Luke glanced at his watch again. Kate was a half hour late.
What was going on? After all this time — they hadn’t spoken in over four years — what was so important that she needed to meet with him tonight?
Barnesdale was probably apoplectic, pacing his office with that attorney. He would get to have his tirade. Luke knew he was simply postponing it by an hour or so.
The bell on the front door tinkled. A red-bearded indigent man poked his head inside and sniffed the deli’s aromas like a foraging animal before a busboy shooed him out the door. Moments later an older couple who were dressed for a night at the opera entered the restaurant. For seventy-three years Kolter’s had fought an unresolved struggle for its identity.
The same could be said for University Children’s. Across the street a warm glow glimmered through the enormous stained-glass windows that stretched across the façade of the original hospital structure. Closer scrutiny revealed a medical campus that looked like the architectural equivalent of a Rube Goldberg invention, a new addition having been added every twenty years or so, each time in a seemingly haphazard fashion. The only unifying design concept was concrete.
University Children’s was similar to Kate in that way. Both lacked a defining character. The forces of life seemed to reshape her beliefs and values to accommodate her goals. It was something that had initially attracted him, her openness to different points of view. But gradually it became an irksome divide in their relationship, brought to a head when Zenavax offered her a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity, one that seemed to override any loyalty she may have felt for his father.
But it wasn’t her decision to join Zenavax, or the problems she created for his father, that had ended their relationship. It was the way she had justified her decision. Kate reverse-engineered her principles to justify her ambitions. Her opinions shifted around like sand dunes. She seemed to have no moral center, no fixed positions that guided her decisions.
Tonight, though, something about her was different. When they had spoken on the phone, her voice betrayed a fear. There was a vulnerability that she had never revealed in their relationship.
It was like the fear he’d heard in Megan’s voice that night three months ago, after some goon had tried to rape her while she was walking home from the hospital. Luke’s grip tightened around his coffee mug as he recalled the moment when Megan had called him from the Rampart police station.
The fear — no, the terror — had burned in her eyes for weeks afterward. That son of a bitch had stripped away her innocence, stolen the sanctuary of a mind untouched by violence.
But Luke knew it was he who had ravaged their relationship. In the aftermath of that night, he had done everything wrong. And not being able to explain his actions, to either Megan or himself, ripped at his gut.
A chorus of horns sounded on the street.
Luke’s head jerked back. Several cars screeched to a halt outside the deli. He craned his neck and saw a small cluster of people moving clumsily across the street, carrying someone in their arms while plodding toward the hospital. Friday night was bringing the usual mix of gang- and drug-related cases to their hospital.
Moments later traffic began moving again.
Where was Kate?
Megan looked at her watch—10:48 P.M. — seventy-two minutes until the end of her shift. The second hand was taking its sweet time completing each circuit.
God, I hate trauma duty.
Tomorrow evening was her last E.R. shift. One more night and she’d be done with trauma duty and done with Luke McKenna forever.
And in exactly forty-eight hours she’d board her flight to Guatemala. The Central American rain forests seemed the perfect place to toss aside the emotional upheaval that had dogged her for the past three months. The perfect place to make a new beginning.
She and Susan were sifting through equipment and supplies strewn across the Trauma Unit as the sheriff’s Search & Rescue crew recovered and secured their gear. The three-year-old girl flown in on Air-5 had been pulled from a car that careened off an unlit forest road. She had suffered only minor injuries and was already tucked away upstairs for overnight observation.
One of the pilots, dressed in a green flight suit and carrying a beige helmet under his arm, was standing near the door talking with another resident. In typical male fashion, they were jabbering about Luke’s fight with the football player as though recounting an epic battle that had global significance.
Megan looked at the name stenciled on the pilot’s breast pocket: R.STEVENS.
“That guy’s one strange dude,” the pilot said.
“Whatta ya mean?” the resident said.
“I mean, McKenna’s not your everyday guy. He saved my bacon big-time during a rescue a few years ago.”
Susan shot a glance at the pilot.
Apparently, her face told him that she wanted more, so he explained: “We were lifting some woman out of the L.A. River. Her car had skipped over the guardrail and gone over a bridge. McKenna and me are in the chopper, the other crew member is on the end of the cable with this woman. As we’re pulling them up, the cable on my hoist gets tangled around some rebar sticking out of a gash in the side of the bridge. All of a sudden we’re tethered to the bridge and I’m having trouble controlling my bird. But I can’t use the cable’s safety release because my guy and this woman are already fifty feet above the ground.”
The creases around his eyes deepened, as if pulled taut by the memory. “Anyway, before I know it, that crazy-ass McKenna shimmies down the cable with no safety harness, no nothing, and works it free. Then he climbs back up the line like he’s some kinda monkey. We’re talking a good twenty-five feet or so in the downwash of chopper blades.” He shook his head. “Once he’s back inside, he gives me this no-big-deal look like he’d just gone out for some air.”
Susan had a silly grin on her face. “Whoa.”
The pilot said, “I still don’t know how the hell he did it. But I’ll take him along on a rescue any time.” He looked at each of them in turn. “He around?”
“His shift ended an hour ago,” Susan said.
“Well, tell him Handlebar says hello.” His eyes brightened and he pulled on one end of his moustache. “He’ll know who you’re talking about.”
A scream came from behind the heavy metal doors. The nightmare did not bloom, though, until the doors opened with a whoosh.
A nurse pushed her way into the room, followed by three men carrying a woman’s body, her crimson torso dangling just above the floor. One man was carrying her by the arms, his hands drenched in blood, his grip slipping. The other two — teenage boys — each held the woman by one of her legs. A stream of blood trailed behind them. The woman’s head was lolled back, and a rivulet of blood streamed from a pucker in the middle of her forehead. Pulsations of thick crimson oozed from her chest — her heart was still pumping.
Megan shouted at Susan: “Call Surgery and tell them we have an adult female with multiple GSW’s — head and chest!”
The man holding the woman’s arms slipped on some blood, and the woman’s shoulder hit the ground. A wavy smear of red marked the spot.
Megan turned to the pilot. “Help me lift this woman onto the table.” To no one in particular, she yelled, “Get me something I can use for pressure bandages. And someone call upstairs. We need six units of O-negative whole blood…”
Luke felt a mix of frustration, fatigue, and disgust as he left Kolter’s at 11:00 P.M. Did Kate decide to back out of their meeting? That wasn’t like her. Timid, she was not — at least not when he had known her. So where was she?
He had no way to reach her. When they spoke she had offered her cell phone number, but he told her it wasn’t necessary because he would meet her at the deli without fail. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would be the one who failed to show.