Code White Part 19

"O-o-h-kay."

She injected a couple of cc's of morphine into his IV for the headache, and then ordered Ginnie to increase the Ativan to keep him well sedated. All in all, this was a good sign, she tried to convince herself. Perhaps the seizure medicine was working after all. If Jamie continued to improve, there would be no need to reoperate, and the SIPNI device could be given a chance to work.

If only it could be that easy.

When Ali had finished writing the medication order into Jamie's progress chart, she looked up from the nurses' desk and was astonished to see Harry Lewton standing over her.

"You again!" she said, flaring her nostrils. "What is it now? Another interrogation? Or am I to be arrested?"

Harry smiled. "Dr. O'Day, we've gotten off on the wrong footing. I'd like to start over again. Have you had lunch?"

Lunch? Was he kidding? He was the last person in the world she would have wanted to have lunch with. Ali snapped the binder shut and shoved it into the chart rack. "I don't remember. I often don't eat lunch. There isn't time."

"Please, let me buy you a sandwich down at Eat Street. Call it a peace offering. We can eat and talk. There are some things we need to discuss. But I'd rather not do it in my office."

"So this is an official request?"

"Not official. But ... pertinent, let's say."

"Pertinent?" She gave him a scornful look. "I don't even know what you mean by that, Mr. Lewton."

Harry said nothing, but kept on looking at her with those bright, gentle eyes of his that went so poorly with the rest of his heavy-jawed, broken-nosed, pock-marked face. Half of Ali wanted to make a quick getaway. The other half of her was already in his pocket. I should at least find out what he wants, she reasoned. If he has suspicions, I would be better off knowing what they are.

Across the room, Jamie's monitor showed all vital signs normal. "All right, consider me your unofficial detainee for the next half hour." She got up to leave, but then stopped. "Wait! One thing before we go," she said.

Ali opened the bottom drawer of the desk behind the nursing station and took out an oddly-shaped object wrapped in silver paper. "On Your Special Day!" was printed all over it in red letters, enclosed by decals of white and blue balloons. Inside was a kid's-sized baseball glove she had bought as a gift for Jamie. It had been autographed by his favorite baseball player, a young center fielder named Chick Suarez, whom Ali had cornered for that purpose at a fundraiser for Lou Gehrig's disease at the Palmer House. The "special day," of course, was to have been the day SIPNI started working. But now SIPNI didn't seem so important. Jamie's very life was at stake. Ali felt an urgent need to give the glove to Jamie, in his darkest hour, as though it were a talisman that could lend him strength.

She tore off the wrapper and went to Jamie's bedside. With Harry looking on, she placed the golden-tan glove on Jamie's left hand, guiding his tiny limp fingers into the slots. As she did so, she read aloud the short line Chick Suarez had written on the back, just above the wrist strap. "Swing for the fences, kid!" it said.

"Swing, Jamie," she whispered again, her eyes wet with tears. Then she bent over and kissed him on the forehead.

Eat Street was a soup and sandwich shop just off the main lobby, part of a local chain that catered equally to the sleek and slim and to convalescents. The lunch rush was already over. Ali selected a Diet c.o.ke and a mandarin sesame chicken salad from off the refrigerator shelf, while Harry ordered a roast beef sandwich with Caesar dressing from the sandwich bar. After Harry paid, they moved to a small wrought-iron table in the back. It was the best place for a quiet talk.

Ali watched Harry bite a chunk out of his sandwich and chase it with a swig of coffee. He spoke with food still in his mouth. "So how is your patient making out-that blind kid?"

Ali understood the way Harry ate. She herself squirted a packet of dressing on her salad, and attacked it with the same ferocity as Harry. Both of them were used to speed lunches-lunches that could be interrupted at any moment by an urgent page.

"Not as well as we had hoped. That's why I need to get back to him as soon as I can."

"I understand."

Ali waited to see if Harry would say more. She was annoyed when he simply went on eating. "So what is this 'pertinent thing' you wanted to discuss?"

"Straight down to business, huh?"

