Manning the security desk in the lobby, Ralph watched David speechlessly as he limped in and shoved through the swinging doors into Hallway One. David spotted the UCPD cops before he saw Diane. They looked on edge; clearly, they'd been alerted that Clyde was in the area.
David nodded at them and peered into the crowded CWA. His walk over had opened the wound further, drenching his shirt. Diane handed off an armful of folders, barked a few orders into the phone, and wrote an order against her knee.
The taller of the two officers directed an exasperated expression David's way. 'She's like the Energizer bunny on coke. We're having a tough time keeping up.' He gestured at David's bloody shirt, then inside the CWA. 'You'd better get that looked at.'
Diane wiped a patient from the board with an eraser and tapped the slot below. 'I'll take Van Canton in Four and I need the- ' She froze when she saw David in the doorway.
The room fell silent. The nurses and doctors watched them both.
Diane wore an expression of blind panic.
'I'm all right,' David said. 'It's not a gunshot wound. Just broken stitches.'
She dropped her chart on the ground and crossed the room in four furious strides, embracing him hard around his neck. He held her clumsily with one hand, the other pressed down over his wound. When she came away, her scrub top was stained with his blood.
She flicked her bangs out of her face, the color slowly returning to her cheeks. 'Let's get you to a room,' she said.
The CWA remained silent behind them as she helped David down the hall. The officers followed Diane a few paces behind like obedient puppies. She brought David into Exam Fourteen, Clyde's old room, and sat him on the table.
'He attacked Peter,' David said. 'I managed to get there before he killed him. We fought, but he escaped. He's somewhere in Westwood-the cops are sweeping the area now.'
Diane hugged David's head, burying his face in her chest. 'Enough, okay?' she said. 'Okay?' She drew back and crouched, raising his shirt. She tested the edge of the wound with a finger. 'You need to be restitched.'
David reached down and touched her face. Her wounds were closing over nicely, drying out and resolving themselves into faint scars. He felt himself brimming with emotion and knew it showed in his expression. Diane stood and her face softened, laying the foundation for a smile that had not yet come. Her eyes, cool and emerald, were vulnerable and deadly serious.
'I don't love you,' David said, a smile touching his lips.
It took Diane a moment to find her voice and respond. 'I don't love you either.'
Guiding her face with his hands, he kissed her tenderly on the mouth. She leaned into him, and he inhaled the fragrance of her hair.
A loud knock on the door, then it swung open. Jill leaned into the room. 'We have a thirtyish Caucasian male, GSW to the right shoulder, just hit the ambulance bay.'
From David's embrace, Diane regarded Jill, who raised her eyebrows expectantly.
'Jenkins,' David said. 'Go.'
Diane turned and headed for the door, grabbing a pair of gloves from a nearby cart. 'Don't go anywhere,' she said over her shoulder.
David sat on the examination table fighting the pain, which was proving to be an exhausting job. He removed the wire from his chest, wincing as he pulled off the tape, and dropped it on the floor.
A gurney swept past the open door on its way to the trauma room, a cluster of shouting nurses and doctors surrounding it. Diane was hunched over the front of the gurney, backpedaling, adjusting the placement of the bell of her stethoscope and shouting orders. Through the flurry of bodies, David saw Jenkins's face, drawn and unamused, but fully conscious.
David wondered about himself. His career at UCLA was likely over. He would receive plenty of opportunities to work elsewhere, he was sure of that. The chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai had been pressuring him for years to come run their department. Switching hospitals seemed appealing, but David thought he'd take a few months off first, for the first time in his adult life.
Bronner came in next, walking unevenly but under his own power, pressing a bloody bandage to his hand. A uniformed cop escorted him. They walked past the open door of David's exam room without noticing him. Peter's gurney followed shortly afterward, surrounded by ER staff. Peter was stirring, but still seemed groggy. David couldn't get a good look at his face, but he saw the braces against his bare legs. Peter straightened his leg, and a patch of cloth fell from the metal joint at his ankle to the floor. Hospital blue. A torn piece of Clyde's scrub bottoms.
One of the doctors pulled up, letting Peter's gurney continue up the hall, and turned to face David through the doorway. He wore a white coat, outdated eyeglasses, and a Zantac pocket protector. His peppery black hair, collected in tufts, was matted down around his skull. The mousy, red-rimmed eyes were magnified through his thick lenses, and David was stunned to realize that he was looking at Ed's latest persona.
Ed's tongue shot out from his mouth, small and pointy, and moistened his lips. He blinked a few times in rapid succession, a perfect imitation of a facial tick, then flipped something up like a coin and caught it. The digital transmitter from Peter's brace. Ed raised two fingers and tapped them to his forehead in a salute. Before David could react, he turned and vanished.
David leaned back on the exam table and focused on breathing evenly. He found the jarring sounds of the ER oddly soothing-gurney wheels on tile, scalpels clinking on trays, monitors beeping as they traced hills and valleys.
An orderly left a covered body on a gurney across the hall from David's room, and shouted into the CWA, 'Someone call morgue for a pickup!' before disappearing back down the hall.
David stared at the dark, lumpy body bag. The cadaver inside was obese and tall, like Clyde. The pain in David's side flared when his feet hit the floor. He shuffled to the gurney and leaned over it, taking a deep breath before unzipping the bag.
The face of an elderly black man peered out at him. David let his breath out in a rush. Though the cadaver was fresh, a bitter, medicinal smell wafted from the fabric of the body bag. Just like the odor he'd noticed emanating from Clyde in Peter's office. He bent over slowly, though it pained him, and picked up the swatch of fabric from Clyde's scrubs. He pressed it to his nose, and inhaled.
The stench of formalin.
At once, David knew with the same gut assurance that came when he pulled a cluster of symptoms together and produced a diagnosis. He trudged slowly down the hall, past the frenzied trauma room, back into the heart of the hospital.
'Hey, Dr. Spier,' a lab tech called out. 'Get back to the room. Someone'll stitch you up in a sec.'
David kept walking, drawing looks from patients and other physicians. Blood dribbled from his wound, leaving a vivid red drop every five or so feet-his spool of thread through the labyrinth. He headed down the quieter halls of the hospital.
Punching a four-digit code into the Omnilock, he stepped through the door into the back corridor. He walked slowly to the freight elevators used for hauling dead bodies up to the crypt. The elevator whirred and creaked on its way up, the bright light overhead assaulting his senses.
It halted with a definitive thud on the seventh floor, and the doors spread. David stepped out into the unlit corridor and walked to the anatomy lab. Another door, another four-digit code. The dissecting-table doors that closed up over the cadavers were all laid open, the units resembling hatched pods. The tables were bare and scrubbed clean. David noticed a ball of wadded cheesecloth at the head of one of the tables. Clyde had used it as a pillow these last days; he'd slept on the dissecting table like a vampire in a coffin. Beside the table was a mound of food that looked to be scavenged from trash cans-sandwich rinds, skins of oranges, bent yogurt cups. Next to that, a scattering of scalpels, scissors, and beakers. And, of course, a container of liquid DrainEze.
The light in the prep room was also off. David stepped through, approaching the mighty wooden door of the crypt. The door clicked loudly when he tugged the handle, then he was standing in the flood of light from the interior, the strong odor of formalin gusting around him. Row upon row of bodies hung from their heads, swaying ever so slightly on creaking chains and forcipiform clamps. Propped against the far wall, at the terminating point of a messy band of blood, was Clyde. A handcuff encircled one hand; the other was pressed to the gunshot wound in
