“You got it,” Wanda promised. “See you in twenty minutes.”
Lukas replaced the receiver just as Lydia turned around, flipping her cell phone closed. Her cheeks were flushed and there was excitement in her eyes. It was different than the kind he’d witnessed last night.
“Good news?” he guessed.
She nodded, tucking the cell phone into her pocket. “I’ve got to run. My partner thinks we might have a lead on one of the other bombers.” She nodded at his pager. “What about you?”
He began to button his shirt. “Somebody came into the E.R. asking for me.”
She dragged her eyes away from his chest. The open shirt had been a definite distraction. “A patient?”
Without a name to go by, Lukas couldn’t speak for his past association with the man. “In all likelihood, he will be.” He could postpone his shower until later, he decided, once he met with the mystery patient. If things got too hectic and he didn’t have a chance to get back, he could always use the facilities at the hospital. “Can I give you anything to go?”
Yes, an encore of last night. The response leaped into her mind out of nowhere. Lydia felt her cheeks growing warm a moment before she blocked out the feeling. She didn’t know if he’d seen the telltale color.
Lydia tried to distract him. “You have any of those quickie pastries you pop into a toaster? You know the kind I mean, sugar, fat and tinfoil.”
“You just named my top three food groups, after coffee.” He opened the freezer and pushed a few boxes around. He had three choices to offer her. “Strawberry, blueberry or apple cinnamon?”
She crossed to the refrigerator and stood behind him. “I love apple cinnamon.”
“Apple cinnamon it is.”
Lukas plucked one out of the box. He didn’t bother saying that she’d selected his favorite, or that she was taking the last one. The less talk between them right now, he decided, the better. He needed to sort a few things out and to put them in their proper perspective. He couldn’t seem to do that right now. Probably because the memory of last night was too fresh in his mind and because she smelled of his shampoo and his soap and something within him was turning alarmingly and strangely possessive.
All he could think about was kissing her again.
Making love with her again.
She was peeling away the foil, making her way to the door. “Don’t you want to toast it?” he asked.
“No time.” She took a small bite. “I’ll see you at the hospital,” she promised.
He hadn’t thought about the next time he would see her. “What?”
Her parting comment seemed to surprise him, she realized. Did he think she was just going to cease existing the moment she stepped outside his apartment? “Conroy’s got to wake up sometime—unless you plan to keep him permanently doped up.”
“No plans,” he told her. “See you later.”
Almost out the door, Lydia hesitated, then doubled back, took hold of the front of his shirt and pulled him toward her. In a movement that, to varying degrees, took them both by surprise, she planted a quick, intense kiss on his mouth.
“See ya,” she repeated, releasing his shirt.
She was gone in a heartbeat. His. His heart slammed against his rib cage at the same time the front door slammed against the doorjamb.
He had absolutely no idea what to make of that. Or her.
But he had someplace to be and no time to waste trying to figure out the actions of one diminutive, mercurial special agent.
Or himself for that matter.
Lukas poured a glass of orange juice and gulped it down on his way to the front door. One of his shirttails was still sticking out as he got into his car. But then, neatness only counted as far as the stitches he made when working on a patient.
Catching all but one of the lights and managing to squeak through that one, Lukas made it to the hospital in under the promised twenty minutes. The day felt more like spring than fall. The sun was warm early and the sky was an incredible shade of blue. There was no sign of the rain that had hit previously. All it all, it felt like a glorious day to be alive.
For once, the emergency room parking lot was almost empty. He left his car in the last space right beside the wall and hurried in through the electronic doors.
Lukas nodded absently at an orderly he recognized by sight if not by name and went directly to the admitting area. The young woman sitting at the desk was unfamiliar to him. Hospital personnel changed only slightly less frequently than the tides. He flipped his name tag around so that she could see it.
“I’m Dr. Graywolf. There’s a patient here asking for me.”
