Trust Me (12 page)

“From my partnership at the clinic. He even offered me an interest-free loan to open my own practice, but the situation is
so complicated… I haven’t felt sure that I should take him up on it.”

“Why not?”

“There are so many legal issues with Rich… What I was trying to say to you, before, is that our partnership is contracted
for three more years, and I’d forfeit everything I’ve invested if I broke the contract.”

“He won’t let you leave?”

“Believe me, there’s no way he’ll let me pull out my money early. So, unless I decided to walk away from all of my savings,
I’d have to get a lawyer, and go to court, and even so, I’d probably lose. I can’t put myself through all of that. It’s too
stressful.”

“No more stressful than staying where you aren’t happy.”

“Ha,” Carly exclaimed. “You corporate big shots might be comfortable threatening people with court battles, but the idea makes
me break into a cold sweat. I don’t want to spend my time meeting with lawyers. I’m a vet. I want to do my job.”

“I’m sure Wexler is counting on that.”

“Maybe. But that’s not even the point. Starting my own business is a huge step, and I’m not ready for it yet. I don’t have
enough experience. I didn’t want to accept Henry’s offer until I was sure that I would be successful enough to pay him back.”

“I doubt that he would have made an issue of it.”

“You know what? You’re probably right. I probably could have taken his loan and spent it on a trip to Tahiti, and Henry would
never have said a word about it. And that’s the best reason I can think of for repaying him quickly, and with a fair rate
of interest. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

It was a rhetorical question. Her tone of voice clearly indicated that any decent person would impose limits on Henry Tremayne’s
generosity. She didn’t even ask whether Max agreed, which he found interesting.

“Maybe not,” he said deliberately, wondering why she was so sure of his integrity. “If Henry Tremayne wanted to be my knight
in shining armor, I might let him.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Carly said immediately. “You couldn’t.”

Her conviction intrigued him. “Why do you say that?”

“Because of what you said last night. You’re not a user, and the idea that you might be mistaken for one is unbearable to
you. You’re cynical, Max, and I think you’ve been hurt by the world more than once, but it didn’t make you cruel, and you
don’t try to punish kindness just for existing.”

Max was silent for a moment. He had no idea of how to respond to such a statement. He knew that most people would choose “ruthless”
rather than “virtuous” as a one-word description of his character, but he would not have agreed with them. He had a handful
of principles that he never knowingly compromised, and although he was not always nice, he did try to be fair. That, he believed,
was what mattered.

“It will be a while before I earn my halo,” he said dryly.

“No kidding,” Carly said. “You have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions about people.”

But the barb was tinged with gentle humor, making what could have been a criticism come off as a shared joke. It was a strange
sensation.

“Anyway,” Carly said, “I think Henry is still determined to save me. That’s what this is all about.”

“Do you need saving?”

“No, no. Really. I can handle Rich.”

Max pictured the man in his mind, trying to see him from a female perspective, trying to imagine what Carly could possibly
have seen in him. He was handsome enough, if you liked blond preppies.

He found himself imagining Richard and Carly as lovers, and his stomach knotted as his mind offered up images of the preppie
with his hands on her, his mouth covering hers, of Carly’s body pressed against—

Enough!
Max cut off the increasingly explicit picture. What was the matter with him? He had no idea where that little film had come
from.

Carly looked curiously at him. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he said, but the images were still there, stuck in his brain like burrs. They seemed to hover behind his eyes, mocking
him. “Just fine.”

W
hen Carly arrived at the clinic on Tuesday morning, Michelle was already at her desk, and her expression was grim.

“Dr. Wexler fired Nick,” she said, without any preamble.

“What?” Carly put down her umbrella and stared at the receptionist. “What do you mean?”

“Yesterday, after you left. Nick was subbing for Tracey in the OR, and he must have done something wrong, because I could
hear Dr. Wexler yelling all the way out here. Something about Nick having a bad attitude.”

“He was
yelling
? Why? Did Nick say what happened?”

Michelle shook her head. “No. He was pretty upset, so he just grabbed his coat and took off.”

“This is crazy,” Carly exclaimed. “If Nick has a bad attitude,
I’ve
never seen it. Where is Rich?”

“Out back. I haven’t said a word to him. The mood he’s in, I figured he’d fire me, too.”

* * *

Richard was outside in the tiny square of green that served as a yard, leaning against the back wall of the building and smoking
a cigarette.

Carly didn’t waste any time. “You fired Nick?”

Richard looked startled. “Who told you?”

“Do you think I wouldn’t have noticed? What happened?”

“He has a smart mouth,” Richard said defensively. “And I don’t know where he got the impression that he can take time off
whenever he wants it.”

“Time off? Rich, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Nick hasn’t taken any time off.”

“He was gone last Tuesday.”

“He had an organic chemistry midterm the next morning! And you okayed it, remember? If you had a problem, why didn’t you bring
it up then?”

A flush of belligerence crept over Richard’s face. “I never okayed any time off. Maybe he checked it with you, I don’t know.
You’d give the kid the day off for a hangnail.”

“But…” Carly began, then stopped. She very clearly remembered talking to Richard about it. Rich had been in a good mood that
day, and had agreed that Nick should take extra time to study. He had even told her to wish the young man luck.

Richard dropped his cigarette butt and ground it under his heel in one quick motion. “Don’t forget,” he said, “that I have
the final say on everyone who works here. Everyone. Even you.”

“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Carly asked, her temper rising. “Fine, Rich. Go ahead and fire me. We’ll just annul that
mistake of an agreement, and then you won’t have to worry about my bad attitude, either.”

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you,” he muttered, staring at the ground.

