Doing Harm (32 page)

Dan smirks and winks at Business Guy’s blond companion. “No. That’s the best part. Over his colostomy stoma. Spreading outward along his abdomen.”

Jason makes a face. “No way. No
way.
Dude, please tell me that the herpes was somehow transmitted from his anus during his surgery. Please tell me that.”

“No. A brand-new infection. Apparently, from what he told us, this guy’s colostomy made him popular in his, uh, social circles. His friends were lining up at parties to get a chance to, you know…” He gestures with his hand in a vaguely suggestive way. “Be
intimate
with the colostomy.” A chorus of groans erupts around the table.

“That is SO nasty.” Jason is gasping with laughter. “So nasty.” He bangs the table with his hand, palm open, and the fine china plates rattle.

The doctors at the table laugh. The nondoctors turn various shades of green. After dabbing the corners of her delicate, pouty mouth with a napkin, Business Guy’s companion bolts from the table without a word.

“I mean, can you believe it?” Dan continues, almost in tears. “The guy didn’t think—” His voice abruptly trails off as he locks eyes with Nancy, who is hurling visual daggers down the length of the table. He coughs, then quickly adds, “Anyway, we’re not sure what we’re going to do with him now.” He stares at the floor and takes a big sip of wine, squirming under Nancy’s bellicose gaze.

The rest of us focus our attention on our dinner plates. The conversation abruptly ends; the only sounds are the scrapes of utensils against china. Although Sally gamely jumps into the void by initiating a discussion about a new movie that’s out, dinner limps its way to the finish line with a decidedly subdued tone as a housekeeper materializes and clears away the dishes. Business Guy begs off, his slim lady friend in tow, as does the epidemiologist (who’s name I still don’t catch). Luis abruptly disappears, so I end up following Dan and Jason downstairs to the finished basement.

Sans wives and children, surrounded by the manliness of classic arcade machines, foosball, and a dartboard, the alcohol flows freely from a bar amply stocked with liquor and beer with expensive-sounding names. Dan fires up some classic music from the eighties and nineties, and within short order, he and Jason are pretty hammered. I pour myself a glass of scotch and sip from it, but I’m otherwise too distracted to join in their drunken debate as to the feminine merits of the various Disney Princesses. So I wander back upstairs, where I stumble upon Nancy, Sally, and Lisa in the living room. Nancy and Lisa are sharing a bottle of chardonnay; Sally is drinking water.

The air is thick with estrogen and talk of Jane Austen novels, so I beat a hasty retreat onto the cavernous, screened back porch, carrying my half-full glass of scotch. The lights are out, and as I move farther away from the door, I quickly become shrouded in darkness. It’s a pitch-dark, moonless evening. The darkness vibrates with the steady drone of crickets.

“What’s up?”

I jump so high I practically knock my head on a rotating ceiling fan.

“Jesus, Luis, you scared the shit out of me,” I gasp, clutching at my chest like an old lady and squinting in the direction of his voice. “I thought you’d gone home.”

“Sorry.” I can make him out now, sitting at the end of the porch in an Adirondack chair—a dark ghost projected against a slightly denser black background. Pungent tendrils of cigar smoke scrape across the back of my throat, trailing a gravelly residue that reminds me of my grandfather’s house when I was a kid. He takes a puff on the cigar in his hand, and his face briefly glows red, illuminated by the embers at the tip.

“Are you out here all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Can I—uh, join you?”

“Sure.” He waves to a chair next to him and offers me a cigar. With his help, I awkwardly prep and light it, take a few tentative puffs—and immediately start hacking my lungs up.

“Easy there, boss.” He chuckles. “Not all at once. Do it like Bill Clinton: Don’t inhale.”

“Got it,” I sputter between coughs. “I didn’t know you were going to be here tonight. It’s a funny coincidence, seeing you here.”

“Not really. I knew you were coming and wrangled an invitation out of Nancy.”

“What?” I wheeze, surprised. “Why didn’t you tell me? When I saw you last Wednesday?”

“Basic rule of intel: You didn’t need to know. Mentioning it ahead of time wouldn’t have made any difference. Right? And it saved you the trouble of having to decipher another one of my texts and meet me in some bar somewhere downtown.”

