“Large” meant it was a very bad case, probably worse than it already seemed. I wondered how that could be, and I almost didn’t want to know the answer.
CHAPTER 16
KATE MCTIERNAN was lost in an odd, but nicely illuminating, thought. When the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, she considered, it’s only because of timing.
That was the insight from her latest kata in black-belt class. Exquisite timing was everything in karate, and also in so many other things. It also helped if you could bench-press almost two hundred pounds, which she could.
Kate dawdled along busy, funky, rambunctious Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The street ran north and south, bordering the picturesque campus of the University of North Carolina. She passed bookstores, pizza shops, Rollerblade rentals, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. The rock group White Zombie was blaring from the ice-cream store. Kate wasn’t a dawdler by nature, but the evening was warm and pleasant, so she stopped to window-shop for a change.
The college-town crowd was familiar, friendly, and very comfortable. She loved her life here, first as a medical student and now as an intern. She never wanted to leave Chapel Hill, never wanted to go back and be a doctor in West Virginia.
But she would go. It was her promise to her mother—just before Beadsie McTiernan died. Kate had given her word, and her word was good. She was old-fashioned about things like that. A small-town mensch.
Kate’s hands were thrust into the deep pockets of a slightly wrinkled hospital medical jacket. She thought that her hands were her bad feature. They were gnarled, and she had no fingernails to speak of. There were two reasons for that: her job as slave labor at the cancer ward and her avocation as a second-degree black belt, a Nidan. It was the one tension releaser she allowed herself; karate class was her R & R.
The name pin on the upper left pocket of her jacket said K. McTiernan, M.D. She liked the tiny irreverence of wearing that symbol of status and prestige with her baggy pants and the sneakers. She didn’t want to seem like a rebel, and she really wasn’t, but she needed to keep some small individuality inside the large hospital community.
Kate had just picked up a paperback copy of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses at the Intimate Book Shop. First-year interns weren’t supposed to have time to read novels, but she made time. At least she promised to make time tonight.
The late April night was so fine, so perfect in every way, that Kate considered stopping off at Spanky’s on the corner of Columbia and Franklin. She might sit at the bar and just read her book.
There was absolutely no way she would let herself meet somebody on a “school night”—which meant most nights for her. She usually had Saturdays off, but by then she was too bushed to deal with pre- and post-mating rituals.
It had been that way ever since she and Peter McGrath had severed their on-again, off-again relationship. Peter was thirty-eight, a doctor of history and close to brilliant. He was handsome as sin and way too self-absorbed for her taste. The breakup had been messier than she had expected. They weren’t even friends now.
It had been four months without Peter now. Pun intended. Not good, but not in the top ten worst things she’d had to deal with. And besides, she knew the breakup was really her fault and not Peter’s. Breaking up with lovers was a problem she had; it was part of her secret past. Secret present? Secret future?
Kate McTiernan raised her wristwatch to her face. It was a funky Mickey Mouse model that her sister Carole Anne had given her, and it was a swell little timekeeper. It was also a reminder to herself: Never get a big head because you’re a DOCTOR now.
Damn! Her farsightedness was getting worse—at almost thirty-one years old! She was an old lady. She’d been the grandam of the University of North Carolina Medical School. It was already nine-thirty, past her bedtime.
Kate decided to pass on Spanky’s and head back to the hacienda. She’d heat up some fourth-degree chili, and maybe have hot chocolate with about an inch topping of Marshmallow Fluff. Curling up in bed with some junk food, Cormac McCarthy, and maybe R.E.M. didn’t sound half bad, actually.
Like many of the students at Chapel Hill—as opposed to the wealthier crowd up Tobacco Road at “Dook”—Kate had a major cash-flow problem. She lived in a three-room apartment that was the top floor of a frame house, a North Carolina “country” house. All the paint was peeling, and the house looked as if it were molting. It was at the ass-end of Pittsboro Street in Chapel Hill. She had gotten a good deal on the rent.
The first thing she had noticed about the neighborhood were the exquisite trees. They were old and stately hardwoods, not pines. Their long branches reminded her of the arms and fingers of wizened old women. She called her street “Old Ladies Lane.” Where else would the old lady of the medical school live?
Kate arrived home at about a quarter to ten. Nobody was living downstairs in the house that she rented from a widowed lady who lived in Durham.
“I’m home. It’s me, Kate,” she called to the family of mice who lived somewhere behind the refrigerator. She couldn’t bring herself to exterminate them. “Did you miss me? You guys eat yet?”
She flipped on the overhead kitchen light and listened to the irritating electric buzz that she hated. Her eyes caught the blowup of a quote from one of her med-school teachers: “Medical students have to practice humility.” Well she was definitely practicing humility.
Inside her small bedroom, Kate pulled on a wrinkled black polo shirt that she never ever bothered to iron. Ironing clothes was not a priority these days. It was one reason to have a man around, though—someone to clean, maintain, take out the trash, cook, iron. She was fond of a particular old feminist line: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Kate yawned just thinking about the sixteen-hour day that would start for her at five the next morning. Dammit, she loved her life! Loved it!
She fell onto the creaking double bed that was covered with plain white sheets. The only flourish was a couple of colored chiffon scarves which hung from the bedpost.
She canceled her order for chili and hot chocolate with Marshmallow Fluff, and she set All the Pretty Horses on top of unread copies of Harper’s and The New Yorker. Kate flipped off her lamp and was asleep in five seconds. End of wonderfully illuminating discussion with herself for the night.
Kate McTiernan had no idea, no suspicion, that she was being watched, that she had been followed ever since she’d walked down crowded, colorful Franklin Street, that she had been chosen.
Dr. Kate was next.
Tick-cock.
CHAPTER 17