The girl in shock let out a tiny sob. "Help him," she said. "You've gotta help him!" She tried to get to her feet with a shudder and began weeping.
"Stay there. Just stay where you are. You're hurt, too."
She put her hand to her head, brought it down splotched with blood that looked like ebony patches in the half light from the headlights. She turned her hand one way and the other, not comprehending what she saw on her fingers.
"Hey! I gotta get some help!"
The drunk bellowed at Wade. He looked up and saw the man stumbling toward him, carrying a cellular phone unit in one hand, and the piece of car framing in the other. He had pulled it out, and a torrent of blood began to cascade down the side of his throat. He cleared his throat, or tried to, and toppled to his knees.
The cellular unit was a newer one, about the size of a small toaster, and he had it sealed in a plastic baggy. Wade grabbed it from him, not only for the use of the phone, but for the baggy… for the sucking chest wound. The man let it go and began to sob. Wade took his hand and put it into the neck wound, saying, "Hold this and don't let go." The wound was simple enough, clean, the puncture relatively small. Direct pressure would seal it without any problems. The drunk swayed back onto his haunches and sat for a moment, his stubby fingers pressed into his neck.
Wade emptied the phone from the baggy. He shoved the phone at the girl who had stopped sobbing and was now making tiny, breathless gasps, repeating over and over again, "Oh, God, oh, God."
"Call 911."
She looked at the phone unit in stupor.
"Pick it up and call 911. Tell 'em we're about two miles south of the country club on S16."
She looked at him, nothing in her eyes.
"God dammit!" Wade roared at her. "Pick up the phone and make the call!"
She jumped. The jolt moved her wretched arm, and she let out a scream of pain, but that pain seemed to clear the expression on her face. She bit her lip, hissing back the agony, and looked at him. "I can get help. I'll… I'll call."
He nodded roughly. He took the baggy and pressed it into the jagged chest wound, easing it in, praying he could get it into place, his tired hands now cold and clumsy, and was having no success when the drunk suddenly let out a wheeze and collapsed onto the pavement.
Wade looked from one to the other. He could save the driver. He knew that, but it would take him away from saving the other. One would be a sure success, the other a desperate bid to do the impossible. He reached for the drunk, and put his hand in the wound, felt the pulsing vein and slick surface, and the tiny tear, warm blood bubbling up around his hand as he compressed and held it.
The boy arched his back, fighting for air, his face already cyanotic. Young, so much younger than the face Wade looked at in the mirror whenever he found time to shave. Had he ever been that young? And if he did nothing, the teen would never move into older years, into the realization of what it was he was meant to do, and who it was he was meant to be.
Clarkson had heard others talk about it, quietly, overheard, rather, because medical staff did not like to admit they had ever come to such conclusions… but there inevitably came a time when one flipped a coin and either saved a life or let it go. He did not know what yardstick they measured by, whether it came from within or without, but he only knew as he knelt there that the waste, the sheer waste, of the boy's life sickened him.
He looked at the life sprawled before him, as it died, and took his fingers out of the neck wound, his chilled hand heated by the blood, and reached for the dying teen, and the plastic envelope, and began to work, as quickly and competently as he knew how. He guided it into place, and felt the sucking pressure of the lung as it took in the patch, and the boy took a clear breath, then another. He could not take his hands out of the chest cavity, though, for he felt certain that he was maintaining pressure on a bleeder which he could not see or diagnose, but which his hands told him was there, had to be there, and so he stayed, unmoving, as the far away sound of sirens began to pierce the air.
He knelt next to the boy, his hands buried in him, saving him and watched the dark pool under the drunk spread and then reach a kind of saturation point as the heart ceased to pump. He never knew that he was dying… never suffered… would never realize the lives he had already taken on this curve.
Clarkson reflected that the dead man was lucky.
When the paramedics reached them, they would take care to load the teen so that Wade could keep the pressure on, helping him step into the back of the van, dislodging him as little as possible. They would take the girl as well, and send for a second unit for the dead, and the one unconscious teen who seemed to have few injuries despite his state.
