John Lescroart - The Oath

They got to the connecting door and Hardy noted the heap of blankets next to his daughter's bed. "Why are you in here?" Hardy thinking it was no wonder his son wasn't sleeping soundly on the hardwood floor.

"You know the Beck. She gets scared," Vincent whispered.

Hardy knew. Fanned by her school's various "awareness" programs, Rebecca's profound and random fears-about death, teen suicide, stranger abduction, AIDS, drug addiction, and so many more-had reached crisis proportions about a year before. "I thought we'd worked most of those out. What's she still afraid of?"

"Just the dark, mostly. And being alone sometimes." Interpreting his father's heavy sigh, Vincent hastened to add, protecting her, "It's not every night. She's way better than she was."

"Good. I thought so. Do you have a futon or anything to lay on under those blankets?"

"No. I sleep good just on the floor."

"I see that," Hardy said. "Except for the bad dreams and being awake at twelve thirty." But Hardy spoke in a conspiratorial, not critical, tone. The two guys in the house had their own relationship-they had to stick together. "Let's get you something, though, okay?"

So they grabbed cushions from the chairs in Vincent's room and put them on the floor. As he got settled, Hardy pulled the blankets over him. "You could probably get in your own bed now and the Beck wouldn't notice."

But he shook his head, happy to be important. "That's okay. She needs me here sometimes. Girls do, you know, Dad."

Hardy rubbed his hand over his son's buzz cut. Vincent wasn't meaning to twist the knife in his heart-he was honing his little man chops, which hopefully someday he would put to better use than his father did. "I know," Hardy said. His hand rubbed the bristly head again. "Are we still not kissing each other good night?" This nightly ritual had ended only a couple of months before, just after Christmas, but occasionally when Vincent's guard was down, or nobody else in the family was around, he'd forget that it wasn't cool to kiss Dad anymore. Tonight Hardy got lucky, and figuring it was going to have to be one of the very last times, held onto the hug an extra millisecond. "Okay, get some sleep, Vin."

"I will now. Thanks, Dad."

"You're welcome."

"Want to hear a joke?"

Hardy, halfway to his feet, summoned his last unit of patience. "One," he said.

"What do you get when you turn an elephant into a cat?"

"I don't know."

"No, you've got to try."

"Okay, I'm trying. Watch. My eyes are closed." He silently counted to three. "Okay, I give up. What?"

"You really don't know? An elephant into a cat? Think."

"Vin…" He stood up.

"A cat," Vincent said. "You turn an elephant into a cat, you get a cat. Get it?"

"Good one," Hardy said. "You ought to tell it to Uncle Abe. He'd love it."

For reasons that eluded him, he stalked the house front to back several times, rearranged the elephants yet again. Then he sat for a while in the living room, until he was fairly certain that Vincent had dozed off. He came all the way into the Beck's room again, leaning down over the cushions and then the bed to make out the dim outlines of his children's faces, calm and peaceful now in sleep.

He eventually, finally, made it up to the master bedroom. There he double-checked the alarm to find that it was still-again?-set for 4:30. He would have to issue a home edict making his alarm clock off limits except for him and Frannie. He moved it ahead two hours.

In bed, with his wife breathing regularly beside him, he wondered briefly about all the subliminal communication going on in his house, among his family. He and Frannie with the elephants, the Beck's now unspoken but still clearly upsetting fears, Vincent's last joke an obvious attempt to keep his father in the room another few seconds, although he would never simply ask. The dynamic, suddenly, seemed to have shifted and Hardy, at least, felt adrift, moving among the rest of them with a kind of gravitational connection, but nothing really solid, holding them together.

He lay awake now, echoes of his son, unable to sleep despite his exhaustion. His memory had dredged up a contradiction that now gnawed at him. Earlier in the day, Rebecca Simms had derided the idea that someone had killed Tim Markham in the hospital. It was ridiculous, she'd said. It must have been an accident.

Or he'd simply just died, which, she'd reminded him, "people do." But by tonight, such deaths-unexplained possible homicides-had become common, a regular feature during the past year or more at Portola. He wanted to call her back and clarify her position-maybe he'd broken through the culture barrier at the hospital where criticism wasn't tolerated and then forced her to consider the unthinkable with Markham, and it had awakened other ghosts.

But the facts of the deaths alone-if they were facts, if they could be proven-were staggering in their implications, and not just for his client, although Kensing was going to be in the middle of whatever transpired. For Hardy, it would mean more hours, greater commitment, escalated involvement; less time with his wife, less connection with his children, less interest in the daily rhythms of his home.

It also meant that he was truly putting himself in harm's way. If someone, whether it was this Rajan Bhutan or someone else at Portola, had in fact killed again and again and if Hardy was going to be involved in exposing those crimes, then he was going to be in that person's sights.

He turned again onto his side, and might even have drifted off into a semblance of a dream state, where he was swimming in turbulent waters with some of Pico's sharks circling, snapping at him, closing in. Then something-some settling of his house, a random noise outside-sent a surge of adrenaline through him and he threw his covers off and sat bolt upright in bed. His breath came in ragged surges.

It woke Frannie up. "Dismas, are you all right? What time is it?"

"I'm okay. I'm okay." But he really wasn't. That largely unacknowledged yet pervasive fear that Rebecca Simms had described at Portola seemed to be stalking him, as well. Even the familiar darkness in his own bedroom felt somehow sinister, as though something terrible lurked hidden just at the edge of it.

He tried to laugh off the imaginings for what he told himself they were-irrational terrors in the wake of a nightmare. But they held their grip. Finally, feeling foolish, he switched on his bedlight for a moment.

Nothing, of course. Nothing.

Still, it took a long while before his breathing became normal. Eventually, he let himself back down and pulled the covers over him. After a minute, he turned and settled spoon fashion against his wife.

Before his brain could start running again, sleep mercifully claimed him.

Kensing finished his morning rounds at Portola's ICU and walked out to the nurses' station. Waiting for him there was the tall and thin figure of Portola's administrator, Michael Andreotti, who wanted a private word with him. They walked silently together down one long hallway, then took the elevator to the ground floor, where Andreotti led the way into an empty conference room next to his own office in the admin wing, and then closed the door behind them.

By this time, Kensing had a good idea of what was coming, but he asked anyway. "So what's this about?"

There was no love lost between the two men, and the administrator wasted no time on niceties. "I'm afraid that the board has decided to place you on leave for the time being."

"I don't think so. They can't do that. I've got a contract."

Andreotti more or less expected this response. He had the paperwork on him, and he handed over the letter. "It's not my decision, Doctor. As I said, the board has decided."