Dr. Knox Read Free Page B

said.
    She nodded. “Yeah, I got—” And then her eyes flicked to Arthur’s laptop and caught there. Her face hardened again. “Like we don’t have enough trouble already. What’s that pirate doing here?”
    I looked at the screen and at the lean, whippy figure in it, standing by the front door, smiling lazily for the camera. Then I went through the waiting room and let Ben Sutter in.
    “What do you say, brother?” Sutter drawled. “You up for a house call tonight?”

CHAPTER 3
    The 101 was fucked, Sutter said, so we took surface streets north and west as the sky ripened from pink to purple, and lights came on all over town. San Pedro to First; First into Beverly; Beverly to Vermont to Franklin to Outpost and into the hills. Like everything about Sutter, his driving was fluid and nonchalant, and it was only on close inspection that you noticed the precision and speed.
    He was thirty-five, five years younger than me, and at six feet tall, an inch shorter. His heritage was an elusive thing—African, Asian, Scots, Native American, maybe Hispanic too. Sutter himself claimed not to know the precise recipe, but, whatever the mix, the result was striking. His features were sharp and angular, as if chipped from coffee-colored stone, animated by a nimble intellect and a sometimes merciless wit, and softened by laugh lines around his mouth and pale eyes.
    The rest was muscle. He was cobbled, plated, and wired together with it, and the first time I’d stitched him up it seemed amazing that anything could pierce that armor. But three bullets had, along with an ugly chunk of shrapnel. Even that torn up, he’d refused treatment until he saw that his wounded teammates and the children they had brought in—a boy and girl, both eight, pulled from the remains of a refugee encampment, and caked in ash and mud—were being looked after.
    That was six years ago, at a Doctors Transglobal Rescue field station in the Central African Republic, halfway between Bangui and Berbérati. I was running the place—little more than a tin-roofed shed with tarps for doors—and Sutter, who’d cashed out of the Special Forces by then, and cashed into the private security business, was babysitting some German geologists. The geologists were unscathed but full of complaint over detours and delays, and before I’d started pulling bullets from him, Sutter had threatened to shoot them if they didn’t shut up.
    He took a left on Mulholland, ran the window down, and hung his elbow out. The evening air was soft, and smelled of eucalyptus and dust. I drummed my fingers on the dash, and Sutter looked over. His gray eyes were bright.
    “Lydia seemed less happy to see me than usual,” he said. “Something going on?”
    I told him about the boy, his missing mother, and the men peering through the clinic’s windows. He squinted, and I told him about Lydia’s impulse to call child services and my desire not to.
    He raised a skeptical eyebrow. “She’s got a point.”
    I shrugged. “I don’t want to hand him over to those clowns unless I have to.”
    Sutter smiled. “You want help looking for the mom?”
    “I’ll let you know.”
    We drove in silence for a while, along the twisting road. “Hard to believe she still doesn’t like me,” Sutter said. “After all these years.”
    “Lydia doesn’t like me that much, and I sign her paycheck.”
    “Which makes you part of the oppressor class. But me—I’m a workingman. Plus, I’ve got a way with people.”
    “And modesty too.”
    I looked out the window, at the shadowed hillsides and canyons along Mulholland. Then I unzipped the black duffel at my feet.
    It was an ER in a hockey bag: surgical kits, anesthetics, pain meds, tranquilizers, antibiotics, sterile gauze, splints, rolls of tape, packs of surgical gloves, IV kits, bags of Ringer’s lactate, and bags of saline. I took another count of the surgical kits, then looked into the back seat. There was a matching duffel there, packed with a