Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  “You’re gonna meet the boyfriend. He’s cool, but kind of the jealous type. You’re not bi or anything, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. You didn’t trip the gaydar. But sometimes Angel’s gaydar gets confused if he’s irritated. Just warning you.”

  Better and better, I thought. Hungover and caught in the middle of a lover’s quarrel.

  “Spend some time with this,” Miles told me, gesturing at the computer. “Get what you need to find that kid. Gotta go change.”

  Miles disappeared, and I squinted at the information, half distracted by the imminent arrival of the irritable Angel.

  And arrive he did.

  “Hi,” I heard someone say from across the room. I turned and saw a tall, well-built guy with a shaved head—kind of a point-guard type a dozen years past his prime. He was wearing sweatpants and a puffy vest, clutching a fruit drink and a small brown bag.

  “Hi,” I said, dragging my corpse and my coffee over to greet him. He set down the bag, then shook my hand.

  “You’re Miles’s friend from the bar?”

  God, he made it seem so sordid. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Where’s Miles?”

  “He’s getting changed, he said.”

  “Of course he is.”

  We stood like that for a few painful moments. I ran my hand over the wheatgrass. “You want some coffee?” I asked.

  He laughed sarcastically, like who was I to be offering the coffee. “So you two met last night?”

  “Yeah. At the Grand Junction. Miles is helping me out on some things.”

  “Oh. What?”

  “Some public health things. I’m a public health doctor.”

  “Well, Miles certainly knows about that. You two are birds of a feather.”

  “Yeah. So, what do you do?”

  “I’m a writer. Cyberpunk. You ever heard of The Electric Fountain?”

  “No.”

  “Spraybots?”

  I guess I needed to get out more.

  Thankfully, Miles appeared at that moment, his pale skinny legs poking out of the bottom of cut-off sweatpants, a disintegrating Grateful Dead T-shirt on top.

  “Yoga time,” he announced. “You guys met. Cool.”

  Miles kissed Angel briefly and scooped the bag off the counter. “Blueberry bran. Awesome. Nate, you up for some Ashtanga?”

  “No thanks.”

  “That’s cool. You should work some poison out of your system, though.”

  “My brain works best on poison.”

  “Work some poison out of your soul.”

  “Soul likes poison, too.”

  Miles put a hand on Angel’s shoulder, asked, “What time do you have to be at work?”

  “Nine-thirty,” Angel said. He caught me looking at him, perplexed. He smiled. “I’m a partner at a law firm, honey.” Then, as Miles slipped a DVD into the player and switched on the plasma screen TV, I heard Angel mutter, “Spraybots.” He chuckled.

  So there I was, taking notes on a scrap of paper. It would have been easier to print everything out, but I didn’t want to interrupt the yoga master. “Chataranga and Upward Dog…” and so on and so on.

  In ten minutes, I’d written down Tim Kim’s current address, as well as the contact numbers for his old school in San Francisco and the summer program in Berkeley. I hopped on the Web, and got directions to the address in Napa.

  It wasn’t lost on me how odd it was to find this information. I mean, it wasn’t easy to get—Miles did, after all, have to crack into a government database—but it wasn’t impossible either. Anyone with some diligence would have been able to find Timothy Kim. And if it was possible to find him, my theory about why the kid wasn’t in Chicago with his dad was crap. He wasn’t being hidden, not very well anyway. By extension, Dorothy Zhang wasn’t being very well hidden.

  If she was with her kid, that is. If she hadn’t jetted off with Moonies or the Zapatistas.

  So, she was with her kid? Or on the run? And if she was on the run, was it from her former colleagues at work? From her brother? Why would she want to hide from her brother? Why was her brother beaten to a pulp? Who were the men who had so frightened him?

  Was his sister under threat by the same man? Was she even still alive?

  “Shit,” I said to myself.

  “Step forward to Warrior One,” said the man on the DVD. “Warrior Two.”

  Dorothy Zhang dead? I didn’t want to think about another body now, and tucked this in with the hundred other unknowns. I looked back to the computer.

