepped into the procedure room, looked at David, and said, "Christ."

Looking from David's face to Diane's, Sandy took note of the emotional current, and her lips pressed together disapprovingly.

"Sandy," David said by way of greeting. He raised his head from the pillow.

Sandy's eyes traced down the front of his hospital gown. "Your catheter's out. Have you voided?"

He nodded. "Let's just say now I know what it's like to have the clap."

"Antibiotics?"

"Unasyn. Started with two grams."

Sandy slid her cell phone into her white jacket and rubbed her hands together quickly, as if to draw warmth. "Look, I can see this isn't the best time, but, well, tact has never been my long suit." Hesitating, she glanced over at Diane.

"It's fine," David said. "What is it?"

A momentary droop in the firm line of Sandy's shoulders. "You've been asked to step down as chief. By the board. There was a vote."

Diane pushed herself off the wall as if she were going to say something. Sandy kept her eyes trained on David.

David's laugh was a bit giddy from the morphine.

"Goddamn it, David. You've had angry confrontations with police, you've been playing Nancy Drew around the hospital, you assault a colleague--"

"Assault," David repeated with amusement.

"--and don't even bother to appear when summoned to the board. What did you expect?" She shook her head in exasperation, then ran a thumb along the bottom of her painted lip, removing excess lipstick. Walking over, she sat on the gurney beside David. "I'm having Dr. Nelson take over responsibilities temporarily--I'll be fucked if I'll give Don the satisfaction. If you spend your time off quietly and distance yourself from this case, maybe things will settle down. Then I could see about--"

"No," David said.

He shifted on the bed and a dagger of pain shot into his side. Sandy moistened some gauze padding and dabbed around the edges of David's wound. By the door, Diane watched silently.

"Back off this case," Sandy said. "The press is making you look like an ass."

"To be honest, I don't really care anymore."

Sandy wadded the gauze pad into a ball and shot it at the trash can. It hit dead center. "You don't have your mother's sense, do you know that, David? You'll never be the doctor she was."

"No," David said. "I won't."

Sandy looked at him, reading his face. Evidently, she didn't find what she was looking for. "Goddamn it, David. Goddamn it." She reached out and patted him on the cheek roughly, almost a slap. "Whichever way this lands, I'm going to be unhappy, aren't I?"

Her expression textured, an odd blend of nostalgia and loss, and David knew she was thinking of his mother. When she looked at him, he sensed a glimmer of newfound respect. She spread her arms so he could hug her, which he did, despite the pain.

She squeezed him tightly, as if afraid to let go. Her lips were close to his ear, so he heard her perfectly when she whispered in her smooth, deep voice, "I'd recommend your not coming in for a while."

They broke off the embrace and regarded each other.

"I understand," David said.

He nodded. Sandy rose to leave, still not so much as acknowledging Diane.

"What was the vote?" David asked.

Sandy paused by the door. "Excuse me?"

"You said the board voted for me to step down. I'd like to know what the vote was."

Sandy readjusted the brooch on her suit jacket--a gold scarab. "Fourteen to one."

David pushed himself up to a sitting position, letting his legs dangle over the side of the gurney. He studied his bare feet. "Who was the one?"

"You know I can't disclose that."

"Who was the one?"

Sandy sighed. "You know who the one was." Her hand described an arc in the air and landed back on her hip. "Me." She nodded curtly and walked out, leaving the door open behind her.

David pressed on the flesh around his wound to gauge its redness. His white fingerprint slowly faded. When he looked up, Diane was watching him.

"I cannot believe they'd have you step down as chief. I mean, it's ridiculous. It can be overturned. You'd get staff support, I'm sure."

"Not anymore," David said.

"Aren't you going to protest?"

"It's an appointed position, not a political race."

"Okay," Diane said. "Okay." She drummed her fingernails against the door.

He stood up. The thumping pain in his side alerted him that the morphine was fading. His face still felt loose and blurry, and he knew he probably looked like hell. Unhooking his IV bag from its pole, he carried it with him as he walked over to Diane. He stopped a few feet short of her.

