Code White (28 page)

“If this is a trick—” she said as she eased back into the chair.

“No trick. Everything I’ve said is true.”

“How do you expect me to trust you after the way you people worked me over me in your office? The next time you try that, I’m bringing a lawyer.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you here. To do things a different way.”

“Threatening me isn’t much of an improvement.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound like … I, uh … Look, I know it’s not fair to push you like this, without—” He broke off and looked away from her, out the window, where a throng of parking valets and patients bustled about the main entrance, with a chaotic but invisibly purposeful energy, like ants at the mouth of an anthill. “Okay. You know what?” he said, turning back to her. “Let me earn your trust. I’ll give mine to you first. Listen a minute and I’ll tell you something about myself, something that hardly anyone knows around here. Something that could make my life difficult if it did get around. And then I’ll leave you free to do what you want with it.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

Harry looked at her from under the shadow of his tanned and lightly creased brow. He waited until she had taken a sip from her Coke before going on. “In what seems like a lifetime ago,” he said, “I used to be a cop. I was a good cop, good with people. After a B.A. from Baylor and a stint at Police Academy, I got my first job in a place called Nacogdoches, Texas. In a small town like that, where most of the officers don’t have full college degrees, you can rise up in the ranks pretty quick. Before I knew it, I was a lieutenant, head of the Tactical Unit, next thing to the chief of police himself. It was a pretty cushy setup. My wife worked for Parks and Recreation, and we bought us a neat little brick ranch house not far from the center of town. Most folks knew me on sight, and I was welcome everywhere.

“Nacogdoches does not have a heavy home-grown crime element. There’s some rowdy college kids on Friday nights, and a little bit of car theft. But we did have a problem with outsiders—drug traffickers who wanted to make us a kind of clearing house for coke and weed on its way North. For about six months, we had a mini-war going on, culminating in something like the O.K. Corral, with one of the biggest drug busts ever in East Texas. A lot of it was my doing. When it was over, my feet scarcely touched the ground in that town. In the newspapers I was the second coming of Wyatt Earp. Big-city departments all over the country were calling me with offers. Didn’t seem like anything could ever go wrong.”

“Very impressive,” said Ali sarcastically as she put down her Coke can and prepared to get up. “Thank you for your confession. Nothing knocks me over like big boys waving their guns.”

“Hold on a minute,” said Harry. “I haven’t gotten to the point. You see, things did go wrong, and when they did, it all came down in a second.” Harry paused until he was sure that he had her attention. “There was this guy, an out-of-work motorcycle mechanic, whose wife had left him and taken away their two kids, a boy and a girl, ages four and six, brown hair and deep blue eyes, as cute as you please. This man had a partiality to drink, and in what is unfortunately not an uncommon scenario, he fired himself up with bourbon one night and decided to reunite his family with a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. He wound up shooting and killing his ex and his father-in-law, then taking the kids and barricading himself in a grimy white bungalow on the edge of town. Police cars from miles around encircled the house. I had my Tactical Unit out in force. For a couple of hours there was a standoff, with us shining our spotlights on the house, and him every so often taking a pot-shot at us and cussing at us through a broken window. My plan was to give him time to let off steam until he got sober and gave up. Usually when the sun comes up, a lot of sorry feelings will come up with it. Until then, all we really had to do was watch out for the kids. But his ex’s family had lived in the town since before Sam Houston’s day, and pretty soon there was a real crowd growing behind our backs, and they were turning up the heat to get something done.”

Ali held her Coke can lightly, but had stopped drinking from it.

“Around two in the morning, some fool from the county sheriff’s department lost his cool and shot a tear-gas canister through the window, hoping to flush the guy out. You never do that when there’s kids on the scene, but, like I said, the heat was on, and it happened. Against direct orders. The house caught fire. In five minutes, there was not tear gas but thick black smoke pouring from every opening. It was a cheap clapboard house, a pile of old dry timber just waiting to burn. Still, the guy did not come out. We called the fire department. Just as we heard the truck’s sirens in the distance, three shots rang out from inside the house.”

