“What are you talking about, Chris?”
“Stop it, Thora. Just stop, okay?”
“Wait…I don’t know what you think you know, but you don’t…I mean, you just can’t…” Her shrill voice faded to nothing.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” he said with quiet conviction. “I know you took a morning-after pill after we had sex in the studio.”
He heard a gasp, then the sound of a thumb being squashed over the cellular mike.
“I’ve also got a nice snapshot of Shane doing you doggy style on the hotel balcony. I’m sure he’d like another trophy to add to his case. You’ll be what…the tenth conquest this year?”
He heard a muffled scream, then a male grunt.
“Is he there now?” Chris asked, reeling from sudden vertigo. “Or has he flown home to eat supper with the wife and kids again? What’s it costing him to commute up there to bone your skanky ass? I guess that makes you feel like you’re worth something, huh?”
No response.
“If he’s there, put him on the phone.”
“Chris…” Thora’s voice was smaller now, almost desolate. “I’m alone. There’s no one here but me.”
“I don’t believe you. I know what you did, okay? And I may be dead in a year. But you…you and Lansing, you’re dead, too. Spiritually dead. You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about…but one day you will. You’re going to prison! And you tell that motherfucker he’s going to stand toe-to-toe with me before it’s over. Just once.”
She was sobbing now.
“How could you do that to Ben, Thora? Forget me. But he’s been doing so well…Jesus. Do you want to turn him into a clone of your fucked-up emotional blueprint?”
Thora screamed like a woman rending her flesh in mourning.
Chris hung up and stood shivering in the darkness. He was no longer alone. Alex was standing in the door that divided the bedroom from the den, her face confused, her bare legs outlined in the light from the window.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I couldn’t pretend anymore.”
“But—You may have ruined everything.”
“How? You’ve been working on this for five straight weeks and you’ve got nothing. You heard Kaiser: poke them with a sharp stick, he said. Well, I just poked Thora. And my guess is, she’s going to poke Andrew Rusk like he’s never been poked before.”
Alex raised her hand like a little girl and wiped sleep out of her eyes. “How’s your stomach?”
“Better. What time is it?”
“Eleven thirty. That’s p.m.”
Chris swallowed painfully. “I guess we’re not going back to Natchez tonight.”
“Not unless you need to get Ben.”
“Did Mrs. Johnson say she was okay with keeping him?”
“She said he was fine.”
“Shit. Thora acted like he was in a panic. She also didn’t like hearing that a woman had called. Asked me who the hell Alex was.”
Alex smiled. “Screw her.”
“No, thanks. Never again.”
Alex walked forward and took his hand, then led him back to the bed. “I’m not making a pass,” she said. “I’d just rather sleep with you than by myself. Are you okay with that?”
He lay down on his back, then scooted across to make a space for her. She got into the bed and laid her head on his shoulder, her body warm along the length of his side.
“Why did you marry Thora?” she asked softly. “Was it because she’s beautiful?”
He thought about it for a while. “I didn’t think so at the time. But now…I think maybe that had more to do with it than I knew.”
Alex nodded, her cheek against his shirt.
“It wasn’t only that, though,” he went on. “And I still don’t know why she would do this. I mean, why not just ask me for a divorce? I’d give it to her.”
“I think it’s about Ben.”
“What do you mean?”
“She knows how much Ben loves you. She can’t tell her son that she wants to take away his wonderful new father because she’s suddenly bored. That she lied when she married you. Death solves all those problems for her. If you die, she’s a noble widow, not a selfish divorcée. And noble widow is a role Thora already knows how to play.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Not to mention adding a couple of mil to her bank account.”
He sighed but said nothing.
“People used to think I was beautiful,” Alex whispered, her hand rising to her scarred cheek. “Before this.”
“You still are. You just can’t see it right now. You’re not the same as you were, that’s all. It’s like women who get chemotherapy. They’re still beautiful, they’re just bald. I call it the Sinéad O’Connor look.”
Alex laughed softly. “You’ve got a pretty good bedside manner, don’t you?”
“Not good enough for Thora, it seems.”
“Well, we know that bitch is crazy.”
Chris closed his eyes. “I’m going to be bald myself soon, if I take the chemo.”
“No ifs, bud.” Alex wagged her forefinger in his face. “You’re taking it.”
“You’re my doctor now?”
“Somebody needs to be.”
He took her arm and turned her on her side, facing away from him, then spooned her tight.
“Oh, no,” she said softly.
“What?”
“This is my favorite thing in the world.”
“Good.” After only a few breaths, sleep was returning.
Alex closed her hands around his arm where it enfolded her. “Don’t freak out if I cry,” she said. “Because I feel like I’m going to.”
“Why?”
“Because life sucks right now. It’s been sucking for a really long time.”
Chris squeezed as tight as he could for a few moments, then eased up. “There are worse things than this. That’s one thing I’ve learned in medicine. It can always get worse.”
She turned her head so that her cheek touched his. “I hope not.”
“We need to sleep, Alex.”
“I know. Are you going to puke on me?”
