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March's thing about bees didn't have a start date, not one Healy could ever pin down exactly. It had outlasted the Zodiac. It had outlasted the fluoride. It had flatly refused to blow through the way March's other fixations blew through, weather that came and went and got forgotten inside a month, and by now it wasn't so much a fixation as it was furniture, a fact of the household, same as March's empty whiskey glasses on the counter or Holly's insistence on a hall light. Everybody who knew Holland March for longer than a week knew about the bees. Healy had simply gotten used to living downstream of it.
That didn't make it any easier to sit through.
They were parked outside a stucco duplex on Cahuenga one afternoon, waiting on a bail skip who wasn't going to show for another two hours if he showed at all, and March had the Herald-Examiner open across the steering wheel, one boot up on the dash, working his way through a bag of sunflower seeds he couldn't taste and spitting the shells out the window with more accuracy than Healy would've credited him with. He'd gone quiet for a while, which was unusual enough that Healy noticed, and then he made a sound low in his throat.
"They're coming." March said.
"Who's coming."
"The bees." He turned the paper around so Healy could see it, a photo of a scientist in a beekeeper's veil standing next to a wooden hive, and a headline that took up a third of the page. KILLER BEES: THE KILLING SWARM MOVING NORTH. "Africanized honeybees. Brazil, 1957. Guy down there was trying to breed a better honey bee, more honey, tougher stock, and it turns out he bred something out of a horror picture instead. Escaped the lab. Twenty-six queens. Now they're working their way up through South America eating regular bees alive and they are not stopping."
"Eating other bees."
"Taking over the hives. Killing the old queens. It's a- it's a bee coup, Healy, it's Idi Amin with wings, and the guy says." He stabbed a finger at a paragraph. "The guy says at the rate they're spreading they'll hit the U.S. border inside ten, fifteen years. Says nothing's gonna stop 'em. Not the Panama Canal, not the desert, nothing."
"So we got fifteen years."
"That's what they said about the Germans."
Healy had let that one sit for a second, because there wasn't really a response to it that wouldn't just feed the fire, and then he'd gone back to watching the duplex, and March had gone back to the article, reading bits out loud every so often- thousands of stings, they said, thousands, one bee's nothing but thousands of 'em, they don't let up, they chase you, Healy, they chase you for a quarter mile, until Healy told him if he didn't shut up about the bees he was going to let the skip go just so he'd have something else to think about.
Same as always, Healy let it run its course and didn't think much more about it. Some fixations you fought. This one you just waited out, same as you'd wait out weather, and the skip never did show, and by the time they packed it in for the night March had moved on to complaining about the birds instead.
Three days later they were in a booth at Kelly's on Vermont, close enough to two in the afternoon that the bar was theirs and the bartender's both, and March was midway through his second whiskey sour and a monologue about a man he'd met "not met, exactly, more like, overheard, at the newsstand on Highland" who had it on good authority that the killer bee story wasn't really about bees at all.
"It's a cover." March said. "Think about it. Government wants to test something- a chemical, a defoliant, something they used over in Vietnam and don't want anybody asking where the surplus went and they need someplace to put the blame when people start getting sick. So they invent a monster. A boogeyman. Bees. Nobody questions bees, Healy, bees are dumb, bees don't have a lawyer."
"The bees have a lawyer now?"
"I'm saying the government picked something nobody'd think to question. That's the genius of it."
"The genius of blaming bees."
"The genius." March said, pointing his glass at him. "Of picking your patsy well." He drank. "The guy at the newsstand had a whole file. Newspaper clippings. He showed me a photograph, supposedly from Brazil, and I'm telling you, Healy, the bee in that photograph did not look natural. It looked assembled."
"You saw a photograph of a bee that looked assembled."
"You had to be there."
"I don't think I did."
March had opened his mouth to argue the point further when something dark and low buzzed past the rim of his glass, and every ounce of blood seemed to leave his face at once. He went rigid, both hands flat on the table, eyes locked on the thing circling lazily over the ashtray.
"Healy." His voice had gone up an octave and thinned out to something closer to a whistle. "Healy, there's a bee."
"That's a fly."
"That is not a fly, that is a-" The insect landed, unhurried, on the edge of the table about eight inches from March's hand, and March came half out of the booth like he'd sat on a lit cigarette, snatching up a folded copy of the Racing Form and bringing it down on the thing with a crack loud enough that the bartender looked over. He hit it twice more for good measure, breathing hard, and then peeled the paper back to inspect the smear underneath with the grim satisfaction of a man defusing a bomb.
"It was a fly." Healy said.
"It had stripes."
"Everything's got stripes if you're looking to find 'em."
"I know a fly, Healy, I have eaten in enough diners in this city to know a fly, and that was not a fly." March sat back down, straightened his jacket, and finished his drink in one motion, hand not quite steady. "You laugh. You go ahead and laugh. When I'm dead you're gonna remember this conversation."
"When you're dead it's gonna be your liver, not a bee. You got a lotta paranoias, March. Zodiac, fluoride, the landlord and his candle. Why's this the one you can't put down?"