"I don't have time for chitchat. Besides Jamie Winslow, I have six patients to round on in the neuro ward, and an article to proof for Nature Medicine, due tomorrow. Plus, if there's a subarachnoid hemorrhage or a trauma case, I could get called in without warning-America Today or no America Today."

"Sorry."

"For what? It's my life and I like it."

"Right. Of course. Dedication. The needs of the sick and the dying."

"Are you patronizing me?"

"No. I admire you-you and all those like you. I just can't quite figure what you get out of it. I mean, I know why I took to the security business. I like to be in control. In my office I have a status board with a hundred green lights shining on it. I'm not a happy man unless I see every last one of those little green lights. If a red one turns up, it gets personal. My wits, my reflexes, my training, I'll throw it all against anything that dares to challenge my control. And when I come out on top, when that little light turns green again, I feel like the world's got some meaning, at least for a little while."

"What if you don't come out on top?"

Harry smiled sheepishly. "Let's not go there," he said, rubbing his forehead with his thumb. "So, tell me, why medicine?"

"Well, a doctor is ... I can only speak for myself. I'm fascinated by the science of it. To study medicine is to study the nature of mankind-my own nature, if you will. If death and suffering are the ultimate questions we all have to face, then medicine is where we face them most lucidly."

She had given him her official answer, the same answer she had given Kathleen Brown and the Department of Neurosurgery and the admissions committee of McGill Medical School and everyone else who had ever asked her why she had wanted to become a doctor. She did not tell him about the little girl Aliyah, who had watched her distant and G.o.dlike father light up with compa.s.sion whenever he saw his patients in the little office beneath their apartment on Steinway Street. In medicine, she discovered, there was no place for condemnation or refusal. All who knocked were admitted. It was wonderful to her that there was a place in the world where nothing mattered except to help those who were anxious and sick. She loved her father's patients. Sitting on the concrete stoop, she would greet each one by name as they came up huffing and puffing, one stair at a time. The pale cloud of mortality around them would break for a moment as they smiled back at her, or thanked her for holding the door. "You are your father's daughter," they would say. "You have his warm hands and clever eyes. How G.o.d has blessed him with a daughter like you!"

Aliyah knew little of science then. She cared nothing for the mysticism of the little amber bottles with long Latin labels. Not even the stethoscope charmed her, as it had fascinated the other children in the apartment building. She knew only that she had discovered something bright and wonderful, a place where wisdom and kindness were the only things that mattered, a sanctuary from the frightening and implacable world around her. And even in those days-even with the sheltered mind of a seven-year-old-she knew that she must never, ever stray beyond its bounds.

"Your father was a doctor, right?" said Harry, jarring her train of thought. "That must have made it a natural choice for you."

"Yes," she said absent-mindedly. But when she had re-thought Harry's question in hindsight, a flash of bitterness shone through her eyes. "No. No, that's not true," she said, her voice hardening. "My becoming a doctor was an act of rebellion. My father had other hopes for me."

How was young Aliyah to understand that what she prized most in her father-his life of compa.s.sion for the hurting and the weak-was off-limits to her? G.o.d requires meekness and devotion from you, she was told. It is unseemly for a woman to look upon the nakedness of strangers. Medicine is a dirty business, and woman was made for purity. But Aliyah would not listen. She had found her sanctuary, and she would not give it up. She fasted until she grew thin, until her father worried for her life and agreed at last to pay her way through medical school. In return, she consented to marry the one to whom she had been promised. Her father exacted a solemn vow on that score. But when her training was done, it was too late. She had found strength in self-reliance. She renounced her vow. She bore her father's rage for doing so. Although the pain in his eyes haunted her for a thousand nights, she could not give in. What was once her sanctuary had become her way of life.

Again, the voice of Harry Lewton broke into her reflection. "Do you mind if I call you Ali?" he said through his mouthful of meat. "Dr. O'Day feels a bit old school."

"I don't care what you call me, as long as you come to the point."

"Very well." Harry put down his sandwich and suddenly adopted a serious tone. "It's about your brother."