His laughter sounded like someone else laughing in a dream. “I’ll try not to.”
She tensed in his arms.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I forgot to check in with someone online. Jamie, actually. It’s kind of a tradition.”
Chris struggled to raise his arm. “Go ahead.”
She pulled his arm back down and snuggled in close. “No…it’s too late now. He’ll be all right for one night.”
CHAPTER 40
“Oh, shit,” said a female voice.
Chris came awake with the bed moving beneath him. Every muscle in his body ached, but his chest and neck felt as though he had endured a car crash.
“Shit, shit, shit,” cursed the woman. “I slept through my alarm.”
Alex, he remembered. He blinked his eyes open and felt full daylight stab his retinas. Alex was standing beside the bed, pulling on her jeans.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nine a.m. I set my cell alarm, but I forgot to plug in my phone. It died during the night. I guess that snuggling scrambled my brain.”
Chris sat up, and a wave of nausea rolled through his stomach. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
She looked at his face and caught his meaning. “Just let me pee.”
She disappeared into the bathroom. Chris slid his legs off the bed, then got up slowly and went to the minibar. He chose a cold Dasani, which felt good going down but made him pray he could keep it there. When he was confident that he could, he went to his bag and took his morning dose of antivirals: AZT, ritonavir, enfuvirtide, and vidarabine. As he swallowed the last pill, the toilet flushed in the bathroom.
“I’m done,” Alex called. “All yours.”
“I think I’m okay now. I felt like I had diarrhea, but it passed.”
She walked over and sat on one of the club chairs. She had washed her face, and for the first time he saw the scars without makeup covering them. In his mind, he saw an image of someone throwing acid onto a painting of a woman.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“About today.”
Her suspicion didn’t fade. “You’ve got two choices. Drive back to Natchez for chemotherapy, or fly to Sloan-Kettering for chemotherapy.”
“Now you’re my mother?”
Alex turned up her palms. “You want to play Russian roulette with your life?”
“That’s what chemotherapy would be under these circumstances. We don’t know what was injected into me. My best chance for survival is to find out exactly what’s killing me. Only then can I get effective treatment.”
Alex considered this. “How do you plan to do that?”
“How about you and Kaiser catch the son of a bitch for me?”
“I guess you feel better this morning.”
Chris picked up his pants and struggled to put them on.
“Where are you going that you need your pants?” Alex asked.
“Over to UMC, to see the researchers Peter Connolly told me about. If they’re not there anymore, I’ll get the names of the top people in the Hematology and Oncology departments and try to see them.”
“For what purpose?”
A wave of dizziness hit him. He sat on the edge of the bed, rocking slowly. “I think we’ve focused too much on Shane Lansing. Okay, he owns a radiation-oncology center. He owns a lot of other stuff, too. We know that something was injected into me. If that something was radioactive, it probably would have shown up on the X-ray I had yesterday. I think it’s more likely that Connolly is right.
Someone got hold of my blood—or semen—then altered it and reinjected it into me. If that’s the case, the odds are against Lansing. Shane cares more about money than medicine, so he doesn’t have that depth of knowledge. We’re looking for superdoctors, Alex. People who are experts on bone marrow, genetics, oncogenic viruses. There aren’t many of those in this entire state, and the ones we do have are right across the street.”
Alex leaned forward in her chair, excitement in her eyes. “How’s your body? Can you function?”
“I think so. I’d better take a shower, though. I’m not going to impress anybody smelling like vomit.”
“Good call.” She walked to the bedside phone. “I’m going to order some breakfast. Can you eat anything?”
“Toast and a bowl of grits. And hot tea.”
She smiled broadly. “You’re the only man I’ve spent the night with in the last ten years who ordered grits in the morning.”
“Welcome home.”
Andrew Rusk was ten miles south of Jackson when his fear hit critical mass. A few days ago, there had been only one car following him. Now there was a motorized battalion, operating in shifts. All American cars, most of the drivers white males between twenty-five and forty-five. He was in deep shit. Cursing Alex Morse with visceral hatred, he swerved off the interstate at the Byram exit and pulled into the drive-through lane of the Wendy’s restaurant there. Two cars followed him.
“Goddamnit!” he shouted.
Last night, when he received the Viagra spam from Dr. Tarver, Rusk had been elated. He didn’t know where Tarver had been hiding, but he was sure that the doctor had good reason to be out of contact. After all, they had hardly spent more than a few minutes in each other’s company over the past five years. Last night this trip had seemed like a leisurely drive down to the hunting camp. Now it was impossible. If he led those sons of bitches in the government sedans to Chickamauga, Dr. Tarver would kill them and him without a second’s hesitation.
Rusk ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke and watched one of the tail cars park in the lot a few yards away. What the hell could he do? If they were following him like this, then they were tapping his phones as well. The office, the house, his cell phones. For a moment he wondered if Carson Barnett had turned him in.
No way, he assured himself. Barnett wanted out of his marriage, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish that. It was that fucking Morse. But was it only Morse? That was the question.
