Line of Fire (15 page)

Thread and lint.

The curve in front of me in the night, the memory of arriving on the scene of my patient’s death was as fresh in my mind as that evening’s visit to Diane’s garish flat.

From out of that darkness came the thought,
Diane referred Amanda to me.

Oh my God.

I failed to brake in time to finesse the curve. To grab the last of the narrow shoulder I was forced to oversteer. My tires squealed. I wondered if centrifugal force would work to my advantage. Or if my late braking would prove to be a fatal error.

Diane was the one who referred Amanda to me. She knows Amanda.

Diane thinks that Amanda is involved with Raoul. She has thought it all along.

The car held the curve.

I exhaled into the last segment of Lee Hill, a straight shot to Broadway
.

Is Diane counting on me to discover—what—the evidence of the affair? Is that why she sent Amanda to me for therapy?

Diane, please, no.

• • •

Diane did not return my calls or my email the next day. She didn’t come into the office on Thursday, which was one of her few regular workdays.

I was tempted to check in with Raoul to discuss things as his friend, but I didn’t know what I would say. If I were offering someone else advice about what to do in the situation in which I found myself, my counsel would have been to stay the hell out of the middle of other people’s marriages.

I decided it was wise counsel, or as wise as I was capable of giving right then.

• • •

The referral source for any patient rarely felt like a crucial fact in my work. But learning the identity of a referral source wasn’t trivial, either. In its simplest form, knowing who had given a new patient my name provided one new data point in the sociogram of the patient’s life; I would be able to identify at least one person in that patient’s near or extended social or professional sphere. Like all professionals running a small business, I endeavored to keep an informal accounting of the people in the community who were sending me work.

On rare occasions, learning the identity of a referrer might provide a warning sign that an ethical conflict, usually a conflict of interest, might be lurking out there.

I tried to recall everything that Amanda had said about how she had heard of me. I thought I had asked about the source of the referral and that she’d said that she’d heard my name mentioned in the micro-community in which she worked. I had accepted the statement at face value.

I didn’t recall asking her for a specific referral name. The truth was that, from almost our first moments together, I had been distracted by Amanda’s stories. Was it possible that one of the things I had been too distracted to learn was the source of the referral? Sure it was. My interaction with Diane raised concerns that my failure to identify the person who had given Amanda my name had left me vulnerable.

Could Amanda be involved with Raoul? Might she know Diane socially? Was it possible that she initially heard my name from Diane in a nonprofessional context? Or even from Raoul?

God.

24

I
was outside with the dogs on Thursday evening when Sam arrived to spend the night at Ophelia’s. He had taped cardboard over the opening where his front-seat passenger window had been.

I had devised a scheme to let Sam know that Coma Doe had shown up in my office. For my plan to work, I needed Sam’s cooperation.

He began bitching about his week even before he killed the engine. I expected the break-in of his car to be the first headline, but he started his kvetching with the judge’s decision to call a motions hearing in the assault trial earlier in the week. It soon became clear that Sam wasn’t as interested in my empathy about his shitty week as he was interested in my advice about the evening ahead.

Ophelia wanted to go back downtown for dinner at Oak. That meant Sam would miss at least the first two periods of the Avalanche game. If I hadn’t needed his help the next day, I probably would have pointed out that the Avs were a work in progress. But I did need his cooperation, so I tried to convince him that he might enjoy a date with his splendid girlfriend. I also told him I thought he would like Oak, even though I wasn’t at all confident Sam would like Oak.

Sam was skeptical. “You think? It’s not too . . .”

I guessed where he was going. “Boulder? No. Oak is Boulder enough for the rest of us, and old school enough for you.”

He grunted. How Boulderish something might or might not be was not an increment of measure that Sam trusted. Oak? Sam was wary of organic food. I wasn’t eager to learn that he also had some odd bias against Oak’s penchant for local sourcing.

“How much time do you have before you need to leave?” I asked.

He checked his phone. “Need to leave in an hour or so. Why?”

“I’d like you to tell me a story.”

“Which story you want? You having trouble sleeping? Simon used to think I was best with the ones where I got to do animal voices.”

I smiled, putting effort into making the smile appear less than gratuitous. “The night of the Fourmile Fire? The assault—excuse me, the battery—you were helping investigate that night? What actually happened to that guy? What was the outcome?”

“This is important?”

“Might be crucial,” I said.

Sam’s eyes told me he was suspicious, but he began the story without demanding to learn my motivation. He pulled himself up onto the hood of his Cherokee as he said, “It starts off as your basic wildfire evacuation story.”

• • •

The car that Sleepy Doe—Coma Doe—was driving out of the path of the Fourmile Fire the night he ended up in the ICU was a 1960 Ford Thunderbird. The car belonged to Coma Doe’s then-girlfriend’s father, who was out of town.

Although Sam had quickly established some storytelling rhythm, I interrupted when he mentioned the T-Bird. “Did the girl’s father collect classic cars, or was it just that one?”

