Next: A Novel (37 page)

She got back in the car. “What’s the gun for?” Jamie said.

“Just in case,” she said. She drove off, turning onto Camino Real. Through her rearview mirror, she saw the kid coming back into the lobby, looking puzzled.

“I want to watch TV,” Jamie said.

“Not tonight,” she said. “Tonight we are going to have an adventure.”

“What kind of adventure?”

“You’ll see.”

She drove east, away from the lights, and into the darkness of the mountains.

CH071

Stan Milgram was lost in endless darkness. The road ahead was a strip of light, but on each side he could see no signs of life at all, nothing except pitch-black desert landscape stretching away into the distance. To the north he could just detect the ridge of the mountains, a faint line of black against black. But nothing else—no lights, no towns, no houses, nothing.

It had been that way for an hour.

Where the hell was he?

From the backseat, the bird gave a piercing shriek. Stan jumped; the sound made his eardrums ache. If you ever plan to motor west, he thought, don’t take a damn bird on the highway, that’s the best. He’d put cloth over the cage hours ago, but the cloth didn’t shut the bird up anymore.

From St. Louis down through Missouri, and on to Gallup, New Mexico. All the way the bird would not shut up. Stan checked into a Gallup motel, and at around midnight the bird began to scream, earsplitting shrieks.

There was nothing to do but check out—with all the other motel guests yelling at him—and start driving again. The bird was silent, once they were driving. But he pulled off the road for a few hours during the day to sleep, and later, when he stopped at Flagstaff, Arizona, the bird began to scream again. It started before he even checked into the motel.

He kept driving. Winona, Kingman, Barstow, heading for San Bernardino—San Berdoo, his aunt called it—and all he could think was this trip would be over soon. Please, God. Let it be over before he killed the bird.

But Stan was exhausted, and after driving more than two thousand miles, he had become strangely disoriented. Either he had missed the San Berdoo turnoff or…or he wasn’t sure.

He was lost.

And the bird still shrieked. “Your heart sweats, your body shakes, another kiss is what it takes…”

He pulled the car over. He opened the door to the backseat. He took the cloth off. “Gerard,” he said. “Why are you doing this?”

“You can’t sleep, you can’t eat—”

“Gerard, stop it. Why?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“It’s too far from home.” The bird blinked, looked at the darkness outside. “What fresh hell is this?”

“This is the desert.”

“It’s freezing.”

“The desert is cold at night.”

“Why are we here?”

“I’m taking you to your new home.” Stan stared at the bird. “If I leave your cloth off, will you be quiet?”

“Yes.”

“No talking at all?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I need it quiet so I can find out where we are.”

“I don’t know why, I love you like I do, after all the changes—”

“Try and help me, Gerard. Please.” Stan went around and got in the driver’s seat. He pulled out onto the road and started driving. The bird was quiet. The miles rolled by. Then he saw a sign for a town called Earp, three miles ahead.

“Mellow greetings, ukie dukie,” Gerard said.

Stan sighed.

He drove forward into the night.

“You remind me of a man,” Gerard said.

“You promised,” Stan said.

“No, you are supposed to say, ‘What man?’”

“Gerard, shut up.”

“You remind me of a man,” Gerard said.

“What man?”

“The man with the power.”

“What power?”

“The power of hoodoo.”

“Hoodoo?” Stan said.

“You do.”

“Do what?”

“Remind me of a man.”

“What man?” Stan said. And then he caught himself. “Gerard, shut up or I will put you outside right now. ”

“Ooh, aren’t you the twisted bunny.”

Stan glanced at his watch.

One more hour, he thought. One more hour, and that bird was out.

CH072

Ellis sat down across from his brother Aaron, in Aaron’s office at the law firm. The office window looked south over the city, down toward the Empire State Building. It was a hazy day, but the view was still spectacular, powerful.

“Okay,” Ellis said, “I talked to that guy in California, Josh Winkler.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He says he never gave anything to Mom.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Says what he sent was water.”

“Well, that’s what you would expect him to say.”

“Aaron,” Ellis said, “they gave her water. Winkler said that he was not going to transport anything across state lines. His mother wanted it done, so he sent water, to test the placebo effect.”

