Bad Medicine (20 page)

We're the ones who dabble in suicide, Molly. You and me.

Not anymore, Joseph Ryan, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut against the fear. That was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.

Even so, she wanted a drink. She wanted it so badly she could actually taste the smoke of good Irish whiskey at the back of her throat. It would slide down so easily. So effortlessly.

And it would be safe, because Joseph Ryan was wrong.

Even so, Molly spun around and slammed back out of the house.

She walked it off. Around her the trees shook and danced. The sky split with early lightning, turning the clouds the sickly green that made St. Louisans look up and worry. The rain came down, first a splattering, then a torrent. Big, fat drops that drenched in seconds and swirled along the street so cars could splash them back up again. Molly turned out onto Euclid and dodged people trying their best to get in out of a thunderstorm that crackled and boomed overhead. Molly barely noticed.

It just wasn't the time for all of this. It was summer, and Gene was right. Molly should have been a teacher so she could outrun her demons during the summer. She should have been a consul in a distant country where the most important thing on her schedule was arranging tables at a state function.

Instead, she was here. Up to her elbows in trauma, up to her armpits in suicides, and the summer wasn't over yet.

Suicides. It couldn't have been something simple. An epidemic. A serial killer or two. Anything but the sight of lifeless eyes and deliberate self-destruction. Anything but the suspicion that it was, after all, much easier just to give in.

And now, not only did the FBI want her to reexamine how someone would have committed suicide, Joseph Ryan wanted her to go back in and reexamine why.

Why should she listen to a guy who ate lunch behind McDonald's instead of in it? Why would his word count for more than that of a mother who sat on a Sears couch in the county?

He'd been so sure. So clear, for that solitary moment, as if it were the only thing he truly understood anymore. As if his years on the street could be distilled into that one truth. Joseph Ryan was an expert, and the area of his expertise was despair.

Before Joseph had spoken to her, Molly had managed to slip all those damn suicides neatly into an envelope marked Closed and shove them away.

Now, she was afraid she was going to have to go back and reexamine at least one.

That was if Joseph Ryan was right.

Molly walked faster. She didn't want him to be right. She didn't want him to make her look at the pictures of that room again, talk to his sister and his mother. She didn't want to wonder enough to rake back through Pearl's desperation or the futility of the life of the lawyer who had decided that the Wainright building was the door out of his life.

Molly needed to talk to somebody about this. Somebody who understood.

Nobody understood.

No, that wasn't true. The crowd at work understood. They might not have stumbled out from the disaster of Vietnam, but they slogged through the desperation that was late twentieth century urban America.

But no one in the ER would talk about this. They would talk about rage and anger, yes. Frustration, indecision, fury. They would talk about exhaustion and they would talk about rebellion. They would not talk about despair. They wouldn't admit it because they were more afraid of it than anything.

It was why none of them would deal with suicides. It was why they would never sit down and listen to Molly tell them why Joseph Ryan frightened her so much. It was why she would never think to tell them.

And that left her only outsiders. People who would need the problem explained, the loyalties defended. And Molly simply wasn't up to it. She wasn't even strong enough to have to define it all for Gene, who understood better than most. She just needed someone who would instinctively know. Someone who spoke in code, so she could shorthand past what she was too afraid to say.

Besides, even though he'd empathize, Gene would do it for a hundred-twenty an hour, and Molly simply couldn't afford it.

Alongside her, a Caprice slowed to a crawl in the downpour. Molly saw the passenger's face turn her way, a faint, pale globe of suspicion beyond the rain-fogged window. She was being watched. Being followed. More FBI agents, she thought.

She hoped.

She walked faster, ignoring them. Ignoring the new disquiet that settled on her shoulders when she considered that they could be there for some reason other than to protect her.

For whatever reason, they didn't follow. They just watched, which was just fine with Molly. She had enough on her plate.

She had to talk to someone who knew Joseph. Who knew Mary Margaret. Who shared the common bond of Vietnam so she wouldn't have to explain or excuse.

Unfortunately, there was one person who fit that bill all too neatly. Even the Vietnam part.

Molly remembered when she'd found out. It had been while Molly had been giving her deposition. When she'd outlined her nursing experience as the introduction to the questioning about how she might have let an old woman die.

"Why don't you mention the year you spent in Vietnam?" he'd asked.

Uncomfortable in her brand-new red suit and high heels, Molly had shrugged. "I never think to," she said, because she didn't. Too much effort, too many questions and assumptions. Too much to deal with on too little stamina.

"But Vietnam has cachet now," he'd said, standing so he could lean over the table toward her. So he could impress her with his crocodile smile and Armani suit. "Everybody wants it on their resume. Even people who haven't served."

"You have it on yours?" she'd retorted.

His smile had grown. "First line. 'I served in Vietnam. Oh, I also graduated top of my class in law-school.'"

"Served where?"

That smile again, taunting, knowing. "The real war. Adjutant general's office. Saigon. I did everything I could think of to stay away, especially since I'd earned my law degree on ROTC. I mean, I figured that a top lawyer like me would take Washington by storm."

