“He’s a cop with a big gun.”
“If I let him watch, will he promise to give me a warning instead of a ticket?”
Tad laughed. “Harry?”
Harry was laughing too. “Where do you live, Tyler?” “Fairfield.”
“Sure, no problem:’ Harry promised. Fairfield was on the far end of the county from his patrol area.
“Fine,” Tyler said. “Let’s throw a party.”
Harry wedged in close enough to see. Squarely on the back of the boy’s head, an area about the size of an index card had been shaved bald, exposing a smile-shaped laceration about four inches long. By Harry’s eye, it was sewn about half shut.
“What happened?” the cop asked.
Tad answered before Tyler had a chance. “Tyler does backflips off the diving board only slightly better than you play tennis.”
Ten minutes and as many stitches later, Tad was done. He advised the boy to take Tylenol for the pain, to take all of the antibiotics he had prescribed, and to stay out of the water for at least two weeks while the wound healed. That done, he walked with Harry into the privacy of an empty trauma room.
“What’s up?”
“Did you work on a patient named Mark Bailey yesterday?” Harry asked. “He had a broken hand.”
“Yes, he certainly did,” Tad confirmed, growing visibly uncomfortable. “Harry, you know I can’t discuss the details of patient histories.”
“I just need a little help, that’s all,” Harry said hurriedly. “Did he tell you that he was injured when his car slipped a jack?”
This was exactly the sort of legal pinch point that Tad worked so hard to avoid. Bailey was a scumbag, and everyone knew it. He was supposed to stay over for one more night in the hospital, but chose instead to check himself out against his doctor’s advice. Those were the actions of a person with something to hide. And he bore the injuries of someone with evil friends.
But the sad fact was that it was Harry’s job to catch bad guys and throw them in jail, not Tad’s. Conscience aside, the doctor wasn’t going to put everything at risk just to help a friend.
“I’m sorry, Harry, I can’t help you. All of my conversations with patients are privileged.”
“I know, I know,” Harry said. There was an edge of desperation to his voice. “But bear with me on this. My career might be riding on it. I just want to give you some opinions of mine. If you agree, you don’t say anything. But if you don’t agree, you can cough. When we’re done, we can both swear under oath that you never gave me any information. Okay?”
Tad had known Harry for a long time, seeing him in and out of the ER a thousand times, escorting victims and bad guys alike. He seemed to be an honest, hard-working, ethical guy. What he was proposing, though, beyond being a little childish, pushed the envelope of ethics and honesty to the breaking point.
On the other hand, Harry’s plan had taken the downside away from the equation, hadn’t it? If he could deny honestly that he had ever given information, then an ethics case could never be brought against him. Plus, was it any less ethical than letting a scumbag wander the streets just so you can protect your own butt? He worded his answer to Harry very carefully.
“I could never agree to do that,” he said, but his eyes said something else entirely.
Over the course of five seconds, Harry’s face showed dejection, followed by confusion, and, finally, understanding. “Yes, of course you couldn’t,” he said. He paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. “I think Mark Bailey is lying about how he got injured.”
Tad said nothing.
“I think he’s afraid that we’re going to find out what really happened to his hand.”
No response.
“I think he broke his hand while he was committing a crime, and that he’s afraid that if we find out about the injury, we’ll find out about the crime.”
Tad was suddenly overcome with a coughing spasm.
Harry was stunned. His whole theory hinged on the assumption that Mark had somehow broken his fingers while he was helping Nathan escape. Maybe Harry had made the wrong statement. He tried again.
“I think Mark Bailey was injured when he was helping someone escape from a prison.”
Bailey. So that’s where Harry’s coming from, Tad thought. He had heard about the kid Nathan Bailey on the news the previous night, and the staff had been talking about him all morning, but Tad had never put the names together. Nonetheless, he had no way to link the elder Bailey’s injuries with any kind of illegal activity committed by him; rather, it was tied to activities committed against him. He coughed again.
Harry looked thoroughly confused now, but Tad would have to let him sort it out alone. “I’ve got patients piling up in the waiting room, Harry,” he said apologetically as he opened the trauma room door. “Your theories are interesting. Feel free to share them with me at any time.”
With that, Tad returned to work, leaving Harry alone with his confusion.
Chapter 21
The house at 4120 Little Rocky Trail wasn’t half the size of the Nicholsons’ place, but it did afford Nathan his first experience with a water bed, and a full pantry more than compensated for the lack of a big-screen television and supersoft carpeting. After awakening around 10:30 and treating himself to another long hot shower, he’d spent what was left of the morning down in the living room, stretched out on the sofa, barefoot, watching cartoons and pigging out on Doritos and root beer.
The good cartoons ended at noon, when his only remaining options were the life sucks shows, soaps or stomach-wrenching junk like Barney and Friends or Smurfs. He turned the TV off. Within minutes, he was bored. Whoever lived in the house had no kids, he figured, because there wasn’t anything that even resembled a toy anywhere to be found, not even Nintendo. He decided to explore.
Figuring that people kept the good stuff in their bedrooms, he started there, returning upstairs to the master suite. The first order of business, before he forgot, was to strip the bed and wash the sheets. It went a long way toward easing his conscience about all this burglary stuff. One thing 4120 had over the Nicholsons’ was a laundry on the second floor. After gathering the sheets into his arms, he walked them out into the hallway and dumped them on the floor in front of the washer. He’d wash them in a minute, but first he wanted to look around.
The master suite was done in a mismatched assortment of light pine and heavy oak. Everything was immaculately clean, evidence of owners who cared about their things. Except for the bed, there were only two major pieces of furniture. The double dresser was chockfull of ladies’ things, underwear on the left and sweaters and blouses on the right. Nathan was aware of a curious stirring in his loins as he handled a bra, and he quickly tucked the garment back in the drawer and slid it shut.
On the other side of the room from the oak collection was a tall highboy. The lower drawers had men’s clothes: socks and underwear in the bottom two, and T-shirts in the next tier. The tag on one of the shirts said SIZE 44. There’d be no additions to his wardrobe from this house.
He slid the chair from a small makeup table over to the highboy to see into the upper drawers. The topmost full-size drawer held dress shirts, ties and assorted jewelry-cuff links, tie tacks, that sort of thing. The last two drawers were small ones, arranged side by side at the top. In them, he found the neatest kind of toys. The drawer on the left had a box of bullets. On the right was the revolver itself. It was big, blue-black, and heavy as a brick. Nathan had seen such things on TV and in the movies hundreds of times, but he had never actually handled one before. It was another one of those things his father had promised they would do when he got older.
He could see the heads of four bullets peeking out through the cylinder openings. There was a way to make the ammunition cylinder flop out of the side of the gun, and he was determined to find out how. Maybe you had to pull the hammer back. He rolled it back to the first click, and nothing happened. The next click took a lot of effort, but as the hammer moved, the cylinder began to turn. As it did, the fifth and sixth bullets peaked their noses out. He got nervous before he had the hammer all the way back, and eased it down slowly.