“Yeah. Okay.” I take a hesitant puff on the cigar. This time I manage to get through it without coughing.

“You were at University Hospital again today.”

I don’t bother to ask him how he knew that. “Yes.”

“You’ve been there a lot lately.”

“It’s where I get my best thinking done.”

“It’s risky, is what it is. You’re not supposed to be there. What if GG spots you, gets antsy, and starts acting up or something?”

I wince. “I don’t think we need to worry about that anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

I tell him about seeing her in the restaurant last night.

“It freaked me out a little, Luis,” I admit. “I wasn’t expecting her to crank it up a notch like that, to take it out of the hospital.”

“Disconcerting.” I can see his face now. My eyes must be adjusting to the darkness. His mouth twitches, and he rubs the top of his head. “An aggressive move. She’s definitely sending you a message. The question is: What’s she trying to tell you? I wonder if she’s trying to goad you into some kind of action after your spat in clinic last week.” He strokes his chin thoughtfully, and his eyes fix on some far-off spot. “We’re going to have to move quickly, Steve. I don’t like this. Not one bit.” His eyes refocus, as if his mind has come back from someplace far away. “I have a plan. I’ll be working in University Hospital from tomorrow morning until Monday. I’ll put the final pieces in place while I’m there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“A guy like me, doing the kind of work I used to do, has a lot of”—he takes a drag on his cigar—“
useful
professional connections with a lot of very interesting people. People with unusual skill sets valuable to the task at hand. People who don’t ask questions. Suffice to say, I’ve called in some favors from some of these old acquaintances.”

“Can you tell me what you have in mind?”

“No. Not now. Not yet. I need to make the arrangements first. Expect a call from me sometime on Monday morning. I’ll explain everything—and I mean everything, Steve—then. Really. No bullshit. I’m going to need your help to make this work.”

“What should I do in the meantime?”

“Well, it would still really help us if we knew which patient. That intel would increase our odds of success. Have you got anything more since the last time we spoke?”

“I think so. We have a lot of diabetics we take care of. I think a diabetic patient in the hospital would be a tempting target.”

“Ahhhhh. You’re thinking induced hypoglycemia.”

“Exactly.” Insulin, commonly used to treat diabetes, coaxes the body’s cells to suck sugar out of the blood. But too much insulin, given all at once in one mighty dose, causes an immediate and catastrophic drop in blood-sugar levels that will, within minutes, induce seizures, loss of consciousness, and death.

“But how to give the insulin fast enough to beat the code team? Without the patient, the nurses, or the doctors realizing what’s going on?”

“I asked myself the same question. And then it occurred to me: an insulin pump.”

A grin slowly unfurls across Luis’s face. “Of course.”

An insulin pump is a motorized reservoir of insulin implanted under the skin of diabetic patients. The pump delivers carefully regulated, preprogrammed doses of insulin so that the patient doesn’t need to keep injecting it.

“A motivated individual, with the right kind of technical expertise, could theoretically reprogram a pump for an overdose right under everyone’s noses,” I say. “And, in retrospect, it would look just like an accident.”

“Nice. I like it. How would she reprogram the pump?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m working on that. I’m going to lock myself in my office tomorrow all day and see what I can come up with.”

“Good man. But remember: Try to lie low. We don’t need GG getting a whiff of what we’re up to.”

“I will.” I take a puff of the cigar. “Luis. What are our chances? Of beating her? Really.”

He smiles, and his teeth gleam in the half-light of the porch. “I like them, Steve. I really do. If we move quickly. And guess right.”

“What if we guess wrong?

“We won’t. We can’t.”

We sit for several minutes, quiet as monks, listening to the crickets.

“So I hear you’re from LA,” I say, apropos of nothing. I wonder vaguely if small talk might help me discover what’s lurking in that confidential file of his.

He blows a very respectable-looking smoke ring. “Yes.”

“Which part? Like, a suburb?” I swirl the remaining scotch around in the glass.

His laugh is short and humorless, like a dog’s bark. “East LA isn’t exactly a suburb, Steve. Especially the part I’m from.”

