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A Novel
by Alan Drew
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"Oh, God. Thank you. Thank you."
Then the kid was coughing, his chest convulsing with oxygen.
"Where're the EMTs?" Ben yelled at the uniforms standing dumbly on the edge of the scene.
One of the cops ran to his cruiser, called in an ETA. "Junipero and Serrano."
"Shit." Ben lifted the coughing kid into his arms. "Get in the car," he said to the mother. Hoag Hospital was three-quarters of a mile away; he could be there in a minute. It'd be ten, maybe fifteen before the EMTs arrived, assessed the situation, and got the boy into emergency. The mother jumped into the passenger seat and Ben laid the boy on her lap—his blue eyes wide with fear now, the blood still running from his nose. Ben peeled the cruiser out of the driveway, and then gunned it out of the housing tract down El Rancho Road.
Hitting sixty, he called in to Hoag emergency. "Driving in a code pink," he said to the nurse on the line. "ETA one minute."
At the hospital, two nurses were waiting, a stretcher between them. Ben laid it out for one of the nurses as they ran the boy inside—unresponsive upon arrival, foaming mouth, bloody nose, CPR.
"How long in asystolic arrest?" one of the nurses said, two fingers on the boy's wrist as they ran through the sliding front doors of the hospital. "With no heartbeat? How long?"
"Not sure," he said. "At least a few seconds."
And then they were through the hallway and banging open the doors to the resuscitation room, the boy, wailing now, lifted out of the stretcher and laid out on the bed, an oxygen mask slipped over his mouth. A half dozen nurses and doctors crowded Ben out, a rush of scrubs, and the boy's mother crying Is he going to be okay? Will he be all right?
Ben stumbled out of the trauma room then, back into the waiting area. His tongue felt like a scrap of alloy, his mouth, too, like tinfoil lined the skin. He found a bathroom and locked himself inside, twisted on the faucet, and bent to slurp the water from the spigot, desperate to get the bitter taste out of his mouth.
It had been snowing when Natasha Betencourt arrived on the Huntington Beach scene. Not thick flakes like the ones falling in the San Gabriel Mountains, but hard pebbles that needled her cheeks. She was on her knees at the edge of a swimming pool, a warm fog of condensation rising from the heated water. The body was floating on its back, the man's eyes stunned wide open, staring blind at the white sky swirling above him.
"They usually bob facedown," the detective said, standing next to her.
"The skimmer's got him," Natasha said. The dead man's right hand was caught in the weir, holding the body in place; jammed up with his fingers, the bucket was making a sucking noise.
"Right," the detective said. "But if he drowned in the pool, he'd still be doing a dead man's float." He held his right hand out to his side, mimicking the dead body, and spun his shoulders a bit, as though trying to imagine a scenario in which the body would somersault onto its back.
"Guess you've ruled out a midnight swimming accident then," Natasha said.
"I haven't ruled anything out."
She'd worked with Detective Joseph Vanek briefly on a case a few years back, '81 or '82, when she was learning the ropes as a brand-new medical examiner. During autopsy, she had found blood in the mouth of the female victim that wasn't her own and suggested to the detective that the woman had bitten her killer, perhaps in some kind of struggle. That led to a FedEx delivery man, whose route included the woman's suburban home, with bites on his right hand and wrist. Blood samples matched, and the killer confessed. A few days later, Vanek had sent her a thank-you note—a simple card with his name embossed on the front and his elegant handwriting on the back. Beyond that, she didn't know much about Vanek, but rumor back then had it that he'd been a homicide detective in South Central LA, working the crack cocaine wars before leaving the LAPD for the Huntington Beach job.
Excerpted from The Recruit by Alan Drew. Copyright © 2022 by Alan Drew. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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