Something flickered behind March's eyes that wasn't the whiskey, there and gone fast enough that Healy nearly missed it. "'Cause I know what they can do, Healy. Firsthand. It ain't a theory to me, it's a-" He caught himself, waved a hand like he was swatting the sentence away same as he'd just swatted the fly, and reached for the bit again, sliding back into the booth. "It's a documented historical pattern is what it is. Government's done it before, they'll do it again, and bees are just this decade's flavor."
Healy let it go, same as he let most of it go. If he'd pulled that thread instead asked what firsthand meant, asked when, asked how the whole afternoon might have gone different. He didn't, though.
"Mock the man with the file if you want." March said. "The file doesn't care. The file's just gonna keep on being right."
Healy had signaled the bartender for the check and let it go, same as always. It was the same shape it always was, March would go quiet, March would panic, March would come out swinging with the file and the newsstand guy and the government, and Healy would let it wash over him and move on, because that was the job not the case work, the other job, the one nobody paid him for, which was keeping Holland March upright and more or less alive between one paycheck and the next. He'd stopped asking himself years ago why the bee thing had never once faded the way his other fixations did. Some questions you stopped poking at because the poking never got you anywhere.
Holly left for school at seven-forty with a Pop-Tart in one hand and a math worksheet she swore up and down she'd finished, Healy standing on the step to watch her all the way to the corner the way he did every morning now, more out of habit than worry, worry was Amelia Kuttner's ghost, over a year gone and still living in both of them a little, in the way Healy's eyes went to doorways and March's hands went to his gun even on days he didn't strictly need it. By the time Healy came back inside March was up, which was itself a minor miracle, dressed, tie half done, working on a cup of coffee he'd made too strong.
"Feeney." March said, by way of good morning, tapping a manila folder against the kitchen table. "Lou Feeney. You remember Lou Feeney."
"Stunt guy. Drove the car into the reservoir in that Bronson picture."
"Drove the car into the reservoir and then, six weeks later, according to the fine people at Cornerstone Mutual Life, drowned off Ventura Pier in a boating accident nobody witnessed, leaving behind a widow, two kids, and a hundred and ten thousand dollar policy that Cornerstone would very much like to not pay out."
"They think he's alive."
"They think he's alive because a claims adjuster's sister-in-law swears she saw him buying cigarettes at a Chevron in Bakersfield three weeks ago, wearing sunglasses at ten at night, which, I gotta be honest, Healy, that's not evidence, that's just a guy having a stroke, but Cornerstone's paying two hundred a day plus expenses to find out, so." He closed the folder. "We got a name. Guy named Petrov ran a garage Feeney used to hang around, apparently did some off-book work for stuntmen who needed cars that could take a hit and keep running. If Feeney needed to disappear, Petrov's the kind of guy who'd know how, or know somebody who does."
They spent the morning finding Petrov and most of the early afternoon convincing him he wanted to talk to them, which was how these things usually went. His garage sat under a sagging awning on Vermont, three bays deep, smelling of gear oil and hot metal, with a half-stripped '65 Buick Riviera up on blocks in the middle bay that Petrov clearly considered more interesting than either of his visitors.
"I don't know no Feeney." Petrov said, for the third time, wiping his hands on a rag that hadn't been clean since the Eisenhower administration. He was a broad, sun-cured man of maybe sixty, with a faded blue tattoo on one forearm that might once have said something in Cyrillic and a transistor radio playing static-laced big band from a shelf over the workbench. "Guy comes in, guy goes out, I don't ask for a résumé."
"We're not asking you to rat anybody out." March said, leaning against the Buick's fender until Petrov's face made it clear that was a mistake, at which point he straightened up and put his hands in his pockets instead. "We're asking you to help a widow and two kids collect on a policy that's rightfully theirs. That's it. That's the whole pitch."
"Rightfully theirs if he's dead."
"Rightfully theirs regardless, is my point, because if he's alive, the smart play for everybody, Feeney included, is he comes in from the cold, admits the fraud was somebody else's idea, and nobody does hard time over an insurance claim. We find him first, or somebody meaner than us finds him first. Which do you figure is better for your friend?"
Petrov considered that while running a thumb along the Buick's chrome, and March, watching him think it over, let his eyes wander to the wall behind the workbench, where a row of hand-painted hubcaps hung on nails next to a faded girlie calendar three years out of date. One hubcap had been done up as a novelty piece, black and gold stripes radiating out from the center hole like a target, with KILLER B'S HOT ROD CLUB lettered around the rim in a jagged, dripping typeface clearly meant to look dangerous.
March went quiet in a way Healy recognized immediately and did not care for.
"That a bee." March said, nodding at the hubcap.
"Huh?" Petrov followed his gaze. "Oh. Yeah, some kid's club, used to race out at the dry lakes, buddy of mine did the paint. Why."
"No reason." March's jaw had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with Lou Feeney. "Just an unusual choice for a hubcap."
"March." Healy said, low, a warning wrapped up as a name.
