Blood Double

by Neil Mcmahon

  “A past life,” Monks said. It was almost literally true.

  She lowered her gaze. “I guess I should see—the patient—now.”

  Monks led her to the cubicle where John Smith waited. When she stepped inside, John’s face turned sheepish, the expression of a boy who had been caught doing mischief. She shook her head in dismay, then sat beside him on the bed and smoothed his hair back, a maternal movement that suggested long-standing intimacy. Monks left.

  A few minutes later, Ronald Tygard came out of the cubicle and walked to the main desk. Monks was already there, busily writing.

  Tygard said to Leah Horvitz, “What do we owe you?”

  Monks’s hand paused and Leah looked up in surprise. This did not happen often.

  “The bill won’t be ready for a couple of days,” she said.

  “You must have a ballpark,” Tygard said impatiently. He pulled a wallet from his inside coat pocket. “Five thousand? Ten?”

  “Oh, I don’t think nearly that.” She looked to Monks for confirmation.

  “Maybe two,” Monks said. “Maybe less.”

  Tygard stripped three bills off a sheaf, as if he were dealing cards, and dropped them on the counter. They were thousands.

  “We can’t accept this,” Leah said, flustered.

  “It’s legal tender, miss.” Tygard was on top again, the high roller, obviously enjoying it.

  “We’ll put it in the safe,” Monks said. “When you get the bill, send someone around to pick up the change.”

  “You can keep it.”

  This time, Monks let it pass. “I need to talk to you and your associates for a minute,” he said. “You’d probably prefer it in private.”

  John Smith was sitting on the edge of the bed when Monks reentered the cubicle. He looked inquiringly at Martine Rostanov.

  “Breathing and pulse are good,” she said. “He says he feels all right.”

  “Go ahead and stand up,” Monks said.

  John rose to his feet, with her steadying him. He lowered his head briefly, dizzy, but then recovered.

  “You going to be able to walk, or you want a wheelchair?” Monks said.

  “I can walk.”

  “Okay,” Monks said. “Listen up, please. I need to make it very clear that you’re leaving this hospital against my medical advice. I’m only allowing it because I’m releasing you into the care of your personal physician. You still have narcotics in your system. There’s the possibility of another overdose and even death for the next hours. Do you understand that?”

  John nodded perfunctorily. He seemed to be regaining his haughtiness again, perhaps absorbing it from Tygard.

  “Then, if you’ll sign this, it’s all written out here,” Monks said. He handed John a release form with his admonitions scribbled on. “Mr. Tygard, since John doesn’t have any identification and you’re representing him legally, I’d like you to cosign.”

  “The bill is paid,” Tygard said. “There’s no need for any of this.”

  “Liability, Mr. Tygard, liability. I’ll get another witness if you object.”

  Tygard took the clipboard and scrawled contemptuously across it.

  “You too, Dr. Rostanov,” Monks said. “And I’ll need to make copies of your driver’s license and California medical license.”

  Her eyes cooled. Monks had expected it, but it still hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you would too.”

  Silently, she handed him the licenses.

  Monks said, “Good luck, John. I’ve given you my professional advice. Now I’ll add some that’s unprofessional. Be more careful about what you put in your arm. You probably got hold of something purer than what you’re used to. That’s how an overdose like this usually happens.”

  John’s face took on an odd look, quizzical, uncertain. Monks got a little grim satisfaction from the thought that his words had registered.

  The group left quickly, with Tygard and Martine Rostanov close beside John Smith, holding his arms to support him—or to shield him from other eyes. No one else seemed to be paying attention. It occurred to Monks that most of the ER staff had been aware of a wealthy thrill seeker and his arrogant lawyer, but only he and Stephanie had gotten good looks at John Smith’s face.

  Monks stepped to a window that looked into the parking lot. The two bodyguards met the group at the outer door and flanked them to a waiting vehicle, a black 600-series Mercedes with smoked windows. Tygard opened a rear door for John Smith to get in. Monks caught a glimpse of another man waiting in the backseat. He was perhaps fifty, handsome, hair just graying at the tips. Dr. Rostanov leaned in to talk with him. The exchange lasted perhaps a minute.

  Then the graying man’s hand came to rest on her wrist. It was a gesture that could have been consoling or grateful. But something about it—an excessive firmness, the sense that it pinned her to the car—suggested ownership.

  The graying man released her. She moved back, and the Mercedes drove off.

  Another car pulled up immediately, a silvery, new-model Volvo. Andrew, the bodyguard, jumped out and held the door open like a valet. She got in, alone, helping her left leg with her hand.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she. Dr. Rostanov, I mean.”

  Monks turned quickly to find Stephanie beside him, watching the Volvo drive away. She wore an expression he had never quite seen before: admiration, tinged with longing.

  “I don’t mean pretty,” Stef said. “Strong. Smart. It really hit me. Think of what it must be like for her, being in with those people.”

  “I’m sure it has its pros and cons,” Monks said.

  “What cons?”

  He looked at her again, realizing how little he knew about the adult that his bright, idealistic child—straight-A and straight-arrow student—was becoming. He realized too that this experience was arguably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her—even if only in her imagination.

