“Listen, all I’m getting at here is that if Bill worked with anyone else and they were insured in an equally ridiculous manner, it would certainly go a long way towards dropping this case.”
“And then everyone would know the precise manner in which we ensure our high-risk employees,” the courier snipped.
“Oh for God’s sake. Fine. In that case, can you tell me where the Glendale Attorney General offices? You’ll almost certainly be implicated for signing off on this.”
“All right. Just hold on,” the courier said, motioning the entire room down with his hands. “Yes. Bill did work as a member of a team. And yes. They were all insured the exact same. To the dollar. Is that enough for you, Mr. Youngsmith?”
“A copy of those records should suffice.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Then a statement from a member of that team saying as much should suffice to end the inquiry,” Frank said, his voice monotone. The air had shut off again. He was sweating through his collar.
The courier looked torn. He glanced at the screen in front of him, and then behind him, as if seeking approval from behind the double doors. He sucked at his teeth for a moment before coming to a decision. He grabbed a small pad, took a name from the screen in front of him and scribbled it violently down, then tore it off and thrust it out to Frank.
“His name is Dr. Baxter Walcott. Down in San Diego. Not convenient, but the closest there is.”
Frank took the sheet and backed away from the courier.
“Now listen to me, Mr. Youngsmith. Once you get that statement, that’s it. There will be nothing else. Right?”
“That should do it,” Frank said haltingly.
“Good. That’s good,” the courier said. “Then you can go on back to whatever it is you do wherever it is you do it.”
Chapter Five
WHEN NIKKIE HIX’S PAGER went off she was visiting her favorite cousin in Tempe, Arizona. They were watching a movie and eating Chinese takeout on the couch when her cousin felt a vibration in the small of her back. She jumped up and let out a little yelp and after looking around for a moment noticed that she had been sitting on Nikkie’s hooded sweatshirt.
“I think you’re vibrating,” she said.
Nikkie, absorbed in the movie, looked at her blankly.
“Hmm?”
“Your sweater.”
Nikkie was so used to carrying the silent pager around with her that at first she had no idea what her cousin might mean.
“Vibrating?”
She picked up the sweater, a thin, wash worn Tennessee hoodie, and reached into the front pouch.
She was still for a moment.
“You’re gonna miss the call,” her cousin said, eyes back on the screen.
Nikkie pulled out the pager, muting its angry buzzing in her hands. Its pink screen bathed her face in a fluorescent glow. She read the display.
Ten days until the draw. The Tournament was back.
“Well how ‘bout that,” she said softly.
“Is that a pager? I didn’t think they even made those anymore.”
Nikkie didn’t answer her cousin.
“... Nikkie? What is it? Is everything okay?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the pink screen. “Just work. They want me to come in early.”
Nikkie had told her cousin that she worked as a traveling rep for a sports apparel company, giving out free merchandise at various sporting events, trade shows, and concerts. She had even gone so far as to purchase a pair of shoes, a watch, and a sports bag and given them over to her, nonchalantly claiming that they were left over from her most recent promotion. All lies.
“How early?” her cousin asked.
“Soon. Next couple of days.”
“Aw. Man. Work sucks.”
“Sometimes, for sure,” Nikkie said, slipping the pager back in her pocket. She hunkered back down into the couch and, drawing her knees up to her chest and popping another bit of orange-flavored chicken in her mouth, she thought of her captain, Johnnie Northern.
————
Ten doctors in five separate hospitals across the U.S. were trained to complete the pre-draw medical exam Nikkie Hix and every other player required, and the closest Tournament doctor to Tempe, Arizona was Dr. Baxter Walcott in San Diego. So it was that two days after getting the page, Nikkie Hix walked in to San Diego’s University Medical Hospital. Dr. Walcott was behind the main reception desk dropping off a file and absently recording observations of his last patient into a Dictaphone when he saw her walk in. At first he thought it was his daughter Sarah, and he waved briefly even as he recorded. Seconds later, however, he clicked it off mid-sentence.
As Nikkie approached, her smile was perfectly disarming. Dr. Walcott was struck by how she even smiled like his daughter; it started as a near-smirk and seemed to roll fully across her face. She had a harmless, welcoming look to her muted green eyes, but over the years Walcott had learned better. It was as if their real hue was loosely draped by a thin, white lace, and when she narrowed them, as she did when she smiled, the lace was tightened, and for a moment Walcott saw something in the green behind that spoke of a type of passion he couldn’t understand, of a fierce pride frightening in one such as her, and that he had only ever seen in two others, and they were of her ilk.
Dr. Walcott had grown fond of Nikkie in a fatherly way, but he hated to see her. Seeing her meant the Tournament was around the corner. She was one of three members of Team Blue, and as the chief cardiologist at UCSD Medical, and indeed one of only a handful nationwide who could, it fell to him to sign off on sending her out into the madness. Of the three on the team, it was always hardest with her.
“It must be that time again,” he said darkly.
“I got the page. ‘Suppose I’m first?”
Walcott looked at her at length. She stood comfortably, hands in the front pouch of her sweatshirt, heels together, toes out, like a cross between a soldier and a ballerina. After several moments, Walcott turned to the receptionist.