"I'm not saying anything. I'm making an observation." He dragged his eyes off the hubcap with visible effort and back onto Petrov, who was looking at him now with the particular caution of a man reassessing whether he wanted these two people in his garage at all. "The Chevron. Bakersfield. You said September he came around the sighting was three weeks ago. That's two months unaccounted for. Where's a man hide for two months that a claims adjuster's sister-in-law doesn't spot him till week eight?"
Petrov's caution cracked slightly at the sound of an actual question instead of whatever had just happened with the hubcap, and he glanced toward the street once, out of habit more than any real fear of being seen, before answering. "There's a motor court out past Newhall. Cash only, nobody asks your name twice. I sent a couple guys there over the years, needed to disappear a while. Wouldn't swear to you Feeney's one of 'em."
"But you'd bet on it."
"I'd bet lunch. Not the car." He nodded at the Riviera like it settled something. "You didn't hear the address from me."
"Never even met you." March said, already writing it down, and Petrov gave them the name of the place and the general cross streets and went back to his Buick without another word, satisfied, apparently, that he'd done just enough to call his conscience square and not one thing more.
Outside, walking to the car, Healy waited until they'd cleared the garage's awning before he said anything.
"The hubcap."
"I saw a hubcap."
"You went white as a bedsheet over a hubcap."
"I did not go white." March adjusted the folder under his arm, chin up, wounded dignity fully engaged. "I made an observation about an unusual design choice. That's a professional habit, Healy, that's called attention to detail, that's the exact thing that Cornerstone's paying me to have."
"Sure it is."
By two-thirty they had what they'd come for, and they were walking back to the car parked half a block down, in the shade of a row of jacarandas that had already dropped most of their purple flowers into the gutter and were working on a second round with March flipping through his notes, cross-referencing something in the file with something Petrov had said, muttering to himself the way he did when he was chewing on the shape of a case. He wasn't watching where he was walking. He wasn't watching much of anything except the pages in his hand, which was a habit Healy had given up trying to break him of, on the theory that a man who could walk straight into a mailbox while reading a matchbook cover was a man who was going to walk into a mailbox regardless of what Healy said about it.
Somebody a couple houses back was watering a strip of lawn thick with clover, and somewhere closer than that a jasmine hedge had gone riotous with the last of the season's blooms, spilling white flowers over a chain-link fence and drawing a lazy, droning traffic of bees back and forth across the sidewalk that neither of them registered as anything worth noticing Healy because his mind was still half on Petrov and the Buick and whether the old man had actually told them the truth about Feeney, and March because March hadn't been able to smell a flowering hedge, or a gas leak, or his own eggs burning, since a night some years back neither one of them talked about, and a nose that couldn't tell him a garden was in bloom wasn't going to be the thing that warned him a bee was in it. He walked through the drifting little cloud of them, the same as he'd have walked through a cloud of gnats, oblivious, three sentences deep into Lou Feeney's timeline.
"Petrov's lying about the date." March said. "He said September, but the Chevron thing was three weeks ago, and if Feeney's been out at that motor court since September that means he sat on his hands for two months before somebody's sister-in-law happened to spot him, which doesn't track, which means either the sister-in-law's wrong or Feeney only just got there, which means"
Something landed on the back of his hand, light as a fingertip, there and then not, and March swatted at it without looking, the automatic gesture of a man waving off a gnat, already three words into his next sentence, and then he wasn't talking anymore. He made a short, sharp sound, more surprised than pained at first, and shook his hand out hard, papers spilling loose from the folder and skating across the sidewalk.
"Son of a bitch"
"What."
"Something got me. Something got me right on the- right here" He'd stopped walking, cradling his right hand against his chest, staring down at a small red welt already rising on the back of it, and his voice had gone thin and fast in a way Healy recognized, with a small internal groan, as the opening notes of a full March production.
"Let me see it."
"It stung me, Healy, something stung me-"
"I heard you, let me see." Healy caught his wrist and turned it over. A single sting, red at the center, a bee's stinger still lodged crooked in the skin, the bee itself already gone or dead in the gutter somewhere, not that it mattered. "It's a bee sting."
"I know it's a bee sting"
"Then why are you telling me it's a bee sting like you just found a body." Healy let go of his wrist, more exasperated than alarmed, already turning to gather the scattered pages off the sidewalk before the breeze took them into the street. "It's a sting, March. Not a gunshot wound. You're gonna live." He crouched, collecting paper, not looking up. "I gotta say, though helluva time for that bee theory of yours to pay off."
March didn't answer that the way Healy expected, with some wounded, sputtering defense of the file and the guy at the newsstand and the government conspiracy. He made a different sound instead, sharper, higher, something that had actual fear riding under it instead of the usual theatrical kind, and when Healy glanced up from the papers he still had a smart remark half-loaded, ready to fire.
It died in his throat.
