Do No Harm

by Gregg Hurwitz

  "Don't reach for the weapon!" Jenkins shouted. "I told you not to-"

  He hit Jesse with the bar of his forearm, knocking him off his feet and through the saloon doors, one of which swung back and clipped him in the forehead, breaking the skin. He swore loudly and kicked one door free from the hinges, exposing Jesse's quivering body. Jesse had rolled onto all fours, his head bouncing as he tried to breathe. Jenkins hammered a black Rocky combat boot down into his ribs, knocking him flat to his belly. "Don't reach for the piece!"

  Two of the construction guys rose to their feet and Dalton pivoted, snapping his fingers. He shook his head, the sagging skin of his jowls swaying with the gesture. They sat back down.

  Jenkins grabbed Jesse by the collar of his flannel shirt and his belt and hurled him out the back door, out of sight. Pausing, Jenkins faced his partner through the broken saloon door, an anachronistic player in a bad Western. Blood ran down his forehead, forking over his right eye. He slapped his hands together twice, slowly, as if dusting them off, then turned and stepped through the back door.

  The bar was deathly silent.

  Dalton scratched his cheek, his knuckles pushing his rubbery skin to the side, then he unholstered his pistol and trudged slowly back through the broken saloon door and out into the alley behind the building. Jenkins had already worked Jesse over pretty well. His fist, which was hammering up and down on Jesse's face, was tightly wrapped in a terry cloth. The terry cloth, freshly borrowed from a car wash, looked nice and hard, crusted with dried soap and wax.

  Jesse's nose bent hard to the left, and his teeth were black with blood. His cheeks were swollen and abraded; the terry cloth would obscure any fist marks, making his injuries look the result of a fall during pursuit. He'd pulled himself to his knees, arms curled protectively over his head, cringing and crying.

  Jenkins spat out words as he battered Jesse. "How could you do that to her face? Her pretty fucking face? How could you?" His blows were mostly missing now, glancing off Jesse's arms and the top of his head. His voice was high and unusually emotional. "Maybe she wouldn't have left you if you saw to her fucking needs, you little monkey!"

  The blood from Jenkins's cut had smeared, rouging his cheek. He stopped punching and turned to Dalton. "Gimme your throw-down."

  Dalton raised his pant leg and eyed the dinged-up. 25 auto nestled in his ankle holster.

  Jenkins bent over, fisting Jesse's hair and yanking back his head. "You know what happened?" he hissed. "You were packing. I came at you and you struck me. I retaliated with reasonable force."

  Jesse shook his head. "No, I didn't. Jesus Christ, I wasn't. I'm not packing. I'm not. What are you doing?"

  "And then you came out here, fell down during foot chase, we had a little standoff, and you gun-faced me."

  "Get your confession," Dalton murmured to Jenkins. He tossed him the. 25 and Jenkins crouched, holding the handle out to Jesse. A line of drool found its way down Jesse's throat, staining his white undershirt a dark red. His breath was coming in gasps. "I didn't… I didn't… What happened to Nance? What happened to her?"

  He leaned forward, palms on the cracked asphalt, and bounced up and down like a Muslim praying. More blood leaked from his mouth.

  Jenkins stood and unsnapped the button on his holster. "What happened to her? You threw lye in her face this morning, you motherfucker."

  Jesse looked up, his broken face suddenly mournful. "Is she… will she be…?"

  Dalton turned to guard the back door, but Terry, the blond construction worker, had already stepped through, arms raised. Jenkins unholstered his gun, but Dalton stepped quickly between him and Terry.

  "Yo," Dalton said. "Seems you walked into a bit of a situation here."

  Terry's voice wavered slightly, but it drew some strength from an undercurrent of righteousness. "He couldn't have hurt Nance this morning," he said. He reached for his back pocket, and Jenkins shouldered Dalton aside, pistol aimed at Terry's head. Terry whipped his hands back up in the air, chest heaving beneath his denim jacket. Dalton reached around to Terry's back pocket and pulled out two Southwest Airlines ticket stubs.

  "We just got back from Vegas a few hours ago," Terry continued. His head was drawn back from the direction of Jenkins's Beretta, as if the pistol were emitting heat. "We stayed at the Hard Rock. A ton of people saw us there." He lowered his arms slowly. Jenkins kept his gun raised, both hands on the stock.

