Dr. Knox (3 page)

There were acres of polished stone and wood in the house, and long runs of floor-to-ceiling glass, and everything smelled of lemons. The rooms were large and flowed one into another, and they all had wide, twinkling views of the city. I followed the blood and the sound of moaning. After a while, I heard voices.

“You've got to keep still,” a young woman said.

“I can't keep still,” a man whined. “I can't keep any fucking way that doesn't hurt like a— Oh, Jesus, look at this. I'm gonna puke again.”

“Here, baby, I've got another towel—lift up a little.”

“Ow! Son of a bitch, Astrid—that fucking
hurt
!”

“If you just stay still—”

“I can't!”

The den, when I finally got there, was not a room full of guns. It was dominated by a massive window, and by a sectional sofa in fawn-colored leather and bloodstained towels. A woman in her late twenties hovered over the sectional. Her body was tanned and curved, with strong calves and arms, and her hair fell in stiff blond waves around a tanned, feline face. She wore cutoffs, a peasant blouse, and an expression of irritation mixed with anxiety as she looked down at the bleeding man. There were patches of dried blood on her arms and legs.

The man was younger, maybe twenty, and he lay on his side with his knees drawn up and his hands tucked between them. He was lumpy and pale, and his face was a sweating beige potato. His hair was dark and frizzy, and there were acne scars on his cheeks and beneath his underfed soul patch. His lips were chalky, his arms and elbows scraped and bleeding. He wore jeans that were wet from waist to knee with blood, and it looked as if a bear had bitten off his left rear pocket, along with a good-sized chunk of what was underneath.

I put the duffels down, unzipped both, squeezed antiseptic on my hands, and pulled on surgical gloves. The man and the woman turned to look at me, and relief swept over their faces like wind across a pond.

I was relieved too. The man was conscious and alert enough to whine, so right there we were ahead of the game. And though he was bleeding, blood wasn't actually spurting out of him—at least not that I could see.

“You the doctor?” he asked. “I'm Teddy. This is Astrid.”

“I don't need names.”

The woman squinted. “You a real doctor?”

“That's what my diploma says,” I answered. “The Web site I got it from even threw in some Latin.”

Astrid looked alarmed, and so did Teddy. “That was a joke,” I said. I pulled a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from one of the duffels, and an IV kit and a bag of fluids from the other. “Give me your right arm, and tell me where you were hit.”

Teddy hesitated, and looked at Astrid. Then he put his arm out. “I was in the Valley, out by—”

“Where on your body.”

Teddy swallowed hard. “My…my ass,” he said. “My ass and my thigh.”

I crouched by the sectional, and slid the blood pressure cuff over Teddy's arm. I put the stethoscope on and inflated the cuff.

“BP's low, but that's not surprising. You have any health problems? Diabetes? HIV? Asthma? Anything?”

“No…I…my doctor said I could lose a few pounds.”

“You've made a good start. On any meds—prescription, recreational, anything?”

“No…nothing. Weed sometimes.”

“Allergies?”

“Uh…I get hay fever. And cats—I'm allergic to cats.”

“You weigh what…one ninety, one ninety-five?”

“One ninety-one.”

I slipped the cuff off. “Left arm now.”

Teddy shifted, and held out his other arm. I wrapped a tourniquet above his left elbow, and tapped for a vein. Then I swabbed the arm and tore open the IV kit. I glanced at Astrid, who had stepped back and was watching openmouthed, with wide eyes.

“You mind her being here?” I asked Teddy.

“Astrid? No, no…it's fine if she stays.”

“And you?” I asked Astrid as I took out the catheter. “You're not going to faint on me?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I'm fine,” she said.

“Great. Get me garbage bags.”

“Like…plastic ones?”

“The bigger the better.”

Astrid looked at Teddy. “In the kitchen,” he said, “under the sink.” She trotted from the room.

“You're shocky, so I'm giving you fluids. Then I'm going to stop your bleeding, patch what I can, and give you antibiotics and some pain meds. Sound good?”

“Can I have the pain meds first?”

“We'll get there,” I said. “Now, this'll sting.” I popped the cover off the catheter, pressed it against Teddy's inner arm below the elbow, pulled the skin, and slid the needle into the vein.

“Fuck!” he yelled. “That fucking
hurt.
”

“I bet,” I said, and taped the tubing to Teddy's arm. Astrid returned with a fistful of white garbage bags. “Give me the bags,” I said. I pointed at a brass floor lamp. “And bring that closer.”

Astrid wrestled it to the sectional, and I hung the Ringer's lactate bag from it. Then I checked Teddy's pulse at his neck, his wrists, and his ankles.

