Do No Harm Read online

  But I guess even good guys have their limits.

  “My mom told me about Mabel.” Nate’s eyes swept the planes of my face.

  I froze. For a moment I wanted to tell him everything. To unload about the crush of patients, the child who’d vomited on my shoes, and then Mabel’s death after I’d unsuccessfully tried to manage her asthma attack with oral corticosteroids. I’d admitted her to the hospital but had received a call later from the ER. Mabel had died.

  I knew Nate would be sweet and empathetic. He’d pour me a glass of wine, draw me a bath, and let me just relax. And he’d listen. But I couldn’t tell him about any of it.

  Sometimes the intricate and complicated nature of belonging to a family still felt unfamiliar to me. I knew I should open up. Nate was a good man, the kind of man whose heart was a home, who put his family first and gave more than he took.

  Yet I couldn’t get my feelings to move from my heart to my tongue.

  “How’d she know?” I asked.

  “Mabel went to her church. She was eighty-seven years old. There was nothing you could do.”

  He was saying it to make me feel better, but the words stung anyway.

  Nothing you could do.

  I turned my face into Nate’s neck, letting the reassuring thump of his pulse flutter against my cheek. I didn’t want him to see the tears scratching behind my eyelids, the feeling that I’d failed glowing in their sheen. I didn’t cry, as a rule. I’d learned long ago that nothing good came from crying. Nothing but waves of helplessness, which I hated, and a throbbing headache, which I also hated.

  Nate said I felt too much as a doctor. That I was too compassionate and needed better boundaries. But I didn’t agree. My compassion for my patients was like a superpower. It made me a better doctor, a better human. Shouldn’t we all care a little more?

  I didn’t want to talk about Mabel, so I stood, moving toward the kitchen to start the never-ending chores of a full-time working mother.

  “You took Charlie for a walk, right?”

  Charlie heard the word walk and stood, his tail wagging. Charlie had turned up on our front porch one day out of the blue. We hadn’t planned to keep him. We both had demanding jobs and a small child; we didn’t have time for a dog. But by the time we’d realized no one was responding to our LOST DOG posters around town, it was too late. He was family.

  “Yep.”

  “Did you do laundry? Josh needs a clean school uniform tomorrow.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you empty—”

  “The garbage? Yep.”

  “Sorry. You know me.”

  Nate grinned, his eyes bright, his smile teasing. “You mean an overly responsible, incredibly anal control freak?”

  I laughed. He was right: I got shit done. “No, a loving mother and a dependable, well-respected doctor.”

  I slipped a sweater on and searched for my fuzzy slippers under the table. “Have you seen my slippers?”

  “I dunno. Bedroom?”

  I found them in the bathroom, slipped them on, and returned to the living room. “You were wearing my slippers again, weren’t you,” I teased.

  “I prefer your heels, dahling.” Nate struck a pose, one hand behind his head, before grabbing my hand and pulling me back down onto the couch. He was looking at me that way he did, like he was hypnotized by me. He nuzzled my neck, and when his lips touched mine, shivers dusted my spine. Even now, married five years and with our son sleeping upstairs, my husband still made me feel like this. Content. Like I belonged. Just being with Nate lit me up from the inside.

  Nate and I met when I was in my first year of residency. He’d arrested a guy who hadn’t wanted to be arrested, and he’d been stabbed through the metacarpal bones of his palm for his effort.

  I don’t know if I believe in love at first sight, but when I saw him it was, as the Italians say, il colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt. Holding his hand in mine as I stitched the gaping skin together, I felt electric.

  “You’re lucky you missed any major veins,” I’d said.

  “I’m lucky, all right.”

  My stomach had twisted as I met his gaze. I snipped the ends of the last stitch and wrapped his hand in gauze, declaring him fit to leave.

  “Let me take you to dinner,” he’d said.

  He was drinking me in with his eyes, and when I spoke it was with less conviction than it should’ve been.

  “Absolutely not.” It didn’t matter that my hand was still warm from his or that his gaze made my stomach feel like it had touched a live wire. “I don’t date patients.”

