Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (9 page)

“All right, I get it,” I said. “You behaved very well. You can talk now.”

He turned to me, lolled out his tongue, puffed up his cheeks, crossed his eyes, and mimed a perfect, signature Harpo Marx Gookie face.

“You fucking clown,” I said, laughing. “Just for that, I’m going to the Living With Dying meeting tonight without you.”

He took both hands off the wheel, folded them in front of his chest, and begged mock forgiveness.

“Fine,” I said. “I have a five o’clock doctor’s appointment. Pick me up at my house about a quarter to eight.”

He pumped his fist, grinned like an idiot, and honked the horn incessantly as we drove up Sunset.

Terry Biggs cracks me up. Even when he doesn’t say a word.

CHAPTER 20

“DROP ME OFF
right here,” I said as Terry pulled into the Hollywood station parking lot. “I’m not going into the office. I have just enough time to make it to this doctor’s appointment.”

“You want me to go with you?” he asked as we got out of his car.

“No.”

“Are you sure? It’ll be a lot more laughs if you take me with you.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said, getting into my car. “I’ll see you later.”

“Good luck,” he said as I pulled out of the lot and onto Wilcox.

I turned on the CD player, but I was no longer in the mood to be transported to a happier place by filling the car with music from a happier time. I killed the sound so I could make my way into the most dangerous neighborhood I know. Inside my head.

My thoughts immediately turned to mortality. Mine, Joanie’s, Bruce Bower’s, and of course, Cal Bernstein’s. Cal had lived, laughed, loved, worked, played, and made his mark on this planet for fifty-four years. And I had been completely unaware of him until the last few seconds of his existence.

But his death hit me hard.

And now it was gnawing its way into my consciousness, reminding me of the words of wisdom I’d heard last night from
an eight-year-old.
We all die, Mike. The best thing to do is have as much fun with your life while you can
.

Maybe Sophie was right. Maybe knowing that death is in the wings drives most of us to make the most out of the time we have on stage.

But still
, I thought
. Dying sucks, and I’m not ready
.

An hour later, I was in yet another exam room, wearing yet another totally useless hospital gown, with my ass the target of yet another doctor.

This time there was no gunfire to interrupt the procedure, and Dr. Abordo jammed an industrial-sized needle into my hip bone. Despite the fact that he’d given me a local anesthetic, it hurt like hell.

“Sorry,” he said. “Take some Tylenol if you’re in pain when the anesthetic wears off.”

“I can live with the pain. What I can’t live with is the suspense.”

“The lab usually takes five days,” he said as he bandaged the site. “Doug Heller will call you with the results.”

“Doug will only give me the cold hard facts. I was hoping you could find it in your heart to tell me the possibilities. Five days is a long time to be in the dark.”

Herand Abordo was young, affable, and after the initial doctor/new patient foreplay, I got the feeling that he’d be more forthcoming than most. But I knew I’d have to press him for it.

“What would you like to know?” he said.

“For starters, what the hell is splenomegaly? I saw you write it in my chart.”

“I’m amazed you can read my handwriting right side up, much less upside down, but all it means is that your spleen is enlarged. I thought Doug told you that.”

“He did. Of course, I have no idea what a spleen is or what it does, but it’s gratifying to know that I’ll have the biggest one in the boy’s locker room.”

He laughed. I’d have to tell Terry that he wasn’t the only funny cop in the squad.

“Seriously, Doc. Is it leukemia? Should I—what’s the phrase you guys use—get my affairs in order?”

“Jesus, Mike—slow down. First of all, only the lab can tell us if it’s leukemia. If it is, you have treatment options. As for getting your affairs in order, absolutely not. Just do what you always do. Enjoy your life. Start tonight. Do you have anything fun planned?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It should be a lot of fun.”

“Excellent,” he said.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my big plans for the evening were to go to my first Living With Dying meeting.

CHAPTER 21

DRIVING HOME I
stressed out over who I should tell about my elevated blood count, my enlarged spleen, and my uncertain future.

It was Wednesday night. Tomorrow was Sophie’s welcome-home party for Carly. And since I wouldn’t get the verdict back from the lab for five days, there was no sense sabotaging anybody else’s weekend.