Phelmans would grudgingly give him an additional twenty-four hours off, for the press coverage had focused on the plight of the young, exhausted doctor, doing whatever he could, on a godforsaken, rain-soaked stretch of road. The news channels would mention the hospital frequently, and good press was always welcome.
There would even be a moment when Phelmans would grasp Wade by the shoulders and say jovially to the news crew, "What do we have here? I tell you what we have here… the makings of a damn fine surgeon!"
And the camera would catch Wade looking at his hands in an unguarded, reflective moment… looking at his hands as if trying to determine what miracle had anointed him, had given him the means to do the impossible.
Chapter Three
John Rubidoux swung his legs out of his car and stood, his dress blues scratching as he did, and even before locking the door and shutting it, he had a finger between his collar and his neck, trying to ease the stiff material away. He could feel the sunlight being sucked in, already hot against his skin. He didn't remember the collar being that tight or just plain irritating. The driver's side mirror flashed in his eyes, even the heavy-duty sunglasses he wore didn't quite catch the glare. He saw himself reflected in the side windows… tall, straight, coat with shiny buttons, police cadet insignia… and dark glasses that hid the expression on his face.
The graduation ceremonies for which his family had planned for months would not be taking place today… or rather, they would be held, as they were held every spring, but he would not be attending because of the page he had received earlier. Instead, he would be standing in a hospital breezeway, hoping that his police dress blues would grant him access away from the jostling crowds of reporters and TV crewmen…. standing just long enough in the hope of seeing the doctor who intended to save the life of the man who'd killed his father.
John spotted the camera trucks littering the far end of the parking lot, and drew away from them, knowing that his uniform would draw them like honey drew flies, not wanting to give them yet another angle to their news story.
Son of murdered cop forgoes his own graduation to protest the court-ordered lifesaving operation granted to the murderer on Death Row… film at eleven.
Oh, yes, they would stampede to get juicy tidbits like that. He had no intention whatsoever of finding himself laid open again, his mother, his family stripped and bared, sore wounds probed and poked viciously to see if there was a spark of life or emotion in them. He had seen it before on the outside, and since he had begun training as a cadet, on the inside, and it sickened him almost as much as the events which brought him to the hospital surgical center now.
Sun beat down on him, on the newly parted crease in his hair, he could feel it on a tender scalp that should have been covered by his hat, but he'd tossed that into the back seat. When he took a deep, steadying breath, the faint tang of smog and pollution bit at his lungs. Oh, yeah, welcome to L.A. All you snowbirds, just come flooding in, enjoy the gangs, the freeways, the smog. The death.
The killers.
John strode into the breezeway which connected the doctors' parking lot with the back entrances to the building, found a shady corner, and leaned into it, prepared to wait. He was fairly certain he would not have to wait long; the operation had been set for one p.m., PDST, according to the newscasts, the soonest the surgical team could set it up after getting the court order at nine that morning. The irony of it all had never ceased to amaze John. He wished his father could have had a court order keeping him alive.
It was not enough that a convicted, brutal murderer like Dover could sit on a California death row for ten, fifteen years while his attorneys exhausted the appeals system. It was not enough that he lived, but now that his own body threatened him, the state fought to keep him alive… so that it could execute him later, the legal system permitting. He had a brain aneurysm, a fatal, ballooning bubble in an artery, and the only thing John could think was that if it ruptured, it would be too quick and clean a death for a bastard like Dover. But his attorneys had fought for treatment, despite the fact that Dover faced execution… and this morning they had won.
Wearily, John put his shoulder to the stuccoed wall of the breezeway and winced slightly as he did, the shoulder still tender from years of basketball in school and college, reminding himself, thank God, that it was not a knee, because if it had been a knee, he would not have gotten through cadet training. Justice be damned. He waited to make a final appeal, a human appeal, to the doctors who would be coming in soon to scrub up and read angiograms and MRIs and decide how they were going to save Dover's life. He would beg them, if he had to, not to operate.
