Inheritance Tax by InitialLuv

Chapter Nine (In which Martina leaves, Mark talks to a professional, and things get pressured.)

When Hardcastle had reassured himself that McCormick was staying close to the main house, he had gone back to the den to sit at his desk. He had justified the location as the best place to keep an eye out for the arriving taxi, pretending that it wasn't actually because he was watching the phone and waiting for it to ring. But now as Milt observed the unexpectedly tender farewell between Mark and Martina, he thought maybe he could have better used his time by spying on the couple through the kitchen window. Hardcastle had witnessed the brief embrace in the den, but he was pretty sure something more intense had happened out by the pool. If he hadn't already suspected it from how utterly distracted the two had been when he'd come to tell them the taxi had arrived, he definitely would have come to the conclusion after witnessing the goodbye kiss.

Not to mention the way the kid was reacting now as the taxi drove away: slumping his shoulders and hanging his head, shoving his hands in his pockets, and looking positively pitiful.

"Hey."

McCormick turned at the call, slightly embarrassed. He replaced the hang-dog expression with a brief frown.

"Charlie call yet?" His voice held an overt nonchalance that Hardcastle was pretty sure was feigned.

"Nah, not yet."

Mark nodded, looked back in the direction the taxi had gone.

"You know, you missed lunch. You hungry?"

McCormick remembered that it had been around noon when he'd started working on the judge's pickup, and that he'd hoped to quickly sort out the annoying noise in the engine before they both tucked into the midday meal.

Who knows how long it will take to fix now, after your tools fell into it?

McCormick looked down at his watch, seeing it was now . . . half-past two? That much time had passed?

Well, he'd had the two 'episodes' in the den, and hadn't had much idea how long either of them had lasted. He'd didn't think he'd lost too much time, though – if one or the other incident had been truly serious, whether in time or in his physical reaction, he knew either Hardcastle or Martina would have forced his hand, making him get immediate medical attention.

"Uh, did you eat?"

Hardcastle made a see-saw gesture with his hand. "Grabbed an orange."

McCormick finally turned from the driveway, walking up the steps to where Hardcastle was waiting. The two men made their way into the house and down the hall toward the kitchen.

Once in the kitchen, McCormick wandered to the refrigerator. He opened it to stare inside, although he didn't make any movement to grab anything. After nearly a minute of this, Hardcastle rapped on the table, hard. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

Mark flinched. "Sorry." He closed the fridge, then moved aimlessly to check the dry foods in the nearby cupboards. After repeating the same non-seeing routine, the doors were shut with nothing removed. McCormick came to sit at the table.

"Sorry," he repeated. "Guess I don't have much of an appetite." When Hardcastle scowled at him, McCormick gave a small shrug. "Doesn't mean you can't eat."

The judge pulled out a chair, also sitting down. He counted in his head, hoping it would help him tamp down the irritation before it became anger. He wondered how high he would have to count before he felt he could comfortably address the kid without yelling at him.

Milt didn't get a chance to find out. Before he had gotten to five, the phone rang.

At first, neither of them rose. They looked at one another, as if waiting each other out to see who would answer the ring. And when McCormick finally stood to move to the phone on the wall, he had the bearing of a man making his last walk down the hall to an executioner's chair.

"Hello? Yeah, hi, Charlie." Mark turned to face the wall, effectively blocking the judge from seeing his face.

"No, Charlie, it's actually for me. . . Well, it's a little unusual. . . No, nothing like that."

Hardcastle rose, coming to stand near the younger man. Mark looked around to see the judge leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and an expectant look on his face.

"Hang on, Charlie," McCormick said, then shoved the receiver in Hardcastle's direction. "You obviously don't believe I'll tell him the truth, so why don't you talk to him?" he asked bluntly.

The judge backed up a bit, raising his hands in concession. "Calm down, kiddo. You're doing fine."

"Yeah," McCormick muttered. "I'm 'fine.' That's why I'm on the phone with a doctor." He brought the receiver back to his ear, still glaring at Hardcastle.