  I didn’t think I’d see him again, but a few weeks later I ran into him at a Christmas party my roommate had dragged me to. I’d been adrift and alone, and then there was Nate, and I chose not to be alone anymore.

  Nate was different from other guys I’d dated. He cooked me dinner, showed me pictures of his family, listened when I spoke, and asked thoughtful questions. And he made me laugh. He always made me laugh. We’d moved in together after just a month, joining our lives the way soul mates and best friends do. And when I found out I was pregnant, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to say yes when he proposed.

  “I have a million things to do,” I murmured against Nate’s mouth.

  “I could arrest you, you know.” Nate wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “I have handcuffs.”

  I burst out laughing. “Maybe I have just a little time.”

  “Ooh-la-la!” Nate lifted my sweater over my head and unbuttoned my pants, rolling them down over my ankles and gazing at my body in admiration. He smiled, the left side of his mouth curving up just a little bit more than the right, and ran his fingers lightly over my bare shoulders as he bent to kiss my neck.

  I kicked my pants off so I was only wearing my bra and underwear. “Now, what was that you said about handcuffs?”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIRST OVERDOSE CALL came at 8:20 a.m., just as Detective Nate Sweeney was dropping his son off at school in Skamania, a small town pressed up against the Cascade mountain range about forty-five minutes outside of Seattle. His mind was crowded with worry as he watched Josh walk down the covered corridor toward his classroom.

  He knew he hadn’t been fooling Josh earlier. The cross on the eastern side of the bridge that spanned the Skamania River had been freshly painted, startling Nate more than it should’ve. He’d slowed the Crown Vic and stared at it, wondering who’d painted it. Robbie’s mom and dad had left town years ago.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Josh had asked from his booster seat in the back.

  Loosening his grip on the steering wheel, Nate had flashed his son a grin. He was good at hiding his darker feelings. But Josh was a sensitive kid. “Nothing, buddy. You ready to fly?”

  Josh nodded.

  “Here we go!” Nate pulled onto the highway and hit the gas. He flashed the cruiser’s lights, the car surging forward with a low growl. The engine thrummed as he accelerated to forty, then fifty, then sixty miles an hour.

  Josh laughed and Nate laughed with him, twin bursts of relief and happiness expanding in his chest. Nate felt like a god when he made his son laugh. He remembered when his own father used to do this for him, the whir of the siren in his ears, the rush of adrenaline as the trees flew by.

  “Faster! Faster!” Josh crowed.

  But they’d reached sixty, and Nate was already easing off the gas. “We’ve reached the speed limit, Josh. I can’t go any faster—it’s against the law.”

  Soon Nate was pulling into the school drop-off lane. He turned to face Josh, surprised to see that he looked like he was about to cry.

  “Hey, what’s wrong, Josh?”

  “I don’t feel so good.”

  Josh had been complaining he wasn’t feeling well a lot lately, but he didn’t have a temperature. At first Nate thought his reluctance was over going back to school after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Then he remembered the bruises on Josh’s back.

  “Is there
something going on at school you want to talk about?” he asked.

  “No. I just wanna stay with you.”

  Nate made a mental note to talk to Josh’s teacher later. “Mommy will be here to pick you up before you know it.”

  Nate had helped Josh put his backpack on, handing him over to the school warden who was waiting to take him to his kindergarten classroom. He watched his son drag his shoes across the pavement in the way only a five-year-old boy could. Josh was smaller than the other kids, and now, his shoulders sagging under his backpack, he seemed tinier, more vulnerable than ever.

  For a moment Nate had debated going inside to talk to Josh’s teacher, but he’d heard the radio crackling in the cruiser and knew he had to go. Josh peeked over his shoulder one last time, his sad eyes meeting Nate’s. Nate lifted a hand good-bye.

  And a second later, Josh was gone.

  * * *

  NATE WAS closest to the overdose, so he flipped his lights on and flew up the main street of Skamania, named after the nearby waterfall of the same name, and headed past the hospital where Emma worked. If he drove another twenty miles up he’d hit the pass, which cut the state in half, but instead he turned abruptly into the Mill Creek neighborhood at the edge of town.

