Although only fifty-something, Porter Walkins had a moral code, a sense of duty, and a contempt for ideology that were better suited to a time three-quarters of a century prior to the current age, and he dressed to complement his character. Elbow patches on a tweed sport coat. White shirt with bow tie, the tie not a clip-on. Gray wool pants held up with striped suspenders. Highly polished wingtips.
Trim and fit, with a careworn and caring face out of a Norman Rockwell portrait of a country doctor, he was always of good humor. But something about him, perhaps some guarded aspect of his hazel eyes, suggested that he hid from the world a persistent melancholy.
With his receptionist out to lunch, he treated Jane in his surgery. When she stripped to her underwear, he seemed not at all concerned about the two Heckler & Koch .45s. She stretched out on the examination table while he assessed and washed the wound, which he found more serious than she did. He applied local anesthetic and closed the bullet-torn flesh with stitches.
“They’ll dissolve over time,” he said. “No need to have them removed.”
On a previous occasion, when she had asked him why he risked treating patients off the record, which could result in the loss of his license to practice, he had said, I watch the news, Mrs. Hawk, by which he had meant not her story specifically, but the news of a world sliding into darkness.
Now he said, “Did you give as good as you got?”
“Better. But not enough, never enough. It’s an uphill slog, and I’m beginning to think I’m just a flatland runner.”
“You’re suffering exhaustion. And I believe you lost more than a pint of blood.”
“I’ve often donated a pint. A pint is nothing.”
As she sat up on the edge of the exam table, the doctor raised one eyebrow and said acerbically, “My exact words were ‘more than a pint.’ Because you weren’t considerate enough to diligently collect the blood for my professional measurement, I think it wise that you don’t self-diagnose the loss as ‘nothing.’ You should rest for a couple days in a room upstairs, where I can check on you from time to time.”
“Stay in your house?”
“I’m not suggesting we share a bed, Mrs. Hawk. I may look like a swinging playboy, but I assure you I’m not.”
“No, I’m sorry, I only meant—you can’t have the country’s most-wanted criminal staying in your house.”
“Most wanted, perhaps, but I suspect not criminal.”
“Anyway, no offense, but if I have to rest, I’d rather rest where I can be with my boy, my son.”
With a hypodermic syringe, Walkins punctured the membrane on an ampule of some drug and drew out a dose.
“What’re you doing?” she demanded.
Her alarm puzzled him. “It’s an antibiotic. Considering your exploits as I know them, I’m surprised you’d flinch at a needle.”
“It’s not the needle. But can’t I take pills instead?”
“You’ll also be taking pills, Mrs. Hawk. Since I have received a fine medical-school education, which you have not, I suggest you say, ‘Yes, Doctor,’ and avoid the likelihood of bacteremia, toxemia, and life-threatening sepsis. And may I assume you’ve been self-injecting the rabies vaccine according to the schedule I gave you.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Truthfully, now?”
She grimaced. “Yes, Mother, I have been self-injecting the rabies vaccine.”
Using a length of rubber tubing as a tourniquet, he searched for a vein in her right arm, said she had excellent venal formation, swabbed her skin with alcohol, and gave her the injection.
As Jane watched the fluid leave the barrel of the syringe, she resisted a swoon, darkness encroaching at the edges of her vision. When Porter Walkins extracted the needle, she passed out and would have fallen off the exam table on which she sat if he had not caught her in his arms.
When she regained consciousness less than a minute later, she conceded the extent of her exhaustion and, once dressed, allowed him to escort her to a room upstairs.