March's face had gone white. He was holding his stung hand up in front of him like it belonged to someone else, turning it, and even from four feet away and crouched on the sidewalk Healy could see it, a scatter of raised welts blooming up the back of his hand and already crawling past his wrist, fast, faster than anything Healy had ever seen a body do to itself, red and swollen and spreading like something poured out instead of something growing.
"Healy." March's voice had dropped to almost nothing.
Healy came up off the sidewalk, folder forgotten, papers left where they lay.
"It's a reaction. People swell up. It ain't-"
He stopped, because March had lifted his face, and something about his eyes stopped the sentence in Healy's mouth before he could finish it. They were wet and wide and a little too bright, and even as Healy watched, the skin around them was tightening, going pink, starting to puff at the lids the way a man's face does after he's been crying hard, except March wasn't crying. March was breathing a short, catching, effortful breath that pulled a thin, high whistle out of his chest on the way in.
Every piece of it arranged itself in Healy's head at once, ugly and complete, the way a picture comes into focus all at once instead of by degrees. The articles. The newsstand guy's file. The bar, the fly that wasn't a fly, the paper coming down on it three times like his life depended on it. Killer bees. Not a bit. Not a joke he'd been running into the ground for as long as Healy knew him because it tickled some crooked part of his sense of humor. Agreeing with lunatics at newsstands, spooking a client over her husband's hobby, waking up gasping about swarms in his own dreams, steering his own daughter around a flowering hedge without even seeming to know he was doing it, and every single time, Healy had filed it next to the Zodiac and the fluoride and the landlord with the candle, because that was where March's crazy usually belonged. He hadn't been crazy. He'd been telling the truth the whole time, dressed up so thick in nonsense that it had passed for a bit even to the man who knew him best, and now his face was closing up like a fist twelve feet from a produce stand and Healy understood, with a cold and furious clarity that had no room in it yet for anything but getting him breathing, that this wasn't a man finding something out. This was a man watching something he already knew catch up with him.
"March." Healy caught him by both shoulders, made him look up. Made his own voice come out level, flat, because panic wouldn't do either one of them any good and somebody in the next thirty seconds needed to not be panicking. "March, look at me. Are you allergic to bees?"
March's mouth worked for a second before anything came out of it. His breath hitched, wet and effortful, whistling on the way down.
Then he nodded. Not a nod of discovery. A nod like a confession finally coming due, small, fast, trembling.
"Yeah." he wheezed. "Yeah, I- I know-"
"You know." Something in Healy's chest went white-hot even as his hands stayed steady, even as the rest of him kept moving. "Since when."
"Since I was a kid." His breath was coming in short, catching pulls now, each one costing him something. "Had it happen- happen before. Not- not this bad. Got lucky." His eyes found Healy's, wet and terrified and, underneath all of it, ashamed. "Never carry the- the kit, I never Healy, I can't-"
"I know. I got you. Don't talk." Healy was already moving, one arm hooked under March's shoulders, hauling him up off the curb where his knees had started to fold without his permission, taking most of his weight without breaking stride. The car was thirty feet away and it felt like a mile. "You're gonna breathe and you're gonna walk and that's the whole job, you don't gotta do nothing else, you hear me?"
March's hand found Healy's forearm and gripped it hard enough to bruise, fingers already swollen and clumsy around the grip, and made a sound that wasn't a word, just an animal noise of fear, and Healy said "I got you, I got you" the whole thirty feet like it was the only sentence he knew, got the passenger door open one-handed, and half-lowered, half-dropped him into the seat.
"Papers." March managed. "The- the file-"
"Forget the file."
"Petrov's gonna think-"
"I don't care what Petrov thinks, shut your mouth and breathe." Healy slammed the door, was around the hood in under two seconds, dropped behind the wheel and had the key in the ignition before his own door had finished swinging shut. The cutlass caught on the first try, thank Christ, because Healy did not have it in him just then to forgive a car for stalling. He hauled it off the curb hard enough to scrape the wheel wells and put his palm flat on the horn to clear a produce truck idling at the corner, and didn't look at March again until they'd cleared the block, because looking meant taking his eyes off the road and he needed both eyes on the road more than he had ever needed anything.
"Talk to me." Healy said, running the light at Sunset with his jaw tight and both hands white on the wheel. "How's the breathing."
"Tight." March's voice had gone reedy and small, coming out between breaths that whistled worse each time. "It's- Healy, it's tight, I can't get all the way-"
"I know. Look at me." He risked a glance sideways at a red light he wasn't stopping for. March's whole face had swollen, lips going thick and strange, eyes near swollen shut, hives crawling up his throat in raised red welts visible even in the bad light, and it was the single most frightening thing Healy had seen. "You're gonna keep breathing for me. Slow as you can. In through the nose"
March wheezed, and it came out almost like a laugh, that particular gallows humor of his surfacing even now, even here, "Not- Not sure I know how to do that anymore-"
"Then in through the mouth, I don't care, just in and out, nice and slow, don't fight it." Healy reached over without taking his eyes off the road again and put his hand flat against March's chest, over his sternum, feeling for the rhythm of it under his palm feeling it hitch, feeling it catch, feeling the effort behind every single breath like the man's lungs had shrunk to the size of a fist. "There you go. There you go, I got my hand right there, you feel that? You just match that. Nice and slow."
