No Rest for the Wicked (17 page)

I put Peter's note in front of my groin. Not to brag here, but believe me, it was not sufficient coverage.

Nancy scratched at her thatch of hair. “That man had a serious potty mouth but his other attributes more than made up for it,” she said. She turned and went back into the living room, the throw dragging on the floor behind her. “Jesus Christ, I feel like I was knocked out with a hammer last night.”

I pulled on a pair of boxers, then fetched her water, orange juice, and an aspirin and said, “Peter got a call from Eclypse's roommate. I can't help it. I think there's something hinky with that woman.”

“You don't like her because she's got all those hexes in her apartment.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Nancy rolled a considering shoulder and said, “Point taken.”

“I can't leave for hours. Do me a favor and have his back until I catch up to you.”

She shook her head, finding her shoes under the table and toeing them on. “He's a big boy.”

“You owe him.”

She blinked at me, raking her fingers through the mess of her hair. From the bowels of her briefcase, she extracted a toothbrush and a lint-covered tube of toothpaste.

“Gimme a few minutes.”

Shortly, she emerged from the bathroom with the dyed blonde hair pulled back in a crooked bun, buttoning her blouse. “You know I've been replaced on this case, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't have authorization to go within fifty feet of a suspect.”

“I've got a feeling you don't let little things like that stop you.”

She brought a tube of lipstick out of her purse and applied it liberally without a mirror.

Staying, impressively, within the lines.

“Don't let him do anything stupid until I catch up to you.”

“Wouldn't dream of it, Mother.” And she let herself out, the blaze of sunlight invading the vestibule and almost obscuring her silhouette from my vantage point at the other end of the hall.

I tried calling Drew a few more times. Betsy kept calling me, but I ignored her and deleted the text messages she was sending me.

Suits' death was all over the news, the manner and cause, of course, cloaked in meaningless phrases. “Los Angeles county coroner said cause of death is still undetermined.”

For the first time, I noted, they spoke of the mysterious code. No mention was made of its potentially threatening use in cyber terrorism. Much, however, was made of its monetary value.

My phone rang for the fiftieth time, and I almost disconnected before I saw it was from Nancy.

“You hook up with Peter?” I answered.

“That's why I'm calling. It's Peter. They're transporting him to Kaiser's in Hollywood. He collapsed climbing the stairs to a house in Echo Park.”

“I'll be right there.” I was almost out the door before I realized the sun was still up. My watch reported the time as five thirty. Sunset was at six thirty.

There ensued the longest hour of my life or unlife. I kept calling Nancy, but she couldn't tell me anything. The hospital emergency room nurse hung up on me three times when I called demanding information. At exactly six thirty I shot from the condo like a rocket, jumped on my Harley, and rode.

* * *

Kaiser Hospital stands at the apex of Hollywood and Little Korea. A concrete-and-glass, newly refurbished monster of medical science with about five assigned parking spaces and red curbs all around its periphery.

Directly across the street was a massive parking lot servicing the Scientology Institute's headquarters. I parked there.

“This is Institute-only parking.” A thin man with buttery soft skin and smooth dishwater blond hair frowned dubiously at my Harley.

“Yeah, I need to clear some shit,” I told him. “It's kind of an emergency.”

He didn't like my tone. I knew this because he told me, “I don't like your tone.”

“Anything happens to her, it's your ass,” I told him. “How's that for tone?”

He sniffed and retreated to the safety of his little glass box. “I'm calling the police.”

“I am the police.” I flashed my fake shield at him thinking, as I did so, that if Peter got wind that I had such a thing, he'd stake me personally.

But it seemed to work. I fled across the four-lane road and through the pneumatic doors to the emergency room.

The emergency room smelled like rubber, antiseptic, and misery. I signed in at the desk and then for five long minutes sat next to a man with a hole in his skull holding a red rag to his face before Jonathan appeared at the end of the hallway.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Is Peter okay?”

“They said it's only pneumonia, thank God.” Jonathan led me around a corner, past a long Formica counter manned by several nurses in scrubs, saying over his shoulder, “It's a good thing Peter has other friends.” He stopped in front of an open door.

