Bad Medicine (37 page)

"We have to tell his family."

Frank never bothered to look over. "No we don't. Joey's been stabbed before. I know how to handle this without them. He wouldn't be able to deal with it if they knew."

"But Frank, they have a right—"

"No, Molly. He's the one with the rights. And now that his sister's decamped, I'm the only one around to make sure they're protected."

"Why?" she asked. "What makes you his official guardian?"

Frank didn't seem in the least perturbed by the question. "He's my friend."

"He's a ghost, Frank. A responsibility. Something you'd have to go out of your way for."

An eyebrow crooked. "And you don't think I'm capable of that?"

"Not even good wolves perform works of charity, Patterson."

Frank looked away then, toward the surgical doors, and Molly could have sworn he seemed introspective. "I told you. He's my friend."

Molly saw it then. The hint of disquiet at the back of his eyes, the quick shudder of revulsion that she knew too well.

"Oh, no," she accused quietly. "It's more than that. You see what you might have become in him."

Frank actually chuckled. "Not what I might have become, Saint Molly. What I did become."

Molly wanted so badly to laugh in his face. "A stressed-out lawyer from the adjutant general's office who went off the deep end?"

The urge died when Frank leveled those wry blue eyes on her and she knew he wasn't kidding. "A lawyer with three young children who'd just lost his wife."

Molly wanted to look away. Hell, she wanted to run away. She hadn't signed on for this. She didn't want to know.

"Didn't you ever wonder why I was in that tacky office in north county at my age?" he asked, that humor of his returning with a vengeance, as if all of life should be this amusing. "Molly, I was in the corporate suites at Monsanto by the time I was twenty-five."

"How did she die?"

Frank waggled a finger at her. "'Ah ha', she's thinking. 'Now I understand why he went after malpractice cases.' Sorry to disappoint you. It was leukemia. She had the choice between treatment and Abigail, and she chose Abigail. I wasn't quite as sanguine about the whole thing at the time."

"I'm sorry, Frank."

Frank peered at her. "You really are, aren't you? Boy, I think I need a tape of this."

Molly damn near smiled at him. "Cherish the moment. It won't happen again."

"Nor would I want it to. Goodwill from you is unsettling."

Molly turned on her heel and resumed her pacing. She tried to think of what she had to do next, but she couldn't quite get past the picture of Frank wandering along the edges of despair with no company but grief. Molly hated that. She hated hurting all over again. She especially hated hurting for him.

She just wanted to go home. She wanted to have someone who would open the door for her and pat her hands and murmur soothing words. She wanted someone to hold her and tell her it was going to be all right, and she'd never had that in her life, considering the fact that what she was looking for was a mother.

Behind her, the doors shushed open and Molly heard tired footsteps. She whirled around again to find the trauma doc untying mask strings and scratching his chest where the cotton scrubs tended to itch and the sweat collected.

"You a relative?" he asked Frank. He already knew Molly.

"His attorney."

That brought the trauma doc to a dead stop. "You're kidding."

Frank smiled. "No kidding. He's a rich eccentric. What can you tell me about him?"

"I can tell you that he's gonna be a sick son of a bitch for a while, but he should pull through okay. I can also tell you that he looks like he's been this route before, but I think you know that already. Can you get him off the streets?"

"Nope."

A quick nod. "You know if he's HIV positive or not'"

"He's not. His choice of oblivion is alcohol, not needles."

Another nod, this one more considered. "Go on home. He's gonna be on life-support for another ten hours or so. You sure he has the money for this?"

"I'm sure."

The surgeon grinned, a tired smile on a tired man with the hands of Paganini. "In that case, we'll pull out all the stops."

Molly felt herself deflating with every word. The adrenaline of crisis died, and she was left feeling like a lump of inert material.

"How 'bout I take you home, Molly?" Frank asked.

That was when Molly noticed that the trauma doc had disappeared back in the direction of the ER without her ever saying thank-you. She'd have a chance to catch him later. Right now, she couldn't think past the fact that Joseph Ryan was still alive, no thanks to her.

"What?"

Frank had the nerve to walk up and take hold of her arm. "I'm not real sure I trust you driving right now."

Molly looked up at him, suddenly weary to death. "I quit, Frank," she said. "I thought you should be the first to know."

Damn him if he didn't smile at her. "Quit what, Molly?"

She pulled away from him and started walking on her own back toward the ER and home. "You were right. You have every reason to say 'I told you so.' So I'm doing it for you."

"Oh, that quit," he said in very patient tones as he followed amiably along. "I'll believe it when I see it."

Molly stopped. "I mean it."

"I know you do. I just don't think this is a promise you're going to keep."

For some reason Molly couldn't quite fathom, he looked regretful about it.

"They tried to kill an innocent man," she said, as if he didn't know. "They did it so I'd stop. Well, I stop."

Frank was studying her face as if waiting for something. Molly wasn't sure what it was, so she looked away. Down the long corridor, she could see the back doors to ER. The place she understood, with rules she abided by. Actions and reactions that made sense.

"What kind of people would do this, Frank?" she couldn't help but ask.

Molly knew what kind of people. She saw them every day. She'd just never been responsible, even indirectly.

"Somebody with a lot at stake, I imagine," Frank answered as if Molly had really wanted to know.

Molly thought about that. She had all the answers. Almost all the answers anyway. She just didn't know what to do with them anymore. She didn't know whom to trust with them.

"How does 800 million a year hit you?" she asked without looking at him. "That's a big enough stake?"

