Chapter 4. Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Chrissy brought House his breakfast and he dug right in. If he rode off into the storm, who knew when he'd have his next meal. The teen came by a few minutes later to top off his coffee. Looking past him and out the window, she said, "I'm heading out to school, so if you need anything else, Aunt Linnie will get it for you."
She took the carafe back behind the counter and pulled out a backpack. House heard Linda tell her, "You drive careful now, ya hear?"
Chrissy waved to the customers and walked out the door. House saw that she was immediately pelted by the rain. She quickly opened her car door and got in. He turned back to Linda, who was filling a large plastic bag with take-out boxes. She pulled a hooded poncho off a hook and put it on. As she passed House she said, "I'm takin' breakfast over to the clinic. Be right back."
House made a split second decision. He'd panicked the night before, but couldn't let possibly unfounded nervousness stop him from finding out if 'Doc' was really Cameron. So he stood and reached out a hand. "I can do it. Stay here and tend to your customers. Maybe I can give your Doc a hand with her patients."
Linda eyed him warily. "You sure?"
"Yeah. Haven't done my good deed for the day. Might as well get it over with."
She handed him the bag of boxes and pulled the poncho back off over her head. "You got a slicker or somethin'?" she asked, eying his leather jacket. "One of Mo's might do for you." She hung up her poncho and brought back a bright yellow slicker similar to the ones the couple at the counter had next to them. He thought it might even be long enough for him. He was just glad no one he knew would see him in it.
Donning the wet-weather gear, he took a last gulp of his coffee, picked up the bag in one hand and his cane in the other and walked out. Sloshing through puddles and rivulets created by the rain, he made his way across the alley to the clinic. He opened the door and heard the bell sound in the back, then called out, "Breakfast is served."
"Just put it on my desk," a voice came back, the same voice as the day before, the voice that sounded just like Cameron's. But something in his voice must have registered with her, too. "Better yet, bring it in here."
"Don't want to drip on your floor," he said but walked to the room that the voice came from.
She laughed, an unmistakable laugh. "It's the least of my worries right now."
He entered a large square room containing four cots with several tall and short metal cabinets between them. Two of the beds were occupied and he recognized Pete, eyes closed, lying in one of them.
He wasn't surprised by the slight woman with the long blond hair, caught in a ponytail, who was taking a blood sample from the other patient. He WAS surprised at how primitive her equipment seemed. "No wonder you haven't been able to find out what caused their shortness of breath," he said, putting the bag of food on the only flat surface that didn't contain medical equipment, most of it the kind he hadn't seen since his early days of Med school.
She glanced at him. He expected her to ask what he was doing there, but instead she smiled and said, "You look like Big Bird." He gave her high marks for hiding her surprise at seeing him.
"Hah!" he exclaimed. "Is that the best you can do?" He was glad that he didn't have to explain what brought him to this town. She probably thought he wouldn't answer her questions. Not truthfully, anyway.
"Just make yourself useful." She handed him the vial of blood she'd just filled and carefully labeled. "Take this to the lab and add it to the rack." She indicated a narrow door at one side of the room. "I'll get to it in a bit."
He walked through the door into a small lab that looked like it dated from the seventies. A rack of test tubes, filled with blood, sat next to a microscope and, as instructed, he added the one in his hand. A slide with a blood smear was on the scope, so he took a look at it. The magnification was too low to see anything much, unlike the electron microscopes he was used to using, but even higher magnification wouldn't have given him any more information.
House returned to the bigger room and said, "If that'll be all, I'll be on my way." He really should be heading south. Cameron could handle whatever was wrong with the two men.
She looked at him for a minute, but there was nothing she could say except, "Have a good trip." He wondered what she was thinking, but wouldn't ask.
He nodded once and let himself out. Once outside in the pelting rain, he slogged his way back to the diner. "Mission accomplished," he told Linda, handing her the wet slicker and sitting back down in his booth.
"Warm you up?" she asked, but didn't wait for an answer before pouring steaming hot coffee into his mug.
He drank it slowly, but was determined to leave as soon as he finished it. When there was nothing left in his mug, he stood and walked to the cash register. "How much for last night and this morning?" he asked.
Linda rifled through some slips in her pocket and extracted two. "Mo says I should give you a ten percent discount for last night, on account of your help with Pete and all." She began adding things up.
"What about my delivery service this morning?" he asked, making her laugh.
"You're a regular boy scout," she declared.
He smiled back watching her do the math. He handed her his credit card. "Add a healthy tip for you and Chrissy," he said on impulse.
"Why, thank you," she said.
He signed the receipt, took his card back, and headed out the door. The rain was continuing relentlessly, and he was happy to get into his car quickly. He drove to the edge of the road. Not much traffic, but it was difficult to see even with his windshield wipers going full speed. He sat there, waiting for a clear path to cross the northbound lanes and turn south. As he did, he reviewed that white board in his head. The reasons to stay far outweighed the reasons to go, so why didn't he? What was he afraid of?
House closed his eyes and swallowed. Then, instead of heading down the road, he drove across the alley into the parking lot of the strip mall, and pulled up in front of the clinic. For once in his life, he would take a chance where the odds might be stacked against him.