Pain Management Page 23

“You went back to your maiden name?” Ann asked her.

  “Always do, child. Always come back here, too. This address makes it a lot easier for my lawyers to squeeze the max out of my exes.”

  “Don’t they make you sign a pre-nup?” I asked her.

  The redhead fired a killer smile at me, instantly shifted to a sexy pout, put her hands behind her back, bowed her head, thrust her hips a little forward, said, “Oh, baby, you don’t love me at all, do you? Not one little bit, you don’t! You just like what I . . . do for you. Like I’m some mangy whore, after your money. I mean, who’s in charge, Daddy? All this,” she whispered, cupping my balls like she was testing them for weight, “or those nasty little lawyers? Don’t they work for you, sweetheart?”

  I laughed. Couldn’t help myself.

  “It’s not funny,” she said, still mock-pouting. She turned and walked off. The back pockets on her jeans danced. I could see where a rich old man wouldn’t have a chance.

  Ann plopped down on a sagging bile-yellow couch, patted the spot next to her. I took a seat. The redhead perched on the arm of a chair, crossing her ridiculously long legs. She was wearing white spike heels . . . like putting whipped cream on coconut cake.

  We’d been touring around for days, and I thought I had it figured out by then. “Who was it for you?” I asked her.

  “My brother,” she said, no hesitation. “My little brother Rex. They named him right. He was a king. My mother wasn’t worth crap, and my father made her look like a goddess. I took care of Rex from the time he was born. Anything he ever needed, anything he ever wanted, I got it for him. I was his big sister, and I could do anything. I did all kinds of things to be able to do that. Never bothered me. Rex was my precious.

  “When he got sick, I could see it in his eyes. ‘Big Sister, you got to fix this for me.’ And, Christ knows, I tried. I looked for the Devil to sell him my soul. But he wasn’t around. Or maybe he figured mine wasn’t worth it, I don’t know. Rex was always a delicate little boy. He wasn’t much for standing pain. When it came, he . . . I died a thousand times every time he . . . hurt. His pain was so real to me, I could feel its . . . texture, like a piece of cloth against my skin.

  “And the pain, it took everything from him. It . . . degraded him. He had no dignity. They wouldn’t give him what he needed. Kept telling me what the ‘dose’ was supposed to be—like he was a fucking gas tank and they were reading a gauge to know when he was full!

  “Well, Big Sister, she knows how to play that. I got him what he needed, right to the end. ‘You always watch out for me, SueEllen,’ that’s what he said, just before he left. And I been snake-mean ever since. It just sucked all the honey out of my heart. Before it . . . happened, I never thought about much. I was a party girl. Just having fun. And taking care of Rex. After he went, I got to thinking. How many other boys there were, dying like that. No dignity. So I looked around until I found Ann.”

  “Without all the money you put up, we’d never have been able to—”

  “Oh no you don’t, missy,” the redhead snapped at her. “I am in on this. That is what you promised. I want to do it with my own hands this time.”

  “I said—”

  “I don’t care what you said. If you just came for financing, you came to the wrong place, this time. You want my money, you got to take my body, too. How’s that for a twist?” she laughed, looking at me.

  I gave her a neutral half-smile, kept my mouth shut.

  The redhead kept her green eyes on me. “Ann thinks she’s been around. And she has. But not around men. Me, I have. Plenty. And I’m not dumb enough to think every ex-con’s a tough guy.”

  “I didn’t say I was—”

  “Which?”

  “Either.”

  “Oh, you been in prison, baby. Or someplace bad. What I want to know is, did it make you bad?”

  “Some say I was born bad.”

  “And SueEllen Fennell says nobody’s born bad. That’s one of those Christian lies. Nothing but a damn fund-raiser. Answer my question.”

  “Ask Ann,” I told her. “I’m going for a walk.”

  The trailer park wasn’t designed for tourists. I found the DMZ between the whites and the Mexicans—a ditch filled with something liquid. I sat down on the bank, in a spot from where I could keep an eye on SueEllen’s trailer, slitted my eyes against the sun, and breathed shallow. After a while, my mind drifted to where it always goes when I need to figure something out.