"I'm back, sorry about that. . . Okay, like I said, it's unusual." Mark took a deep breath, and Milt could see that the man's hand was gripping the receiver so hard his knuckles were turning white.

"Charlie, do you know anything about polycystic kidney disease?"

McCormick didn't say much for the next few moments, his only words being either a "Mmm-hmm," or a "Right." And then he got to the meat of the matter.

"I think it might be in my family history. I think I need . . . to get checked out."

Hardcastle listened in slight surprise as McCormick candidly listed the noticeable differences of the last few weeks, which had now become possible symptoms. He watched his friend's face as it changed from contrite to pensive to reluctant.

"Already? I mean, it's kinda late, isn't it. . .?" Mark looked at his watch briefly. "No, I can do that. . . Yeah, that sounds okay.

"Thanks, Charlie."

McCormick hung up the phone, then slowly turned back to the judge.

"He wants me to come down for lab work. Blood test and all that. As soon as possible. He said he can put in a rush order and have the results by tomorrow."

"So he knew what you were talking about?" Hardcastle asked cautiously.

Mark nodded. "Yeah, some. But he said if the test results show anything . . . 'off,' that he'd refer me to a . . . nephrologist? I think that's what he said."

"Okay!" Hardcastle clapped his hands, and gestured toward the garage. "Well, since my pickup's out of commission, we'd better take the 'Vette."

McCormick knew that the selection of the Corvette over the Coyote meant he'd be riding shotgun, and he looked stunned. "You're not going to let me drive," he realized in disbelief.

Milt didn't even try to soften the blow. "After what happened in the den – twice?! No, you're not getting behind the wheel again until we know what the hell is going on. Now let's go, so we can figure it out."

So not ten minutes later, as Hardcastle maneuvered the Corvette down the driveway and onto the PCH, McCormick found himself in the passenger seat, on the way to his date with the unknown.

Mark barely had to identify himself at the registration desk before he was directed back to the lab area. Providing a urine specimen and getting his blood drawn was relatively routine, as was the weight check. But all the physical pricking and prodding didn't do much for his mental state.

The nurse who guided him to the scale momentarily placed his chart on the nearby counter. Mark glanced at it, trying to remember the last time he'd paid a visit to this medical complex where Charlie practiced. An unwelcome memory seized his consciousness: the time he'd been shot by Dex Falcon and Wendell Price, who then had carelessly tossed him into that God-forsaken ravine. At the tail-end of his recovery, he'd been allowed by his surgeon to come to Charlie for follow-up visits, as long as anything remotely out of the ordinary had been immediately reported. But that had been over two years ago. There must have been something more recent, he thought to himself, some crazy case of Hardcastle's where I got pummeled and ended up with bruised ribs . . . or a nice head wound, after getting pistol-whipped. But all he could seem to recall was the bullet wound in his gut, the dread and delirium in the hospital, the nightmares that still made occasional appearances. . .

As he was consumed in his memories, he initially missed the nurse's direction to step off the scale. She repeated her request, somewhat gently, and he bristled at the tone. I'm not an invalid, I don't even feel that sick, don't talk to me like that.

Yeah, the mental status was not good.

"If you'll just step over here, Mr. McCormick, we'll get a blood pressure, and then you'll be free to go." The nurse spoke the words with a humorous bent, and the pun was probably unintentional. In fact, Mark had a feeling the nurse didn't know his background, as she gave the appearance of a fresh-faced new hire. He wondered again about his chart, and how far back into his medical records it really went. Five years? More? It wasn't unthinkable that it would have his prison information in it.

Free to go. He thought ruefully about the comment Martina had made, about how there were certain sayings or clichés that now meant so much more than a flippant remark. He knew exactly what she had been talking about.

Stir crazy. Crime doesn't pay. Take no prisoners. It takes a thief to catch a thief. Partners in crime. Thick as thieves.

He sat in the cubicle area the nurse indicated. She retrieved a blood pressure cuff and a snazzy blue stethoscope, and automatically began to reach for his left arm.