Diane blew a strand of hair off her face. He watched her closely, lovingly.

"I don't adore you," he said. "Not at all."

"Good." Some of the anger left her face. "I don't adore you either."

CLYDE'S breath fogged the window against which he leaned as he gazed down the seven-story drop to the dark square of the UCLA Medical Center quad. The top tier of the PCHS parking structure glowed beneath the lights, crammed with cars and trucks. The security guards moved up and down the rows in their nurse-white shirts. The top floors of the office buildings on Le Conte were also in view, sticking up above the fringe of trees like dominoes, and he could just make out the splintered wreckage of the scaffolding.

Clyde kept his eye on one car in particular--the olive-green Mercedes parked in the choicest spot near the hospital. From this distance, the ashole lettering on its side was visible only as a red smudge.

A few drops of condensation resolved on the foggy glass and trickled to the sill. He'd been watching for some time.

He spotted the white coat first, then recognized David walking tenderly up the concrete stairs to the top level, Diane Trace slightly in front of him. At either side of them were men in suits--one standing tall and lean, the other wide and slumped. The detectives.

After discussing something animatedly, they helped David into his car. Then they headed down to the lower tier, escorting Diane to her Explorer.

The Mercedes pulled out of the parking structure, Diane's car just behind it. When they passed the parking kiosks, a van pulled out from the curb and followed them both, about a block back.

Clyde pressed both palms against the glass on either side of his face, like a mime, and watched David's car until it disappeared from view.

Don strode up to Sandy's door, white coat flaring. He raised his hand to knock, but before he could, Sandy's voice issued through the solid door. "Come in."

A Bic pen behind her ear, Sandy worked at the conference table under the glow of the green banker's lamp. She flipped through a contract, sighed, tossed it to the side, and glanced at the next document in the pile before her.

"Dr. Evans, I'd like to thank you for your support in this matter, regarding Dr. Spier." Sandy did not look up. Don waited for a response, but finding none, continued. "It was, uh, a wise decision, I believe, for the division."

Still looking down at her paperwork, Sandy mumbled something under her breath.

"I'm sorry?" Don said.

Sandy finally looked up. "I said, 'Go fuck yourself,' Dr. Lambert." She pulled the pen from behind her ear and attacked the next file in her stack.

Don watched her work for a few moments, his mouth slightly ajar. He made sure to close the door quietly behind him when he left.

David was vaguely aware of the carpet cleaning van following him and Diane a few blocks back; Yale had selected it as the undercover vehicle, as it wouldn't be out of place in upscale Brentwood. It parked across the street when David pulled into his garage. Diane left her Explorer at the curb, near the mailbox. She helped David inside, and in a confusion of beeps and codes, he disarmed the security alarms.

She walked him down the long hall to his bedroom, one arm looped across his back, and deposited him on his bed. He lay back on the stark white pillows with a groan, holding her hand. His eyes were swollen, underscored by bags so dark they resembled contusions.

He held her hand and looked up at her. She was scanning the plain, empty room, the white walls, the lonely chair in the corner, and David felt a sudden, intense vulnerability--a concern that his bedroom revealed more of his life than he himself wished to grasp and convey.

"You should go," he said. "The cops will escort you home and keep an eye on you."

"Are you sure you want to be alone?"

He nodded. She backed up to go, but he didn't relinquish her hand. Despite the codeine, his wound was throbbing with his heartbeat, regular intervals of pain. The shock of almost being killed had caught up to him all at once, rushing him like a bad dream recalled. And though he'd been anticipating it, the news from the board didn't lessen the sensation that he was badly navigating rocky waters.

"I could stay," she offered again quietly.

He shook his head, but still held her hand, held it tighter.

"It's okay," she said. "You can need me." She looked at him and gave him the silence for as long as he needed it.

"Five minutes," he finally managed.

She let her hand slide from his, then, crossing her arms and shrugging her shoulders, she lifted off her top. Her hair spilled down across her shoulders, a golden fan spreading.