  The neighborhood had an air of quiet desperation about it, a mix of run-down houses with cracked windows and rusted mobile homes, the siding peeling in ugly, jagged strips. The yards were overgrown and neglected, choked with weeds, the faint scent of garbage filling the air.

  Nate had been called here for domestic assaults, drug busts, and once a murder. But increasingly, the calls were about opioid overdoses. As such, the lieutenant had recently told his detectives to investigate both fatal and nonfatal overdoses in an effort to trace the drugs back to the dealers.

  The overdose was a young woman of about twenty-five. She’d passed out as she was driving, the car coming to rest in the middle of the cul-de-sac, her little girl in the backseat. The paramedics were giving her naloxone when Nate arrived.

  “Witness is over there,” said Bill Petty, one of the paramedics. He jerked his chin toward a scrawny woman with dark, unwashed hair standing next to a squirming four-year-old.

  “I live there,” the witness told Nate, pointing across the street to a rusty mobile home. Her voice was scratchy, like she’d smoked too many cigarettes. “I was doin’ dishes when I saw the car sorta driftin’. She was slumped over the wheel.”

  Nate took a few notes and thanked the woman before calling social services to get the girl. He noticed a familiar figure in the crowd gathering near the ambulance.

  “Stevie McGraw,” he growled under his breath. The local teenage scumbag watched the events, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. His black hair hung in greasy sheets, gaze sharp behind horn-rimmed glasses.

  By now Bill and the other paramedics had revived the mother.

  “I have a headache,” she mumbled, her eyes bloodshot.

  “Well, of course you do,” Bill replied briskly. “You weren’t breathing for a while. Your brain didn’t have any oxygen.”

  “Why don’t you tell me where your dime baggie is?” Nate asked her.

  Still dazed, she pointed at the glove compartment. Nate snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached into the compartment, extracting a baggie with a couple of white pills and a lot of residual powder. He held up the pills and examined them, surprised there were any left.

  “Oxy?”

  She nodded.

  “You could have killed your daughter.”

  The woman burst into tears then. Her arms, bloody from raking broken nails down them, came up to cover her face. Bill bundled her into the ambulance and closed the back door. He caught Nate’s eye and shook his head. They’d known each other since elementary school, and Nate could see the stamp of exhaustion in his sunken eyes, his sloped shoulders.

  “We had four overdose calls yesterday,” Bill said. “This one will check herself out of the hospital as soon as she can. When will it stop?”

  Nate had no answer. Most overdose patients refused further treatment. Even a brush with death was rarely a turning point for an addict.

  “Get some rest tonight, Bill.” He clapped his old friend on the shoulder, then waved as the ambulance whooped and headed for the hospital.

  Nate sat in his cruiser and jotted a few more notes as he waited for social services to arrive.

  Nate hadn’t always wanted to be a cop. Just the opposite, in fact. He’d seen how hard his dad had worked for their small town, how much being a cop had taken out of him. The constant stress and resulting high blood pressure had caused the stroke that eventually cut him down in his prime. He’d worked his whole life to make Skamania a safer place. Nate couldn’t appreciate that when he was young. He did now.

  One night his childhood friend Robbie Sadler had gotten out of bed, written a suicide note to his parents, stolen his father’s gun, walked to the bridge that spanned the Skamania River, and shot himself in the head. His body was found downstream three days later. So when Nate finished high school, he’d signed up at the police academy, determined to save lives and stop others from taking them.

  From his cruiser, Nate watched Stevie through narrowed eyes. The young man exhaled, a gray cloud of smoke swirling around him as he talked to one of the neighbors. Is it possible that Stevie dealt the oxy to that woman? Stevie was bad news. He’d been caught hacking the school system to change his grades last year and had been picked up for dealing weed to younger kids.

  Nate groaned. If he arrested Stevie, the paperwork would take him all morning. But then he remembered that white cross. Pain expanded inside him like a balloon, so tight, so intense, he wanted to slice it open to relieve the pressure.

