A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

me down, and they’d get hold of my text messages and phone calls from Sprint, which would further link me to Monica and lead them to Rick Alvarez down in Costa Rica, and he would lead them to Madvig.

He’d tell them I had been looking into a Dr. Madvig who had killed his wife and had properties in Beachwood and Malibu.

So they had to come! Even if it was to arrest me because they didn’t understand what was going on—let them come!

Then Ben came back to the room, wheeling in a tall, L-shaped tray table with a plate of food on top of it: scrambled eggs, toast, and some fruit. He got my bed into a sitting position and swung the tray over my lap. Then he ungagged me, and because my arms were still bound, he fed me, sitting on the edge of my bed, one forkful at a time. It was my first food since Friday, and I thought for a second of going on a hunger strike but decided it was best to continue to be compliant. To observe him. To find an angle.

“How are the eggs?” he asked. He seemed to enjoy caring for me.

“Very good,” I said. “Thank you.”

“My secret is a little bit of milk. Put the milk in with the eggs in a bowl and stir it up. Make ’em fluffy.”

“You do the cooking, too?”

“Oh, yeah. I love to cook.”

When I was finished eating, he had me stand up. I was still in the straitjacket, and he bound my ankles, loosely. “We need you circulating,” he said. “Good for your kidneys, your whole body. And we don’t want you to get bedsores.”

He kept an iron hand on the back of my neck, and with my feet partially bound all I could do was shuffle, and there was no way to escape. I thought momentarily of trying to throw myself from his grip and brain myself on the floor, but if I did that I would be of no use to Monica.

As we turned back to shuffle toward the bed, my legs were a little shaky but not as bad as I thought they’d be, and I was able for the first time to look out the window.

My view was of a driveway, bordered on the left by dark-green grass and on the right by wild grass leading to a cliff edge, and beyond that was the Pacific. Since the bed kept me from getting too close to the window, my line of sight was limited, but I prayed that I’d see Thode and Mullen coming up the driveway at any moment.

After a few minutes of shuffling in the room, with no arrival from the cavalry, Ben got bored and said: “Want to walk around the house?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s good to move my legs.”

And this wasn’t a lie. I had been in that bed since sometime Friday night and I needed to move. I needed to get strong. That was another angle: regain my strength.

Out of the room, he led me down a long hallway of maroon Spanish tile. We passed two rooms with closed doors—could Monica be in one of them?—and the third door we passed was partially open. I glanced over and could see part of a long metal desk, a boxy white machine of some kind, and a tray of glass tubes filled with blood. I stopped shuffling and said: “What’s in there?”

“That’s our lab, where we do the blood work.”

“Who does it? You?”

“No,” he said, like my question was ridiculous. “John handles hematology and anesthesiology. The doc does the cutting, and I do the nursing.” This was the division of labor.

“And you do the cooking, too. You do a lot,” I said, trying to flatter him, get him on my side.

“Yeah. I like to stay busy. Keep moving.”

I started shuffling again. “What did the other boys do?”

“They made the runs to Mexico for the transplant drugs and all the other meds. We’re like a pharmacy. We offer full service.”

He was proud of what they did and had no hesitation about telling me anything. He didn’t seem to have a low IQ, but he was guileless and almost innocent. I didn’t know how to classify him—simple but not simple?

So maybe there was a way to exploit his nature, to manipulate him, but I couldn’t forget, even if he came across as a gentle giant, that he was also violent. He had killed that boy at the motel, and when he came to my house following Lou, he would have killed me. And he had poisoned George.

With his hand heavy on my neck, I shuffled some more, and then the hallway emptied out into the kitchen, which was no longer a kitchen.

It had been transformed into a makeshift nursing station with everything you might find in a hospital, and beyond the kitchen—and even more disturbing—was a large high-ceilinged dining room that had been tented off and remade as a surgical triage unit. This nightmare was much too real, and I knew the answer, but I asked Ben: “What goes on in there?”

“That’s where the doctor uses his gift,” he said with great reverence, and to the left of the tented room were two French doors, which seemed to lead to an outdoor area.

“His gift?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, he likes money, like anybody, but really all this is because he loves the work. They never should have taken his license away.”

He clearly worshipped Madvig, an utter sociopath, and careful to keep the disgust out of my voice, I said: “How did you meet him?”

“In a halfway house,” he said. “I’d just finished ten years at Lancaster for armed robbery, and he’d had his little vacation at the rich man’s country club, but they put us in the same house in Ventura, and when we got out he took me in and sent me to nursing school, and the rest is history.”

All this pleased him very much, this story of their friendship, and