Last night, Thora Shepard had called his house fourteen times. After two hysterical messages had been left on his answering machine, Rusk unplugged the phone. When he arrived at his office this morning, Janice had reported twelve messages left by a Mrs. Shepard, each one more frantic than the last. Thora wasn’t so stupid as to have stated her reason for needing to talk to him, but something told him that Alex Morse was involved. That, or Thora was having second thoughts about killing her husband. That wouldn’t surprise Rusk. The woman might be movie-star hot, but she was also nuts, as he had seen the first time around. Typical society chick, really. She looked as if she had it all together, but underneath the facade she didn’t know whether she was going or coming.
He took his cheeseburger from the girl in the window and paid with a $10 bill. “Ketchup,” he said. “I need some ketchup.”
He took a huge gulp of his Coke and pulled into the exit lane. One of the tails pulled right up behind him. These guys weren’t even trying to conceal themselves.
The funny thing about Thora Shepard, he thought, crossing over the interstate and turning onto I-55 North, was that they hadn’t even had to kill her first husband. The poor guy had died of natural causes. Of course, Rusk had never told her that. Thora had made her payments just as instructed, and he was happy to take her money. The irony of that woman becoming a return customer was almost too much. But Rusk didn’t have time to enjoy it now. Thora was flipping out, and if she lost it in front of the wrong people, it could cost him dearly. He needed to make contact with Dr. Tarver, and soon. He had no idea how to do that, but as he roared north toward Jackson, he realized that he didn’t have to—Dr. Tarver would do that for him. All he had to do was play it cool. Sometime in the next twelve hours, he would walk around a corner or step into an elevator or climb into his car, and Tarver would be there. Like magic. That was how the guy worked. And all the FBI agents in the world wouldn’t be able to stop him.
Rusk looked at his rearview mirror and laughed. It was time to cash in his chips and split the country. He only hoped they could fleece Carson Barnett before D-day. Barnett would be their pièce de résistance, and he would set them up for the last couple of decades of their lives. As the interstate flowed beneath him like a gray river, Rusk saw himself on a sun-drenched beach with a dark rum drink in his hand and Lisa lying nude beside him. He hated to leave the kids behind, but there was nothing to be done about that. Business was business. He slowed down until the dark sedan behind him had no choice but to pass. As its clean-cut driver glanced his way, Rusk smiled like the Cheshire cat.
Dr. Tarver regretted the look of dumb incomprehension on his adoptive brother’s face. It was exactly the look he had expected, the puzzled disbelief of a child being told that his dog has been run over by a car.
“All of them?” Judah said. “Every one?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Eldon. “I’m sorry.”
“Even the chimps?”
They were standing in the back room, beside the primate cages, not the best place for this discussion. “The chimps most of all. Nothing can remain that would tell anyone what we’ve been doing here.”
Judah’s face was working like that of a boy doing sums that were beyond him. “I thought what we were doing here was good.”
“It is good, Judah. But people won’t understand that. You know what they’re like.”
“I know, but, but what if I kept them? Just some of them?”
“I wish you could. I really do. But you know that’s impossible.”
“I been studying hard. I been practically running the front this past year. Why couldn’t I keep running the breeding part, you know? Just the beagles?”
“You don’t really know what’s involved in the business part, Judah. There’s so much more to i
t than taking care of the dogs. There’s ordering and records, computers and taxes. Plus, you have to be licensed. If I’m not here, the whole thing just doesn’t work.”
A new fear entered Judah’s eyes. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know that yet. But I’m going to send for you once I get there.”
“Are you?”
“Don’t I always?”
Judah’s eyes darted toward the cages again. “Why can’t we just give the animals away?”
“Because they’re sick. They’re carrying special germs now. They would infect other animals, and that might be a disaster. It might even cause Armageddon, like in—”
“The Revelation of St. John,” Judah said in the voice of an automaton. “Chapter sixteen. The seven vials of the angels. My name is in that book.” His voice dropped in pitch. “‘And the second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man. Every living thing that was in the sea, and had life, died, and—’”
“That’s right,” Eldon said, cutting him off before the spirit took him. “You don’t want to be called to account before God for bringing that to pass, do you?”
After long reflection, Judah shook his big head.
“I tell you what,” Eldon said, as if just thinking of this idea on the spot. “You take care of the beagles and leave the primates to me. I know how hard that would be for you.”
Judah bit his bottom lip. “The beagles is hard, too, you know? I know every one of ’em now. Every one has a given name.”
It amazed Eldon that a man as tough as Judah could be so soft when it came to animals. For Judah was a fearsome creature, once roused to anger. He was a match for any jihad-minded suicide bomber. It was men like Judah who had taken Iwo Jima from the Japanese. Men who could bayonet their way through endless ranks of the enemy, then charge uphill into withering machine-gun fire and never question the orders that put them there. That unthinking patriotism had allowed America to survive into adolescence, and a continued lack of it would insure that she never saw national maturity.
“You don’t know,” Judah went on. “You’re never up front with ’em. It’s like they’re all mine. Like June Bug when we was kids.”