“You're running fast.”

“Is that bad?” Teddy asked.

I shrugged. “It's about par, all things considered. But your pulse is strong at your extremities, and that's good.”

“My ass hurts something fierce,” Teddy whined.

I held up a syringe. “Got your ride waiting,” I said, and I injected morphine sulfate into the IV port.

“How am I really?” Teddy said, a trace of sleepiness already in his voice. “Am I okay?”

“If your wallet was back there, it's KIA,” I said. “Otherwise, you're not too bad.” I looked at Astrid. “How about some music.”

She looked confused. “What?”

“Music,” I said, and pointed at a bookshelf, and an iPod mounted on little speakers there. “Something with a beat.”

Astrid hesitated for a moment, and went to the shelf. In another moment Raphael Saadiq came on. “Heart Attack.” I smiled. “Turn it up.”

Line cooks must know the feeling—slicing, stirring, firing—assembling dish after dish from menus as familiar as nursery rhymes. Magicians must know it too, working one feint, one precise trick, after another—show after show, anticipating the gasps from the audience, and every round of applause. Certainly I'd known something like it back in college, when my soccer coaches had run us through endless three-man passing drills—against two, three, four, five defenders—moving in shifting triangles up and down the field. It was as much about muscle memory as about conscious thought—maybe more so. And that's how it was as I worked on Teddy.

So on went the surgical mask, out came the bandage shears, the jeans were sliced away, the gunshot wounds—a messy but uncomplicated through-and-through of the left glute, and a deep furrow in the right quad—were flushed with saline. Coagulant powder went into the ass wound, then pressure, then dressings. The thigh wound got sutures. After that, a slug of prophylactic antibiotics—Ancef would do the trick—and then a tetanus booster.

All the while, the garbage bags filled up with the shreds of Teddy's pants, bandage wrappers, bloody gauze pads, bits of tape. The music played, I tapped my foot, and now and then paused to check Teddy's pulse and BP, which, along with his color, stabilized and then improved. And Teddy—with loopy morphine logic and a steadily thickening voice, and despite my insistence that I wasn't interested, that I really didn't want to know—talked and talked and talked. About how hard it was to get a business off the ground, about how much he hated the Valley, about what a cheap prick his father was, but mostly about his very bad day.

“You even know where Tujunga is? It's past Pacoima, for fuck's sake. That's like the ass of nowhere. You drive farther east, you're in New York or something. Took me fucking forever to get there. And I'm at this…I don't know what the hell it was. One of those self-store things, where people keep the garbage the garbage man won't take. It's up on this hill, and I'm waiting for…for some people. I'm standing by my car, looking down at Foothill. There's a big-ass truck jackknifed across most of the street, and there's melons or something rolling around everywhere, and some insane backup, and then this dick in a Hummer—he leans on his horn, pulls out of the crowd, and drives up on the fucking sidewalk. Must be doing fifty at least, and people are waving and jumping out of the way. I take a couple of steps forward, 'cause I know there's gonna be a serious crunch and I wanna see, and then it's like somebody kicks me—and I mean fuckin'
hard
—right in the ass. I thought I was going down that hill, for chrissakes. And then there was another kick, and I was on the ground, and my pants were wet. And not in a good way.”

Teddy thought this was funny, and he chuckled to himself, and noticed Sutter leaning in the doorway.

Sutter held up the little cooler full of blood. “You gonna top off the tank?” he asked me.

“Not yet.”

Teddy squinted at him for a while. “Who're you?”

“The nurse,” Sutter said. Astrid smiled at that, and Sutter smiled back and winked at her.

Teddy scowled, but the morphine and the ebbing of his own terror were making him drowsier by the moment. He shook his head. “You sure? You don't look like a nurse.” Sutter chuckled softly, and Teddy scowled more and went back to his story.

“Then I'm down on my belly, and I just want to get the hell out of there, so I drag myself to the car. I get in and get down to the street somehow. I couldn't feel anything then—my leg was practically numb—but by the time I get on 134 my ass is like on fire. I don't know how I made it back in one piece.”

Sutter nodded sympathetically. “The holes I saw in your Porsche—you were lucky to make it out at all. What were you doin' there in the first place?”

Astrid shot Teddy a warning look, which he didn't recognize. “Doing?” Teddy said. “I was supposed to meet some people is what I was doing.”

Another concerned nod. “Business meet?” Sutter asked.

“Should've been no trouble,” Teddy said. “A simple swap. Now I don't know—”

Astrid coughed elaborately. “Teddy, babe, you should take it easy. Right, doc? Shouldn't he keep quiet?”

I didn't look up from my suturing. “That's never bad advice,” I said.