"Rahman? I'm not going to talk about him."

"He's here in the hospital."

"What?" She set down her plastic fork and stared at Harry with a half-open mouth.

"He's been arrested. He's being held in an isolation room just over there, in the ER"

Ali's hand moved over her throat, as if shielding herself. "So it's true?"

"Yes, he's admitted to being mixed up with the bomb."

"Then what do you want from me?"

"To warn you, first of all. You see, the way they found him was through tracing phone calls made by you. At least three of them during the past year."

"My phone calls?" She looked at him incredulously.

Harry nodded.

"How did you ... I ... I..." It was as though he had just told her that her apartment had been robbed. "That's absurd. I've never called him. I told you, I haven't spoken to him in years." Her words were forcefully chosen, but there was a pleading quality in her voice that betrayed a hint of panic.

"Well, your phone records say otherwise."

"Then the records lie."

"Do you know how unconvincing that sounds? Is that all you have to say?"

"Yes," she snapped.

"Look, I'm trying to help you. You've got to understand how bad this looks. They've already obtained Federal search warrants against you-that's how they got the phone records. Your movements around the hospital are being observed. The only reason they haven't detained you is because they're hoping you'll lead them to-"

"Warrants?" Ali spiked her fork into her salad, leaving it sticking up in the air like a harpoon. "Go ahead! Observe this!" she exclaimed as she brusquely stood up, knocking her chair with the back of her legs. "You people think you can ride roughshod over anyone's privacy, like a national gang of peeping Toms. Well, I'll not stand for it. My personal life and my movements are none of your business. To h.e.l.l with you, Mr. Lewton!"

Harry reached for her wrist, but her fiery look stopped him short of actually touching her.

"Please sit back down," Harry said in a low voice. "That's the FBI, not me. Give me five minutes. Please, I want to help."

Although she had gotten up to leave, she had not taken the critical first step. She scrutinized Harry's face, trying to figure out what his motives were. Why should he help her? He didn't even know her. But his eyes and mouth showed none of the condescension she had met in Lee and Avery. His look was earnest, nonjudgmental, even a little bit worried.

"If this is a trick-" she said as she eased back into the chair.

"No trick. Everything I've said is true."

"How do you expect me to trust you after the way you people worked me over me in your office? The next time you try that, I'm bringing a lawyer."

"That's why I wanted to talk to you here. To do things a different way."

"Threatening me isn't much of an improvement."

"I didn't mean it to sound like ... I, uh ... Look, I know it's not fair to push you like this, without-" He broke off and looked away from her, out the window, where a throng of parking valets and patients bustled about the main entrance, with a chaotic but invisibly purposeful energy, like ants at the mouth of an anthill. "Okay. You know what?" he said, turning back to her. "Let me earn your trust. I'll give mine to you first. Listen a minute and I'll tell you something about myself, something that hardly anyone knows around here. Something that could make my life difficult if it did get around. And then I'll leave you free to do what you want with it."

"You don't have to do that," she said.

Harry looked at her from under the shadow of his tanned and lightly creased brow. He waited until she had taken a sip from her c.o.ke before going on. "In what seems like a lifetime ago," he said, "I used to be a cop. I was a good cop, good with people. After a B.A. from Baylor and a stint at Police Academy, I got my first job in a place called Nacogdoches, Texas. In a small town like that, where most of the officers don't have full college degrees, you can rise up in the ranks pretty quick. Before I knew it, I was a lieutenant, head of the Tactical Unit, next thing to the chief of police himself. It was a pretty cushy setup. My wife worked for Parks and Recreation, and we bought us a neat little brick ranch house not far from the center of town. Most folks knew me on sight, and I was welcome everywhere.

"Nacogdoches does not have a heavy home-grown crime element. There's some rowdy college kids on Friday nights, and a little bit of car theft. But we did have a problem with outsiders-drug traffickers who wanted to make us a kind of clearing house for c.o.ke and weed on its way North. For about six months, we had a mini-war going on, culminating in something like the O.K. Corral, with one of the biggest drug busts ever in East Texas. A lot of it was my doing. When it was over, my feet scarcely touched the ground in that town. In the newspapers I was the second coming of Wyatt Earp. Big-city departments all over the country were calling me with offers. Didn't seem like anything could ever go wrong."