“This is ridiculous.” I heard Peter's voice coming from behind a curtain draped there, and I pushed inside.

The room was about six feet by ten and completely filled with a bed in which Peter lay looking unaccountably small swaddled in white sheets with a tube attached to his arm. A medical person, Nancy, and two many-armed blinking machines had somehow managed to cram themselves into the small space.

“Two at a time, please,” the nurse said to Jonathan when he attempted to follow me.

Jonathan cast me an angry look, but stepped back into the hallway, arms crossed.

“This is stupid.” Peter was mad as hell and struggling for every breath. He had a tube clipped to his nose that I recognized from my own experience as an oxygen delivery system. He spotted me then. “Adam.”
Wheeze
. “Tell them. I have to leave.”

“What happened to him?” I asked Nancy.

“We surprised someone climbing out Emily Guadalupe's window. Peter chased him for a block and then he collapsed,” she said. “I was afraid he'd had a heart attack.”

“A heart attack?” said Peter, looking outraged. “My heart is fine.”

When Peter took a breath, it sounded like someone trying to suck air through a collapsed tube. “Emily Guadalupe could be in danger,” he said. “I've got to get out of here.”
Wheeze
. “Tell them, Adam.”

I glanced at the nurse. He was a big guy with incredibly clean white hands and surprised black eyebrows. His brow wrinkled, and he seemed to look at me more closely. I wondered if someone who spent his life battling death could feel its presence on me. “We work together,” I told him.

“Just give me a shot and release me,” Peter demanded of anyone who would listen.

“Mr. Ortiz, you need to rest,” said the nurse. He turned to me. “We've given him a sedative, but you can stay until he falls asleep.” He adjusted one of the nozzles on the tube taped to Peter's arm, then swept the curtain aside and left.

Nancy laid a hand on my arm. “The doctor said pulmonary thrombosis can lead to cardiac arrest in men his age. They want to keep him overnight for observation.”

Peter glared at her. “I'm fine.”
Wheeeze
. “I need to get out of here.”
Wheeeeze.

His face was flushed and his eyes were angry, but underneath it he had a pasty look. I knew Peter well enough to know that if he
could
get out of bed, he
would
. In all the years I'd known Peter, I'd never seen him weak or injured. It was doing my head in a little.

Men his age.

Peter was only thirty-nine. Of course, he worked in a profession that was considered high risk, and he was your typical type A. Pushing everything to the max, overachieving his sweet little ass off.

“Maybe you should just do what the doc says,” I told him.

This of course infuriated Peter even more, and he noticeably gritted his teeth. “There's a woman missing.”
Wheeze.

“We don't know she's missing,” Nancy said to me. “A neighbor told us he hasn't seen Ms.

Guadalupe for a couple of days, and Peter seemed to think that was meaningful.”

“You knew something that night,” said Peter. I could tell he was trying to shout, but his voice came out thin and reedy. “You know something you aren't telling me.”

“I don't know anything.”

Wheeze
. “You suspect something…” He tried to get up off the cot, but then sank back, closing his eyes tiredly. He looked ashen and defeated. “God fucking dammit,” he said.

From where she stood in the doorway, Nancy said, “Peter, maybe you need to give this one a pass.”

“I'm tired of losing people to this damned thing,” said Peter, and now he sounded weak and teary.

I put my hand on his arm. “You haven't lost me.”

The sedative must have been kicking in. Peter's eyelids kept fluttering closed, and his breathing was getting deeper. The red lights on the monitor behind him were pulsing at a slower rate as well.

“Nancy,” he said. “Let me talk to Adam alone.”

“Sure.” She pulled the curtain closed and shut the door as well behind her.

“I need to tell you something,” said Peter.

“Sure.” I stood next to the bed, letting myself reach down and put my hand on his arm. His skin was cold.

He seemed to struggle just to breathe.

“Peter, whatever it is, it can wait.”

“No, it can't,” he said laboriously. “In my desk. In the upper right-hand drawer. If anything happens to me, there's papers there for you.”

All I can say is it came so completely out of left field I couldn't take it in for a minute.

“Papers?”