“I think that was the one and only. Can I go on now?”

The mystery of how my business card had shown up at the scene of the crash was solved. The T-Bird, I was pretty certain, belonged to an ex-patient of mine, who had inherited it from his mother. He’d actually driven it to a session to show it off to me after her death. At that time, years before, he’d been married and had a daughter around Jonas’s age.

He’d been seeing me to deal with the complications in his life caused by the fact that he was gay. He thought his mother’s death might help him open the door to the closet.

That information was protected by therapeutic privilege. Telling Sam that I knew the solution to the business card puzzle and then not telling him said solution would be tantamount to taunting. I didn’t want to go there. I said, “Please go on. Sorry to interrupt.”

Sam sighed but proceeded. The girlfriend’s father had begged her to find a way to get his T-Bird to safety. Problem was, his daughter worked at the Denver Tech Center, well over an hour from Boulder; she could not get back to move the T-Bird in time.

She enlisted the help of the guy she’d been dating. That was Coma Doe. She asked him to fill her daddy’s iconic square T-Bird with a list of stuff from her room that she wanted to save and then to drive the car down to town.

“The trip was complicated by animals,” Sam said. “One domesticated. One wild.”

“Don’t feel any obligation to do the animal voices,” I said. “I’m not Simon.”

“Gotcha,” Sam said.

• • •

The domesticated animal was Coma Doe’s then-girlfriend’s four-year-old English bulldog, named Henry. The wild walk-on was a good-sized buck with an impressive rack that was escaping the fire by crossing a two-lane road in the Boulder foothills in the dark.

Coma Doe spotted the buck in the Thunderbird’s headlights. To avoid a direct impact he reacted with a reflexive turn of the steering wheel. A split second later he accompanied the evasive steering with some emergency hard braking.

I raised a finger to indicate I had a question.

Sam made a guess: “Skid marks confirm the evasive maneuvers. He turned before he braked,” Sam said. “In that order.”

“Were there hoof marks to confirm the presence of the buck?” I asked.

“Right front quadrant of the T-Bird clipped the deer,” Sam explained. “Busted the car’s headlight. Busted the deer’s femur. First responders did the humane thing, destroyed the buck not far from the scene.”

I said I was sorry to hear that. Sam, who grew up shooting deer for recreation, and for dinner, shrugged. His shrug, I thought, lacked a certain compassion.

He wanted me to keep in mind that the old car, though a beauty, was blessed with neither antilock brakes nor electronic stability control, since neither had been invented back when John Kennedy was elected president. The absence of those features—in addition to the driver’s unfamiliarity with the model, and the radical steering maneuver, and the hard braking, and the off-center impact with the hindquarter of a big deer—complicated any efforts the driver may have made to regain control of the car.

The result was that the T-Bird was fishtailing erratically as it crossed the road.

I asked, “Confirmed, once again, by skid marks?”

Sam said, “Yep, we got data. And an expert to interpret it.” He also had a caution for me. “Right about now that bulldog comes into the story. The bulldog’s entrance involves some unavoidable conjecture. The conjecture is supported by facts, but accident re-creation is not an exact science. Certain shit happens off camera. Just does. Flying bulldogs? Sometimes you got to have faith.”

I told Sam I could live with a little flying-bulldog conjecture.

• • •

The accident re-creation guy surmised that when Coma Doe hit the brakes to avoid the buck, the rapid deceleration of the Thunderbird caused Henry the bulldog—despite his significant mass, or perhaps because of it, Henry was not immune to the laws of physics—to be launched from his temporary perch on the backseat of the T-Bird. At the instant of Henry’s precipitous takeoff, he became a fifty-eight-pound canine missile.

A mere fraction of a second after launch the bulldog projectile smacked Coma Doe so squarely on the back of his head that it might have appeared that the driver’s skull had been the precise target programmed into the bulldog missile-guidance system.

The sudden deceleration of the car, along with the brute force of being struck on the back of the head by the solid torso of a bulldog with a healthy appetite, caused Coma Doe’s head and face to begin to fly forward at alarming speed. The acceleration of the upper portion of his body did not abate until it met the rigid, uncushioned plastic and metal of the most definitely non-impact-absorbing steering wheel of the up-until-that-moment almost cherry Ford Thunderbird.

As a result of the flying bulldog trauma Coma Doe suffered the first and second of his multiple closed-head injuries that night.

• • •

I was confused. I said, “First and second?”

“Henry was uno. Turns out a whack on the back of the head by a flying bulldog is good for a decent concussion, at a minimum. Who knew?” he said.

“And the second?”

“Our boy’s faceplant on the steering wheel. That impact caused a second concussion, along with a broken jaw and a laceration or two. By then, the poor guy’s brain was sloshing around in his skull like an apple in a barrel at a Halloween party.”

“Whiplash?”

“You betcha,” Sam said, moving his own head all over, as illustration. “This way, that way. Every damn which way.”

