The Pain Scale
Also by Tyler Dilts:
A King of Infinite Space
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2012 Tyler Dilts
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612186023
ISBN-10: 1612186025
For Nicole
PART ONE: COMPLAINT
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
W
HEN
I
SLEEP
I dream of pain.
“On a scale of one to ten,” the new doctor asked, “with zero being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you can possibly imagine, how would you rate your current pain level?” He was young, not far past thirty, with thinning red-blond hair and freckles tinged green under the fluorescent lights. Wore surgical scrubs under a white coat and a fake smile. An ID badge identified him as Dr. Ballard. It was maybe the ten-thousandth time I’d been asked the same question in the previous thirteen months.
“Did you read my file?” I asked.
“Of course, Mr. Beckett.” He looked confused, as if I were accusing him of something. Must have been the edge in my voice.
“Do you know what I do for a living?”
“You’re a police officer.”
“A homicide detective.”
“Oh. Well.” He didn’t follow.
I wanted to tell him my problems with his question. Why it was meaningless. Why I was so sick of it I could barely keep myself from screaming. I wanted to tell him about the things I’d seen. It would only take a few examples. To tell him the kind of pain I could imagine. And that the reason I could imagine
it was because I’d witnessed the actions that caused it with my own eyes. To tell him, for example, about a woman who’d been flayed alive by her husband after she had asked him for a divorce. About a six-year-old boy who’d been immolated by his welder father with an oxyacetylene torch because he’d gotten up to ask for a glass of water after bedtime. About an elderly woman who’d been dismembered by her meth-addled grandson because she wouldn’t surrender her Social Security check. I wanted to tell him about dozens of cases I’d worked, about the bodies of people who had experienced pain so extreme it would be beyond the imagining of anyone who hadn’t beheld its victims for themselves.
I wanted to tell him I could imagine pain that would make him weep.
I wanted to tell him that it felt like I had a bear trap tearing into my wrist and my arm was plunged shoulder-deep into a vat of boiling oil.
Instead, I stared at the FDA food pyramid poster on the wall and said, “Eight.”
He examined the scar tissue that, but for a quarter of an inch on the top of my forearm below the base of my thumb, formed a shiny pink band around my wrist, just about where my watchband used to be. More than once it had been mistaken for one of those charity cause-of-the-month rubber bracelets.
He poked at it a few times, then began typing into a computer on a rolling cart tethered to an outlet in the wall. “It’s been, what, eight months since the last surgery?” He didn’t look away from the monitor.
“That’s right.”
“And you’d like a refill of your prescription?”
“Yes.”
“You know Vicodin can be habit forming.”
“You don’t say.”
He still didn’t look at me. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t get the sarcasm or if he was just ignoring it.
“Have you thought about Advil or Tylenol?”
I was glad the nurse had already taken my blood pressure, because I imagined it rising every time he opened his mouth. The deep breaths I took didn’t help.
“Look at me,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Quit typing and look at me.”
He did. Mouth hanging open, green eyes wide with confusion, as if he didn’t know what to do with a patient who was going so far off the script. Didn’t they cover that in med school? Wasn’t there a handout or something?
I let him stew in the awkwardness a few seconds before I spoke. “I’m only here because my old pain management specialist moved to Idaho and the HMO said I have to start from scratch.”
He didn’t answer. I don’t think he knew what to say.
Across the room, I heard my partner’s ringtone sound from the cell phone in my coat pocket. She knew where I was. It could only mean one thing.
“Look,” I said, “I know you’re just trying to do your job and all, but you need to understand something. The things that I’ve seen, that I’ve experienced, have taught me more about pain than you’ll ever know. That ring you just heard means someone’s dead and I’m all out of time to sit here and chat with you. Either write me the fucking prescription or refer me to the new pain-management doctor.”
He did both.
As soon as I was in the hallway, I speed-dialed my partner, Jennifer Tanaka. We were next up in the case rotation, so she’d
stayed behind at the Homicide Detail’s squad room downtown while I came to my appointment.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I hope you’re ready to get back in the saddle.”
I’d only returned three weeks before from a yearlong medical leave, and the first cases we’d caught had all been rubber stamps—a murder-suicide (an out-of-control husband and his unfortunate wife) and a convenience store robbery in which the clerk and the fourteen-year-old gangbanger trying to rob him both wound up dead. They all required the reams of paperwork inherent in any homicide investigation, but little more.
“Something interesting?”
“Yeah. It’s bad. Mother. Two kids. Bixby Knolls. Looks like a home invasion. I’m on my way now.” There was a waver in her voice I couldn’t remember ever hearing before.
I wrote the address in my notebook and told her I’d meet her there.
They used to call Bixby Knolls “uptown.” They don’t so much anymore, but its Los Cerritos neighborhood is still one of the oldest of the old-money sections of Long Beach. While most of the city has grown denser and taller, with cutting-edge architecture and designs to meet the ever-increasing upmarket demands of gentrification, Bixby Knolls is still the place to go for a traditional starter mansion with half an acre to call its own. Bordered by the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River on the west and hemmed in by the 405 freeway on the south and the Virginia Country Club on the north, it’s a quiet neighborhood, still clinging to the notion that ostentatious bragging about wealth is just plain bad form. The homes there are luxurious enough that they never took the hit the rest of the real estate market did. The prices start at just under two million.