“Push all of my appointments back an hour, will you? I have to see this patient.”
Walcott went over to a far cabinet and pulled a string of perhaps twenty keys from the side pocket of his white lab coat. He flipped through them, chose one, and unlocked the drawer lowest to the floor. He flipped through several manila folders until he came upon three blue folders in succession in the far back. The very last of the three read Hix. Walcott pulled it and, with a loud popping of the knees, stood once again.
“This way,” he said, managing to keep the defeat out of his voice. To the receptionist it was almost humorous; this girl couldn’t be older than twenty-five and yet here the head of Cardiac was catering to her. She hadn’t spoken but five words and yet he was already motioning for her to follow him back into the depths of the hospital. But something in Dr. Walcott’s heavy mannerism gave her pause and kept her mouth closed.
They passed many patient rooms as they walked, some open, some closed. Here and there gurneys rolled by and now and then a passing doctor or resident would say hello to Dr. Walcott. The hospital had a distinctive smell, inhumanly clean and slightly animal at the same time, like the laundry room in which the dog spends the majority of its time. They turned several corners and went into one surgical room only to pass through a small door in its rear into another, larger room in which several sets of glistening chrome machines sat inert. Dr. Walcott directed Hix to a patient bed where she sat; the butcher-paper covering the bed crinkled as she settled herself. Walcott gently closed the door behind them and turned to face her. She looked about the room, her feet dangling off the edge of the bed.
“So you’re back,” he said.
“I’m back.”
“I assume I’ll be seeing Northern and Haulden shortly, then?”
“Northern, yeah. Max is up east somewhere. He’ll probably get checked up there,” she said, her slight southern twang rising every now and then. Although she seemed
at ease Walcott couldn’t help feeling that she was very far from home.
He went to the closest of the machines, a black computer monitor situated on an ornate subterfuge, and flipped it on. He then opened up her file, removed a sheet of paper, and began writing remarks as the machine whirred intermittently.
“Blood sample first. To let it process.”
Nikkie hopped down from the bed and sat at the desk near the monitor. She pushed one sleeve up and rested her elbow on the desk, as if preparing to arm wrestle. At first Walcott was worried he might not find the vein, but her forearm, if small, was strong and defined and had a prominent blue vein that he tapped easily. She never winced. She watched the blood shoot through the piping and spatter into the first of two vials with interest.
After he had both samples he secured each in its own centrifuge, closed the lids, and set them spinning. On the attached monitor a spreadsheet opened and numbers appeared in the columns.
“If you could take off your shirt, please.”
She moved back to the bed and took off her sweatshirt and the t-shirt under it, leaving only her light pink bra on. She looked as strong and healthy as she ever had, her small form more athlete than actress. Her smooth, unblemished skin belied the unique medical turmoil of her inner system. Her only noticeable scar was just at her bellybutton where there once was a piercing, a remnant of her collegiate years before the Tournament. It had since been torn out. She couldn’t precisely remember when. By the time she noticed it was gone the wound had already scabbed over, leaving only a swath of red blood on her shirt.
What always got Dr. Walcott was her tattoo.
How a girl like Nikkie Hix could sport any tattoo at all, and wear it well, was still beyond Walcott, even five years after he had first seen it.
On her, as on all three of them, the inking seemed less like a man-made design and more like a natural patterning of the skin. Like veins of mineral in a rock, or a striking whorl of graining in a piece of lumber. It covered her right shoulder and extended halfway down her upper arm. Because the ink flowed with the curves of her shoulder and arm muscles, the design seemed of two pieces, like plate armoring, but symmetrical. It took the shape of two reverse-teardrops, one falling from her shoulder and the other climbing from the top of her bicep. From a distance the drops seemed filled in. A closer look revealed the design fractured here and there by slopes and dips, always reflected symmetrically on both sides.
Walcott had asked Nikkie Hix, upon first seeing her, what it was. “What do you think it looks like?” she’d replied. Walcott said that while the shapes looked like water from a distance, it reminded him of a flame close up, something that would come from a single candle in a dark window.
“A light in the dark,” she said.
Dr. Walcott put on his stethoscope and began to softly probe Nikkie’s stomach, listening here and there for abnormal acidic activity. He moved up to her chest and told her to take several deep breaths. Nikkie watched his face the entire time.
“You can quit, you know. You don’t have to do this. There are other doctors.”
Walcott looked at her for a moment before popping the earpieces out and turning around to another of the machines.
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you, from your end,” he said, as he flicked another of the chrome displays on, his back to her, “but it’s a good deal more difficult when you three keep coming in on gurneys. Or those around you do.”
Nikkie was silent as Walcott took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and several cotton balls from the top shelf of a cabinet. He then proceeded to gently clean five separate spots on Nikkie’s upper body, one on either shoulder, one just below her sternum, and two just below her waist. To each of these spots he attached suction cups of the type normally used in EKG testing. He checked the monitor on the centrifuge once more and then moved to a locked cabinet just below. He took out his set of keys, located the correct one, and unlocked it. From it he pulled an apparatus that looked like a center-punch. Nikkie’s gaze moved from Walcott’s face to this new instrument.