  When I came around, my watch said it was almost an hour later. And the math I’d been doing kept coming out to the same total, no matter how many times I added it up.

  “Some of those ‘gatekeeper’ nurses, they’d be happier working at Dachau,” the emaciated man in the wheelchair told me. “When they see you coming, they look for the pain in your eyes. It gets them excited, the dirty little degenerates.”

  “Douglas . . .” Ann said.

  “But you know what really gets them off?” he said to me. “When they get to tell you ‘no.’ “

  The small house was modest, but in pristine condition, its fresh coat of blue paint with white trim set off against a masterful landscaping job that used boulders for sculpture. The ’Vette’s big tires crunched on the pebbled driveway. In the carport, an ancient pink Firebird squatted next to an immaculate Harley hard-tail chopper, its gleaming chrome fighting iridescent green lacquer for attention.

  The man who answered the door was big, powerfully built, with dark, intelligent eyes. He looked past Ann to me. “I told Dawn we were coming,” Ann said.

  He nodded, stepped aside.

  The living room was dominated by a rose-colored futon couch. And the striking strawberry-blonde who sat on it. She was a pretty woman, but you could see she’d once been gorgeous. And way too young to have aged so much.

  Ann went over to her. They exchanged a gentle hug and a kiss. The man who’d opened the door took up a position behind the couch.

  “Tell him, Dawn,” Ann said.

  The woman’s gaze was clear and direct, azure eyes dancing with anger. But her voice was soft and calm, almost soothing.

  “I’ve got MS,” she said. “When I was first diagnosed, I set out to find out everything I could about it. Kind of ‘know your enemy.’ Back then, the medical establishment would go into this ‘Pain is not usually a significant factor in MS’ routine every time patients complained. Now, finally, it looks like they figured it out. . . .”

  “Or decided to finally give a fuck!” the man standing behind her said.

  Dawn reached back with her right hand as he was reaching down with his. Their hands met as if connected by an invisible wire. “Yes,” she said. “And now the Multiple Sclerosis Society is admitting that as many as seventy percent of folks with MS have what they call ‘clinically significant pain’ at some point, with around forty-eight percent of us suffering from it chronically.”

  “You couldn’t get painkillers for MS?” I asked her, surprised despite everything I’d been hearing.

  “Well, you could always get drugs,” she sneered. “Even in the bad old days, neurologists liked handing them out—stuff like Xanax and Valium. Not because our muscle cramps and flexor spasms were ‘real,’ you understand. Since the pain was ‘all in our heads,’ they figured the tranqs would calm us down and make the problems in our brains and in our spines magically disappear. And since they did acknowledge that the deep fatigue was ‘real,’ you could always get stimulants.”

  “But aren’t all those just as addictive as painkillers?” I asked her.

  “Addictive?” She laughed. “Oh, hell yes. I had one neuro prescribing eighty to a hundred milligrams of Valium a day for me. She told me not to worry, there was no chance of becoming addicted. Needless to say, she was full of it. She just wanted her patients calm and placid, so they wouldn’t complain or take up too much of her time. Medicaid wasn’t paying her to give a damn, just to keep us quiet.”

  Her left arm twitched. Her mouth was calm, but I saw the stab i
n her eyes. She took a deep breath through her nose, pushed it into her stomach, then her chest, and finally into her throat. Let it out, slow. A yoga practitioner, then. People in pain try every path out of that jungle.

  “Let me tell you,” she went on, “detoxing from the Valium was a megaton worse than jonesing off cocaine. They used to say that was nonaddictive, too. But when I was young, I was into all kinds of street drugs, even freebasing. And I got off all of them myself. No programs, no nothing. But that Valium . . . damn!

  “And all the stims they hand out for fatigue, they have pretty serious side effects . . . plus a potential for permanent damage I’m not willing to accept. The hell with the neuros. These days, I treat the fatigue with good strong coffee and naps.”

  “What about the pain?”