  “Suppose that was Lex Rittenour,” Monks said. “And you were Dr. Rostanov. Think you’d be criticizing his billion-dollar brainchild?”

  “I’d have told him what I thought, yes.”

  “In that case,” Monks said, “I seriously doubt you’d still be with him.”

  Her mouth moved in a quick little pout, an expression he was much more familiar with. It meant that she knew he was right, but was damned if she was going to admit it.

  He put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulders. “I’ll be packing up pretty quick. You should too.”

  “To what, an empty bed and a hot water bottle?”

  She stalked away, leaving him taken aback. The night was deepening the lesson that his daughter was a human being, with her own life, perhaps even desires.

  Monks walked back into the ER and took up his position on the bridge. His watch read 8:38 P.M. He would be done at ten, the last leg of a three-shift stint, with the payoff of six days of freedom. He tried to refocus on a briefing for his relief. It was harder than usual.

  He recalled the brief vignette he had glimpsed earlier, of the Asian woman who had arrived with John Smith, talking heatedly with Mrs. Hak. Monks walked to the admissions desk where Mrs. Hak was working. She was small-boned, attractive, and looked forty. But Monks had heard that in fact, she had been a child during the Korean War. She certainly remembered the hellish winter of 1950–1951, when most Koreans starved and many froze, with U.S. troops faring not much better, in the fighting that savaged them everywhere. He had never seen her look surprised.

  He said, “I saw you talking to the lady who brought that patient in. I wondered if she left a name. In case something comes up.”

  Mrs. Hak shook her head. She spoke clear if choppy English that sometimes took a little deciphering, but she understood everything that was said to her.

  “From Korea,” she said. “Scared of trouble. No names.”

  “Did she say what happened?”

  “Find him on sidewalk.”

  “They were just passing by?”r />
  “Taxi driver.”

  A taxi driver who had obviously had some degree of emergency medical training. “He knew CPR,” Monks said.

  “Maybe solja first.”

  Monks remembered the man’s parachute-type roll. Monks had not had personal contact with troops of the Republic of Korea in Vietnam, but they had been legendary. To the enemy—anyone or anything labeled Communist—they were a nightmare. In the early 1970s, while serving in the navy, he had passed through Seoul, where the downtown streets were strung with banners warning against spies from the north. Martial law and 10:00 P.M. curfew prevailed, with uniformed soldiers patrolling the streets, eager for the sport of beating or even shooting student offenders. Caution was an essential survival skill in Korea, and it was entirely possible that this pair were illegal immigrants, to boot.

  “Okay. Thanks, Mrs. Hak.” Monks turned to go.

  “Docta? What you think might come up?” She watched him with her neutral gaze.

  “Nothing, really,” Monks admitted.

  There was no reason anything should.

  3

  Monks had hardly started reviewing his next chart when lights began flashing on the ER’s walls. He knew it was only a fire alarm, but for the first instant, the bright strobelike bursts brought a memory of the far-off trails of tracers. Immediately, a muffled bell started sounding in a 2–3–2 pattern.

  Leah Horvitz stood, supervising while the other nurses hurried around closing doors. Monks listened for the PA message that would announce the fire’s location. These alarms were almost always drills; even if it was real, it would not affect the ER unless it was very close.

  “Dr. Red is on One-North,” the PA said, the message, like the alarm, coded to prevent patient panic. Monks stopped paying attention. One-North was at the other end of the building, near medical records and the pathology lab.

  But then he heard another sound, faint and faraway, one he probably would not have picked up, except that he had spent a lifetime listening for it:

  Sirens.

  City fire inspectors sometimes supervised the drills, but emergency vehicles would not come out for one.

  Monks walked into the waiting room. The fifteen or so people there watched him anxiously; they could hear the sirens too, and see the flashing lights coming fast.

  “Don’t be scared,” Monks said loudly. “There’s a minor incident at the other end of the hospital.” A few people moved closer to the door anyway, obviously unimpressed by his reassurances. Down by One-North, two trucks pulled up, with city firemen unloading equipment on the run. Monks went back into the ER, moving faster.

  “This might be for real,” he told Leah. “Cover the room a minute, I’ll go take a look.” If patient evacuation did become necessary, it would be a good thing to have a jump on it.

  Monks turned a corner and met Stephanie, hurrying toward the ER, looking breathless.

  “You were supposed to go home,” he said.

  “I went to see what was happening,” she panted, grabbing his lapel and turning back. “Come on, there’s something weird.”

  Monks trotted alongside her. Strobe lights were flashing all down the hall, and he began to smell the acrid reek of smoke.

  “Weird?” he said.

  “I saw two firemen go into the lab,” she said. “They were apart from the others.”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “It’s not where the fire is.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s in a conference room, down by Records,” she said impatiently. “I saw them spraying it.”

  The hallway outside the lab was empty. Farther along, around another corner, Monks could hear a sizable commotion, raised voices, and the sounds of heavy-booted feet.

  “In there,” Stephanie said, needlessly whispering, pointing at the lab’s closed doors. “I heard one of them say, ‘This is it.’ They, like, trotted in and closed the doors behind them.”