  Jesse was rocking on his knees. "What happened to Nance?" he wailed. "Is she alive?"

  Dalton crouched over Jesse and took him by the wrist. A stamp was smeared across the back of his hand. Cheetah's. A Vegas strip club.

  Dalton stood and walked back inside the bar, his shoulder brushing Terry's. After a moment, Jenkins lowered his pistol. He reached out a hand and rested it on Jesse's matted hair. Jesse continued to rock and wail. "Is Nance all right?" he sobbed. "Did someone kill Nance?"

  "No," Jenkins said quietly. "She's still alive."

  Jesse collapsed, crying with relief. Jenkins holstered his weapon, touched Jesse gently on the head again, and left him crying on the asphalt.

  Chapter 4

  Hunched over the pocked wooden table so his broad shoulders arched into a hump, Clyde studied the plastic bottle of DrainEze with flat, unblinking eyes. A filthy window screen filtered the breeze into dusty gasps of air that swirled among the scattered papers on the floor before dying in the room's stench. Half-drunk cans of Yoo-Hoo dotted the countertop in the adjacent kitchen, amid pots filled with congealed macaroni and cheese, and pans caked with the burnt remains of refried beans.

  Perched on his knees, his hands were oddly swollen, gathering thickness around his knuckles and hairy wrists. They raised to the tabletop and rested nervously at the edge, twitching. His pitted fingernails scraped along the wood. A twisted metal lamp cast a cone of light before him. He seized a syringe and turned it a half rotation before testing the needle with the tip of a finger. The bezel broke the puffy skin and he yelped, pulling the needle away. He closed his eyes reflexively, murmuring to himself. "Three, two, one. Stand back from the door. Back from the door." The mantra seemed to calm him. When he opened his eyes, the anxiety on his face had dissipated.

  Working the meat of his injured fingertip between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand, Clyde produced a bead of blood, which he lapped up.

  He wore faded blue hospital scrubs. Physician's scrubs. A beatup navy-blue corduroy baseball cap sat low across his wide crown, his balding scalp visible through the netting in the back. It bore no emblem. Both his cheeks were marred with acne scars, deep irregular indentations that held the shadows of the room. A high thin scar above his right ear notched his hair, which he kept short on the sides and back but long and stringy on top, perhaps to disguise his hair loss. Though he was not grossly obese, his extra weight hung on him loose and flaccid. A single key dangled from a thin ball-chain necklace, which disappeared into the folds of his neck.

  His tongue darted from his mouth, tensed, the tip poking at his upper lip. Beneath the table, his feet seemed to move independently, pushing into each other, flopping and scratching like two dogs at play. His Adidas sneakers had yellowed with age and grown brittle along the soft middle soles.

  He swallowed the orange tablet he'd been sucking on, then spooned another helping of instant coffee from the jar directly into his mouth. A grimace twisted his face momentarily, then faded. He chewed slowly, some of the grains gumming at the corners of his lips. His mouth pulsed a few times, then he swallowed hard, tilting back his head as though gulping down a vitamin.

  A rat scurried unseen through the mound of unwashed clothes that curled around the base of his twin bed. The bedside lamp, a yellow porcelain number bearing a Motel 6 sticker, had been draped with a thin purple scarf. It provided meager, diffuse light.

  His pupils twitched twice to the left. He grunted through his nose and turned back to the work at hand. Pushing the needle into the gray DrainEze bottle, he withdrew the plunger, filling th
e syringe with the vivid blue liquid. With a jerk of his thumb, he pushed the syringe down, sending a thin spurt of alkali across the tabletop. The liquid pooled in minuscule drops, eating slowly into the tabletop. His wide mouth split in a grin, the corners curving back toward his low-set ears.

  Two other DrainEze bottles sat on the table, industrial-sized with juglike handles. Two glasses of cloudy water waited near his right hand, beside a small surgeon's tray that contained syringes, needles, and a scalpel. His right shin nudged an open metal footlocker holding a host of medical tools and devices.