Teddy yawned and looked at Sutter. “You're not really a nurse, are you?”

“What gave it away?”

“You—”

“Teddy!” Astrid said sharply. “You're fucking high on pain meds. How about you keep quiet, baby? Just rest.”

I peeled off my gloves, tossed them in the garbage bag, and stood. I stretched my arms over my head. “That should do it.”

“You're finished?” Astrid said. “Teddy's okay?”

I nodded. “He was lucky—the bullet didn't hit gut or bone. He should be all right if he takes it easy and gets some looking after.”

“What kind of looking after?” Astrid said.

I began stowing gear in the black duffels. “He's going to need antibiotics for at least a week. I can leave you some, but he'll need more. And his ass needs maintenance. A wound like that, there're always foreign bodies in it—bits of fabric, maybe bullet fragments, grit, who knows what. It needs to be drained, cleaned, and re-dressed periodically, watched for infection.”

“Aren't you supposed to do that?”

“I've done what I can for now. As far as anything else, I'll tell you what I tell everyone I see in these circumstances: he should see a qualified health professional for follow-up care.”

Astrid squinted and looked at Sutter. “What the fuck does that mean? Isn't that you?”

He smiled. “We get paid, we'll be here, hon.”

Astrid shook her head. She said nothing, but her look was eloquent:
Assholes.

On the way down the hill, I asked Sutter if he thought Astrid would call for follow-up care for Teddy. He laughed.

“He'll be lucky if she doesn't turn him into barbecue.”

I awoke with a bar of sunlight across my eyes, tangled in a cotton blanket, sprawled on Nora Roby's sofa. There was a shower running somewhere, the smells of brewing coffee, oranges, and toast, and music coming from speakers on the bookshelves behind me. I had fragmented memories of calling Nora from Sutter's pickup the night before as we rolled down from the hills, of meeting her at a dim, noisy cave in Silver Lake, of Nora's long hair—jet, shot with gray—against the leopard-print upholstery of a corner booth, of too many hipsters and too much irony, of Nora driving me to her house. The sound from the bookshelves resolved into a song: acoustic surf music, twangy, retro, and earnest.

I turned and fell off the sofa, tagged my elbow on the coffee table, and upended one of the empty wine bottles there. It spun across the Persian rug and the tiled floor, and came to rest against the French doors that led to the garden. I sat up and squinted in the light flooding through the Los Feliz cottage.

“Fuck,” I said, rubbing my elbow. My throat was lined with steel wool.

The shower went off, and Nora called from her bedroom. Her voice was amber and smoky. “You talking to me?”

“Your sofa's too small,” I said. “Also, your house has too much light.” I wrapped the blanket around me and searched among the cushions for my clothes. I found my jeans and Nora's panties, but couldn't locate my own underwear.

She laughed. “That's what the listing said:
convenient to Hillhurst restaurants, and too much light for your hungover guests.
It's what sold me on the place.”

Nora walked into the living room. She wore cutoffs and a sleeveless black tee shirt, and her arms and legs were long, firm, and graceful. She was tall—just a few inches shy of my height in bare feet—and her pale face was striking, if not television pretty. Her eyes were large, searching, and nearly black, her nose was strong, and her mouth generous—warm when she smiled, somber and daunting otherwise. At rest, it was an icon's face, a grave Madonna's, a scholar's, but in motion something mischievous was there, something wayward. She ran fingers through her damp hair and grinned, and looked a decade younger than her forty-two years.

I hitched the blanket up. “Also, your music's too loud.”

“I think it's last night's Merlot you're hearing,” she said.

“And you feel fine?”

“I didn't drink as much, and I already ran five miles this morning.”

“Nobody likes smug,” I said, and fished my boxers from behind a cushion. “Pediatricians don't need a bedside manner?”

“I didn't think you were a child, though maybe I got that wrong. For grown-ups, I prescribe a few milligrams of smug, plus a shower and coffee.”

I'd met Nora a year ago, at a wedding extravaganza in Santa Monica, where I was a reluctant plus-one for a pediatric resident who'd been volunteering at the clinic. Nora supervised my date at UCLA Medical Center, along with both of the brides, and she'd come to the reception accompanied only by her considerable self-possession. She wore a gray gossamer dress, and smiled as she crossed the hotel terrace and introduced herself. She knew who I was, and had a champagne flute for me, and one of her own. We refilled them several times as the toasts kept coming, and left together before the cake.