  Now, no one’s ever accused me of keeping my nose where it’s supposed to be. I didn’t see any No Trespassing signs on Miles’s desktop. I wasn’t going to dig through private folders, but the desktop…

  “As you breathe out, think about your shoulder blades coming together…”

  The desktop was unfamiliar territory—seems Miles had split his hard drive into about a half-dozen other drives: “THX Code,” “Brk Code,” and something wild called, well, “Smthg Wld.” I avoided them all, not needing to see any high-level coding and not wanting to see what Miles considered “wild.” A desktop folder caught my eye. “NMcC.” Those letters seemed familiar. I opened the folder.

  “Downward Dog. Lift your tailbone to the sky. Stay rooted in your forefingers and your thumbs. Breathe in. Slowly release the tension from your body…”

  At that point, I was rooted in the fifteen files contained in the “NMcC” folder. All were Web pages—articles, a few blurbs from CDC.

  All were about me.

  46

  I CLEANED OFF IN A marble shower the size of my first apartment. The stink of alcohol still clung to me like a skunk’s spray.

  Pants went back on. Shirt. I stared at the balled-up windbreaker with the gun nestled inside. Nate McCormick and Smith & Wesson? I did not want those names to be in the same sentence. I did not want to be the man who felt so threatened he needed a goddamned weapon. But, hell, I was threatened. Disgusted with myself, I strapped on the gun. Zipped up the windbreaker.

  I emerged from the bedroom into a modern domestic tableau: Angel, pureeing some deeply purple concoction; Miles close behind him, arms around his waist.

  Angel cut the blender.

  Miles turned to me. “Smoothie? Blueberry and wheatgrass. Full of antioxidants.”

  I said sure, and Angel tipped the carafe to fill three glasses. He handed me one, and I saw his eyes linger.

  The two were dressed for success. Angel in his trendy business casual, Miles in a suit and tie. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

  I felt Angel staring at me.

  “Going to a funeral?” I asked Miles.

  “Got a meeting with Whitey McWhite today, Nate. Pitching our services to the Empire.” He named a huge software firm in the area.

  “Why the jacket, Nate?” Angel asked.

  “Uh, I’m a little cold.”

  “It’s not cold,” he said, and continued staring. I took a sip of the smoothie, trying to be as nonchalant as possible.

  “Get out of here,” Angel said.

  “Angel—” Miles looked shocked.

  “Get out now,” his lover repeated.

  I stammered, “What’s—”

  “He has a gun, Miles,” Angel spat. “You invited someone with a gun here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Under your left arm. I didn’t spend two years as a prosecutor and not know what a shoulder holster looks like.”

  There was a long moment in which no one said anything. Miles’s face was a mixture of confusion and disappointment. Finally, he spoke. “You should go, Doc.”

  I set down the glass with the smoothie. “Thanks for…thanks for everything.” I felt like a schoolboy caught in the act of cheating, stealing, lying. There was nothing really left to say, so I began to slink toward the elevator.

  “What are you doing, dude?”

  “He’s leaving, Miles,”
Angel said. “Let him go.”

  “What are you doing, Nate?” Miles repeated. “You think you’re going to work this out with a gun? What world do you live in, man? You’re going to go toe-to-toe with these guys who you say sliced up your friend? You a good shot, Nate?”

  Angel sighed. “Miles—”

  “Quiet, sweets.” He turned back to me. “This ain’t you, Nate.”

  “You don’t know who I am.”

  “And obviously neither do you. You want to find out what happened to your friend, you want to find this Zhang woman, this isn’t the way to do it.”

  “It’s just for protection,” I said weakly.

  “Let him take his popgun, Miles.”

  “Angel,” Miles said sternly. “Play out the scenarios, Doc. These guys find you, you have a gun, you pull it, you shoot once, then you’re dead. These guys find you, you don’t have a gun, you have a spitting chance.”

  “I don’t have a chance either way.”