“And you believe him,” Aaron said, shaking his head.

“I think he has documentation.”

“Of course he does,” Aaron said.

“Sign-outs, lab reports, other documentation maintained by his company.”

“Falsified,” Aaron said.

“That documentation is required by the FDA. Falsifying it is a federal offense.”

“So is giving gene therapy to friends.” Aaron pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Do you know the history of gene therapy? It’s a horror story, Ellie. Starting back in the late 1980s, the biotech guys went off half-cocked and killed people right and left. At least six hundred people we know about have been killed. And plenty more we don’t know about. You know why we don’t know?”

“No, why?”

“Because they claimed—get this—that the deaths couldn’t be reported, because they were proprietary information. Killing their patients was a trade secret.”

“Did they really say that?”

“Could I make this shit up? And then they bill Medicare for the cost of the experiment that killed the patient. They kill, we pay. And if the universities get caught, they claim they don’t have to give informed consent to subjects because they are nonprofit institutions. Duke, Penn, University of Minnesota—big places have been caught. Academics think they’re above the law. Six hundred deaths!”

Ellis said, “I don’t see what this has to do—”

“You know how gene therapy kills people? All sorts of ways. They don’t know what’s going to happen. They insert genes into people, and it turns on cancer genes, and the people die of cancer.

Or they have huge allergic reactions and die. These goofballs don’t know what the hell they are doing. They’re reckless and they don’t follow the rules. And we,” he said, “are going to smack their asses down.”

Ellis squirmed in his chair. “But what if Winkler is telling the truth? What if we are wrong?”

“We didn’t break the rules,” Aaron said. “They did. Now Mom’s got Alzheimer’s, and they’re in deep, deep shit.”

CH073

When Brad Gordon started the bar fight at the Lucky Lucy Saloon on Pearl Street in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he hadn’t intended to end up in the hospital. The two guys in the tight-fitting plaid shirts with the pointy pearl-button pockets looked like pussies to him, and he figured he could take them easily. There was no way to know they were brothers, not lovers, and they didn’t take kindly to his remarks about them.

And there was no way to know that the smaller one taught karate at Wyoming State and had won some kind of championship at a Bruce Lee tournament for martial arts in Hong Kong.

Kickboxing with metal-tipped cowboy boots. Brad lasted all of thirty seconds. And a lot of his teeth were loose. He had been lying in this fucking infirmary for three hours, while they tried to push the teeth back in place. There was one periodontist they kept calling, but he wasn’t answering, possibly because (as the intern explained) he was off hunting for the weekend—he liked elk. Tasty eating.

Elk! Brad’s fucking mouth was killing him.

So they left him there with icepacks on his face and his jaw shot full of Novocain, and somehow he fell asleep, and the next morning, the swelling had gone down enough that he could talk on the phone, so he called his attorney, Willy Johnson, in Los Angeles, holding the business card between his bruised thumb and forefinger.

The receptionist was cheerful: “Johnson, Baker, and Halloran.”

“Willy Johnson, please.”

“Hold on, please.” The phone clicked, but he wasn’t put on hold, and then he heard the woman say, “Faber, Ellis, and Condon.”

Brad looked again at the card in his hand. The address was an office building in Encino. He knew what that place was. It was a building where solo attorneys could rent a tiny office and share a receptionist who was trained to answer the phone as if she was working at a big law firm, so clients would not suspect their attorneys were on their own. That building housed only the most unsuccessful sort of attorney. The ones who handled small-time drug dealers. Or who had done jail time themselves.

“Excuse me…” he said, into the phone.

“Sorry sir, I am trying to find Mr. Johnson for you.” She cupped her hand over the phone.

“Anybody seen Willy Johnson?”

And he heard a muffled voice yell back, “Willy Johnson is a dick!”

Sitting there at the entrance to the emergency room, weak and in pain, his jaw aching like hell, Brad did not feel good about what he was hearing. “Did you find Mr. Johnson?”

“One moment sir, we’re looking…”

He hung up.

He felt like crying.