  “All I get for that is the medical marijuana—it’s the only ‘illegal’ drug I’ve used since I got pregnant, and Tam’s eighteen now. And in college,” she said, proudly. “But even that doesn’t always work.”

  “And that slimy Supreme Court just struck down the law that allows medical marijuana,” Ann said, fiercely. “They won’t let people even—”

  “Shhh, honey,” Dawn said to her. “Look,” she said earnestly, turning to me, leaning forward slightly, her man’s big hand on her shoulder, “the thing about neurologically based chronic pain is, it doesn’t work like ‘normal’ pain. Pot isn’t enough. It relaxes the muscles just great, but does nothing at all for ‘nerve burn.’ It’s like a really bad sunburn, only all over your whole body. I can even feel it inside—like if you could get a sunburn on your large intestine, or something.

  “And the thing about that is, when it gets bad enough, it makes you . . . I don’t know . . . something less than human. When you can’t sleep, can’t sit up, can’t move, can’t get any kind of relief, just lay there and cry, curled up in a ball. It got to the point where I was willing to do just about . . . anything to make it stop, even for a few minutes.”

  “The only people who really understand pain are the ones who have it,” her man said, making it clear he was ready to help a few doctors learn. “When Dawn scratched her cornea, that lowlife punk in the white coat acted like she did it on purpose, just to score a few stinking Vicodins. You think I couldn’t find better stuff in ten minutes? You think I don’t know where the tweek labs are? If Dawn hadn’t . . .”

  He didn’t finish. Didn’t have to.

  “What’s with the Grand Tour?” I asked Ann on the drive back toward Portland.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “All these people, the ones you’re making sure I meet. They’re all in on whatever scheme you’ve got going. What do I need to see them for?”

  “I thought, maybe if you knew that it wasn’t just about cancer . . . if you knew the . . . caliber of the people we’ve got involved, and why they’re doing it, you’d—”

  “What? Enlist in the cause? This was supposed to be a trade, remember?”

  “I told you, I’m ready to take you back to Kruger any—”

  “And I told you, I don’t think it’s over. And if I want to get anything out of him, I need to make sure it is.”

  “That’s the real reason you’ve been with me every second, then. Not because you really wanted to meet the others.”

  “You like saying things like ‘real reason,’ don’t you? Like you’re just pure virgin goodness and, me, I’m a man for hire. You’re right about the last part, anyway. Only thing is, I’m not a stupid man for hire. Reason you brought me around to all those people is so they’d get a good long look at me, right? Just in case something goes wrong . . .”

  “What could go—?”

  “I think you’ve got a lot of information, and maybe even some halfass plan, but you’re not sure yet. Besides, I think maybe you’ve got desire confused with skill.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I knew a girl once. Janelle. She was loyal to the core. The kind of girl who’d never drop a dime. But she was so dumb, she might let one slip, you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said, keeping her anger at bay because she wanted something. Or maybe she was smart enough to realize I wasn’t talking about her.

  “We’ve been doing this running around for almost a week,” I told her. “I met a lot of people. More than one who could do anything I could do. Dawn’s man, he’s a good example. So here’s what I think, lady. I think I’m the perfect man for your job. Because the people you’ve got, they’re all good people. In your mind, anyway. You don’t mind them doing some stealing, maybe. But violence, that’s not their thing, as far as you’re concerned. And that’s all that counts, what you think. No plan is perfect. If things go wrong, if somebody has to be hurt—”

  “Like that . . . man with the white knife.”

  “Yeah. Like him. I’m perfect for it, the way you got it scoped. If I have to take a fall, well, I’ve been down before. And you know I wouldn’t take anybody else with me.”

  “You think I set up the whole—?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I mean, sure, it’s true: there was a freak doing shakedown. And Kruger was burned about it. And maybe there even are a couple of men looking for Rosebud, too. But I think this was all about me proving in. Again.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A test. Another test.”

  “That’s not true! I need your help, I told you that. And I wanted to show you that we could . . . I mean, SueEllen alone, she’s good for the money I promised you. But I never thought it would come to—”

  “I see how careful you are about risking your own people. You had it your way, none of them would be in on it.”