  Nate pulled out a tin of toothpicks he kept in his slacks pocket. He placed one between his pinky fingernail and the nail bed, and then slowly, excruciatingly, pushed the toothpick into the tender skin.

  Searing pain burst through his fingertip, jarring and brutal. Nate gasped. He squeezed his eyes shut and let the pain remind him what he had to do.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, Nate hurried toward the police department, a two-story brick-and-glass building in the center of town. An American flag flapped above the glass entry doors.

  He’d missed roll call, but knew Lieutenant Dyson wouldn’t mind. This was Skamania. There were fewer than six thousand emergency calls and criminal cases a year. It was one of the best, and worst, things about taking the detective job here after the chaos of patrolling in Seattle.

  Stevie hadn’t been carrying any oxycodone. But he did have an ounce of marijuana in his back pocket. Since he was underage, Nate had booked him for possession. He’d even seized the $4.92 Stevie had in his wallet for good measure.

  Nate shoved a bite of a glazed donut into his mouth as he entered the station, all he’d had time to grab for breakfast this morning.

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” he said into his cell phone, still chewing. He nodded at Thompson, who was on duty at the front desk, and moved toward the detectives’ area. He thumped Sanchez on the back and raised a hand good-bye to McManus, who was leaving. “I’ll visit him later.… I will, promise. I gotta go.… Yeah.… Yeah. Love you too.”

  The police department was busy. Phones were ringing, keyboards clattering, papers shuffling. The smell of burnt coffee drifted in the air. The cubicles in the detectives’ area were squished at the back of the room.

  Nate crossed to his cubicle, which was decorated with the traditional swag of a detective: pictures of his family, police awards he’d won, a trophy he’d brought from Seattle. He sat down to file his report about the overdose.

  “You’re gonna get fat.” One of the other detectives, Kia Sharpe, nodded at the donut in his hand.

  Nate patted his abs and grinned, his blue eyes sparkling. “Never.”

  “Life is not fair,” she complained.

  Kia was the yin to Nate’s yang: a cynical pessimist with a fractious, snappy attitude. She had bitten-down
nails, shaggy hair, and a jaw so square you could park a car in it. But beneath her dark eyes and black leather jacket, she was quick-minded and wily as a snake.

  Before Nate could reply, Lieutenant Sam Dyson poked his head out of his office. “Sweeney!”

  Nate hustled into Dyson’s office. The walls were covered with pictures: Dyson with the mayor, with his officers and detectives, riding horses with his children, holding his grandkids, a wedding photo with his wife. Medals hung on the spaces in between.

  A photo on his desk showed Dyson and Nate’s dad, Matt Sweeney, back when they were partners, looking young and virile, both in full uniform standing in front of their patrol car. These days Dyson looked more like a cowboy than a cop, with a gray handlebar mustache, craggy eyebrows, and a face so creased he looked like he’d slept facedown.

  “Hiya, Nate. How’s Emma?”

  Dyson had always had a soft spot for Nate’s wife, ever since she’d caught his granddaughter’s diabetes and probably saved her life.

  Nate smiled, thinking of Emma this morning, the way her dark hair swirled around her shoulders, her thighs peeking out from the hem of the T-shirt she’d borrowed from him. He’d never loved anyone as much as he loved Emma. And now Josh, of course. This morning he’d watched as she rinsed their son’s cereal bowl in the sink and been completely hypnotized. Even doing the most mundane things, his wife was exquisite. She’d turned and caught him staring and had bent for a lingering kiss, filling him with warmth. He didn’t know what he’d done to deserve a love like this, but he sure as shit was grateful.

  “She’s good,” Nate replied.

  “Good. Listen, I got a call from Seattle this morning.” Dyson smoothed nicotine-stained fingers down his mustache. “One of their informants was making noises about a fentanyl deal going down out here, but he’s gone quiet. They asked us to do a welfare check.” Dyson tossed a file at Nate. “Name and address are there. Let me know what you find.”