"Healy" March's hand found his wrist again, gripping hard, swollen fingers clumsy but strong with fear. "Healy, I don't wanna-"
"You ain't going anywhere." He said it harder than he meant to, more command than comfort, because the alternative, the thing March wasn't finishing that sentence with, wasn't a thing Healy was going to let exist in the car with them. "You hear me? We did not survive a year of getting shot at, blown up, and thrown off a goddamn hotel roof for some bee to finish the job in a Buick. You're gonna sit there and breathe and hold onto my arm as hard as you want and we are gonna get you to a hospital, and that is the whole plan, there is no other plan."
March didn't answer, which frightened Healy more than anything he might have said. His breathing had gone shallow and quick, chasing air instead of taking it, chest hitching hard under Healy's palm, hives crawling now past his collar, one eye swollen most of the way shut. Healy kept his hand where it was, kept talking not because he thought the words were doing anything, but because the sound of his own voice, low and steady, was the only thing he had to offer that wasn't sirens or speed, and he laid on both without apology, running two more lights and clipping the shoulder around a stalled delivery van, the hospital sign finally swinging up ahead on Sunset like something out of a fever, and he had never in his life been so glad to see a building.
"Almost there. Almost there, hang onto me, we're almost there."
The lot came up too slow and then too fast, Healy standing on the brake and skidding the last twenty feet into a spot that wasn't really a spot, and for one terrible second he had to let go of March's chest and March's hand both to throw the car into park, feeling the loss of that contact like something physical, before he was out his own door and around the hood at a dead run.
"I need help!" He had the passenger door open, one arm already under March's shoulders, hauling him half out of the seat, March's legs not doing much to help him. "Somebody get me a doctor, my friend can't breathe."
Two orderlies came off the loading ramp at a run, and then it was hands other than his own, a gurney appearing from somewhere, March's fingers losing their grip on his wrist as they lifted him onto it. For one disorienting second there were suddenly four people around him instead of just Healy, someone calling out vitals, someone else already working scissors up the sleeve of his shirt, a third voice, calm and clipped, saying anaphylaxis, get me point-three epi IM, let's move like it was the most ordinary sentence in the world and March's swollen face turned toward Healy for one last second, eyes barely visible in all that puffed, hived skin, before the gurney swung through a set of double doors and the doors swallowed him whole.
Healy went to follow and a nurse with a clipboard, put a flat hand against his chest that stopped him hard.
"You family?"
"Might as well be."
"Waiting room's that way. Somebody'll come find you." And then she was gone too, through doors that swung shut behind her, and Healy was left standing in a hallway that smelled like rubbing alcohol and old coffee, his hands empty and shaking slightly now that there was nothing left to hold onto, staring at two swinging doors that had just taken the only person on earth he'd have called family if anybody'd bothered to ask.
The waiting room had orange plastic chairs bolted in rows, a television bolted to the wall playing a game show with the sound down low, and a clock that Healy checked so many times in the first twenty minutes that he could have told you, afterward, the exact second hand's position at any given moment without being able to tell you a single thing that had happened on the television screen above it.
He sat. He stood. He sat again. Somewhere behind those doors a man was either breathing or he wasn't, and there was not one single thing Healy could do about which, and that particular flavor of helpless was one he hated more than any beating he'd ever taken, because a beating you could see coming and brace for. This was just waiting, empty-handed, in a chair built for somebody smaller than him, listening to a studio audience laugh at something he couldn't hear.
He thought, for a while, about strangling March himself once this was over, purely on principle. The man had known. Not suspected, not had a bad feeling, not picked up some half-formed dread off a tabloid headline, known, flat and factual, known it since he was a kid and had a reaction and gotten lucky, known it every single time he agreed with a stranger's conspiracy at a newsstand, every time he woke up gasping about a swarm, every time he steered his own daughter around a flowering hedge without breaking stride to explain why. He'd had a plain, six-word sentence sitting in his mouth the whole time, I'm allergic to bees, carry the kit and instead he'd spent a month dressing the truth up as a bit, government boogeymen and assembled photographs and a file from a stranger at a newsstand, funny enough that Healy had laughed along with it, funny enough that neither one of them had ever once had to sit still with what was actually true. And on top of the lie of omission, the plainer, dumber failure underneath it: even knowing, even after however many years of knowing, the man had never once bothered to carry a kit that could have stopped all of this on a sidewalk in under a minute. Six words and a two-dollar vial, and instead Healy had spent a month thinking of it as a quirk to be managed instead of a fact to be planned around, filed next to the Zodiac and the fluoride because that was where March usually lived, and March had let him file it there, on purpose, every time, because it was easier to be laughed at than to be looked at straight.
