“For your throat, sir?”
“Tha’s right,” said the Shark, noticing a door, but thinking it might be a storeroom.
“This is Macrodantin,” said the Indian. “It’s for urinary tract infections.”
The Shark’s eyes cut back to the man’s face.
“Say what?”
“Urinary tract infections, sir.”
“Urinated track? You sayin’ this for my pecker, man?”
The Indian shrugged.
The Shark stepped back from the counter, clutching at his throat. Then froze, watching the Indian raise his hands.
He turned.
She was standing in the middle of the store—standing there like she had just beamed down from her starship—smiling, biting her teeth together in a kind of angry smile, and staring at him out of green-glitter eye paint. In her small brown hand the Glock 19 looked like a bazooka. Before the Shark could reach for his .38, she stepped forward and pushed the Glock hard against his throat, forcing his head back.
“Hola, Tiburon,” she said. “Got a problem with your throat, motherfucker?”
And she shot him.
PART ONE
THE SHARK’S TONGUE
1
WEST LOS ANGELES
Dr. Marcus Ford, director of the Trauma Unit at the Willowbrook Medical Center, put down his mug of coffee and looked around the room, trying to locate the source of the noise. It sounded like a hornet maybe, or a big, fat fly. It was flies he hated. Their opportunism, their fixation on decay disgusted him. But this noise wasn’t right for a fly. Then he realized it was coming from the clock radio in his daughter’s bedroom. He’d bought it himself for her thirteenth birthday, but he was normally dressed and gone long before she woke up, long before the thing switched itself on. He stood there for a moment, listening, trying to catch up with a little part of her life that he’d missed.
Then he reminded himself that he wasn’t too pleased with Sunny right now, that he was going to have to say something to her because of the way she’d behaved. If he didn’t draw the line, things would only get worse. But he was dreading the confrontation. What would he do if she just ignored him or told him to mind his own business? Or worse? She wasn’t above that kind of thing nowadays. She would turn on him at the most unexpected times and places and hit him with a statement of defiance or criticism that was clearly designed to hurt. It caught him out every time, because to Ford it didn’t sound like his daughter talking. It didn’t sound like his little girl. It was as if a different person had gotten inside her somehow and was struggling to take control. He tried to imagine what Carolyn would have said about it, whether she would have understood it better, handled it better. But then again, if Carolyn were still alive, he reminded himself, there probably wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.
He went into the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice. Yellow sunlight squeezed through the shutters, and from outside came the faint flutter and hiss of lawn sprinklers. He peered out across the back gardens: a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase, climbed into a Lincoln Continental and reversed out of his driveway. Dan or Don, was it? He’d moved to Kirkside Road about a year before, worked for an investment fund of some kind. Ford recalled standing on the sidewalk in his running gear, hearing the man talk about how thrilled he and his wife were to have found a house in such a safe neighborhood, while burly characters in overalls carried huge boxes into the house. The two men had talked about inviting each other over for drinks or a barbecue. So far it hadn’t happened.
Ford took the juice through to Sunny’s room, where the clock was flashing 7:30. On the radio a girl was in raptures over the price of the Mista Taco spicy cheese taco with regular diet coke (at participating restaurants), but Sunny looked fast asleep. With her blonde hair mussed—yellow strands clung to her mouth, stirred by her gentle breathing—she looked very grownup, a little too grownup for the flowery pink wallpaper. He stood there for a moment, breathing the musty smell of potpourri and shampoo, looking at her latest gangsta rap poster taped up over the dresser: four black kids with diamond-studded teeth snarling at the camera from an urban wasteland of rubble and burned-out buildings. Directly beneath the poster a one-eyed teddy bear looked like an archeological relic—a reminder of a long-lost, more clement world.
“Sunny?”
She squinted up at him through sleepy eyes, then moaned, rolled over, and slapped the clock radio off.
Ford frowned.
“Orange juice. You want it?”
She was silent a moment. Then she slowly pushed herself up on her elbows.
“Yes.”
He handed her the glass and went over to the window to open the drapes.
“No, Dad, don’t,” she whined. “It’s too bright.”
He opened them halfway. Sunny moaned and rolled over, covering her head with the sheet.
“It’s time to get up, young lady.”
Sunny pulled her feet up under the bedding, searching for warmth.
“Sunny? What time did you come home last night?”
Now she was very still.
“What?”
“What time did you get in, damn it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Ford folded his arms. He’d come back the night before loaded with groceries, including a good supply of fresh vegetables, all ready to cook a decent supper for them both. Sunny had seemed unhappy about something, but wouldn’t say what. Then she’d announced that she was going over to the Wilsons’ house for the evening and would eat at the mall. Ford had made her promise to be back by nine-thirty. She hadn’t kept her word. It was after midnight when Ford had woken from his armchair slumber to find her asleep in bed.
“It had to be ten-thirty or later, Sunny, and you promised me nine-thirty. I told you nine-thirty.”
“It wasn’t my fault. The others wanted to stay.”
“If there was a problem, you should have called me. I was worried.”
Sunny flipped the sheet back and looked at him with her pale blue eyes—Carolyn’s eyes.
“What about?”