"Uh, can you do it on my right arm?" he asked, feeling a little foolish, but really not wanting the vice-like squeeze on the fresh bruises.

She smiled placatingly and changed her position, pushing up his right sleeve slightly to position the Velcro cuff. She hooked the stethoscope into her ears.

It was as the cuff was deflating that Mark got the first inkling that something was wrong. The nurse had a furrow between her eyes as she listened intently to the beats, timing them with the gauge. She wrote something in his chart, and then stood somewhat abruptly.

"I think I need a different cuff. This one might not be the right size. I'm just going to grab one from the other station."

Mark rubbed his right arm, still able to remotely feel the grip of the cuff. He tried to relax, to slow his heartbeat, but he could also feel the grip of fear.

When the nurse arrived with a different cuff, she made quite a show of inspecting it before wrapping it securely around his arm. He noticed she had even acquired a different stethoscope, which was red.

The second reading didn't do much to reduce the furrow between her eyes, or to dispel the alarm in McCormick's gut. He watched as she quietly wrote another note in his chart, before rolling up the blood pressure cuff and putting both it and the stethoscope in a basket on the wall.

"What was it?"

She looked at him carefully. "Well, it's a little high. But that could just be 'white coat syndrome,'" she offered.

"'White coat' – What?"

"Anxiety raising your blood pressure," she clarified. "It's not uncommon for people to be nervous during an appointment."

Mark snorted. "You must not have read my chart. This stuff is old hat to me." When the nurse looked at him somewhat doubtfully, he explained, "Occupational hazard, I guess." He hoped she wouldn't inquire just what kind of occupation made him frequently need doctor appointments.

"Well, I'm sure Dr. Friedman will check your blood pressure again when you see him, you shouldn't be too worried about it right now," the nurse said, still not saying what the "it" was.

"Yeah, okay, but what was it?" Mark asked again.

She tapped her pen on his chart lightly. "Well, the first reading was 154 over 92. The second reading was 150 over 90."

He nodded, absently rubbing his right arm again. "And what is it usually? I mean, in my chart, what was it the last time I was here?"

She lifted a page, searching. "The last time you were here was last July, for stitches, a knife wound – "

"Oh, yeah, I knew there had to be something," he interrupted without thought. "And it wasn't a knife, it was a scalpel."

While Mark had been on break from school last summer, Hardcastle had decided the two would tackle what he'd determined was a sedate, predictable case: going after a disreputable physician who was dealing painkillers under the table, at excessively inflated rates, to patients with addictions. The majority of the people the doctor "treated" were patients who had gone to so many different clinics and pharmacists that they had been black-balled, in a sense, of receiving any more medication legally. McCormick had played the part of the addict desperate for just another bottle of painkiller . . . and as he'd still had some visible (and mental) scars from the Price/Falcon mess, his role-playing had assumed a fair amount of credence. Unfortunately the case had taken an unexpected turn, when the suspicious doctor had investigated Mark's bullet wound and surgery scars, ultimately figuring out the young man's true identity. When Hardcastle had McCormick meet with the physician one more time, hoping to reel him in, the doctor had been prepared. Before Hardcastle could intervene and stop the altercation, the doctor had been able to slice the scalpel along Mark's palm. The only positive result Mark had taken from the injury (other than the fact that the apprehended doctor was now also guilty of assault and battery) was that it was his left hand, for once, so it wouldn't dramatically impair his ability to drive the Coyote.

McCormick became aware that the nurse was staring at him with a look of mild shock. He blushed slightly. "Forget it," he mumbled. "Just, what was my blood pressure that time?"

She turned back to the chart. "It looks like it was 110 over 75. And the time before that –"

"Never mind." Only 110 over 75 – after a fight with a bad guy and an injury. He was rising. She looked up at him like she wanted to say more, but he spoke first.

"I'm 'free to go,' right? So I'm gonna go." He pointed in the general direction of the exit. "I'll, uh. . . yeah." And as he walked briskly back to the waiting area, he wondered if it would be better to tell the judge about the results now, or wait until Charlie dropped the hammer.