The anger didn't have anywhere honest to go, though, because underneath it, plain as the orange plastic under him, was the other thing, the thing that had put his hand flat on March's chest in the car and kept it there through two red lights and a stalled delivery van, the thing that made him check the clock every ninety seconds like watching it hard enough might make the doors open sooner. He was not a man who used the word scared about himself, out loud or otherwise, but he'd have had a hard time finding a better one for what he'd felt watching March's face swell shut in the passenger seat of his own car.
He checked the clock again. Twenty to three, meaning Holly'd be out at three-fifteen, and there was a decision buried in that fact that he turned over for a minute. call the school, have somebody walk her to a neighbor's, tell her something's come up? before deciding against it. No sense scaring her before there was anything real to be scared of. If this went bad, she'd know soon enough, and if it went the way it was supposed to go, there was no reason a fourteen-year-old needed her whole day wrecked over something that would, by tonight, be another item on the long list of things her father had somehow survived. Healy could handle the space in between. He was built for the space in between. It was most of what the job had ever been.
He got up once and asked the desk if there was any word, and was told, not unkindly, that someone would come find him, which was the same sentence the nurse had used, and which he now understood to be a professional courtesy for sit down and stop asking. He sat down. He didn't stop thinking about it.
At three-thirty he got up again, dug a dime out of his jacket pocket, and used the payphone bolted to the wall by the restrooms to call a kid named Sherry’s mother, a woman named Dot who lived two doors down and who Holly sometimes walked home with when the bus ran early. He kept his voice easy, told Dot that he and March had gotten hung up on a case out past Newhall and might run late, would it be any trouble if Holly came by for a couple hours after school, maybe stayed for supper. Dot, who had never once in eighteen months asked either of them a single hard question about their arrangement, said of course, no trouble at all, and Healy thanked her and hung up before she could hear whatever was sitting underneath his voice that he hadn't quite managed to keep out of it.
He stood by the payphone a minute longer than he needed to, one hand still resting on the receiver, watching a janitor push a mop bucket down the hall in long, unhurried strokes, and thought about how close that phone call had come to being a different phone call entirely, the kind you made once, that changed a kid's whole life on the other end of the line, a kid who already got that call once. He put the thought down hard and went back to the orange plastic chairs.
It was closer to four than three-fifteen when a doctor came through the swinging doors, young guy, tired around the eyes, white coat with a coffee stain on the cuff and asked, in the flat voice of a man who'd delivered both kinds of news that day already, if he was here for Mr. March.
Healy was on his feet before the sentence finished. "How is he?"
"He's stable. Anaphylactic reaction, bee sting. We got epinephrine into him quick, which is the whole ballgame with these few more minutes and it'd have been a different conversation. He's on antihistamines now, getting some fluids, and he's talking, which is a good sign, though I'll tell you he's not making a whole lot of sense, but that might just be him."
"That's usually him." Healy said, and felt something loosen in his chest for the first time since the sidewalk on Vermont.
"He told the triage nurse this wasn't news to him. Says he's known he was anaphylactic for years, got diagnosed after a reaction back when he was younger, the whole workup, skin tests, a doctor sitting him down and telling him plain that a sting could close his airway and he needed to carry epinephrine on him for the rest of his life." The doctor said it evenly, no particular judgment in it, which somehow made it land harder than judgment would have. "So near as I can tell, he walked into today already knowing everything I just told you. The diagnosis, the risk, all of it." He glanced up from his clipboard. "You didn't know any of that?"
"No." Healy said. The word came out flatter than he meant it to. "I did not know that."
The doctor nodded, unsurprised, the way a man nods at something he's heard some version of a hundred times before from a hundred other exhausted people standing in this same hallway. "We want to keep him a couple hours for observation, make sure nothing rebounds on us. After that he can go home, but he needs to see the allergist again, get the prescription current, and he needs to actually be carrying the epinephrine this time, not just knowing he's supposed to."
"He'll have it." Healy said, in a tone that left no room in the sentence for anybody to argue, least of all the man it was about. "You can bet the house on that."
They let him back an hour later, once the swelling had come down enough that March looked more like himself and less like a stranger wearing his clothes still puffy around the eyes, lips still a little thick, a raised red flush at his throat that would take a couple days to fully fade, an IV taped into the back of one hand. He was sitting up against a couple of pillows, and when Healy came through the curtain he tried for a grin that didn't quite make it all the way across his swollen face.
"Hey." March said. His voice had a thickness to it, half medication and half the aftermath of a throat that had nearly closed on him. He tried for the grin again. "Guess I was right about something for once."
Healy didn't sit down. Didn't smile back. Just stood at the foot of the bed with his arms crossed, and let the silence run a beat longer than was comfortable before he spoke. "Doctor tells me you're anaphylactic. Diagnosed. Skin tests, the works. Says some doctor sat you down years back and told you plain as day you needed to be carrying a kit for the rest of your life."
The grin dropped off March's face like it had never been there.
"That true?"
March didn't answer right away. He picked at the tape holding his IV in place, eyes on his own hand instead of on Healy. "...Yeah."
"You knew. Not suspected. Not had a feeling. Knew. Had it in writing, near as I can tell, from an actual doctor, with the actual word for it."
