K Stewart - A Devil in the Details

I scooted my scrawny butt up on the crispy paper as instructed and arranged the sheet so she could get a good look at my right leg. The scars were almost perfect circles of shiny pink skin on either side of my calf, hairless and smooth. It looked like I’d tangled with a really big hole punch.

Bridget poked and prodded at me with cold fingers, making those “hmm” noises that doctors do. “Any tenderness?”

“Nope.”

“Any muscle weakness or spasm?”

“Nope.” Aside from what my workouts brought on, but she didn’t need to know that.

“It doesn’t look like the poison left any lingering tissue damage.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “I still don’t know how you managed to clear that out of your system so fast, when we couldn’t even figure out what it was.”

I knew how. The doctors in Bethesda ran every test they could think of to identify the toxin in my system, with no luck. In fact, more than half the samples were misplaced or destroyed. At first, the hospital staff joked that I was the unluckiest patient ever. When I kept getting worse, with no antidote in sight, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

Enter Mira, her herbs, and her magic. They flew her out, quietly telling her she may need to say her good-byes to me. For three days in the ICU, she snuck me her own brand of medicine and prayed to her goddess while my right calf turned dark and sent ominous red streaks up my thigh. I don’t know how high they had the morphine drip set, but I was pretty much a vegetable for the really fun parts. All I could remember of the intense fever was being so very thirsty. And just when the doctors started mumbling about amputation, the infection receded, my skin pinked up, and I started to heal. The doctors congratulated themselves for a job well done, all the while wondering what the hell they did that finally worked.

The secret of it always made me smile. It wasn’t a modern medical miracle. It was an ancient one. I always wondered what the doctors would think of that if they knew.

“You still doing the exercises?” Bridget, oblivious to my wandering thoughts, continued groping my leg.

“Yep.” She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me. “I am, I swear! Ask Mira.”

“Okay, slide down. Let me see the hip.”

This was the tricky part. In order for her to see the hip to her satisfaction, the boxers had to go. It was an interesting dance to accomplish that without losing the sheet, and of course she wouldn’t make it easier by leaving the room. She did turn her back, though. Hurray for professionalism amongst friends.

She made me do a few runway walks across the room, and a couple deep squats, just to prove I could. “You want me to balance on one leg and juggle torches next?”

The good doctor ignored me. “Looks like your range of motion is almost back to normal. You might have some pain in cold or rainy weather, though.” She leaned against the sink and gave me that thoughtful look. I hated that look. Nothing good ever followed that look. “That’s a helluva scar collection you have going, you know.” Crap. It was this conversation.

I glanced down. My legs, aside from the most recent acquisition, were unscarred. There were, of course, the lovely claw marks down my left side from armpit to hip, a constant reminder that I was most definitely human. There were also the other minor ones I’d collected over the last few years. They were nothing grossly disfiguring, but they were probably not the kind of scars a security consultant should have. Since no one was actually sure what a security consultant did, no one called me on it. “Chicks dig scars, right?”

Bridget shook her head, the friend gone and the doctor firmly in place. “The older you get, the more your body is going to hate you. Maybe you ought to think of slowing down some, while you’re still healthy.”

“I’m thirty-two, Bridge. Not a hundred thirty-two.”

“You want to live to see thirty-five?”

Of course I wanted to. The odds of it, though? Not good. I accepted that a long time ago. The samurai fears not death, only a bad death. “You know, Cole’s a cop, and no one gives him this shit.”

“Cole doesn’t have four ICU stays under his belt.”

“I’m not going to argue this with you again, Bridge.” She was a friend, yes. But even friends have limits.

“Mira and Anna-”

“Mira and I have talked about it,” I said in my best end-of-discussion voice. In fact, we’d talked and screamed and thrown things… Yeah, it had been discussed-at length. “And they will always be taken care of.”

Her jaw clenched, and I could hear her teeth grinding. I have that effect on a lot of women. “Fine. But as your doctor, I’m obligated to tell you to slow down.” She threw my pants at me, smacking me in the chest. Trying to catch them, I dropped the sheet, and there was a scramble to cover myself with something, anything. Bridget smirked. “And as your friend, I’m reminding you that Mira says not to forget your mom’s birthday present.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered, dressing after the doc left the room. Was there anyone Mira hadn’t told? This was getting ridiculous.

I wandered back out to the front to find Bridget at the receptionist’s desk again and three people in the waiting room. The doc glanced up at me once. “I’ve got you down for another checkup in a month, Jess. Keep doing the therapy; maybe get some swimming in this summer.”

That earned a grimace. I don’t swim. I do sink rather well, though. “I’ll see what I can manage.”

She grabbed my hand when I went to leave and lowered her voice. “God watches out for you, Jess. I firmly believe that. But you can’t keep testing him this way.” She had that look in her gray eyes, the one that said she truly believed. How my wife the witch and this devout Catholic became best friends, I will never know.

“You worry too much, Doc.” No doubt, she would spend her next visit with Mira detailing just what kind of a worthless sumbitch I was. There were times when I wondered if she was right.

The sun was bright when I walked out into the parking lot. There wasn’t a cloud in the steel blue sky, and it looked as if that sky went on forever. Sometimes I wondered how the world could look so cheerful, knowing what horrible things existed there. Then I thought of people like Bridget-good people, with faith in a greater power, in absolute good. I hoped I wouldn’t let them down.

As I was clambering into my truck, my hip buzzed. I was learning to hate my cell phone. It never brought good news. There was some wriggling involved, but I finally got it out of my pocket. “Hello?”

“Dawson.” In just that single word, I could hear defeat in the old Ukrainian’s gravelly voice. My stomach tied itself in knots in anticipation of bad news.

“Hey, Ivan. What’s the word?” I rolled the window down and got comfortable. It wasn’t like anyone needed my parking spot.

“Is there to be any chance that you are to be hearing from Archer, of late?”

I frowned at the odd question. I’d met Guy Archer only once, and we weren’t what I would call close. He was a stocky man with black hair graying at the temples, stick-straight posture, a faint French accent. Stoic didn’t even begin to describe his expression. Ex-military, I thought, or possibly Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In plaid shirts, blue jeans, and worn work boots, he looked like a lumberjack, and he bore that impression out when I saw him pin a playing card to a tree trunk with a thrown hatchet. Lumberjacks did that kind of thing, right?

We had exchanged nods and not much else. I stuck to the United States mostly, and Guy sat up there in Toronto, doing his own thing. Miguel, yeah, I kept in touch with him, but Guy-not so much. “No, not for months. Why?” There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Ivan? You still there?”