I'd had more than a few relationships in the decade since my marriage had sputtered out, all brisk, friendly, but slightly chilly affairs, with sadly consistent contours: the company was amusing and bright, the sex vigorous, and the exit doors were always in plain sight, none further than a few months away. I told myself that that's what happened in war zones, but my relationships in L.A. hadn't been any different. Until Nora. I wasn't sure what accounted for how long things had lasted between us. Maybe it was her intelligence, or the warmth and kindness I saw whenever she volunteered at the clinic—the way the kids took to her. Or maybe it was because she was as suspicious of romantic entanglement as I was, and expected even less. Or maybe, after a long time alone, I was ready not to be.

Showered, shaved, and drinking coffee at the kitchen table, I felt slightly less fragile. I spread strawberry jam on a croissant and told Nora about the latest letter from my landlord.

“I get that he's serious about selling,” I said, “but he's delusional about the asking price.”

She looked at me over the top of her iPad and smiled. Her teeth were very white. “Delusion is what L.A. real estate is about. He'll get his number, or something close—if not in August, then a few months later.”

I drank some coffee. “What happened to the market being in the toilet? Underwater mortgages, abandonments—where did all that go?”

“Do you ever look at the business section? There's all this foreign money in town, looking for a place to park. An American safe-deposit box with a view—that's what the guy on
Bloomberg
called it.”

“It's Skid Row, for chrissakes.”

“That's authentic urban grit down there. Hipsters pay up for that—it makes the artisanal cheese taste better. And they're just the first wave; a few years from now your street will look like Melrose.”

“You know, that building's in shit shape.”

Nora laughed. “Don't try to understand it: it's Chinatown, Jake. The real question is: what are you going to do when he sells?”

I rubbed my jaw and felt tired again. “Find someplace else, I guess. There're other vacant storefronts in the neighborhood.”

Nora shook her head. “You think other landlords will be different? Even if you find a place you can afford, you'll be going through the same thing in—what—a year or two? The tide's running against you there. You should check out the Valley. Over there you could find a place to live that's not above your office, and maybe then you'll finally unpack. How many years has it been, living out of a backpack? Four?”

“Three and a half—and I don't live out of a backpack. And screw the tide; screw the Valley too.”

“Excellent wind-pissing,” Nora said, laughing. “What's so bad about the Valley?”

“Besides being too hot, flat, and ugly?”

“And where you are now is such a garden spot? There are sick people in the Valley. Poor ones too.”

“My ex said something like that before I went on my first gig with DTR.”

“And?”

“I told her that there were doctors in New Haven to take care of them, if not as many as there should be. But where I was going, I might be the only doctor. If I didn't show up, no one else would.”

Nora raised a graceful brow and smiled coolly. “That's heady stuff, Dr. Schweitzer—tough to compete with. What did the missus say?”

I shrugged. “As time went on, she minded less and less.”

She chuckled. “I imagine. Still, there
are
other clinics downtown—good ones too, and better funded.”

“My patients don't go to them.”

“If you weren't there, maybe they would.”

“Some of them would; some wouldn't. Anyway, there are plenty of doctors in the Valley.”

Nora poured more coffee into her mug. “Plenty of doctors,” she said, smiling, “and not so many lost causes.”

“Don't mock my good works,” I said. I drank some coffee and took some sections of an orange from a blue glass bowl.

“Speaking of lost things…,” I said, and between bites of the orange I told Nora about the vanishing woman, and the little boy she left behind.

Nora peeled another orange while I spoke, her long fingers pulling off the skin in a single curling ribbon. She listened without comment and was silent for a while after I finished. Then she sighed.

“Lydia's right—this is what DCFS is there for.”

“Seriously? Am I the only one who thinks they're useless?”

“It's a bureaucracy, like any—”

“It's not just any bureaucracy. It's kids' lives they fuck around with.”

“And is there any better excuse for getting into a little trouble than trying to help out a kid? I mean, who could blame you for that?”

I squinted at her. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning, I think sometimes you get bored, or restless, or something. Maybe the clinic work gets predictable, and then you want to stir it up—add some risk to the mix. Or do I have that wrong?”

“You studying for the psych boards?”

She smiled. “I'm a gifted amateur. Are you going to ignore my advice and go looking for this woman?”

“I am.”

“Do you have some kind of plan, or are you going to put up fliers?”

“I thought I'd ask around the neighborhood. Maybe someone's seen her.”

“Let me go on record that this is a bad idea.”

I drank some more coffee. “I don't see why.”

“You tell me you think this girl is on the run from somebody. So it follows that she might be hiding, and that this might make her hard to find—no? Not to mention the risk that you might cross paths with the guys who are already looking for her.”

“Maybe they could tell me something.”

Nora shook her head. “And maybe they'd have questions for you. Maybe you could end up looking like she did.”