"Very impressive," said Ali sarcastically as she put down her c.o.ke can and prepared to get up. "Thank you for your confession. Nothing knocks me over like big boys waving their guns."

"Hold on a minute," said Harry. "I haven't gotten to the point. You see, things did go wrong, and when they did, it all came down in a second." Harry paused until he was sure that he had her attention. "There was this guy, an out-of-work motorcycle mechanic, whose wife had left him and taken away their two kids, a boy and a girl, ages four and six, brown hair and deep blue eyes, as cute as you please. This man had a partiality to drink, and in what is unfortunately not an uncommon scenario, he fired himself up with bourbon one night and decided to reunite his family with a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. He wound up shooting and killing his ex and his father-in-law, then taking the kids and barricading himself in a grimy white bungalow on the edge of town. Police cars from miles around encircled the house. I had my Tactical Unit out in force. For a couple of hours there was a standoff, with us shining our spotlights on the house, and him every so often taking a pot-shot at us and cussing at us through a broken window. My plan was to give him time to let off steam until he got sober and gave up. Usually when the sun comes up, a lot of sorry feelings will come up with it. Until then, all we really had to do was watch out for the kids. But his ex's family had lived in the town since before Sam Houston's day, and pretty soon there was a real crowd growing behind our backs, and they were turning up the heat to get something done."

Ali held her c.o.ke can lightly, but had stopped drinking from it.

"Around two in the morning, some fool from the county sheriff's department lost his cool and shot a tear-gas canister through the window, hoping to flush the guy out. You never do that when there's kids on the scene, but, like I said, the heat was on, and it happened. Against direct orders. The house caught fire. In five minutes, there was not tear gas but thick black smoke pouring from every opening. It was a cheap clapboard house, a pile of old dry timber just waiting to burn. Still, the guy did not come out. We called the fire department. Just as we heard the truck's sirens in the distance, three shots rang out from inside the house."

Harry looked back out the window for a moment, back toward the scores of pa.s.sers by who had never heard of Nacogdoches, Texas.

"You get training for situations like that," he went on, "but there's no training that prepares you for the sight of those churning black clouds of smoke and the heat of the fire that you can feel from all the way across the street. Everyone was paralyzed. Everyone but me, Wyatt Earp. I kicked open the back door and charged into the house, gun drawn. Everything was blinding white from flames that covered the back wall. I had to pull my jacket over my nose just to breathe. In a few seconds I found the guy. He was sprawled out on the floor of the front room, that long-necked gun beside him, his head in a pool of blood.

"I looked for the kids. I found 'em in the bathroom in the middle of the house, dressed in their jammies, with a Spider-Man doll and a stuffed bear beside 'em. They were dead. Their dad had shot 'em point-blank, each with a single .44 slug to the head. There was no doubt. I have gone over that scene a million times in my mind-and in my nightmares-and there is absolutely no doubt that they were ... dead. A six-year-old girl cannot have a hole the size of a grapefruit in the back of her skull and still be alive. A boy ... a boy cannot have pieces of brain sticking to the wall, and ... and still be alive...."

Harry's voice trailed off. As he looked into his cup of coffee, Ali wondered whether he was glimpsing a reflection of ghosts from the past. Abruptly, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the cup and took a big gulp from it. "I'm sorry to regale you with the nasty details," he said. "But the point ... the point is that what I saw, with my own two eyes, is that those two kids were dead. They were as surely dead as anyone will ever be."

"Of course," said Ali.

"I was wrong about one thing. While I was still feeling for pulses in the bathroom, I heard a moan from out front, and I realized that the perp, the guy himself, was still alive. He had shot himself at an angle, a common mistake in suicides, and, what with the recoil and all, the bullet had cracked his skull and knocked him out, but he was still very much alive and breathing."