"Only you took Saigon by storm instead."

"And Bangkok on weekends."

Still, he'd been there. He'd served in a war unlike any other war, where there hadn't been rear lines, where there hadn't been a real demarcation between friend and foe. Where your friends were alive one minute and dust particles the next. He'd known Joseph Ryan before the war had ruined him, and known Mary Margaret Ryan before her case had shattered her.

He was an asshole. A user. A despoiler of hardworking people everywhere. He lived in a fancy office now, used Vietnam as punctuation in a resume.

He was still the only one who would be able to tell Molly whether or not she should listen to Joseph Ryan.

Molly kept walking. She walked for an hour, ever mindful of the silent, watchful men who followed her; and then, when she gave up, when the storm gave up, she trudged alone back to the silent, watchful house and took a shower. She might as well. After she cleaned herself up, she was going to have to wallow back in the grime. She was going to have to call and ask a favor of Frank Patterson.

Chapter 11

"Can I help you, sir?"

Molly had triage this morning. For a change, it was pretty quiet, which had just given her ulcer more of a chance to seize up over the decision she'd made the afternoon before.

It was a stupid idea.

It was the only one she could come up with that might let her finally get on with the summer.

Five o'clock would be fine, his secretary had said. Five o'clock it is, Molly had answered, as if she were making an appointment to get her hair done.

The way her stomach was cramping up, she wasn't going to make it to five o'clock anyway. What difference did it make? Why should she want to know any more about suicides than she did? She had enough on her hands. Enough to do at work—at both works—to keep her busy until the day she dropped dead. Which, if she continued to feel the way she did, should be anytime in the next twenty-four hours.

"I want to see a doctor."

Almost with a start, Molly returned her attention to the conversation she'd begun with the man who'd stepped up to her desk. It was a measure of how distracted she was that she hadn't heard the secretary alongside clearing her throat. It was a betrayal of how very preoccupied she was that she hadn't even noticed just why the secretary was clearing her throat in the first place.

Molly gave the man a smile.

He didn't smile back. Molly could only imagine why. On an August morning when the temperature and humidity both were hovering around the hundred mark, her mystery guest was standing in front of her in a full-length, buttoned-down, winter raincoat. He was also standing as if he were very, very uncomfortable. Oh hallelujah, Molly thought with ill-disguised glee. A distraction.

"Can you tell me what seems to be wrong?" she asked with a perfectly straight face.

Her guest glared. "I
need,"
he said carefully, not moving, "to
see
a
doctor."

No fool she, Molly grabbed a clipboard with a form and motioned him back to the work lane with her. The secretary, already blushing furiously at what she'd probably have to write down on the patient complaint line, didn't even bother to watch.

Molly opened the door into the treatment room and showed the man through. She waited only until the door was completely closed, though, before dropping the good behavior.

"All right," she demanded, hands on hips. "What's going on?"

Her patient, a youngish, smallish, baldish man with an unshaven chin and a moist upper lip, didn't answer. He just reached down to unbutton his coat.

Molly prided herself on her professionalism. She had never, ever laughed in a patient's face.

Until that moment.

She'd been expecting to hear what her patient had inserted. After all, the ER had a virtual Foreign Body Hall of Fame, a testament to the imagination with which humans approached the idea of self-fulfillment. Everything from animal to vegetable to mineral had been pulled out of one tract or another.

This morning, when Molly needed it the most, her patient topped them all.

He opened his raincoat to reveal that beneath his best London Fog and shiny black wing tips, he was stark, staring naked. He was not, however, alone. There, hanging from the end of his penis by its bill, was a live, full-grown, white duck.

Molly burst out laughing.

"What the hell is that?" she demanded instinctively.

The man looked down, as if he had to reacquaint himself with the problem at hand. As it were.

"My friend. Albert."

Molly started laughing again. Then she clamped her hand over her mouth, as if that would help. "I'm sorry... really..."

The patient darkened all the way to his sock line.

"What do you want us to do?" she asked. "Mr...."

"Betelman. Allan Betelman," he said. "Couldn't you make him let go?"

This time it was Molly who darkened. She was trying so hard, but she couldn't take her eyes off ground zero. Maybe, she thought in some distress herself, there really wasn't anything to those suicides after all. Maybe it had just been one of those group things. Like the head wounds. And penises. She'd seen an awful lot of strangely decorated penises lately. It was just too bad Vic couldn't add this one to his tattoo file.

"Sir," she said, trying her best to look him in the eye even as her voice hit two distinct notes. "We don't do ducks here."

"You have to do
something,"
he protested. "I'm in agony."

"How did this... how did this happen?" she managed to ask.

Mr. Betelman didn't seem in the least hesitant about sharing his problems. "Well, I trained him to do it," he told her. "With duct tape. I mean... well, you probably wouldn't understand."

"I seldom do, sir."

"He's supposed to let go, though. When I'm... when we're... finished."

Now her shoulders were shaking. The pitch of her voice rose alarmingly. "And?"