Bestiary

CHAPTER TWO

The veterans administration hospital was just off Wilshire Boulevard, but most motorists never even noticed it. They were too busy looking for the on-ramp to the 405 freeway, and traffic at this spot as a result was almost always a nightmare — even by L.A. standards.

The hospital access ramp was separate from all the others, and every time Greer took it he felt slighted. As his beaten-up Mustang convertible left the other cars, he felt afresh his injuries. All those bastards driving by, he thought, had no idea of the pain he’d suffered, and the wounds he had borne, fighting for his country in Iraq. It was just so damn easy to drive on by, in your Mercedes or your SUV, babbling into your cell phone, and never give another thought to guys like himself who had made the big sacrifices.

And for what? That was one question that had kept him up more nights than he cared to count.

By now, he knew the VA routine inside out. He parked his car in one of the few spots that offered any shade, checked in with the security guard, who always demanded that he show his credentials every time he came in (one more way for the military to still stick it to you), and then hobbled down the hall to the physical therapy clinic.

Most of the other patients in there he knew — there was Gruber, who’d lost both hands to a booby trap in Tikrit; and Rodriguez, who’d stepped on a land mine outside Basra; and Mariani, who’d never talk to anybody about what had happened to put him in that wheelchair. Greer would look around at all these other guys, many of whom had suffered far worse injuries than he had, and try to make himself feel better. See, he’d say, you could be pushing yourself around like Mariani, or using clampers for hands like Gruber, or clomping around like Rodriguez on a carbon-fiber leg. But it never worked the way he wanted it to; he was just as pissed and bitter when he left as when he arrived.

Indira was his usual therapist, and today she had the table already prepared for him. “How are we feeling, Captain Greer?” she said, smoothing the paper cover on the table nearest the windows. “Are we grumpy as usual?”

He never knew how to answer stuff like that. Affirmative?

She patted the table with a smile, as if she were urging a dog to jump up onto the sofa. “Come on and get ready. I’ll get the towels.”

There was a changing room to one side, and he went in there, put most of his clothes and valuables in a locker, and came back out in his clean T-shirt and running shorts. He refused to wear those open gowns.

Indira was waiting, and as soon as he levered himself up onto the table, she slipped a small pillow under the crook of his neck, another one under his knees, then gently wrapped the hot towels around his left leg. He tried not to let her see him studying her as she did all that, but he suspected that she was aware of it. The first time he’d seen her, he was so consumed with pain and rage that he’d hardly noticed her. But the next time, and the time after that, he’d been able to take a good look.

She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known. She was small, with dark hair and dark eyes, and her skin was a kind of copper color. Kind of like the Iraqis’. She didn’t talk a lot about herself, but over the many sessions he’d had, he’d learned a few things. She was from Bombay, which accounted for that kind of singsong way she spoke, and she was something called a Zoroastrian. It was some ancient religion (he’d looked it up on the Internet) that believed in cycles of fire, or something like that, lasting millions of years. She lived somewhere in West L.A., with her parents and a bunch of brothers and sisters. He could never figure out a way to ask her how old she was, but he was thirty and he knew that she had to be younger than that.

“Let’s give it fifteen minutes,” she said, setting an egg timer and leaving it by his feet. “Tell me if it gets too hot.”

The heat was used to limber up the leg, before they tried the exercises designed to increase the muscle tone and range of motion. He’d never told her how his leg had been injured, and she’d never asked; he wondered if that was part of their training. Wait till the gimp volunteered the information; don’t press him on it. He knew a lot of the guys — like Mariani in the wheelchair — didn’t want to talk about it. And in his case, he was just as happy to keep quiet. When he’d been brought into the camp’s medical tent outside Mosul, Sadowski had corroborated his story; they’d been conducting a perimeter patrol when a sniper had taken a potshot. In those days, not a lot of questions got asked; everything was up for grabs, and sniper attacks were an hourly occurrence. The army had given him his Purple Heart, his honorable discharge, and a monthly disability check that didn’t go nearly far enough.

He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ticking of the timer and the grunts and groans and murmured conversations of the other vets talking to their therapists and going through their agonizing drills. Still, he kind of looked forward to these sessions; the government paid, and Indira took care of him.

When the timer went off, she came back, unwrapped the towels and tossed them into the bin, then told him to bend the knee. At first it wouldn’t go.

“I’ll help,” she said, lifting the leg slightly. “Tell me if you need to stop.”

Her hands were cool and smooth, and the leg felt better just from her touch. He tried to flex the knee, but sometimes it felt like the damn thing had just locked in place. Like right now.

“Just relax,” she said, “let me bend it. Don’t you try to do anything.”

He closed his eyes, and willed himself, or tried to, into a state of passivity. Indira gently flexed the knee, a few degrees at a time, then went through the other exercises, bringing the leg slowly to one side and then the other, to make sure he wasn’t losing lateral motion. She had him do some standing exercises, a couple of squats that were more like crouches, and finished up, as usual, with the ultrasound, designed to penetrate the muscles and break up the scar tissue.