“Anything could have happened to you out there. How did I know you hadn’t been mugged or run over or something?”
“In Beverlywood? Oh, come on, Dad. Get real.”
Get real. That was the phrase she used all the time now, whenever he said something she didn’t like. It was as if she lived in the real world, and he was just visiting from Planet Parent.
“What’s real, young lady, is that you come home when I tell you to or you don’t go out at all. Is that clear?”
“You’re always late for everything,” she said, coolly. “And if you don’t get a move on, you’re gonna be late for work too.”
“That’s not the point,” Ford said. “And for your information I’ve taken the day off today. The point is—”
“Really?” She sat up, suddenly wide awake. “Does that mean you can come watch the volleyball game this afternoon?”
“Don’t try and change the—”
“It’s my first time on the team.”
Ford blinked. She’d made the junior volleyball team. That mattered to her, he knew that. Yet she hadn’t told him until now.
“It is, huh? Why didn’t you say so before?”
“Because I’m saying so now,” she said, slipping into a kind of petulance she didn’t usually show anymore. It was part of what she was going through at the moment—this slipping in and out of girlishness. It was very confusing. “The game starts at five-thirty.”
Ford pushed at a coffee stain on the carpet with his toe.
“Well, honey, the trouble is—”
“Oh, please. It’ll be great. All the parents’ll be there.”
“Honey, I can’t. I’m giving this talk today, at a conference. I told you about it. That’s why I’ve taken the day off: to prepare.”
Ford looked at his watch. The truth was he had most of his speech still to write, and he was supposed to get
it cleared with the medical director first, not to mention Lucy Patou, the chief of Infection Control.
“Dad,” she drawled, stretching the syllable, letting him know he was the worst father in the neighborhood. “So when will you be back?”
“About six-thirty, I think. If nothing conies up.”
Sunny looked down at the bedspread for a moment.
“Yeah, right,” she said—no longer the child, no longer his little girl—and she climbed out of bed. Ford knew he ought to get back to the subject of last night, but his heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
“I’m sorry, honey.”
She turned and looked at him for a moment, pushing the fine hair out of her eyes.
“How old is that suit?” she said.
Ford looked down.
“I don’t know, six, seven, maybe ten years.”
“It’s too small for you,” she said, and she went into the bathroom.
Ford put his hands on his hips and frowned. Then he turned to look at himself in her wardrobe mirror. She was right: the pants pinched around the middle, and there was a little pillow of flesh at the front. In the past he’d always prided himself on staying in shape, but recently he hadn’t kept up so well with the jogging and tennis. Now he was paying the price. It had been easier when his wife Carolyn had been alive. They had often jogged together, and Carolyn had been a high school tennis champ. Sunny hit a mean forehand herself, but now she had all the other school activities to keep her busy.
He sighed and walked up close to the mirror. In exactly two months’ time he would turn forty. He tried a smile—according to Carolyn his best feature—and then noticed the coffee stains on his lower teeth. He wondered how long it would be before his sandy-colored hair would turn gray—it had already receded a good deal at the temples—how long before the circles beneath his brown eyes would take on the haggard permanence that marked the onset of middle age.
If Carolyn had been alive, she would have told him it was time to get out of Trauma. Seventy-hour weeks and all-night emergencies made it a young man’s game. Hardly anyone stuck it out after forty. He tried to imagine her words, how she would have said he should leave the Willowbrook and take up a more comfortable post at double the pay—a post at Cedars-Sinai, for example, or the Columbia Health Care Corporation. Would she have brought Sunny into the equation or not? He tried to imagine what she would have said, and whether in the end he would have done what she wanted.
The Santa Ana winds had come early that year, and in the hills to the north brushfires had been smoldering since the weekend. A brown haze hung over the city, smudging the horizon, tainting the air with a chemical smell like diesel oil and burnt plastic. At noon the temperatures reached a hundred degrees and kept on climbing.
Driving down Robertson towards the Santa Monica Freeway, Ford wrestled with the airconditioning system in his white Buick Century. After nearly five years he still hadn’t gotten the hang of it. Whichever setting he chose, whichever outlets he selected, whichever direction he pointed the vents, he was either sweltering or numb with cold. But that didn’t stop him from trying. Every morning, right through the summer, he would spend several frustrating minutes changing the settings, adjusting the outlets, and redirecting the vents, before finally giving up and rolling down the window. It wasn’t the only feature of the car that annoyed him: there was the huge turning and the bouncy suspension. Not to mention a tacky interior that recalled the worse excesses of seventies sedan luxury. Carolyn used to laugh each time Ford cursed the immovable gearshift. Whenever Sunny had climbed in with muddy shoes or a runny ice cream, Carolyn would say with mock officiousness, “Watch the burgundy velveteen.” One way and another they’d laughed a lot in that car.