From her expression, the woman didn’t appear to know what or who he was talking about. Turning in her chair, she called out to the heavy-set woman next to the coffeemaker. “Wanda?”
Wanda Monroe, as dark as the coffee she favored, came forward, a big, bright smile on her lips as she saw Lukas. More than two decades his senior, Wanda treated him the way she treated most of the young doctors at the hospital, as if he were part of her extended family.
“What did you do, Doctor, fly?”
“Caught all the lights,” he replied.
“Must have.” She set down her spoon and crossed to the desk with a mug of very strong coffee. “Sorry to get you in before your hours, Dr. Graywolf, but he insisted on seeing you. Won’t let anyone else near him. Said it had to be you or nobody.” Wanda’s dark eyes swept over him. “Guess you’ve got the magic touch, Doctor.” Her laugh was deep and completely infectious. “Maybe someday I’ll find out for myself if you do or not.”
“What would your husband say?”
“Probably, ‘pass the remote, honey.’” She winked at him. “As long as we don’t televise it, Ed won’t know a thing about it,” she chuckled, her dark eyes dancing. She indicated the area behind her. “Patient’s waiting for you in Room Six.”
He nodded his thanks and went back to the rear of the hospital. Room Six was to his left.
He stopped dead just inside the swinging door.
It had to be a joke, he realized, coming forward. One his mother had to be in on, since she was the one who had told him about the bogus fishing trip.
“Uncle Henry, what are you doing here? Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?” Genuinely happy to see the man he freely credited with saving him from sure self-destruction, Lukas embraced his uncle, enveloping him in a bear hug.
Henry Spotted Owl returned the hug with a great deal of feeling, hanging on to Lukas for a long moment.
The hug felt almost anemic compared to what Lukas was accustomed to from to his uncle. Something was wrong. He stepped back. His pleasure at the surprise visit died away as he took another, more focused look at his uncle.
Lukas saw that the beloved leathery face, which bore the scars of hard living, looked somewhat pale. The last time he had seen Henry was six months ago. The man had looked robust, as fit as the day he had taken Lukas under his wing at the boxing club he’d started more than fifteen years ago.
The word “robust” was not the first one that came to mind now.
He still wasn’t getting the full picture. Lukas sat on the edge of the gurney beside his uncle, placing his arm around the older man’s shoulders. When had they gotten to feel so frail? Or had he just been too busy to notice?
“What happened to the fishing trip? I talked to Mother yesterday and she said you were going away on a fishing trip.”
Henry shrugged uncomfortably. “I didn’t want her to know I was coming here. I didn’t want to worry her. I figured if she thought I was going fishing, she wouldn’t riddle me with questions about something I don’t want to talk about.”
The picture was beginning to take shape. And Lukas couldn’t say that he particularly liked what he was seeing. “But you’ll talk to me about it?”
“You’re the doctor.”
Lukas remembered other times when they had sat just like this, side by side on a bed in his closet-si
ze bedroom back on the reservation. Then it had been his uncle who was the man with the wisdom. He didn’t know if he was comfortable with this reversal.
“Do you need one?”
Henry Spotted Owl frowned. He wanted to say no, that he didn’t. That he was as healthy now as the day he’d walked into his sister’s house to tame his wild nephew and to make sure they remained a family in every sense of the word. But that would have been a lie. And he wasn’t here to lie.
“It’s getting to look that way,” he told his nephew with a studied casualness that the expression on his face couldn’t quite pull off.
There was pride involved here and Lukas knew he had to proceed cautiously to spare his uncle. “Doc Brown send you here?”
Henry laughed harshly. “Doc Brown doesn’t know his scalpel from his stethoscope.”
Lukas doubted that his uncle would have sought him out in a professional capacity if someone hadn’t started him thinking along those lines. His uncle was a fiercely proud, fiercely private man, and asking for help wasn’t something he did easily. “Exactly what did Doc Brown say that made you come here?”