  Monks went to the double metal doors and felt them with his palms. They were cool. He knocked, then tried the handles. The doors were locked. It was not something that happened automatically. There was another exit from the lab, but it struck him as very odd that firemen would seal off any potential escape route.

  He knocked again, louder, pounding. “Are you all right in there?” he called. “What’s going on?”

  After half a minute, there was no response. He walked down the hall and turned the corner toward Records, Stephanie hurrying along with him.

  Several firemen in full gear were standing watchfully outside the door of a conference room, holding extinguishers, with a heavy hose snaked across the floor. Smoke hung in the doorway. What he could see inside the room was wet from sprinklers, and globs of extinguisher foam clung to surfaces.

  “Two of your men went into a laboratory,” Monks said to the group. “The door’s locked. I think you’d better check it out.”

  One of them stepped forward and raised his mask, revealing an earnest face with a walrus mustache. It looked puzzled.

  “My men are all here, sir,” he said. He turned to his crew and demanded, “Any of you go into a lab?” There was a general shaking of heads.

  “Can you describe them?” Monks asked Stephanie.

  “They looked the same as these guys,” she said defensively: covered from head to foot in helmets, heavy rubberized slickers, gloves, and boots.

  “Let’s go take a look,” their chief said. “Anybody got a key?”

  Other hospital personnel were gathered at a distance, evacuated or drawn there to see what was going on. A couple of the hospital’s security personnel were there too, including the night chief, Joaquin Gutierrez. Monks had gotten to know him fairly well over the years; the ER did a lot of business with Security, especially after dark.

  Monks beckoned to him. Joaquin approached with a sort of waddle; he was not a fat man, but had a barrel-like torso that bottomed into stubby legs and almost no hips. He wore a perpetually woeful expression.

  “We need to open up the lab,” Monks said.

  Joaquin searched the ring of a couple dozen keys that hung from his belt. “Looks like a coffeemaker,” he told Monks quietly as they walked. “The plastic housing melted, like it shorted. Caught some paper napkins on fire, they caught the drapes.” Joaquin shook his head. “I don’t know. Lot of coincidence.”

  The implication touched Monks with queasiness—there might be an arsonist in the hospital.

  Joaquin singled out a key, unlocked the lab doors, and pulled them open.

  Monks stared in disbelief. The room’s far end looked like it had exploded. The stainless-steel storage refrigerator doors were gaping open; racks of blood were strewn across the floor, many smashed, pooling into a gory swamp glittering with broken glass. The whole mess was covered with extinguisher foam.

  “Jesus,” the fire chief said. He wheeled to the men who had come with him. “Whoever did this better have a damn good explanation.”

  But nobody did. There was another round of head-shaking, and steadfast denials from the firefighters that any of them had even entered the lab.

  Within a couple of minutes, janitors wearing barrier gear against possible contagions arrived to clean up the blood. The fire chief was talking to lab personnel, assuring them the city would cooperate if they wanted an investigation.

  “There’s nothing we can do here,” Monks said to Stephanie. “Let’s get back.”

  “You think it was an accident?” she said.

  “What else?” The obvious scenario was that two of firefighters—overzealous, pumped up on adrenaline—had attacked the wrong area, and were understandably trying to cover for it.

  She shrugged. “It’s still weird.”

  “You watch too much TV,” Monks said.

  It got weirder a few minutes later. Joaquin Gutierrez reappeared, coming to the ER doorway and motioning Monks into the hall. He looked even more unhappy than before.

  “You mind coming back down, Doc? Seems lik
e most of what they smashed was from the ER. Like it was deliberate.”

  Monks was startled. “Really.”

  “Yeah. They stole some stuff too.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Blood.”

  Monks was more startled. He walked with Joaquin to the lab.

  The senior lab tech on duty—a spectacled, owlish man named Ollie Burstall—had started taking inventory.

  “As if this wasn’t bad enough,” Ollie fumed, flailing his hand toward the violated storage refrigerators. “They took blood samples off our desks. Oafs are one thing. Ghouls are another. What are we going to find in the broom closets, cattle mutilations?”

  “You’re sure that most of what’s missing is from the ER?” Monks said.

  “That’s what tipped me off,” Ollie said emphatically. “I was about to recheck one with a high differential count when the fire started. When I came back, it was gone. I started looking at the rest, and that’s the common denominator.” His finger tapped Monks’s chest. “You people.”

  This implied a number of things. That whoever had done it was familiar enough with hospital procedure to know the various places where the samples were likely to have been stored. That it was, in fact, intentional. And that the intent was something specific, although Monks had not a clue what. It occurred to him that the two firemen Stephanie had seen might have been phonies; might even have set the fire in the conference room as cover.

  But that was a hell of a lot of trouble to go to, to destroy some blood samples. If the object was theft, what could be done with several test-tubes? The blood was useless for a transfusion or anything of that sort: all of different types, and it could easily have contained a spectrum of diseases, possibly including HIV, hepatitis B and C, or other virulent agents. Monks had known of all kinds of items stolen from hospitals—money, equipment, supplies, and, of course, drugs—but this was nonsensical.