Harry looked back out the window for a moment, back toward the scores of passers by who had never heard of Nacogdoches, Texas.

“You get training for situations like that,” he went on, “but there’s no training that prepares you for the sight of those churning black clouds of smoke and the heat of the fire that you can feel from all the way across the street. Everyone was paralyzed. Everyone but me, Wyatt Earp. I kicked open the back door and charged into the house, gun drawn. Everything was blinding white from flames that covered the back wall. I had to pull my jacket over my nose just to breathe. In a few seconds I found the guy. He was sprawled out on the floor of the front room, that long-necked gun beside him, his head in a pool of blood.

“I looked for the kids. I found ’em in the bathroom in the middle of the house, dressed in their jammies, with a Spider-Man doll and a stuffed bear beside ’em. They were dead. Their dad had shot ’em point-blank, each with a single .44 slug to the head. There was no doubt. I have gone over that scene a million times in my mind—and in my nightmares—and there is absolutely no doubt that they were … dead. A six-year-old girl cannot have a hole the size of a grapefruit in the back of her skull and still be alive. A boy … a boy cannot have pieces of brain sticking to the wall, and … and still be alive.…”

Harry’s voice trailed off. As he looked into his cup of coffee, Ali wondered whether he was glimpsing a reflection of ghosts from the past. Abruptly, he snatched up the cup and took a big gulp from it. “I’m sorry to regale you with the nasty details,” he said. “But the point … the point is that what I saw, with my own two eyes, is that those two kids were dead. They were as surely dead as anyone will ever be.”

“Of course,” said Ali.

“I was wrong about one thing. While I was still feeling for pulses in the bathroom, I heard a moan from out front, and I realized that the perp, the guy himself, was still alive. He had shot himself at an angle, a common mistake in suicides, and, what with the recoil and all, the bullet had cracked his skull and knocked him out, but he was still very much alive and breathing.”

Harry took a deep breath, as if tallying up a score. “So here’s what I had. The house was about to come down around me. I was standing there choking to death, with my eyes burning from all the heat and smoke. There were two kids past earthly help. And there was this guy, a fucking mean son of a bitch who had done something too horrible to imagine, and who had already expressed his desire to not go on living in this world. All that was beyond dispute. Having seen the mess he had made, I knew this better than anyone else ever could. And yet, he was alive. That … that is the point. The kids were dead. He was alive. I had exactly one chance to make it out, and when I did I came dragging that son of a bitch with me.

“And that was when my life changed. There were no hurrahs that greeted me as I came out of that house. In the blink of an eye, Wyatt Earp had turned into John Wilkes Booth—a guy who had traded the lives of two sweet kids for a louse who had no future ahead of him except death row. Although the coroner’s report backed me up, people standing in the crowd swore they had heard the screams of the kids in the roar of the fire. Rumors flew. It was said that I had chickened out when I saw the flames around those screaming kids, and took the quickest way out of the house to save myself. It was said that I had charged the place in a drunken stupor, and barely staggered out alive. It was even said that the perp had been an old drinking buddy of mine, and that my real intention had been to help him escape out the back way.

“The newspapers made a piñata out of me. My fellow cops didn’t want to be seen with me. People who used to tip their hats would now spit as I walked by them. Even my wife started treating me like a stranger. I don’t blame her for that so much—she worked for the City, where a lot of the dead woman’s relatives had jobs, and sooner or later she had to cut loose from me if she wanted to go on showing her face around town.

“I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did. I didn’t make it easy for her. I got pretty sour on people. I hung out all night in bars. I didn’t use to drink, but I did then for a while. And every time I had a bad dream or smelled a whiff of smoke, I saw those two dead kids in front or me, and I would fly off into a crazy cussing fit like you wouldn’t believe.

“The drinking made it easy for everyone. The City let me go—didn’t fire me, exactly, just said I wasn’t welcome anymore. So I packed up, minus a wife, and moved to Houston, where I got a job as a beat cop, which lasted until the newspapers there dug me up and decided to make another story out of me on a slow Sunday. After that I gave up police work for good. I had a chunk of money from our house after the divorce, and that paid my way through an M.B.A. in Security Management. I live the quiet life now, comparatively speaking.