"Yeah."
"The whole time, then. Every bit of it, the newsstand guy, the file, the government, the dreams. That wasn't a bit, March. That was you telling me the truest thing about yourself you had, over and over, in the only shape you were ever gonna let yourself say it in, and I laughed along with it because I thought that's all it was." Healy's jaw worked once, twice, before he trusted himself to keep talking. "You had a kit once. An actual prescription, from an actual doctor who sat you down and told you what happens if you get stung without one. What happened to it?"
March was quiet long enough that Healy thought he might not answer at all, and when he finally did, his voice had lost every trace of performance in it, thin and tired and stripped down to something almost young. "Ran out. Never got it refilled." He swallowed, wincing at what that cost his throat. "Carrying the kit means it's real, Healy. Means every day I gotta open a drawer and look at a box of needles a doctor gave me on purpose, for a diagnosis with a real name, and remember there's a thing out there, dumb as a housefly, that's got my number on it whenever it feels like collecting. So I let the prescription lapse and didn't get it renewed, and I never told you the real word for what I had, 'cause the real word doesn't have a punchline."
"So instead you just…what. Hoped."
"Instead I hoped." March said it plain, no defense built around it, which from him was its own kind of confession. "Worked fine for years. Till today."
"It didn't work fine, March, it worked because nothing ever tested it. That ain't the same thing." Healy finally pulled the one plastic chair over and sat, heavier than the chair wanted, the anger in him not gone but banked now, burning lower and steadier. "You know how close that was? You know what I was doing with my hand on your chest in that car? I was counting your breaths 'cause I didn't have anything else to count."
"I know." March's swollen eyes were wet again, and this time it wasn't the hives. "I'm sorry."
It wasn't a word March spent easily, and they both knew it, and Healy let it sit in the curtained-off little bay a moment before he answered, because some sentences didn't need anything added on top right away.
"Holly know?" March asked eventually.
"Not yet. She's at Dot's. I told her you and me got hung up on the case." Healy watched him carefully. "Figured that was your call to make, how much of this she hears and when."
"All of it." March said, quieter still, nothing left to hide behind. "She's gonna hear about it eventually anyway, might as well be from me, straight, so she don't spend the next six months thinking every bee in Los Angeles is coming for her old man. And she oughta know why, too the whole why, not the government-conspiracy version. Kid deserves better than the bit." He was quiet a second. "She been worrying much…Since Amelia. Since all that."
"She's tougher than either of us give her credit for."
"Gets that from her mother." March said, and let it sit there too.
Healy leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at him with the flat, serious weight he usually saved for telling a client the truth they didn't want. "From here on, anything and I mean anything, March, don't care how crazy it sounds coming outta your mouth, don't care how much it feels like admitting something you'd rather not anything about you dying, about your body, about something that could actually put you in a box, you tell me straight. First time."
March looked at him for a long moment, swollen eyes finding something entirely legible in Healy's face, and then nodded, slow, no tremor left in it. "Yeah." he said. "Okay. Yeah, that's…..that's fair. Kit stays on me. Every day. You can check."
"I will."
"That's not a threat I love hearing, but I'll take it."
"For what it's worth." March added, working up a small, crooked, still-swollen version of his usual grin, "I did tell you. Repeatedly. At significant personal cost to my dignity, that bar included."
"You told me bees were secretly government assassins."
"I told you bees were gonna be the thing that killed me. Turns out I had the mechanism wrong and the outcome right. That's a passing grade in my book."
"Passing grade." Healy repeated, and let out a breath that was half a laugh, mostly just relief with nowhere else to go, and sat back in the miserable little chair and let himself, for one full minute, just look at the man breathing thick-voiced, puffy-eyed, still hooked to a bag of fluid, arguing his own near-death experience into a debate point because breathing was the whole entire thing that had mattered for the last hour and a half, and it had never once, in all their history together, looked so good.
They discharged him a little after six, with a folder of paperwork, an appointment card for an allergist on Wilshire, and a small white paper bag from the hospital pharmacy that rattled softly with glass vials of epinephrine and two boxes of syringes still individually wrapped in their sterile paper. A nurse with tired, kind eyes had walked Healy through the whole business at the discharge desk while March sat slumped in a wheelchair beside them, chin nodding toward his own chest how to snap the top off a glass ampule without slicing your thumb open in the process, how to draw up the dose without introducing an air bubble, where on the thigh to give it, how hard, how fast. There was no gadget for it yet, she told him, not one you could carry in a coat pocket and jab through a pair of trousers in a panic; somebody back East was reportedly working on exactly that, a self-contained syringe a man could use on himself with one hand and no training, but it wasn't on any shelf Healy could walk into, and wouldn't be for years yet, so for now it was glass and steel and a steady hand, and Healy had better plan on being the steady hand, because March, in the moment it mattered, would not be in any condition to be his own.