The world did not need Dover. It was infinitely better off without a vicious rapist who violently, permanently, mutilated his victims… when he did not outright butcher them. John did not wait just for himself or his family, but for the ten families who had suffered loss and unbelievable outrage, nine dead victims, a half a dozen other scarred victims, and the tenth family like his, a cop's family. Two of the finest had died cornering Dover and bringing him in. There was no sense in a world which would try Dover, and then let him linger, laughing behind bars, at what he'd done… a world which would save Dover from the justice his own body perpetrated against him.
It had seemed a strange kind of fortune when the news stories had started trickling out as Dover's lawyers filed their first round of appeals. Immersed in training as a cadet, Rubidoux had not paid too much attention in the beginning to any of the follow-ups to the trial. It had been difficult enough dodging the few reporters who had followed him around the first couple of days as he'd entered the police academy. Scavengers, jabbing and thrusting for any morsel they could steal from the wreckage of his life. Over the months, he had learned to block them out, and even rumors of health problems for Dover had not caught his attention as graduation loomed. Then his mother had called.
She had not cried when his father was killed. Not in front of him or the others, but he knew she cried. Sometimes when he called to check up on her, the serenity would be gone from her voice, the cheerfulness that he had heard his whole life, vanished, her tone hollow and thickened.
But she was weeping when she called him, the noise thin and upsetting to hear, and the words came through almost garbled. "The son of a bitch is dying, and they're going to court to save him."
How she said what she said shook him almost as much as what she said. "Ma… what?"
"I said, the son of a bitch is dying, and his goddamn lawyers are going to court for medical treatment to save him."
He remembered looking across the tiny courtyard of the building he lived in, seeing the ferny branches and lush purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees which lined the streets of the old residential area, a sea of smoky indigo, rising above asphalt shingle and tile rooftops. He heard, but it took a few moments to sink in. His body ached down to the bones from the past few days of obstacle course prep and the feeling seemed to sink down into that ache, piercing him.
"Ma, do you want me to come home?"
It was the only thing he could think of to say. It came unexpectedly out of his core, where thought did not seem to exist.
It stopped her crying. She took a deep, shuddering breath. "No, Ruby, that's all right. I just wanted you to know."
"Now tell me again."
"He has a brain vessel that's about to burst. It's likely to be fatal. They refused him surgery, so his lawyers are suing. They're going to get a court order and a surgical team is standing by as soon as it goes through. Is there a God in heaven that keeps this man alive when your father is gone?" Her voice rose until it nearly disappeared altogether.
"I'm driving out tonight."
She sighed. Then, "Bring your laundry."
"I can't do that!"
"Hon, I need something to do. Something to keep me from thinking!"
That had been two weeks ago, and it was like when he had first been told his father had died in the line of duty. Everything changed, and nothing would be the same again.
He found himself standing with fists clenched, his jaw so tight the cords on his neck stood out, his temples throbbing with the pressure. John forced himself, bit by bit, to let go, pulling in short, forced breaths. He had not become a cop because of anger. He had done it because of his father's intense pride and belief in the job, instilled in the son as well. If his father had been given a choice to live or die in finding and stopping Dover, he would still have done what he did. John felt that as strongly as he'd felt his grief at the outcome.
Spring heat, hinting at what summer in the basin could be like, washed in from the parking lot, light waves shimmering. His throat had gone cottony. He shoved a hand into his pants pockets, felt a number of quarters lingering in there, and ducked inside the hospital to see if he could find something cold to drink.
The wing entrance lay next to the cafeteria. He could smell coffee on the air and something that held the aroma of meat loaf, and the garishly painted vending machines caught his eye as he tracked down the aromas. He found a relatively unflavored brand of bottled iced tea he liked and plinked his quarters in, grabbed the chilled container and twisted it open, taking nearly half the bottle in the first gulp. Wetness and sweetness flooded his dry mouth and throat in a satisfying tide.