  “Come on, dude. You got your brain. You got your wits. You got a chance. But not with that.” He pointed to the slight bulge under my arm. “Look, I didn’t pull an all-nighter so you could get yourself killed. You owe me. I don’t want to read about you in the paper. Screw the weapon.”

  I stared at him and did, for a moment, play out the scenarios. Then I unzipped my jacket, and Miles took a step back.

  “I’m making sure I don’t backslide,” I said. I unholstered the pistol, fiddled with the cylinder, and popped it out. I handed it to Miles. “I owe you.”

  “You’re doing the right thing,” Miles said. He balled the cylinder in his fist, smiled, and clapped me on the shoulder. “You let me know whatever else you need. We don’t want more people getting nasty tumors, do we?”

  Outside, I trawled around until I found a small pile of gravel. I worked the grit into the action of the gun. Satisfied that no industrious kid or jonesing addict would ever be able to make the thing work, I dropped the Smith & Wesson into a storm drain.

  From the trunk of the car, I retrieved the box of bullets. I dumped them in a trash can. I threw the holster in after them.

  There. All done. I now had nothing but my wits. And I hoped they were enough.

  The cell shook as I approached my car. A blocked number. I picked it up.

  “You don’t answer your phone? I called you twice this morning, McCormick.”

  “And didn’t leave a message, Ravi.”

  “Because I’m at the General and I’m using their line, and I’m telling myself that if you don’t pick up the goddamn phone I’m taking this case all for myself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We got one, man,” he said. “We got another one.”

  47

  FOR ALL ITS SHINE, SAN FRANCISCO has an underbelly. And when the underbelly gets sick, it comes to San Francisco General Hospital.

  The General backed up to a gritty neighborhood called the Mission, just northwest of grittier Bayview. The hospital was aging, publicly funded, and hemorrhaged cash as fast as its trauma patients hemorrhaged blood. Every year, the overseers at the hospital would trudge to City Hall, hats in hand, begging for scraps from the budget table. I don’t think the phrase “in the black” was ever used to describe the place. “In the red” was far more apt—literally and metaphorically.

  I drove along Potrero Avenue, in front of a phalanx of buildings that composed the oldest part of the campus. The buildings smacked of the East Coast. They were brick, not something you often see in earthquake territory, and they had a Gothic flair, not something you often see west of the Rockies. The whole layout had a sinister vibe, evocative of straitjackets, transorbital lobotomies, and other miseries. I passed a small sign that said “Emergency Services” and “Physician on Duty 24 hours.” In these days of nonstop medicine, the sign itself seemed like a throwback. From the faded colors, I figured it had been there since the Eisenhower administration.

  The main hospital was a hulking gray edifice. Very Soviet, and not very welcoming, despite the small circle of flowers planted outside the entrance, despite the brightly colored heart sculpture rising up from the flowers.

  Weird aesthetics aside, I liked the General. The grounds of public hospitals, county hospitals—big or small, rural or urban—fill me with a glimmer of optimism, that maybe some part of our anonymous, anatomized society still gives a shit. Give me your tired, your poor, they say. But please give us your tax dollars to say it. In the case of the General, the offer to be taken in is extended to more than sixty-five thousand people a year, ninety percent of them low income or indigent, and who were nearly equal parts white, black, Asian, Hispanic. In that way, I think, places like the General are the true monuments to our best qualities; they mean more than promises stamped into copper on some statue in New York Harbor.

  There was another reason I dug the General. It was operated by the Department of Public Health for San Francisco. Public health. My kind of people.

  The visitors’ desk was staffed by one volunteer and two sheriff’s deputies. The volunteer, a birdlike septuagenarian, pointed me to the elevators, and I rode skyward with an orderly who needed a bath and a cluster of harried-looking residents from UCSF. They spoke in hushed volume about some “brain-dead ER doc.”

  Fourth floor.