The Willowbrook Medical Center was half an hour’s drive away on the freeway. It had been built as a direct response to the Watts riots of 1965 and the social problems that lay behind them. Although planners and administrators had seen to it that the name Watts had all but disappeared from the city maps, the vicinity of the hospital remained one into which LA’s white population rarely, if ever, ventured. Today, thanks to a program of closures, the hospital’s service area was stretched over more than one hundred square miles of the city, but still only three percent of its patients were Caucasian. The majority of those remaining were now Hispanic, reflecting the high level of immigration into the area from across the border. Among the Willowbrook staff African-Americans were in the majority, although within the Trauma Unit there was usually a mix, thanks in part to the presence of army surgeons. With two thousand intentional-injury admissions per year—gunshot and stabbings mostly—the Willowbrook offered experience in handling battlefield casualties that was otherwise available only in wartime. In fact, the rotation scheme that brought army doctors in had been Ford’s initiative. Formerly a resident at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, he had served in the medical corps for eight years, rising to the rank of major.
Despite the violence, Ford no longer worried about driving into South Central, not now that they had Freeway 105. The Willowbrook was just two blocks away from the east-bound exit, six from the westbound. When Ford had joined the hospital seven years earlier, it had been different. Back then, whichever route you took, you were still left with two and a half miles of Imperial Highway to cover or three miles on El Segundo Boulevard. Both roads ran right by the projects and were notorious for muggings, carjackings, and shootings. Of course people were still careful once they were off the freeway. They kept their doors locked and drove in the left-hand lane, away from the sidewalk, but Ford hadn’t heard of any drivers being shot at since the ‘92 riots, and he barely even thought about it anymore.
Finding traffic to be light that Tuesday morning, he flipped on the cruise control and began working on his speech, noting his ideas on a microcassette recorder.
The conference he was speaking at was being held at the Convention Center downtown. Towards 2000: Priorities for Medical Research and Development was being organized by the National Institutes of Health, the afternoon session being dedicated to the field of anti-infective agents. It promised to be an interesting forum.
Past experience had forced Ford to face the fact that he was not a natural public speaker. With a small group of medical students he had no problem. It was like a conversation. You could look into their faces, gauge their interest, make contact. But in front of a crowd of strangers it was different: you talked, they listened—provided what you were saying really interested them, provided they could follow your argument, provided your delivery was clear, confident, and free of hesitation. Otherwise they sat there in silence, row upon row of expressionless faces, waiting for you to finish. The thought that he was a surgeon in the company of pharmacology specialists, talking about their field of expertise rather than his, made him even more apprehensive.
Ford was still thinking about his speech as he approached the Wilmington Avenue exit. He was on the ramp, still doing forty, when the pickup in front of him suddenly slammed on its brakes, its tail end drifting sideways, tires screaming. Ford stamped on the brake pedal, but he was too close, going too fast, the mass of the car still surging forward. He felt the wheels lock. He yanked the wheel right and tried to steer into the gap by the rail.
The rail was what he hit. There was a noise like a gunshot, and he was thrown forward against the seat belt. He sat for a moment behind the wheel, his heart pounding, just waiting for his body to tell him if he was actually hurt. But he wasn’t. He’d made it. Still feeling a little shaky, he climbed out onto the road.
There were cars all over the junction. In the middle an ambulance was slewed across Wilmington Avenue. A police helicopter swept overhead, tilting as it circled the scene. Ford took in the devastation. People were getting out of their cars to get a better look, fascinated but scared too. The ambulance itself was wrecked. It looked as if someone had pounded the front with rocks and then torched it. Yellow crime-scene tape fluttered in the smoke-tainted air, and Ford noticed a
couple of squad cars parked a little way from the junction with a group of policemen standing around a black woman. There was glass everywhere and in back of the ambulance dark patches of what looked like blood.
2
Nurse Gloria Tyrell came out of the Emergency Department isolation room holding a pair of blood-spattered Pump Reeboks as Ford entered the corridor.
“Good morn—”
A shout from the isolation room cut off her greeting.
“Oh! Muh-motherfuckah!”
The voice crackled with superhuman rage. Gloria shrugged her huge momma-bear shoulders and held up the bloody shoes.
“Boy comes in dusted. I don’t think he even knows he’s been stabbed. Twice.”
Ford looked back down the corridor at the crowds in triage, where wounded people were being prioritized.
“What’s going on, Gloria?”
“Didn’t you catch the news?”
“On the radio just now I heard something about a young girl. Hammel, was it? Is that what all this…?”
Ford saw Mary Draper, a fourth-year resident, come out of the critical room, radiologist Marvin Leonard’s baritone booming out behind her—“Ra-di-ation, ra-di-ation, ra-di-ation”—clearing the room while he took his pictures. Seeing him, she smiled.
“I’m glad you could find time to be with us, Doctor.”
“I got stuck coming off the 105,” explained Ford. “Somebody torched an ambulance at the bottom of the ramp.”
“I know. We stabilized one of the paramedics. He’s in OR-two now with pretty severe head injuries. Somebody hit him with a baseball bat.”
“Ouch.”
“Plus we have two auto-versus-peds and a couple of gunshot wounds. A patrolman got a stray bullet in the thigh, and there’s a homeboy’s been shot through the neck with a nine millimeter—a Glock, I think the paramedic said. Weren’t you bleeped?”
“I’m not even supposed to be on today. But I need to talk to Haynes.”
Slipping on his white coat, Ford followed Draper back into the critical room.
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