He'd read the instruction sheet through twice standing right there at the desk and then a third time in the parking lot, digging his reading glasses out of his jacket pocket under the sodium lights to make sure he had the dosage right, muttering the whole time about how a man ought to be able to read his own emergency medicine without a magnifying glass, and then he'd folded the sheet into quarters and put it in his wallet, behind his driver's license, where he'd know exactly where to find it if his hands were shaking too hard to think straight. March, for his part, was in no state to argue about anything; the antihistamines had hit him like a truck on top of everything else his body had been through, and he leaned on Healy's arm the whole walk to the car with the loose, cooperative weight of a man who'd stopped fighting his own legs sometime around the hospital's automatic doors.
"You're gonna carry me to the car." March said, not quite a question, words slurring soft at the edges. "Aren't you?"
"Already doing it."
"This is undignified."
"You almost died of a bug bite two hours ago. Dignity left the building a while back." Healy got the passenger door open, eased him down into the seat, and reached across to buckle him in himself when March's fingers fumbled twice at the belt and gave up, which drew no protest at all, which told Healy more about how wiped out he really was than anything the doctor had said. "You good?"
"M'good." March mumbled, head already tipping sideways against the window, eyes sliding shut. "Tell Holly I said-"
"I'll tell her something. Go to sleep."
He was gone before Healy had the driver's door shut, out cold against the glass, mouth slightly open, breathing slow and even and completely unremarkable, which after the day they'd had struck Healy as close to a miracle as he expected to witness this decade. Healy sat behind the wheel for a second without starting the car, looking at him, swollen face slack in sleep, one hand still faintly marked where a single bee, out of the whole vast indifferent animal kingdom, had picked him to land on, and felt the last of the day's fear finish curdling into something that had exhaustion in it, and gratitude, and underneath both of those, already sharpening back up now that the crisis had passed, a very specific kind of irritation that he intended to enjoy expressing at length once March was in a condition to receive it.
He started the car, easy this time, no need to peel out of anything anymore, and pulled out of the lot at a civilized speed with the little white paper bag of vials and needles riding on the seat between them like a passenger of its own.
Healy drove them home the long way, no real reason for it except that the radio had found something decent and Holly wasn't due back from Dot's until seven, and there wasn't anywhere else in the world either one of them needed to be. Somewhere behind them, in a filing cabinet at Cornerstone Mutual, a stunt man named Lou Feeney was still very much alive and going to have some explaining to do; somewhere out past Newhall, a motor court was still standing where a fraud was still hiding, unaware that the two men paid to find him had spent the better part of the day getting rerouted by an insect with no idea whatsoever what it had almost accomplished, purely by accident, for free.
He got March inside and onto the couch without waking him more than half a degree, enough for March to mumble something that might have been a thank-you and might have been a complaint about the lighting, and then drove to collect Holly himself rather than call Dot back and explain any more than he already had over the phone.
She came out onto the porch with her backpack already on, hair coming loose from its braid the way it always did by the end of a school day, and took one look at his face through the windshield before she'd even gotten the door open.
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Healy." She got in, seatbelt on before he'd even pulled away from the curb, which was its own kind of tell, because Holly fought that seatbelt like it owed her money most days. "You've got the face."
"What face?"
"The face you make when something happened and you've decided I don't need to know about it yet, except you always end up telling me anyway 'cause you're bad at keeping things from me, so you might as well just start now and save us both the drive."
He almost laughed, because she wasn't wrong, and because there was something about being read that clean by a fourteen-year-old that undid a little of the day's tension all on its own. "Your old man got stung by a bee."
"That's it? That's the face for a bee sting?"
"Turns out he's allergic. Bad allergic. We spent the afternoon at the hospital."
That took the smart remark right out of her, and she turned in the seat to look at him properly, backpack sliding off her shoulder onto the floor mat, all the teenage armor dropping away at once the way it always did the second something real got said in front of her. "Is he okay?"
"He's home. He's sleeping it off on the couch right now, and he's gonna have a sore throat and a real bad mood for a couple days, but yeah. He's okay." Healy glanced over at her, softened it. "Scared me pretty good, if I'm being straight with you. But he's okay."
Holly was quiet for a block, watching the jacarandas go by, and then she said, in a smaller voice than the one she usually used, "He's not gonna, like… is this a thing now? Is he gonna be in danger every time there's a bee around?"
"Doctor gave him medicine to carry. Little shots, for if it happens again. Long as he's got it on him and uses it quick, he's gonna be fine." Healy reached over without really thinking about it and put a hand briefly on top of her head, and she let him. "I'm gonna make sure of it. That's my job."
"I thought your job was finding people."
"Turns out it's a lot of jobs." Healy said, and that got a small, watery laugh out of her, which was close enough to the sound of things being alright that he let himself believe it.
She went straight to the couch when they got inside, crouching by her father's sleeping, swollen, still-faintly-hived face with the particular gentleness she reserved for him and almost nobody else, and pulled the throw blanket up over his shoulder without waking him, and Healy watched her do it from the kitchen doorway and thought, not for the first time, that whatever else had gone sideways in both their lives to land the three of them in this particular house together, they had at some point, without much discussion, built something that worked.