  I walked over the scuffed linoleum, past the whiteboard with patients’ names, past a patient dragging an IV pole, toward Ravi, who waited at the nurses’ station, standing beside a petite woman with frizzy blond hair and heavy glasses. Ravi’s clothes weren’t what you’d call standard health department: black pants, cream silk T-shirt, blazer. The guy looked like a shorter, squatter, swarthier Don Johnson. He even sported the two days’ growth of beard.

  “You walk here?” he asked impatiently.

  “I walked to my car, drove here, and walked from my car.”

  “You look like shit.”

  “Great to see you, too.”

  He grunted. “Long time, McCormick.” Ravi turned to the woman. “Monica, this is Nate McCormick. Bane of disease and bad guys everywhere.” To me, he said, “This is Monica Evans, bane of skin disease and cystic acne.” Monica blushed. I noticed she had perfect skin, creamy and glowing under the sudden rush of red. I shook her hand, keeping my eyes glued to hers so as not to signal I noticed her embarrassment.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Monica opened her mouth to speak, but Ravi bowled her over. “After we put out the quiet word, Monica got a call from a pal of hers in the San Francisco Department of Public Health.”

  “It was off the record,” Monica said.

  “Yeah. Anyway, she got a call about it, so we decided to come down here early to take a look. It’s it, man. Extensive involvement of the soft tissue around the mouth and eye. Woman’s here because she began to bleed from one of the sites.”

  “Where is she?”

  Monica pointed to a room down the hall. “In—”

  Again, Ravi cut her off. “That’s a problem.”

  I waited for an explanation.

  “SF Public Health is with her now. Monica’s pal, it seemed, didn’t realize there was anything to get excited about until we acted excited.” He shot a scathing glance at his co-worker, who blushed again. “Now we’ve got jurisdictional bullshit to contend with.”

  “They wouldn’t have invited you guys?”

  “San Francisco never brings in state. They think they’re so damned competent they never invite us in.”

  One thing I didn’t miss about working in public health were the pissing matches between agencies. The normal flow of involvement was from local to state to the feds. Normal flow, though, implied there was a set protocol for bringing in bigger guns. However, some of the monstrous locals—San Francisco, LA, New York—were so sure of themselves, they often handled everything locally. If it got too big for them, they leapt over the state authorities and went straight to CDC. Public health, in general, is an invitation-only affair. And if the locals don’t invi
te the state or the feds in, they usually stay out.

  To be fair, SFPH did have the reputation of being highly competent. As such, they rarely placed calls to the state offices across the Bay. The problem here was that the call had been placed on the down low. But Ravi Singh was not a down-low-type guy. He was ambitious. He smelled glory, and he was going for it.

  “They’ll screw the pooch on this one, if we let them,” he said unhappily.

  “We can’t keep them out of this,” Monica replied.

  “I know that, Monica.”

  “Okay,” I said, tired already of the bickering. “What’s the story?”

  Looks were exchanged between the two state docs. “Go ahead,” Monica told Ravi.

  “Beatrice Lum, forty-three, Asian,” he said. “Came to the ED two days ago because she was bleeding from a wound in her face and the family couldn’t get it to stop. Ulcerated mass. ED docs applied pressure, but couldn’t stop the bleeding, which they thought was coming from the maxillary artery. She was crossed and matched, and got a unit of blood in the emergency room. ENT was consulted. They took her to the OR, gave her another unit there, and ligated the artery, de-bulked what they could of the mass.”

  “You said extensive involvement?”

  “You’ll see her. It’s extensive.” He cleared his throat. “They did an MRI yesterday. It showed multiple soft tissue masses through the face. There are two large lesions. One on her maxilla, which eroded into the maxillary artery—debulking probably got about fifty percent of it. There’s another big one lateral and inferior to her left eye. That’s wrapped around the temporal nerve and involves the orbicularis oculi muscle. The smaller tumors seem to be staying in the skin and subcutaneous tissue. The bigger ones aren’t respecting tissue planes.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “It is bad. Her whole freaking face is becoming a tumor. And it hurts her, man. It’s in the nerves.”