There was smoldering anger in the dark eyes as Henry raised them to look at his nephew. “That he doesn’t think I’ll live to be a hundred.”
Since Henry had come to him, there was only one logical conclusion to be drawn. “Your heart?”
Henry nodded. “He thinks I need bypass surgery.”
Lukas remembered Doc Brown. The man represented the only medical care available on the reservation until Lukas and his friends had taken to making their semi-annual pilgrimages there. Everyone was certain that Doc Brown had been born old and stoop-shouldered. His idea of practicing medicine was to place a Band-Aid strip over a wound and to browbeat patients into rallying. Lukas knew that the old man wouldn’t have bandied about the term “bypass surgery” if he wasn’t significantly alarmed.
“What kind of a test did he give you?”
There had been several. The names were all foreign to Henry.
“Made me run with these white round little things glued to my chest until I thought my eyes were going to pop out,” Henry informed him moodily.
“A treadmill test.” That stood to reason, Lukas thought. “What else?”
Henry shrugged. “Took enough blood out of me to make three vampires happy. Don’t remember what else.”
“That’s okay. Do you have any of the test results with you?”
Henry looked annoyed as he shook his head. “I didn’t want to tell him where I was going, either. Man’s got a mouth like an old woman, always talking. Nobody’s business but mine.”
“No problem, I can have him fax the reports over.” The last time he’d been on the reservation, he’d brought a fax machine and a renovated computer with him, making the man a gift of them both. Doc Brown had grumbled about progress moving too fast for him.
Lukas thought for a long moment, mentally reviewing the cardiac surgeons on staff. He wanted the best for his uncle.
“Thom Harris is an excellent surgeon.” The man had a full calendar. “I’m sure I can get you in to see him.”
“Why would I want to see him?” The question was belligerent.
“A consultation is standard before surgery.” Henry’s finances were tight and Lukas worded this as delicately as he could. “Don’t worry about his fee, I’ll work something out with him.”
“There’s not going to be a fee,” Henry told him. “Because he’s not going to operate on me.”
Lukas sighed. This was going to be trickier than he thought. He was beginning to realize that what his uncle had come for was to be assured that he didn’t need surgery. “Look, Uncle Henry, I know how you feel. And maybe Doc Brown’s wrong, maybe you don’t need surgery. But if you do, I want you to have the best.”
“So do I, that’s why I came here.” Henry looked at his nephew, seeing for a moment the scared, defiant, fatherless boy who had given his mother so much grief as he had tried to find a meaning in life amid the poverty that surrounded him. “Doc Brown’s not wrong. I haven’t felt right for a while now. I already know I need the surgery.” He looked at his nephew. “I want you to be the one to do it.”
He’d gotten so caught up in wording everything just right and saving his uncle’s pride that he hadn’t seen this coming. But he should have.
“Uncle Henry, I can’t operate on you. I’d be too emotionally involved.”
The protest made no sense to the older man. “Of course you’d be emotionally involved. You love me, boy. I want someone who loves me holding that knife, making those cuts.” He caught hold of Lukas’s arm to emphasize his point. “Because someone who loves me has a high stake in my making it through the surgery.”
Rather than shrug out of the hold, Lukas gently placed his hand on top of his uncle’s. “Any surgeon who agrees to do the surgery has a high stake in the outcome. And there are rules, Uncle Henry—”
“The hell with rules,” Henry interrupted. “They’ve been bent before. Bend them again. You, I want you to do the surgery.” He pulled himself up, a proud, small bull of a man who had lived life hard and enjoyed every moment he had wrenched away from a less than kind fate. “It’s you, Lukas, or I go back to the reservation and go on that fishing trip I told your mother I was taking. Whether I make it back or not…” His voice trailed off as he shrugged.
Lukas sighed. He knew he was cornered. There was no way he was letting his uncle go back without conducting a thorough examination. And if the fears of the reservation doctor were correct, he couldn’t allow his uncle to leave without having the surgery. Maybe, under the circumstances, he could bend the rules the way his uncle demanded. Or at least be allowed to assist in the surgery. “You always were a stubborn old man.”