I felt rotten about holding out on Diana, but her husband had died a few years ago, and I knew that if I told her about the bone marrow biopsy she would jump to the illogical conclusion that I was next.

On the other hand, keeping it a secret from my father was not only an easy call, it was a blessed relief. If Big Jim even had an inkling that I could possibly have cancer, he would bombard me with a litany of specialists I should see, homeopathic remedies I should try, and stories of medical miracles meant to inspire me to a state of physical and spiritual well-being.

I love my father, but his unsolicited advice and well-intentioned meddling would turn five days of waiting for the lab results into an eternity.

Decision made:
I would suffer in silence
.

But as soon as I turned onto Hill Street, I realized that silence wasn’t in the cards. There was a white stretch limo parked in
front of my house. Behind that was a big ugly food truck that my brother Frankie and his girlfriend Izzy had cleverly dubbed The Big Ugly Food Truck.

I parked, opened the front door to the house, and braced myself for the onslaught of my loving family.

“Where the hell have you been?” Big Jim bellowed. “We were about to start the party without you.”

Sophie was right beside him. “No we weren’t,” she said. “Large James has no patience. I made him wait.”

“Thanks for waiting, but I thought the party for your mom was tomorrow night.”

“It is,” Big Jim said. “This is the party for people who are planning tomorrow’s party. Have a seat.”

“It’s been a long day, Dad, and it’s not over. Do you really need my help?”

“Hell, no. We don’t need your help. Sophie and I just want to regale you with what we’ve cooked up and watch you fall down in awe of our party-planning prowess.”

“Regale in a hurry,” I said. “What’s the limo doing out front?”

“That’s the official vehicle for the homecoming queen,” Sophie said. “I decorated the inside. You can’t see it till tomorrow.”

“I’ll count the minutes. And what’s Frankie’s big ugly food truck doing here?”

“Because Frankie and me, we are
los cocineros
,” a female voice answered.

I turned around. It was Isabella, my brother’s girlfriend, business partner, and according to Big Jim, the person most responsible for helping Frankie keep both feet on the ground. Sophie loved her. I loved her. Hell, everybody loved her. Frankie most of all.

“Izzy,” I said, kissing her on each cheek. “Congratulations. I wondered who Sophie was going to hire to take on the culinary gig for this momentous homecoming fiesta.”

“Are you kidding?” Izzy said. “Me and Frankie, we beat out a
dozen other big ugly food trucks.”

Sophie had a mouth-wide-open grin. “It was a tough choice,” she said, her eyes dancing around the room, from me to Big Jim to Izzy and back, “but I decided to keep it in the family.”

“
Cómo estás, mi hermano?
” It was Frankie, holding out two beers. He passed me one and gave me a big bro hug.

“I don’t know how you say ‘beat to hell’ in Español, but that’s how I am, and to make it worse, Terry and I have to go out tonight to follow up on a lead.”

“Oh, Mike, not tonight.” It was Diana. She and Big Jim’s wife Angel came out of the kitchen, each with a glass of white wine in hand.

“Yes tonight,” I said, giving her a kiss. “I cleared the decks for tomorrow night, but nobody warned me about the party before the party.”

“How well do you know your father?” Angel said, moving in for my final welcome-home kiss. “Even worse, he’s corrupted this poor little girl. She’s picking up all his bad habits. Carly will see what he’s done, and she’ll probably never let us near Sophie again.”

“More likely she’ll thank us,” Big Jim boomed. “It takes a village, and we all did a bang-up job of helping raise this little troublemaker while Carly was in China. Especially you, Mike.” He capped the compliment with the ultimate Big Jim gesture of gratitude. A genuine, old-fashioned
attaboy
. He slapped me on the back.

The shock reverberated through my body, seared my brain, and took my breath away. Six inches lower and he’d have connected with the exact spot where the horse syringe had drilled a hole in my bone, and I’d have passed out cold.

My eyes watered, and I sucked hard on the beer bottle to help drown out the pain. It didn’t help.

“I have to take a bio break,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I practically staggered to the bathroom, but the fun quotient in
the room was too high for any of them to notice.