“My will. And…a set of keys to a safe deposit box. I've set up a trust with your—”

“You
what
?”

He closed his eyes as if to ride through my tantrum. Inhaled, wheezing mightily, and pronounced, “We have to think about it, Adam. What will you do after I…you know.”

Little spikes of panic beat inside me in tandem to the monitor's behind Peter's head. “Not gonna happen.”

“It will eventually. I'm not getting any younger. And you…you look younger than you did a year ago.”

“I do?”

He grinned, a sloppy, crooked grin. Even with the chapped lips and the tubes, he still looked lascivious. “Yeah. It's amazing.”

I'd give a lot for a reflection some days. “Cool.”

He inhaled noisily. The tube in his nose hissed. “I've got thirty years if I'm lucky.”

This was completely unacceptable. I guess I'd always assume he'd outlive me. Hell, he
had
outlived me, if you came down to it.

“No.” I shook my head as if I could make the idea leave the room. “No.”

“Who will take care of you?”

A smooth wash of anger relieved some of the anxiety in my chest. “I don't need taking care of.”

A deep, difficult inhale. “You need”—
wheeze
—“somebody to get you the blood.”

“Not your problem,” I said.

“Yes. You are,” he said. A deep breath. “Been my problem”—
wheeze
—“since first saw you”—
wheeze
—“at the academy.”

Fuck. I thought he was shaking beneath my hand, but then realized it was me who was trembling. “Stop it. Just go to sleep and stop…”

He chuckled, and it devolved into a cough that seemed to rattle his spine.

“Peter, just sleep,” I begged him.

“Couldn't sleep some nights”—
wheeze
—“thinking about you.” And he managed a sloppy smile.

I reached up and touched his hair. “Yeah. Me neither.”

“And those years on the beat.”
Wheeze. Wheeze.

“Peter, we can talk about this later.”

“We wasted so much time,” he said. “I wish…”

It seemed a week for regrets, I thought. “Don't waste your breath.”

“About…Caballo,” he said slowly. “You'll need”—
wheeze
—“friends…”

“That's it,” I said, and I backed away from the bed and toward the door.

“No,” he said. “Wait.”

But I left the room before he could say anything else.

* * *

Jonathan and Nancy were waiting in the reception area. Jonathan turned on me. “This is your fault.”

I ignored him. “How serious is the pneumonia?” I asked Nancy.

“They said he's exhausted. It
is
possible to overdose on cold tablets. He was dehydrated, and his pulse was racing. He had a fever of a hundred and four a couple of hours ago, and he was raving.” She raised her eyes to mine and gave me a meaningful look. “Said a bunch of wild things about vampires.”

Jonathan made a noise, and I noted for the first time the state he was in. His hair was sticking up in the back. His T-shirt was on inside out, and he was wearing shorts that were completely inappropriate for the season and showed that he obviously had on shoes with no socks. “He's working himself to death.” He rubbed at his cheeks, and I was embarrassed to see what looked like dried tear tracks there.

Nancy frowned at Jonathan. “You should go home.”

“I want to be here when Peter wakes up.”

“He's drugged,” I told him. “He won't be coherent until morning. Go home and get some sleep.”

“What are
you
going to do?”

“Jonathan,” said Nancy in exactly the voice my mother would have used, “you aren't going to do him any good if you get sick too.”

He was shivering and his arms were covered with goose bumps. I only then noticed that in a room full of people in coats and jackets, Jonathan had on short sleeves. He rubbed at his cheek again, looking like a twelve-year-old kid all of a sudden.

“He didn't have an insurance card in his wallet,” he told me. “But I called the union and got a preacceptance from them. And his department secretary gave me his medical history, allergies and stuff.” He shivered and rubbed his arms.

“I called Jonathan, and he met the ambulance when they arrived,” Nancy explained to me.

Something I had been unable to do.

“We're lucky you were here,” Nancy told him. She cast a glance at me.

“Yes. Good job,” I forced myself to say.

Nancy waved me aside then and said, “I spoke to his union rep and Davis's assistant. They agreed they need to put all recent erratic events aside and give Peter a couple of weeks to get himself healthy again.”

I studied her. “That was very savvy of you.”