CHAPTER 6
The Clinic
°°°
The Millbrook Community Clinic ran two nights a week out of what used to be a dentist's office, the reception desk still bearing a faded decal of a cartoon molar nobody had gotten around to scraping off.
Mara had been volunteering there long enough that the smell of it — antiseptic and old carpet and the low mustiness of a building that never quite got enough heat in winter — had stopped registering as anything but familiar.
Yvonne met her at the door with a clipboard and the harried energy of a woman running triage on a shoestring. “We've got six on the board and Dr. Alvarez called out sick, so it's just us and whatever we can handle without him.”
“What's the worst of it?”
“Bed two. Sixteen-year-old, vitals are fine, but she won't say why she's shaking and she won't let anyone but a woman touch her. I was hoping you'd take her.”
The girl in bed two — Deja, according to the intake sheet, no insurance, no emergency contact listed — had her knees pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around them so tight her knuckles had gone pale.
She flinched when Mara pulled the curtain, then seemed to catalog her fast, the way people did when they'd learned to read a room before they trusted it.
Whatever she found in Mara's face, it let her exhale, half an inch.
“Hey. I'm Mara. I'm just going to sit here, okay? You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to.”
It took another ten minutes of quiet, careful nothing — checking a pulse, offering water, sitting close enough to be steady without crowding — before Deja said anything at all, and when she did, it came out in a rush, like she'd been holding it so long the dam finally just gave.
“They gave me a bag to hold. Just for a night, they said.
I didn't even look in it, I swear, I just put it under my bed because my mom's boyfriend goes through my stuff and I didn't want him finding it, and then these guys came to my school today and said if I don't bring it back by Friday they're gonna —” She stopped herself, pressed a fist against her mouth.
“I can't go home. I can't go home with it still there.”
“Okay.” Mara kept her voice level, the same voice she used for every version of this — fear dressed up as a medical complaint, because fear had nowhere else safe to go. “Who's ‘they,’ Deja?”
“I don't know their names. Just that everybody on Curtis says the same thing about them. That they work for Kepler.”
The name landed in Mara's chest the way it always did lately — quick and unwelcome — and she filed the reaction away to examine later, because Deja needed her calm more than she needed anything else right now.
~ ~ ~
Tucker was in the waiting room when Mara finally came out to grab a fresh blanket, standing near the door with the flat alertness of a man on a job even when the job didn't have a name yet.
Cole was with him, leaning against the wall by the window, and something in her chest did an inconvenient, traitorous thing at the sight of him that she decided, firmly, not to examine either.
“What are you two doing here?”
“Yvonne called Tucker,” Cole said. “Said there was a kid in trouble connected to the east side crew. Figured it wasn't a coincidence.”
“It's not your business, Ledger.”
“Made it my business the second they started using clinic patients as delivery mules.” Something flat and dangerous moved behind his eyes, gone as fast as it came. “Can I talk to her?”
Mara studied him for a long moment, weighing the man who'd put a stranger through a magazine rack against the one who'd knelt in a stairwell explaining deadbolts to a six-year-old, and found, somewhat to her own surprise, that she trusted both versions enough to say yes.
“Gently,” she said. “She's terrified.”
“I know how to talk to scared people.”
He did. That was the thing that undid her a little, watching it happen — the way he lowered himself into the chair beside Deja's bed slow and measured, the way his voice dropped into something almost gentle, nothing like the flat warning tone he'd used in the hallway thirty seconds earlier.
“Hey. I hear you've got something that isn't yours sitting under your bed.”
Deja's whole body went rigid. “I didn't tell anyone that.”
“You told the nurse, and the nurse is trying to keep you safe, same as I am. Here's what's going to happen. Somebody's going to go get that bag tonight, quiet, no fuss, and it's going to disappear somewhere those guys will never find it. You're not going back to that corner. Not Friday, not ever.”
“They'll come after me.”
“They'll come after a girl who doesn't have anything they want anymore, and they'll get bored fast when there's nothing to collect.” Cole's voice stayed level, certain, the voice of a man who had clearly done this exact math before and trusted it.
“I'm not going to pretend it's nothing. But I'm telling you it's handled, and I don't say that unless I mean it.”
Whatever Deja heard underneath the words — and Mara suspected it was less the promise itself than the plain gravity of a man who looked like trouble telling her the truth like it cost him nothing to be plain about it — something in her finally broke loose, and she cried the way kids cried when they'd been holding themselves together for people who needed them to.
~ ~ ~
Yvonne caught Mara by the supply closet an hour later, after Deja had been sent home with a real safety plan instead of a false promise, and Tucker had already left to make good on Cole's word about the bag.
“I'm going to say something and I need you to hear the practical version of it, not the personal one.”
“Okay.”
“That man has walked in here twice in three days and both times it's ended with a scared kid actually getting helped instead of just patched up and sent back into whatever mess she came from.
I've been trying to get a security plan together for this place since somebody put a brick through the front window in March, and every plan I've priced costs more than this clinic makes in a year.” Yvonne folded her arms. “I want to ask him to keep doing what he's already doing. Officially. A liaison, not a bodyguard. Somebody the scared ones trust enough to actually talk to.”
“That's not really your call to make about his time.”
“No. But it's my call to ask, and it's yours to have feelings about, which you clearly do.” Yvonne's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “I'm not blind, Mara. I just don't have the energy to pretend I am.”
“There's nothing to have feelings about. He's a patient's ride, half the time. Occasionally a very large, very well-armed handyman.”
“Sure.” Yvonne didn't push it, which was somehow worse than if she had. “I'll ask him myself, then. Save you the trouble of pretending you don't already know what he'll say.”
She was right, and Mara hated that she was right, and said nothing else about it as she went back to finish Deja's discharge paperwork, writing cautious, legible instructions for a girl who needed, more than anything on that form, someone to keep the promise that had just been made to her out loud in a plastic chair.
~ ~ ~
Boone found Tucker outside twenty minutes later, leaning on the truck waiting for Cole to finish whatever he was finishing inside, and asked the question in the level, unbothered voice of a man who already suspected the answer and wanted to hear it said out loud anyway.
“How many times this week has Ledger been somewhere he wasn't assigned?”
Tucker considered lying, decided against it, because Boone had a way of already knowing the answer before he asked the question and only asking anyway to see who'd try to shortchange him.
“Couple. The clinic. The nurse's building.
Once at her kid's school, though he'd probably tell you that one was a coincidence.”
“Would he.” Boone watched the clinic's lit window for a moment, arms crossed, working through something behind his eyes that Tucker had learned a long time ago not to interrupt. “The nurse and her kid.”
“Mara. And Eli.”
“That's the one Deja Rivera's mother's been talking about all over Curtis Street, then.
Nurse who sat with her girl for two hours and didn't leave till she stopped shaking.” Boone shook his head slowly, not quite disapproving, not quite anything else Tucker could name yet either. “I'll talk to him.”