A slow smile began to work its way to the lips that were drawn back in a harsh, straight line. “Never claimed not to be.” He eyed his nephew, knowing he had him. “Do we have a deal?”
Henry held out his hand, waiting for Lukas to take it.
Lukas slid his hand into his uncle’s grip, trying not to notice that it felt far weaker than it usually did. It made him acutely aware of Henry’s mortality.
“We have a deal.” He rose from the gurney, signaling to a nurse. “All right, let’s see about getting you healthy enough to live to be ninety-nine.”
Henry looked at him indignantly. “One hundred,” he corrected.
Lukas laughed. “One hundred,” he agreed.
Chapter 10
Elliot stood in the middle of the cavernous loft that held little else than sunlight. This was where the anonymous phone call had sent them hurrying to—an empty loft above an abandoned warehouse in the rundown factory section of Norwalk. Traffic had been a bear, due to all the construction on the 405 freeway. It had taken them twice as long as it should have to get here, apparently all for nothing.
Frustrated, Elliot shook his head, the gun he’d held drawn and ready when they’d entered the deserted loft still in his hand.
“Well, if they were here, they certainly aren’t anymore. Maybe it was a bogus tip.”
The surge of adrenaline that had shot through Lydia when they’d forced open the door had yet to settle down. It felt as if someone was playing cat and mouse with them. She hated being the mouse.
Lydia scanned the room, squinting against the sunlight. Stooping, she ran her fingers along the floor. “It wasn’t bogus. They were here all right.”
Curious to see what she’d found, Elliot crossed to her. But unless her vision was a hell of a lot better than his, there was nothing in front of her except scuffed floor. “What makes you so sure?”
She held up her hand. There was no telltale dirt. “When did you ever see a loft this clean?” Rising, she brushed one hand against the other out of habit rather than need. “They cleaned out everything before they took off.” She frowned, moving around the empty loft. There was nothing left behind except one sagging sofa, an obvious holdover from the last real tenants. “Te
ll you one thing, I’d like to hire these characters to do my place.”
As Elliot watched, Lydia crossed to the dilapidated sofa and began flipping over the cushions one by one.
Holstering his weapon, he joined her. “What are you doing?”
She tossed the second cushion onto the floor, after the first. “When I was a kid, whenever my parents had people over, this was how I got my spare change after everyone else left the room. Found a wallet this way once. Maybe one of our supremacists left something behind they didn’t count on leaving.”
It was worth a shot, though it was a long one. But right now, other than a comatose suspect who might or might not come around, they had nothing else to go on. “Anything?”
Tossing the last cushion aside, she took out a handkerchief as she bent to pick up something amid the dirt and stale crumbs of some unidentifiable meal trapped beneath one of the cushions.
“Two dimes and a nickel. And this.” Using the handkerchief, Lydia held up a small detonation cap for his inspection. “They were here.”
He nodded. They’d gotten lucky after all. “I’ll call the crime lab boys, have them dust the whole place.” Elliot laughed dryly under his breath. “They ought to love that.”
“Probably not, but it’s their job. And it’s ‘techs,’” she corrected.
Phone in hand, ready to call, Elliot stopped to look at her. “What?”
“They’re ‘crime lab techs,’ not ‘crime lab boys.’ They’ve got a woman on the team now. Holly Shapiro,” she told him, though she doubted it would stick. Elliot had a real problem when it came to remembering names. Faces he never forgot, but names escaped him on a regular basis. “She wouldn’t take kindly to being left out.”
“Techs,” Elliot repeated with an obliging nod of his head as he pressed a series of numbers on the keypad. Contacting the people he was after, he gave them the necessary information and location before ringing off. He flipped the phone shut, then pocketed it. “By the way, where were you this morning?”
In Graywolf’s Hands Page 11