“What’s the matter with you?” Carly demanded. “You were yelling at Nick—”

He flashed her an angry look. “Why do you always take that kid’s side? You weren’t there. If you had been, you’d know that
your technician is a flake. Yesterday he left a batch of antibiotics out of the cooler and destroyed it. That might not be
a big deal to a groovy guy like him, but I’m the one who has to eat the cost. And this isn’t his first screwup, either. He
ruined a serum sample last week, and then had the fucking nerve to start arguing with me when I showed it to him.” He raised
his eyebrows at her. “Well? What do you say now?”

“That’s… not good,” Carly said, stunned.

“Damn right it’s not.”

“He’s always been so reliable.”

“Not anymore.”

“He’s… under a lot of pressure at school right now. He has a really heavy course load, and he’s been staying up late, studying
…”

“Yeah? Well, that isn’t my problem. I’m not his dad. I told him last week that if he didn’t shape up, he was out of here,
but I guess he didn’t believe me. Now he does.”

Carly exhaled slowly. “It just sounds so strange,” she said unhappily. “I’ve never had a problem like that with Nick… if
anything, he’s caught
my
slipups…”

“You’re calling me a liar?”

“Of course not. I just wondered if maybe you make him nervous. He’s not used to working with you, and—”

“And he doesn’t ever have to work with me again.”

“But Rich, we’re understaffed! Even with Nick around, I was spending too much time doing work that we should be paying someone
else to do. You have Tracey to assist you in surgery, so firing Nick hardly affects you, but I can’t work without a technician
I trust.”

“You have Pam.”

Carly tried to control her frustration. “You know perfectly well that Pam isn’t experienced enough to do complex lab work
or X rays on her own. I don’t have time to supervise her. I want Nick back.”

“Forget it.”

“Then I want a new technician.”

“I’ll look around.”

A terrible suspicion began to take shape in Carly’s mind, and she stared at Richard, searching his face. In the daylight,
his tanned skin looked dull and coarse. Had he aged so much over the past few years, she wondered, or had her vision simply
improved as she got to know him? The fine, sculpted facial bones were the same, as well as the molded nose and the sun-streaked
hair, but the luster that she remembered was gone.

“What?” he asked, drawing himself up under her scrutiny.

Carly shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. Richard was selfish, yes, and sometimes petty, but at the heart of it all, he was
not malicious. It would be out of character for him to do something as profoundly evil as firing Nick in an attempt to provoke
her into quitting. The young man had simply been a casualty of her partner’s unpredictable temper.

She took a deep breath. “Give me your word that you’ll get someone to replace Nick,” she said. “This isn’t a luxury, Rich,
it’s a necessity. If I can’t keep up with my schedule, then we’ll lose clients, and that means money.”

“I said that I’d look around, didn’t I?”

“Okay. Good. I’ll post an ad—”

“No, I’ll do it,” he said, and Carly had to be content with that.

“Hello?” Michelle opened the back door of the building and looked cautiously out, clearly expecting to see one or more bodies
bleeding on the ground.

“What?” Richard scowled at her.

“Dr. Wexler, your nine o’clock appointment is here,” Michelle said formally, wearing her most neutral receptionist face. Carly
noticed that he had been demoted from first name status as a result of the Nick episode. Richard didn’t seem to care.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.” Without looking at Carly, he pushed past Michelle and disappeared into the building.

“Oh, my poor Henry,” Pauline sighed as she turned off the flame under the whistling kettle. “That poor saintly man. Did I
tell you, Mr. Max, that he put my daughter through beauty school? She owns her own salon now, in Sacramento, and it’s all
because of Henry.”

She poured hot water into a brown teapot, then covered the pot in something that looked to Max like a small patchwork quilt.
He looked dubiously at the delicate china cup on the table in front of him.

“And when I needed an operation on my hip—I have terrible problems with my bones, you know—he wouldn’t let me go to the HMO
doctor. He said, ‘Pauline, we can do better for you,’ and he found me a famous surgeon. Then I thanked him and said that I
couldn’t do it because my insurance wouldn’t pay for that fancy doctor, but I was sure that the HMO doctor was good enough
for me. He wouldn’t hear it, though, Mr. Max, and would you believe that he took care of everything? I never even saw a bill.
And now my hip is as good as new.”

She shook her head. “He never deserved to have something like this happen, never. Will he be all right, do you think?”

“I think so,” Max said. He didn’t have the heart to say otherwise.

“If you say so, then I’ll believe it,” Pauline said, and poured tea into his cup. “Some people might not be so glad about
that, but I certainly am. Do you take milk or lemon?”

“Milk,” Max said. He frowned. The way Pauline had just said
some people
sounded as if she had a specific person in mind.

“So,” he said. “You wanted to talk to me about something?”

“Well, yes, I do, and I’m glad that I’m able to. I thought I might not have time, considering all the mess.”

“Mess?”

“The mud,” Pauline said. “I’m so busy cleaning up mud in the kitchen that I hardly have time to look after the rest of the
house, which is a job in itself, you know.”

Max nodded. He had come here directly from a series of meetings at Syscom headquarters, and the shift from software technology
to kitchen mud felt a little too abrupt. He was not known around the office for his chattiness or his patience, and he now
had to make a conscious effort to reach for the latter.

“I’m sure that you’re wondering why there’s such a problem with the mud,” Pauline suggested.

“Yes,” Max said. “I was.”

“Well, it was never a problem before.”

“Before?”

“Miss Martin wants the dogs to spend the day outside in the yard,” Pauline said, with a dour look. “It seems to be her opinion
that it’s better for them to be out there instead of sleeping indoors in the sunroom during the afternoon, which is what they’ve
always done.”