  Across the thigh of his scrub bottoms, a series of tiny holes in the fabric revealed glossy spots of scarred skin. Cautiously lowering the needle, Clyde positioned it just past the last hole in the scrubs. He sank the plunger slowly, allowing several drops of liquid to dribble from the needle. The liquid ate quickly through the thin scrubs, and he shrieked and jerked his leg as it began to attack his flesh.

  Grabbing the glass of water, he poured it over the wound. The water darkened his scrubs in a flame pattern, with licks reaching down his calf. Holding his leg still with his other hand, he poured the second glass of water over his thigh. Then he placed both hands flat on the table and sat perfectly still, whimpering softly as the last drops of alkali continued to burn in his flesh. His face grew shiny with sweat.

  After a while, Clyde stood and headed into the kitchen. He filled a glass with water from the tap and drank it, three times successively, before placing the glass back in the cluttered sink. Opening a can of wet cat food, he dumped the contents on top of the mound of cylinder-shaped servings already overflowing the small bowl. Twitching his fingers, he made a kissing noise, but no cat came.

  The skull tattoo on the outside of his flabby biceps caught his attention, and he returned to the footlocker, produced a cotton ball, and doused it with rubbing alcohol. The skull lifted easily from his skin, blackening the moist side of the cotton. Continuing to rub at his biceps, he lumbered to the clothes mound at the base of his bed, unearthed a stained mirror, and propped it against a wall. With a raspy groan, he slid from his scrub bottoms, then stood and stared at his reflection. A series of alkali burns dotted his right thigh, like the marks of small, burrowing insects. Most of them were scarred over, gnarled knots of fire-red flesh. The freshest wound wept a clear, viscous fluid, which caked on the thick black hairs of his leg.

  Cupping his limp penis in his hand, Clyde crossed to his bed and pulled the strewn sheets up into rough position. When he climbed in, his bulk took up most of the width of the bed, his shoulders pressing back into the child's headboard. He dug for a pack of cigarettes beneath the sheets and squeezed it until the top popped open. Only two cigarettes remained. Placing them in his mouth side by side, he lit them together and smoked them as one unit.

  The blackness outside his window had lightened to a grayish cast. Smoking his cigarettes and plugging his leaking wound with a fat thumb, he waited for morning.

  Chapter 5

  The modern Greek-style house peeked out from behind bunches of pampas grass and fan palms, the leaves throwing perfect shadows against the white stucco. Between the home's windows, vines of split-leaf philodendron snaked up the walls, the glossy dark-green leaves flapping in the breeze like atrophied wings. On the front lawn, two large palm trees crisscrossed like necking flamingos. Situated on Marlboro Street in Brentwood, David's house was a few blocks south of Sunset but still close enough that the occasional passing semi ever so slightly vibrated the paintings on the walls. The house seemed almost shy, set back a good twenty yards from the street.

  A blaring car horn in the distance awoke David at 5:30. He turned beneath his comforter, removing his earplugs and placing them in a nightstand drawer. He heard the traffic immediately, and wondered if there was a more effective brand of earplug that might rescue him from the all-hour sounds of Sunset Boulevard.

  His king-sized bed sat centered beneath a window that overlooked the thin side yard. No blinds or drapes dressed the window; he liked to awaken with the gathering sunlight. Aside from a solitary padded chair in the corner on which David hung his white coat, the room was entirely bare. He still slept on the right side of the bed-he'd never felt comfortable making the migration to the middle. The sheets on the left side remained almost perfectly smoothed. He found something immensely depressing about the blank strip of still-made bed beside which he slept every night.

  David reached for the phone immediately and dialed the ICU.

  "Yes, hello, Sheila. Dr. Spier here. We sent a woman upstairs yesterday, and I wanted to check in on her. Nancy Jenkins."

  "Oh." Sheila exhaled loudly. "What a thing. Such a sweet woman." The tone of her voice was not heartening. "She was doing better in the late evening," she continued. "She even regained consciousness and spoke briefly with some detectives, but then things went to hell in the middle of the night. Her temp shot up; we took a portable upright chest, saw she'd developed free air, and rushed her to the OR."

  Despite David's efforts, the alkali had won out. Dr. Woods's endoscopy yesterday evening had revealed that Nancy had sustained 3a grade esophageal injury. It had been a mess down in her throat. Exudates gooping the membranes, deep focal and circumferential ulcers, and black blisters of necrotic tissue, waiting to slough, heal over, or simply give way. One of the focal necrotic patches in her esophagus had finally blown out in the night, allowing air and infection to escape into her body.