  “They’re not criminals. All they want is to—”

  “Sure. I’ve heard it. Heard a lot of it, these past few days. So it’s just you and me, right, bitch? Joan of Arc and the expendable fucking ex-con.”

  She did a lousy job of trying to slap me as we were rounding a long curve, but a pretty good job of almost running us off the road. I kept my right hand and forearm in a blocking position in case she wanted to take another shot, but she seemed done.

  “You bastard,” she said, quietly.

  “I was in a war, once,” I said, softly. “There were two kinds of people you never wanted to go into the bush with: morons and martyrs. Understand?”

  “Yes!”

  “These drugs you want to hijack—you get caught doing it, they’ll never get into the right hands. So that only leaves three possibilities.”

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Either you want to get caught, go out in a blaze of glory, get a lot of media attention about your great sacrifice . . . like that. Or you don’t really have a plan; just a lot of information.”

  “You said there were three.”

  “Yeah. Or you plan to use me as bait: send me down a blind tunnel, tip the cops, then make your own move while I’ve got them tied up for a while.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. How could you tie up a bunch of cops?”

  “I don’t mean with ropes. I mean . . . I mean, I’m not going back to prison. So it might take them a long time to bring me in. And it wouldn’t be cheap at their end. And I think you know all that.”

  “Maybe you give me too much credit.”

  “Maybe. Only I don’t think so. I think people spend so much time looking at your chest they never figure out how smart you are.”

  “And you, you’re, like, immune?” she said, bitterly.

  “Not immune. I just don’t get D-cup blindness.”

  “Good,” she said. “Fuck yourself.”

  The light was gone by the time we got back to Portland. Ann had changed in a gas-station restroom, so when she popped out of the Subaru she looked ready for work. I was slouched in the passenger seat, making it look like she was working unleashed, no pimp. We couldn’t be sure what information the knifeman had given his boss. We couldn’t even be sure he’d given any information at all. There hadn�
�t been anything in the papers, but that didn’t necessarily mean he’d even survived. So we stayed with the script.

  Ann took a few tentative steps on the cheap spike heels, wiggling her bottom like she was practicing her moves. She headed for the same patch in the vacant lot where it had all started. I settled in to wait.

  When it happened, I almost didn’t pick him up. A black kid, looked maybe nineteen, smooth brown-skin face, neatly trimmed natural. He was wearing a way-oversize black-and-white flannel shirt with sleeves so long they covered his hands, moving in a bouncy, prancing strut, covering ground like he owned it. Typical gangsta-boy moves, about as menacing as Martha Stewart.

  But I was working, so I hit the switch and the window slid down in sync with the kid rolling up on Ann’s left side. That’s when I saw the chrome muzzle protruding from the tip of his right sleeve. He was maybe fifteen feet away and closing when he brought the gun up in the trigger-boy’s Hollywood flat-sided grip.

  By then, my left forearm was along the windowsill, with the Beretta resting on top. I had three into him before Ann heard the sound of the shots.

  “Get in here!” I yelled at her.

  She ran toward the car, stumbled to her knees, got up quickly, snatching one of the spike heels off the ground, and half-hopped her way around to the driver’s side. I was already next to the kid’s body, relieved despite myself to see the faint light from down the block reflect on the flashy chrome semi-auto in his hand—it was the real thing, all right.

  I knew, from the standard mumbo-jumbo every shooter gets when he can’t afford anything better than Legal Aid, that “self-defense” also includes “defense of others.” But if I shot the kid again once he was down, I couldn’t ever use that one in court. I balanced it in my head for split seconds. The people who’d ambushed me back in New York hadn’t made sure of their kill, and paid heavy for it later. But I couldn’t see a sign he could make it even if someone around there had 911’ed the action. He spasmed once. Then he crossed over.

  I was back inside in a flash, and Ann had us gone from the scene in less than that.

  Her hands were steady on the wheel as she slid the Subaru around corners, not giving the impression of great speed, but really covering ground. My hands were trembling a little, so I left them in my pockets.