“The funny thing is, if I had to go back into that burning house a thousand times over, I would never change a thing. I was a public safety officer, not a judge or an executioner. I’m glad I acted like a man and didn’t let my thinking get screwed up by my hate for the shooter. If the world doesn’t understand that or can’t accept it, well, fuck the world.”

Ali was at a loss for words. She had misjudged Harry Lewton. Behind his craggy prizefighter’s face there was a man who thought deeply, felt profoundly, and who had the strength to meet tragedy head-on, not dismiss it like Helvelius or howl against it like Kevin. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “Most people live by their feelings. Professionals have to act on hard logic. Doctors, too. We have rules for this kind of situation, the rules of triage. You save whomever you can save. That’s it. It’s not your job to make moral judgments.”

“I wish I had met you in Nacogdoches.”

“You still haven’t said what you want from me.”

“I want you to talk to Rahman.”

Ali jerked back in her chair as though she had received an electric shock. “No, I won’t do that.”

“Nothing official. No tape recorders, no FBI. Just you, your brother, and me.”

“I’m sorry. No.”

“It’s important. We haven’t gotten zip from him about the bomb. Time is slipping through our fingers and we need a break desperately.”

“I can’t. I would if I could, but I can’t. I couldn’t bear to be in the room with him.” She felt her heart beating against her ribs. It was hard to control her breathing.

“I’ll be there.”

“You don’t understand. Rahman won’t say anything about the bomb to me. It would be useless.”

“He doesn’t have to say anything. You can learn just as much sometimes from what a perp doesn’t say.”

“No! Please don’t ask again.” She gripped the edge of the table as a wave of nausea passed over her.

“There’s bad blood between you two, isn’t there?” he said, trying to ease back.

“That’s … an understatement.”

“You seem to be afraid. Afraid of him.”

“Does it show?”

An image flashed before her, of an afternoon at her father’s house in Queens. It was cold and drizzly. In the tiny backyard, two once-luxuriant Japanese maples had shed their leaves, leaving behind a skeletal cagework of branches, blackened by rain and the grime of the city. He stood beneath them, his sallow, tapering, serpentine face twisted in a defiant smirk, oblivious to the rain that dripped from his pointed chin.
Yes,
he said.
Father has told you true
. And in that moment, the featureless, unnameable nightmares of twenty years crystallized into panic. She could neither speak nor move, but her bowels and bones screamed for her, sounding out her horror and rage.
Then you are no man,
they cried.
You are Satan, whose very whisper brings death. But I have not forgotten her whom you have destroyed. I will carry her cause through eternity, and lay it at the judgment seat of God.

She blinked, and the specter disappeared. In front of her she saw only the face of Harry Lewton, looking back at her gently. “Look, we all have our hobgoblins,” he said. “As a rule, they grow bigger the more we turn our backs on them. Sometimes the best thing is to turn around and look ’em in the eye.”

“Easily said.”

“Listen, I won’t let him hurt you physically. I’ll be at your side. All I’m asking is that you try whatever you can do. The survival of this hospital might depend on it.”

“I’m … I’m not the person you think I am. I’m not strong like you.”

“You don’t think so? You cut into people’s brains for a living. You’re climbing up the ladder of the most male-dominated medical specialty there is. You must have had to get through years of insults and hazings and sexual innuendos to get to where you are. And you want to tell me you’re not strong?”

“I don’t feel strong. I feel … afraid.”

“Trust me.”

She looked out the window, envying the humdrum lives of the people outside. Even though they were walking in the shadow of a bomb that could end their lives in an instant, they did not know it, and not knowing it left them free to go on with the tacit self-assurance people always had—the delusion of being destined to live forever. “I want to trust you,” she said at last with a sigh. “I want to believe in someone right now. I’m tired of having to figure things out.”

“You learn to trust by trusting.”

Ali placed her hands over her eyes, then drew them down to her chin. “Oh, hell! I’m a goddamn fool,” she said. “But I’ll … I’ll do it.”