Sam’s whiplash description had an odd, “Old McDonald Had a Farm” cadence that distracted me more than a little. “Go on,” I said. “Please.”

• • •

Coma Doe had been wearing his factory-installed lap-only seat belt, but shoulder restraints, headrests, and airbags had been no more of a consideration on the date the Thunderbird was manufactured than was an iPod dock, a rear-seat DVD player, or a digital navigation system.

The fishtailing Thunderbird, suddenly pilotless because of Coma Doe’s dual head traumas, crossed the single lane of oncoming traffic, hopped off the raised shoulder, and descended into a shallow but wide roadside culvert. The car exited that drainage airborne, covering an impressive distance of almost twenty-three feet before it touched down again, front tires first.

At that point, the car, pristine but for the busted headlight, was on a route that would lead it to become airborne yet again. The second flight would have exceeded the seven-plus yards of the first by a considerable margin, since the takeoff would have involved a high cliff and a deep ravine.

That flight never happened. Instead, the front end of the Thunderbird butted head-on at an estimated thirty-eight miles an hour into the unyielding trunk of a once stately lodgepole pine. The tree suffered no consequential damage from the impact because the evergreen had already been tortured to death by an army of life-sucking pine beetles.

The doctors who treated Coma Doe later surmised that microseconds after the Thunderbird met the tree trunk, his skull endured the third of the three distinct closed-head injuries it suffered that night, and the second in a row that involved the remarkably unyielding steering wheel of the Ford classic.

• • •

“Henry?” I asked.

“By that time he was safely pinned on the floor behind the front seat.”

“Well,” I said. “At the end of the day, no assault, and no battery?”

“Right, if you don’t count Henry,” Sam said. “Now tell me why you wanted to know.”

“During our walk the other day? I told you there was another thing I needed to talk to you about,” I said.

“Yeah?” His phone was in his hand. He glanced at the time. “Is this going to be one of your long explanations?” He sniffed his left armpit. “I should shower.”

“I need you to be sitting in my waiting room at three thirty tomorrow afternoon. I have something I need to hand to you. At that precise moment.”

Sam reacted as though he thought I was kidding. He said, “No way,” slid off the hood of the Cherokee, and directed me to bring whatever it was home with me. I could give it to him then. He promised me that he would be back at Ophelia’s.

I said, “This is time sensitive. It’s important that you see what I have to show you at that precise moment on Friday afternoon. And that I hand it to you personally.”

He checked the time again, sniffed his armpit again. He said no, again.

I reemphasized the importance. He sighed. He asked if his partner Lucy could do it. I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea on many levels.

Sam interrupted again to remind me of a previous visit he’d made to my office, one that hadn’t gone well. “That one time I fell asleep in your waiting room reading a magazine, you told me you didn’t want me to wait inside for you ever again. You said I scared one of your patients. Which I don’t think was my fault. You guys have that waterfall in there that, I swear, would put anyone to sleep. It’s like hanging out at the base of Niagara.”

“It was one of Diane’s patients who complained,” I said. Other than that minor detail, Sam’s story was pretty much true. The scene had not been idyllic, with Sam’s snoring being what it was, and with a disgustingly distended rivulet of drool seeping from the corner of his mouth all the way onto a so-where’s-the-actual-swimsuit photo in the
Sports Illustrated
annual swimsuit edition
.
“We’ll consider this to be a one-time waiver to the no-waiting-in-the-waiting-room policy.”

“Why?”

I said, “Please, Sam? Read between the damn lines. Be there on time. In fact, get there a few minutes early. And stay awake, even alert.”

He looked over my shoulder, smiled, and waved. My back was to the doublewide. I assumed he was waving at Ophelia. Given the time, and the altitude of the sun in the western sky, she had likely just stepped outside to perform her evening salutations. I knew specific times of day when it was better that I didn’t attempt to make eye contact with Ophelia. I raised my hand to add my greeting, but I didn’t look over my shoulder.

I said, “So you know, I won’t be free to talk tomorrow until five fifteen.”

Sam spotted the discrepancy. “You want me there before three thirty—being alert and all—while I’m waiting to get whatever it is you want to hand me, but I can’t actually talk to you until later?” I nodded. “And I’m supposed to listen to that water-fall without falling asleep and offending somebody’s patient?”

“You’ll only be there a few minutes. I’ll come out to hand you . . . something. Then you’re free to do what you wish. If you can come back at five fifteen, that would be great. By then, all will be clear.”

He said, “You promise me, here, today, that this will make sense? And that I’ll understand the importance?”

“That’s the idea.”

He was staring over my shoulder at Ophelia, the tension in his face melting away. Sam was falling in love with a terrific woman. As an observer of the nascent romance, I found myself delighted for him. If he wasn’t such a big, pale, freckled polar bear of a man, I am certain that the whole romantic thing would have been cute to watch develop.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“One more thing,” I said. “Under no circumstances can you speak while you are in my waiting room. It’s crucial that your voice not be heard. Not a sound.”