“Oh.” I don’t know that much about East LA, but I know enough to realize that, based on his reaction, Luis probably didn’t grow up in the same kind of modest but comfortable middle-class neighborhood that I did. That’s something I’ve never stopped to consider before. Smart and smooth, Harvard-educated, he doesn’t … seem like he’d be from a place like East LA.

I must be broadcasting my thoughts on my face. “Surprised?” His voice is soft. Even a little dangerous. I’ve never heard him sound this way before. “Why? Am I not living up to your expectations? Of what an East LA boy should be?” And then he shrugs off his generic American accent as effortlessly as sliding out of a pair of flip-flops. “
¿Que onda, guero?”
he growls in a thick Latino accent. “Huh, ’mano? ’Choo want me to talk like thees, ’esse?” He dismisses me with a wave of his hand and slips seamlessly back into his normal inflection. “No offense, but you white boys from the suburbs are all the same. You see exactly what you expect to see. Even Dan. He’s my friend, but the way he talked the other day about that patient of yours, the kid who got shot in the penis, made me want to puke.”

“I worked hard to get where I am,” I say defensively.

“I never said you didn’t.” He inhales, and his face lights up like a flame, all shifting patterns of shadow and scarlet, before the smoke from his exhalation obscures it. “Don’t get me wrong, Steve. But when you were a kid, were you ever afraid—and I mean well and truly scared shitless—to go to school? And I’m not talking about some bitch-ass anxiety dream about not studying for the big test or showing up in your underwear.”

I don’t answer. I don’t need to.

“Back home, do you know what they called the boys who managed to graduate from high school in my neighborhood?

“What?”

“Alive.”

I squirm in my seat and take a sip of my scotch. I mean, how the hell do I respond to
that
?

His lean, olive face emerges from the darkness as he bends forward in his chair, peering at me intently. “So. That’s my story. What’s yours?”

“You don’t know?” I ask, genuinely surprised. “I figured you would have had your …
people
figure that out for you by now.”

“It wasn’t relevant to the task at hand. I only went back as far as your college.”

“Then how’d you know I’m from the suburbs?”

“It wasn’t hard to guess.”

I shrug. “Not much to tell. I grew up just outside of Philly, across the river in Jersey. My mom’s a fifth-grade teacher. My dad works at the airport, as a ticketing agent for one of the big airlines. My older sister is married to a fireman—a really good guy. She stays at home with the kids. They live down the street from my parents.”

“So you’re the first in your family to become a doctor?”

“Are you kidding? Do you even need to ask?”

“I bet they’re proud of you. Your parents.”

“They hosted a block party the day I graduated from med school in my honor. A
block
party. Closed off the street. Diverted traffic and everything, thanks to a little help from my brother-in-law. What can I say? Parental pride is what two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of student loans buys you these days.” I rub my free hand, the one not holding the cigar, down my face, and wonder what my parents would think of my present predicament. I don’t dwell on it for long since the thought of letting them down is something I can’t even begin to wrap my head around; just the memory of the block party alone is starting to make my throat tighten. “You know, just a few months ago, the prospect of having to pay off that debt was, like, the biggest problem in our lives. Sally and I talked about it a lot. But now, well…” I stare out into the night.

For at least a full minute after my voice trails off, I can sense Luis just sitting there, completely still, puffing on his cigar and silently considering me.

“You’re a lot tougher than you look, man,” he finally says. “And stubborn as hell. You would’ve made a decent Marine.” He reaches over and claps me on the shoulder. “Ooo-rah.”

“Thanks.” I smile back. High praise coming from him, but just for fun I add, “I think.” He guffaws. I take a drag on my cigar. “Speaking of the Marines, why’d you first sign up, anyway? Did you always want to be a soldier?”

He exhales lazily, and the smoke stretches languid fingers up toward the slowly rotating ceiling fan. “Not exactly. The Corps was my way out.”

“You mean … it paid for college and med school?”

He smiles, not unkindly. “Yeah, the Corps covered my education. But it meant much more. The Corps saved my soul.” His eyes burn almost as brightly as his cigar tip. “Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but the Corps means something, teaches things, that you’ll never understand.” He rubs his free hand, the one not holding the cigar, across the top of his head. “Let me put it this way. Why are you trying to stop GG?”

“Well, to save my family and career, I guess. To get her the way she’s gotten me.”