Frank nodded in consideration. "Yeah, I bet that'd do it for some people."

Molly sighed. The men in the van hadn't done it for 800 million. They'd done it for fun. But they'd been sent by very serious men in very serious trouble, and Molly was pretty certain she knew what it was. "In that case," she said softly, "I think it might be Argon Pharmaceutical."

Molly wasn't sure what kind of reaction she'd wanted from Frank. She was very sure, however, that she didn't want laughter. Which was probably the sole reason Frank Patterson laughed.

Molly spun around to see something very close to sadness in his eyes as he shook his head at her. "See what I mean?" he said. "You keep at it, Saint Molly of the Battlefield, no matter what anybody else says."

"What's so funny?"

"A few vital facts are becoming clear to me. You figuring on telling anybody but me?"

"I don't know. Why?"

He was standing there, his weight on one hip, arms crossed, waiting for her to figure something out. When she didn't, he just shook his head again. "I guess you haven't gotten back to that part of your notes yet. Which means you don't remember one of the companies Peg was on retainer for."

The minute he said it, she remembered. "Argon?"

Frank nodded.

"That's where it starts then," Molly said, not sure yet whether the information made her feel better or worse. "We were right. It wasn't with Pearl. It was with Peg. It was something she got from Argon. My God, Frank, do you know what this means?"

"It means that I'm officially out of your loop. Three days ago, the firm put me on the Argon account."

"So?"

"So, I am barred by attorney-client privilege from revealing anything I know that would jeopardize the company in any way. I can't do anything to help."

That one damn near stopped Molly in her tracks. "Do you know what's going on? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"I'm telling you that even if I did, I couldn't reveal it to you. It's a felony offense, Molly. You should know that. Didn't you read
The Firm,
like everybody else in America?"

"You did that knowing that I thought Transcend was the problem?"

"I did that before I ever heard the word
Transcend.
I still haven't seen anything on the company, just the notice about my new responsibilities. I'm sorry, Molly. Whatever you do, I can't help anymore. Not in any way."

Now Molly did know how she felt. She felt furious.

"Do you want me to tell you exactly what they did to Joey, Frank?"

"It doesn't matter, Molly."

Damn him for looking more sincere than she'd ever seen him. Damn him for doing this to her.

"They put you on the case for that specific reason, you know."

"That doesn't matter either."

Molly tried to find some kind of reprieve in Frank's expression. Those spectacular blue eyes were closed off, though. Decided. Finished. Molly shouldn't have been surprised. She was, though, damn it. She was disappointed.

"So I guess I was right in the first place," she said. "I quit. You can let them know that for me when you see them."

Then she just turned and walked away.

"Molly!"

Molly didn't stop. It figured, Frank followed as if she just hadn't heard him.

"She wasn't worth it."

That got her. Molly stopped dead on a heel and spun around to find Frank standing four square behind her.

"I don't know about the other lawyers," he said. "I didn't know them. But you're wasting your time on Peg. She played too hard and skirted too many corners. She probably deserved what she got."

Molly was stunned to her toes with the fury she felt. He looked so bland and harmless standing there, as if he really couldn't have said what he just did, "She took care of her brother."

Frank shrugged. "Everybody needs to be redeemed, Saint Molly. It's what gets all the real work done in this world. Joey was her redemption."

"Remind me to say the same for you when you turn up dead."

"I wouldn't expect any less. Although, in my case the password to my diary would read Elizabeth, not Joey."

"Elizabeth?"

He grinned. "The woman who chose Abigail over me."

Molly couldn't help it. She had to hurt him. "Wise choice."

"Yeah," he said, perfectly sincere and making her hate him. "It was. Just took me a while to find out. Remember Peg by Joey, not by the rest."

"It sounds like you're the one who can't figure out how to remember her, not me."

* * *

By the time Molly got home, the sun was struggling up through a haze of humidity and pollution. The grass sparkled pink and crystal with the dew, and a thousand birds greeted her from the trees as she pulled up.

She didn't notice. She could barely put one foot in front of the other as she walked up to the door and let herself in. She didn't realize that Magnum had behaved, or that he refused to leave the house until he'd licked her face, those huge, sad eyes of his watching her all the while. She didn't listen to the pond in the back or smell her roses that bloomed in the corner or feel how cool and damp the morning air was against her skin. She walked back into the kitchen to make herself some tea, only this time, when she thought about putting vodka in it, she didn't stop.

By the time Sam showed up two hours later, a quarter of the bottle was gone and Molly had made it as far as the family room.

"I came to ask how that poor boy was," he said, peering down at her where she sat curled up in her favorite armchair, the tea long gone and the vodka being drunk straight out of the mug. "I think I should ask the same of you."

"Want some tea, Sam?" she asked, not bothering to face him.

With a groan like metal stressing, Sam lowered himself onto the couch. In the corner the TV was turned to the "Today Show," but the sound was off, so that Willard Scott simply looked like his pants were too hot. "No. Not this morning. He died, that boy?"

Molly took another sip from her almost-empty tea cup. "No. He didn't die."

Sam nodded. "
Gottenyu,
this is good. It would have been a terrible thing. And you? How are you doing?"

Molly didn't bother to lift her head off the back of the chair. "I'm tired, Sam."

Sam gave her one of those peculiarly Jewish nods that seemed to carry entire trains of thought and opinion. "You knew him, then?"

Molly sighed. "I know him. He's hurt because I've been trying to be a hero."