Harry took a deep breath, as if tallying up a score. "So here's what I had. The house was about to come down around me. I was standing there choking to death, with my eyes burning from all the heat and smoke. There were two kids past earthly help. And there was this guy, a f.u.c.king mean son of a b.i.t.c.h who had done something too horrible to imagine, and who had already expressed his desire to not go on living in this world. All that was beyond dispute. Having seen the mess he had made, I knew this better than anyone else ever could. And yet, he was alive. That ... that is the point. The kids were dead. He was alive. I had exactly one chance to make it out, and when I did I came dragging that son of a b.i.t.c.h with me.

"And that was when my life changed. There were no hurrahs that greeted me as I came out of that house. In the blink of an eye, Wyatt Earp had turned into John Wilkes Booth-a guy who had traded the lives of two sweet kids for a louse who had no future ahead of him except death row. Although the coroner's report backed me up, people standing in the crowd swore they had heard the screams of the kids in the roar of the fire. Rumors flew. It was said that I had chickened out when I saw the flames around those screaming kids, and took the quickest way out of the house to save myself. It was said that I had charged the place in a drunken stupor, and barely staggered out alive. It was even said that the perp had been an old drinking buddy of mine, and that my real intention had been to help him escape out the back way.

"The newspapers made a pinata out of me. My fellow cops didn't want to be seen with me. People who used to tip their hats would now spit as I walked by them. Even my wife started treating me like a stranger. I don't blame her for that so much-she worked for the City, where a lot of the dead woman's relatives had jobs, and sooner or later she had to cut loose from me if she wanted to go on showing her face around town.

"I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did. I didn't make it easy for her. I got pretty sour on people. I hung out all night in bars. I didn't use to drink, but I did then for a while. And every time I had a bad dream or smelled a whiff of smoke, I saw those two dead kids in front or me, and I would fly off into a crazy cussing fit like you wouldn't believe.

"The drinking made it easy for everyone. The City let me go-didn't fire me, exactly, just said I wasn't welcome anymore. So I packed up, minus a wife, and moved to Houston, where I got a job as a beat cop, which lasted until the newspapers there dug me up and decided to make another story out of me on a slow Sunday. After that I gave up police work for good. I had a chunk of money from our house after the divorce, and that paid my way through an M.B.A. in Security Management. I live the quiet life now, comparatively speaking.

"The funny thing is, if I had to go back into that burning house a thousand times over, I would never change a thing. I was a public safety officer, not a judge or an executioner. I'm glad I acted like a man and didn't let my thinking get screwed up by my hate for the shooter. If the world doesn't understand that or can't accept it, well, f.u.c.k the world."

Ali was at a loss for words. She had misjudged Harry Lewton. Behind his craggy prizefighter's face there was a man who thought deeply, felt profoundly, and who had the strength to meet tragedy head-on, not dismiss it like Helvelius or howl against it like Kevin. "I'm sorry," she said at last. "Most people live by their feelings. Professionals have to act on hard logic. Doctors, too. We have rules for this kind of situation, the rules of triage. You save whomever you can save. That's it. It's not your job to make moral judgments."

"I wish I had met you in Nacogdoches."

"You still haven't said what you want from me."

"I want you to talk to Rahman."

Ali jerked back in her chair as though she had received an electric shock. "No, I won't do that."

"Nothing official. No tape recorders, no FBI. Just you, your brother, and me."

"I'm sorry. No."

"It's important. We haven't gotten zip from him about the bomb. Time is slipping through our fingers and we need a break desperately."

"I can't. I would if I could, but I can't. I couldn't bear to be in the room with him." She felt her heart beating against her ribs. It was hard to control her breathing.

"I'll be there."

"You don't understand. Rahman won't say anything about the bomb to me. It would be useless."

"He doesn't have to say anything. You can learn just as much sometimes from what a perp doesn't say."

"No! Please don't ask again." She gripped the edge of the table as a wave of nausea pa.s.sed over her.

"There's bad blood between you two, isn't there?" he said, trying to ease back.