Still dressed, I sat down on the toilet seat to let the pain subside. It didn’t. There was no Tylenol in the medicine cabinet, but there was a bottle of Advil. I popped two and washed them down with beer. I lowered my pants and looked at the bandage on my hip. No blood. Just a million nerve endings screaming in agony. I took a third Advil, thought about a fourth, then decided to give the first three time to kick in.

I put on my happy face and rejoined the party planners. “I’ll bet there’s one thing you didn’t get for this shindig,” I said.

“What?” Sophie challenged.

“The Rockettes.”

“Ha!” she said. “We
did
get them. Only we got the LA Rockettes.”

“I thought the Rockettes only worked in New York, and they’re called the Rockettes because Radio City Music Hall is in Rockefeller Center.”

“Well, our Rockettes work for Big Jim’s Trucking Company.”

I looked at my father.

He nodded. “She’s right. You know them as Chico, Freddie, Rufus, and Otto. But tomorrow night, when they put on their dancing shoes and kick up their heels, they’re going to be The Truckettes. It’s going to be a night this little girl will never forget for the rest of her life.”

He was right. But in all the wrong ways.

CHAPTER 22

“DO YOU KNOW
how many different support groups there are in LA?” Terry asked as we drove to the Living With Dying meeting.

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Take a wild guess. Just toss out a number.”

“Eighty-three.”

“More like a thousand and eighty-three. Mike, I went online. If you have an addiction, an affliction, a disease, a disorder, a habit, a handicap—whatever the hell is mucking up your life, there’s a bunch of other people mucking up their lives the exact same way. So what do they do? They get together in a church basement somewhere and talk each other out of the muck.”

“I know. Kilcullen’s been sober for twenty-five years. And if it weren’t for Gamblers Anonymous, my brother Frankie would be living under a bridge somewhere, if he were alive at all. Maybe the reason there are so many of those support groups is because they work.”

“That’s what I’m getting at. You have a problem, you get together with likeminded people, and you fix it. It’s such a good idea that I’ve started my own support group—Cops Without Yachts. You want in?”

Terry doesn’t just dream about going into stand-up comedy after he leaves LAPD, he works at it. Half a dozen support-group
jokes later, we pulled into the parking lot at Our Lady of Mercy.

It was 7:56. We waited in the car and watched people shuffle down the stairs or take the handicap ramp to the basement. At eight on the nose, we walked in just as the meeting was getting under way.

The space was brightly lit and cheerful, with one entire wall covered with artwork drawn by kids who used the facility during school hours. Terry and I took seats in the rear, and I did a head count. Twenty-two people—three in wheelchairs, and three more wearing nasal cannulas hooked up to portable oxygen tanks. Almost everyone was either bald, balding, or wearing a hat.

The leader, sitting at the teacher’s desk in the front of the room, spoke. “Hey, everybody, my name is Charlie Brock, I’m forty-four years old, and I’m living with hepatocellular carcinoma, or as I like to say after three drinks—liver cancer.”

Everyone responded with a chorus of “Hi, Charlie.”

“I see a few new faces, so for those of you who are joining us for the first time, this is the Colorado Avenue chapter of Living With Dying. We don’t have a lot of rules, and except for the flight of stairs you walked down to get here, we don’t have any steps to follow. We’ve all been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and while some of us are destined to stick around longer than others, we all know that we’re leaving the party before it’s over.

“That, my friends, can be a real bummer, so we meet here three nights a week to get un-bummed. We’re all dying, but our primary mission is to help each other focus on living. Which means nobody wants to hear you bitch and moan if your Social Security check was late, or if you saw a roach in your kitchen—unless said roach is the ass end of a joint—which, God bless Prop 215, has been legal for folks like us since 1996.”

Several heads in front of me nodded enthusiastically. California’s Compassionate Use Act allowing the use of medical cannabis was a significant victory for every chemo patient in the room.

“So that’s how these meetings work,” Charlie continued. “We
know that you’re dying, but what we want to hear about is how you’re living. Did you paint a picture, build a birdhouse, drink an amusing little pinot grigio, get laid, write a song? Who wants to share first?”

Hands shot up, and Charlie pointed at an African-American man.