Dr. Knox Read Online Free Page A

the cooler, and we headed for the big front door. I stopped as I passed the Porsche and pointed my chin at dark splotches on the paving.
    “Somebody’s leaking,” I said.
    “And not oil.”
    The door opened before we reached it, and a pudgy young man with thin arms stepped out. He was short and flushed, with sweat in his thin blond hair and damp spots on his polo shirt. His khaki pants were too tight around his waist, and didn’t quite reach the tops of his boat shoes. He spoke in a quavering voice.
    “You’re the doctor?” he asked Sutter.
    “He is,” Sutter answered.
    The sweating man put out a tentative hand. “Doctor…?”
    “Dr. X,” Sutter said. “You’re not the guy who called.”
    “That was my boss. He…he couldn’t be here. He’s in court on Mon—”
    Sutter cut him off. “You’re what—an associate?”
    The man nodded. “Second year. And you are…?”
    “The office manager. You have something for me?”
    The man reached into his pocket and handed Sutter a white envelope. It was wrinkled and damp but the right thickness. Sutter tucked the cooler under his arm, and riffled a thumb through the cash. “Where’s the patient?” he asked.
    “He’s in the den. I…I’m going to wait out here.”
    I nodded, and followed the blood trail through the door.

CHAPTER 4
    There were acres of polished stone and wood in the house, and long runs of floor-to-ceiling glass, and everything smelled of lemons. The rooms were large and flowed one into another, and they all had wide, twinkling views of the city. I followed the blood and the sound of moaning. After a while, I heard voices.
    “You’ve got to keep still,” a young woman said.
    “I can’t keep still,” a man whined. “I can’t keep any fucking way that doesn’t hurt like a— Oh, Jesus, look at this. I’m gonna puke again.”
    “Here, baby, I’ve got another towel—lift up a little.”
    “Ow! Son of a bitch, Astrid—that fucking
hurt
!”
    “If you just stay still—”
    “I can’t!”
    The den, when I finally got there, was not a room full of guns. It was dominated by a massive window, and by a sectional sofa in fawn-colored leather and bloodstained towels. A woman in her late twenties hovered over the sectional. Her body was tanned and curved, with strong calves and arms, and her hair fell in stiff blond waves around a tanned, feline face. She wore cutoffs, a peasant blouse, and an expression of irritation mixed with anxiety as she looked down at the bleeding man. There were patches of dried blood on her arms and legs.
    The man was younger, maybe twenty, and he lay on his side with his knees drawn up and his hands tucked between them. He was lumpy and pale, and his face was a sweating beige potato. His hair was dark and frizzy, and there were acne scars on his cheeks and beneath his underfed soul patch. His lips were chalky, his arms and elbows scraped and bleeding. He wore jeans that were wet from waist to knee with blood, and it looked as if a bear had bitten off his left rear pocket, along with a good-sized chunk of what was underneath.
    I put the duffels down, unzipped both, squeezed antiseptic on my hands, and pulled on surgical gloves. The man and the woman turned to look at me, and relief swept over their faces like wind across a pond.
    I was relieved too. The man was conscious and alert enough to whine, so right there we were ahead of the game. And though he was bleeding, blood wasn’t actually spurting out of him—at least not that I could see.
    “You the doctor?” he asked. “I’m Teddy. This is Astrid.”
    “I don’t need names.”
    The woman squinted. “You a real doctor?”
    “That’s what my diploma says,” I answered. “The Web site I got it from even threw in some Latin.”
    Astrid looked alarmed, and so did Teddy. “That was a joke,” I said. I pulled a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope from one of the duffels, and an IV kit and a bag of fluids from the other. “Give me your right arm, and