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 outsideright 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.
CHapter 072
Ellis sat downacross 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."
CHapter 073
When Brad Gordonstarted 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.