“We’re very good about not endangering others when we can help it” she said, softly.
“You are very good. But not perfect.”
Walcott moved over to her and took her hand in his, palm up. “You know what this is. It replicates a diode hit, on a much smaller scale, of course. You should immediately go numb within the localized area.”
Walcott pressed the device to his own palm and fired it. He felt a small static shock but nothing more; as it should be. He then positioned the punch on her palm, looked up at her, and pressed a red button on its top. It gathered tension and then snapped into the center of her palm. Nikkie grit her teeth and instinctively tried to pull her hand away, but Walcott held her fast.
To Nikkie it felt like she had slammed her funny-bone on a sharp corner, only the feeling was in her palm and not on her elbow; a moment of intense numbness followed by needle pricks that slowly spread themselves out over the surface of her palm to her fingertips. It was as if someone had squeezed her fingers shut over a fistful of thistles. Her hand contracted of its own accord.
This pain lasted for perhaps ten seconds and then slowly dissipated. The only evidence of the punch was a small wet mark, merely a few drops of liquid.
Walcott was grim as he repeated this test four more times in the four other areas on Nikkie’s body. The results were similar, although the pain varied slightly. Each left a small wet mark that Walcott wiped off with a cotton ball. The punch just below the waist was the most painful; it momentarily took her breath away, and the numbness was replaced by ten or so seconds of what felt like extreme menstrual cramps that spread from her uterus throughout her lower intestines. Thankfully, they also shortly abated.
“It says in your file that you were hit in the left shoulder last time, also below the left breast, and on the left hip,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Your NRS readings confirm that.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that even a year later your body is still showing effects.”
“You’re always sayin’ this.”
“I’m still not convinced that a body can fully heal from what they’ve done to you, Nikkie.”
“You say that every year too.”
“You know, I just lost a colleague to this ridiculous organization.”
Nikkie narrowed her eyes.
“A doctor?”
“He was the head of our research team. Older fellow. He took a full hit and died not even three weeks later of cardiac arrest. I’m positive it was the damn diode.”
The centrifuges slowed to a stop, beeped twice, and suddenly the corresponding monitor displayed a long data sequence. Walcott moved over to the monitor and sat down on a small swivel stool. He slowly scrolled down through the numbers, checking them against past readouts in Nikkie’s file.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nikkie said quietly.
Walcott printed the results, all three pages of them, and took them back to Nikkie. He set them on her lap. Nikkie picked them up and cocked her head as she scanned them.
“But it doesn’t change your opinion, naturally,” Walcott said.
Nikkie shrugged. “This is what I do. I’m young. I can recover,” she said, offhand. “This looks like a mess of numbers to me. Just tell me: will I work?”
“You’re still prone to it, if that’s what you mean. The diode will hurt you.”
“C’mon Doc, don’t look so sad,” she said, smiling slightly.
“This spits in the face of the oath I swore,” he muttered.
“Then stop! If you feel so bad about it, stop.”
“It’s far too late for anything like that,” he said, looking down at her as he shook his head kindly. “My leaving won’t stop that courier with his tracksuit from coming into this hospital and handing me that blue folder, and it won’t stop you from coming in this hospital, conscious or not.” He gently took the papers from her and
clipped them onto his board.
“It’s you that has to stop,” he said, looking into her face. “I can only go if you go. And you’re not planning on quitting any time soon, are you?”
“Never.”
Nodding slowly, Dr. Baxter Walcott signed the bottom of the report and handed it back to Nikkie.
“In that case, you’re cleared.” Convincing any of these players of the harm they were doing to themselves was like trying to reason with a fanatic. He wasn’t going to die on that hill. There were other ways.
Nikkie hopped up and put her shirt and sweatshirt back on. She folded up the report and stuffed it into her front pouch. “I’ll see you around, Doc.”
“Don’t get shot, Nikkie. We still don’t know how deeply the diode affects you.”
“I never plan on it.” She winked at him and strode from the room.
Dr. Walcott sat down heavily on the swivel stool.
His daughter winked just like that.
Chapter Six
ALLEN LOCKTON FELT CLEAR-HEADED only when he was exercising.
This isn’t to say that he zoned out when working out... quite the opposite. He made decisions, he formulated plans, and he did his work on the run quite literally.
With the fifth cycle of the Tournament imminent, Lockton was feeling overwhelmed. They had him running all over the USA and soon he would be running all over other countries. He would have job after job, one after another. On top of all that there was now, apparently, a frumpy balding guy asking too many questions.
How in the world did that happen? And yet he’d seen it himself, with his very eyes. Problems were meshing together, layering on top of each other, like so many loose sheets of paper strewn about on a desk. Where did one issue end and the next begin? This was especially hard for a man like Allen Lockton, who needed things compartmentalized. He could tackle everything in the world if it was presented to him in a single file line, but now it seemed like it was coming from all sides.
I need to work out, he thought as he looped about the roundabouts in his car exiting the BlueHorse grounds.
The Tournament Trilogy Page 5