  David swung his legs out of bed and rested his feet on the thin beige carpet, careful not to disturb the perfect pattern the cleaning lady's vacuum had left last Wednesday.

  "Unfortunately, Dr. Freedman had to do a subtotal resection of the esophagus," Sheila continued. "I believe he pulled up a segment of small bowel to replace it." She paused, and David heard a sheet rustling. "Small bowel?" she said. "Why not colon?"

  "The small bowel has more active peristalsis," David said.

  "Oh." He could hear the nurse breathing during the long pause. "We did everything we could," she said, more sadly than defensively. "As you know, everyone's really following her closely. I've had more phone calls checking up on her. Nurses, lab techs, docs, reporters calling every five minutes… " When she spoke again, the sharp anger in her voice startled David. "What kind of a bastard does a thing like this?"

  "Well," David said, letting the hypothetical question hang and fade, "I'm glad she's in your hands now."

  "Yeah… " Sheila sighed again, and David heard the phone rustling against her cheek. "To tell you the truth, Doctor, I'm getting tired of giving out bad news on this one. Dispensing misery is a tough way to make a living."

  He rubbed one eye with the heel of a hand. "Pretend you're an IRS agent."

  Her laugh was soft, but genuine. He said good-bye and hung up the phone, then stared at it for a moment. Three minutes into Monday, and he already felt like shit.

  By now, with all he'd seen, perhaps he should have grown desensitized to medical emergencies. Suicide attempts where the bullet blows out the cheekbone but leaves the brain intact; motorcycle wrecks ending in near-decapitation-by-stop-sign; children beaten so frequently about the mouth that their frenula are torn, the stringy halters no longer connecting the upper lips to the gums. But every time he thought he'd seen it all, something found its way through the swinging ER doors to push the limits of his experience a few inches further. His experience was his strongest ally and darkest companion, a pupil ever dilating. Yesterday morning had once again proven that the world had an inexhaustible hoard of surprises. What kind of sickness had to fester in the coralline whorls of a human's brain to cause him to direct a viciously corrosive substance into another human being's face?

  Heading into the shower, David scrubbed methodically from his forehead to his toes, washed his hair, and let the hot water steam him for a few minutes before getting out. His feet perfectly centered on the white bath mat, he stared at his reflection in the mirror. By most estimations, he was a handsome man-the kind of handsome that comes not fr
om distinctive or striking looks, but from features that are even and predictable, and therefore pleasing. A square, masculine jaw, light brown hair cropped short and worn slightly mussed, not-too-thin lips with a pronounced Cupid's bow, and two eyes that were a light shade of blue, just short of interesting. His crow's-feet were not quite visible from this distance unless he squinted. His neck seemed less firm and muscular than it had been five years ago, but he wasn't sure if that was based on a glorified remembrance. He decided he was holding up okay. Still attractive, if a little ordinary.

  Drying his back, he headed into his bedroom and placed his pajamas neatly in their drawer before dressing in his scrubs. He lifted his white coat off the chair in the corner and pulled it on, then removed his stethoscope from the inside pocket, and laid it across his shoulders. Until he felt the weight of the stethoscope around his neck each morning, he felt partially unclothed.

  Walking into the study, he admired the perfectly even shelves, the rows of books organized by size and genre. Diplomas lined the far wall, framed in a cherry wood. Harvard undergrad and medical school, equally pompous with their scrolled Latin, started the row, followed by his UCSF residency certificate and board certification for Emergency Medicine. One of his Outstanding Clinical Instructor plaques hung slightly crooked. He straightened it with the edge of his thumb.

  Turning to the large brass birdcage in one corner, he sighed before removing the drape. The Moluccan cockatoo awakened instantly on its perch, shifting from one black claw to the other. A bright salmon-pink crest protruded from behind its head, a flair of color on its otherwise cream body.

  "Hello, Stanley," David said flatly.

  "Elisabeth?" it squawked. "Where's Elisabeth?" David's wife had spent three painstaking weeks one summer training the cockatoo to ask for her when it wanted to be fed. Stanley's repertoire of comments had not since been expanded.