He went out to get breakfast, but it hurt too much to eat, and people in the coffee shop looked at him oddly. He saw his reflection in the glass and realized his whole jaw was blue and puffy. Still it was better than last night. He wasn’t worried about anything except this attorney Johnson. All his initial suspicions about the man were confirmed. Why had they met at a restaurant, instead of his law firm? Because Johnson didn’t belong to a law firm.

There was nothing to do but call his uncle Jack.

“John B. Watson Investment Group.”

“Mr. Watson, please.”

They put him through to the secretary, who put him through to his uncle.

“Hey, Uncle Jack.”

“Where the fuck are you?” Watson said. He sounded distinctly unfriendly.

“I’m in Wyoming.”

“Staying out of trouble, I hope.”

“Actually, my attorney sent me here,” he said, “and that’s why I am calling you. I’m a little worried, I mean this guy—”

“Look,” Watson said, “you’re up on a molestation charge, and you’ve got a molestation expert to handle your case. You don’t have to like him. Personally I hear he’s a prick.”

“Well—”

“But he wins cases. Do what he says. Why are you talking funny?”

“Nothing…”

“I’m busy, Brad. And you were told never to call.”

Click.

Brad was feeling worse than ever. Back at his motel room, the guy at the desk said someone from the police had come looking for him. Something about a hate crime. Brad decided it was time to leave beautiful Jackson Hole.

He went to his room to pack, watching some true-crime show where the police caught a dangerous fugitive by pretending to put him on television. They staged a fake TV interview setup, and as soon as the guy relaxed, they slapped cuffs on him. And now the guy was on death row.

Police were getting tricky. Brad hastily finished packing, paid his bill, and hurried out to his car.

CH074

The self-proclaimed environmental artist Mark Sanger, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica, looked up from his computer in astonishment as four men broke down the door and burst into his Berkeley apartment. The men were dressed head to foot in blue rubber hazmat suits, with big rubber helmets and big faceplates, rubber gloves, and boots, and they carried evil-looking rifles and big pistols.

He had hardly reacted to the shock when they were on him, grabbing him with their rubber hands and wrestling him away from the keyboard.

“Pigs! Fascists!” Sanger yelled, but suddenly it seemed like everybody was shouting and screaming in the room. “This is an outrage! Fascist pigs!” he shouted as they cuffed him, but he could see their faces behind the masks, and they were afraid. “Jesus, what do you think I’m doing here?” he said, and one of them answered, “We know what you’re doing, Mr. Sanger,” and spun him away.

“Hey! Hey!” They pulled him—roughly—down the steps from his apartment to the street.

Sanger could only hope media would be waiting, cameras ready to film this outrage in broad daylight.

The press, however, was cordoned off across the street. They could hear Sanger as he shouted, and they were filming him, but their distance prevented the up-close, in-your-face confrontation he hoped for. In fact, Sanger suddenly realized how this scene must look through their lenses—

policemen dressed in frightening hazmat suits escorting a thirtyish bearded man in jeans and a Che Guevara T-shirt, who struggled in their arms, cursing and shouting.

Sanger knew he must look like a madman. Like one of the Teds: Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, one of those guys. The cops would say that he had microbiology equipment in his apartment, that he had tools for genetic engineering, and he was making a plague, making a virus, making a disease—something horrible. A madman.

“Put me down,” he said, forcing himself to be calm. “I can walk. Let me walk.”

“All right, sir,” one of them said. They let him stand on his feet, and walk.

Sanger walked with as much dignity as he could muster, straightening his shoulders, shaking his long hair, as they led him to a waiting car. Of course it was an unmarked car. He should have expected that. Fucking FBI or CIA or whatever. Secret government organizations, the shadow government. Black helicopters. Unaccountable, the crypto Nazis among us.

Fuming, he wasn’t prepared to see Mrs. Malouf, the black lady who lived on the second floor of his building, standing outside with her two young kids. As he passed her, she leaned forward and started yelling at him. “You bastard! You risk my family! You risk my children’s lives! You Frankenstein! Frankenstein!”

Sanger was intensely aware of how that moment would play on the evening news. A black mother shouts at him, calls him Frankenstein. And the kids at her side were crying, frightened by everything that was happening around them.