“Are you doing your exercises at home?” Indira asked, as usual, and Greer, as usual, lied that he was.

“Are you okay on your meds?”

“I’m running low on the Demerols, and I’m out of the Vicodin.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “Didn’t we get you a renewal on the Vicodin last time?”

“Yeah, but I spilled ’em. Most went down the kitchen sink.”

She frowned. “You know, those can be addictive,” she said. “We’re limited on what we can prescribe.”

“Oh yeah, sure, I know that,” he assured her. He could never tell if she knew he was lying, or if she was just doing what she could to help.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and as she went off to the clinic dispensary to see if she could get him a new prescription, Greer got dressed and checked the time. He was due to meet Sadowski at the Blue Bayou, the strip club where Sadowski’s girlfriend danced.

Indira, God bless her, got him the pills—“They were very suspicious,” she told him, “and next time we will have to get an okay from Dr. Foster”—and he slipped them into the breast pocket of his shirt on the way out to the parking lot. The sun had moved, and the steering wheel had come out of the shade; it was blazing hot when he tried to hold it. He flicked on the radio, and used a crumpled page of the L.A. Weekly to hold the wheel.

Going against traffic, it took him only ten minutes or so to drive down toward the ocean and pull up in front of the club. He hung his Handicapped placard on the rearview mirror, and noticed that parked right behind him was a Silver Bear Security Service patrol car. Sadowski was already here.

Inside, the place was nearly empty. The stage lights were off, and a guy with a mop was washing down the runway for tonight’s show.

Greer got a Jack Daniel’s at the bar from Zeke, who asked him in a low voice, “That it?” Zeke also sold him his drugs, especially the ones the VA would never prescribe.

“Yeah,” Greer said. “I’m set.”

Zeke nodded and moved off.

Sadowski was sitting in the back booth, with a beer and a copy of some gun catalogue spread out in front of him. He was a big guy, with a slack face and closely cropped, bristly hair — Greer had once kidded him, when he first got the job at the security service, that he looked like a silver bear, so how could they have turned him down? Sadowski had kind of liked the joke.

“What are you shopping for now?” Greer asked, easing himself into the booth. “An anti-aircraft gun?” Sadowski, he knew, already had a private arsenal better than the one they’d had in Iraq.

“Ammo clips, Captain.”

“I told you, you don’t have to call me that anymore,” Greer said. “And what, they don’t give you ammunition to go with your piece?” He gestured at the pistol strapped in its holster to Sadowski’s side. He was wearing his full uniform — silver-gray shirt, pants, and sidearm.

“Nah, this is stuff I need for home use. Steel-jacketed shells.”

Greer didn’t even ask what he’d need them for. Sadowski was part of some secret militia that was arming itself and getting ready for Armageddon, and whenever he tried to tell Greer about it — or get him to enlist — Greer would just nod, then turn the conversation back to business.

As he did now.

“So, what’s the big rush? You said you had something?”

Sadowski took a swig of his beer and pushed the gun catalogue to one side; under it, there were some folded papers.

“Owner’s leaving tomorrow morning, be gone for one day,” he said, opening the top paper and showing Greer a color photocopy of a Colonial-style house behind a red brick wall.

“Jesus, you could have given me a little more warning.”

“I only found out today.”

Greer wearily reached out and turned the papers around to see them better. Under the picture there was a blueprint, with several points circled in red.

“I have to do any cutting?”

“No, I can give you the codes, if you want ’em.”

“Isn’t that going to be a little obvious?”

“There’s one entrance, in back, that’s not wired yet. It’s part of an addition that was just put on. You can’t see it in the picture.”

Greer studied the papers. For over a year now, he and Sadowski had had a nice little business going on the side. Sadowski would hand over information about Silver Bear clients whose homes were going to be left unattended — clients were instructed to tell the firm whenever they were going to be away for more than twenty-four hours — and Greer would burglarize them. Sadowski received a 25 percent finder’s fee, based on whatever the value of the fenced goods turned out to be.

“Any idea what’s inside?” Greer asked, washing down a couple of Vicodin. He liked to know what he was looking for, and what he might expect to find. He worked alone, and he was not about to start carting out big-screen TVs and desktop computers; he was strictly interested in the small and the portable. Cash, jewelry, maybe a laptop if it presented itself.

“The guy’s a doctor,” Sadowski said, unhelpfully. “They like to wear Rolexes.”

“Then he’ll probably have it on, wherever else he is.”

Sadowski pondered this, then brightened. “But these guys always have more than one watch.”

Greer sighed, folded up the papers and slipped them into his jacket. “He married?”

“No.”

So there might not be much jewelry. Unless… “He gay?”

“Don’t know. Want me to ask around?”

“Christ, no, I don’t want you to ask around.”

Sadowski looked stumped, which wasn’t out of the ordinary. “So you gonna do it or not?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Because he’s only going to be—”

“I said I’ll think about it,” Greer repeated, leaning in close. Then he slipped out of the booth before Sadowski could invite him to a meeting of the Minutemen, or the Friends of the White Race, or whatever the hell it was he kept stockpiling his ammo for.