by JJ Lamb
Man, its way too quiet here.
Her watch told her she still had enough time to hurry to their apartment and make a bowl of soup, or at least find something else. She tossed the sandwich into a trash basket across the room, gave herself two points for the shot, and left the lounge. At the hallway leading to their apartment, she hesitated, then walked back to the elevator.
She decided to go see Harry, see if she could help him. When she started to press “2”, she noticed a black square under “1.” Just a plain square with no writing. Underneath it was a narrow three-inch slot. It had to be an unadvertised destination to a lower floor.
Probably the kitchen. Maybe I can grab a free meal, or at least nose around.
She tapped it.
The car moved down and then clunked to a halt. The door remained closed.
Wadda you want, “Open Sesame?”
She laughed at herself and quickly checked her watch. At this rate she knew there’d be no food until after work. The slot and the closed elevator door kept staring at her. She pulled her ID card from around her neck and shoved it into the slot.
Whoosh, the door jerked open.
Mmmmm. Funny, Ethan didn’t say anything about this.
At first her feet refused to drag her into the dimly lit area, but then she forced herself to step out into the corridor. She’d been holding her breath and was startled when the elevator snapped close and started its climb again.
It was a weird, shadowy area, and hard to see much of anything. But like the second floor patient units, there seemed to be only two wings. She could either go left or right. No, wait a minute: straight ahead was a narrow tunnel-like pathway that disappeared into darkness. Her eye did that twitch thing, like it always did when she was scared or cornered.
Well, I’m not going there. No way!
The tunnel made her think about being a kid again, about the deserted old studio in her rundown neighborhood. Most kids said it was haunted—they all stayed away from it, including Gina. But one day the place became the only way to get past a gang of boys without taking a beating—or something worse.
That was when the twitch started.
* * *
Five boys, ranging from 10 to 12, were standing in a don’t-cross-me line on the sidewalk. And they were only a short half-block away. They tried staring her down, stood tall with their thumbs hooked into their jeans, sure that she was going down, was going to have to take whatever they tossed her way. And they were in no hurry—they wanted her to think about it, wanted her to be really scared.
Her eye started twitching. Gina had almost been caught by these same boys before and she’d seen them beat on some poor jerk … like her. It would be serious.
She stood near the ten-foot, iron-bar-fence that surrounded the creepy deserted movie studio; she wouldn’t be climbing up and over it, that was for sure—each bar had a spiked top. Her only way in would be to squeeze through. The bars were pretty close together and she wasn’t sure she could suck in her gut enough to get through to the courtyard.
She walked past the old studio most days. The place was falling down, and she was sure it was haunted. That’s what everyone said. Her apartment house was right next to it but at the other end of the two-block-long building. She would stand on the fire-escape outside her bedroom window and try to see inside one of the dirty windows of the old studio. But she never saw anything.
The boys must have figured she had enough time to freak out and would really be scared; besides, they were probably tired of standing around and doing nothing. They began to walk slow and easy in her direction. She checked behind her again, but thugs from the same gang were standing at the other end, blocking her escape.
They suddenly let out a war whoop and ran full out. She held her breath, sucked everything in and tried to squeeze through the bars. She didn’t think she was going to make it, but she pulled her gut in so hard she couldn’t breathe … And finally slipped through.
The five of them now stood right outside the spiked fence, looking in at her. One of them yelled, “You stupid bitch, you better come out of there before the vampires suck you dry.” Then they laughed.
Someone else screamed out, “Leave that to us, you little pussy.”
“Here, kitty, kitty. Here kitty, kitty.”
She knew they couldn’t get in this way—they’d never fit through the bars. Besides, all their tough talk didn’t hide their fear of the old studio. She was safe here.
Or was she?
One thing she knew: she wasn’t going out where they were. No way. She’d just have to run through the two-block length to the other end of the studio. It was the only way home.
I gotta, gotta.
Gina started running in large circles to work up speed. With her eyelids half closed, she took off.
Dear God, please, please, help me. I promise I’ll never be bad again. I promise … I promise … promise … help me … help me.”
She ran flat out, her heart hammering in her chest, her shoes crunching down hard on scattered glass, which made her slip and slide, over and over again. Creepy moans were all around her. She ran harder, faster, until she was panting so rapidly she couldn’t catch another breath. She stopped, bent over, hands on her thighs, and looked around.
When she calmed down, not only an eerie sense of courage, but a feeling of inner peace made her really look at her surroundings. She studied the spooky building.
One wall of the three-story structure was crumbling. Dirty old stucco was peeling off the other walls. She’d never seen the inside before.
She walked up a cobblestone pathway to a loading platform. Rotted, splintered crates were tossed everywhere. A thick rope hung from an open second-floor window over the platform; it swayed in the breeze, frayed strands spread out like pleading fingers. And the moaning? It was coming from the wind blowing through broken doors and smashed windows. One long moan that never stopped.
There was nothing here to be afraid of … at least if she stayed on the outside.
She whooped, tossed out a wild laugh, and did an Indian dance of joy, round and round in a circle before she walked the rest of the way home.
* * *
Gina looked at the dark underground tunnel-like area and smiled. But she still wasn’t going in there. Instead, she turned toward a buzz of voices far down the dimly lit corridor. She walked carefully, trying to keep her sneakers from squeaking.
The male voices got louder and louder the farther in she went. There was light ahead, coming from a pair of swinging doors. Each door had a glass panel high up and there was a two-inch or so crack where the door’s rubber flaps didn’t quite match up.
Gina tried standing on tiptoe but the glass was too high to see inside. She bent close in to the flap and could make out a long kitchen counter against a wall and a wooden cutting block in the middle. She leaned into the door and slipped—knocked her shoulder hard against it.
The conversation behind the closed doors stopped. Gina jolted up, turned and ran down the long hallway back to the elevator.
She heard the men far down the corridor as she hammered the button with her fist. “Come on, come on!”
The elevator door sprang open, but a large hand grabbed her arm.
“Where do you think you’re going, sister?”
Gina’s heart froze in her chest. She tried to pull away as she looked into the man’s intense eyes—they seemed to burn a hole through her.
“Hey, Bernie, can’t you see you’re scaring―” the other man leaned over and read her name tag, “―Gina.” He lifted the hand away from her arm like it was something slimy or diseased. The man smiled and said, “I’m Jeff. Don’t let this animal scare you. We’re just not used to seeing any pretty ladies down here.” He reached over to a switch on the wall next to the elevator door and gave the area more light. The place was still pretty creepy, but Jeff seemed friendly enough. He was tall and slender, and he seemed to be going out of his way to make her feel at ease.
; “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” Jeff’s voice was probing, but polite.
“Actually, I just started this job … it’s my very first day and I came looking for the kitchen. The food in the vending machine in the cafeteria was a disaster.” She smiled at the two of them. “I mean, it’s not like I can run into the Golden Arches down the street. I was hoping you had something decent to eat down here.”
She could tell neither of them was buying any of it, but Jeff said, “We only put together enough food for the patients.” His voice changed, hardened almost imperceptively. “So we don’t expect to see you here again. Right, Gina?”
“Right!” She stepped into the elevator. As the door closed, Bernie glared at her, but Jeff only nodded.
Chapter 11
Ethan Dayton sat at his desk, fingers tapping a nervous beat on the two new employee folders that were side by side in front of him.
Unfinished business. That’s what papers on his desk usually meant.
Is that what these two new nurses are … unfinished business?
Gina Mazzio, RN, and Harry Lucke, RN.
He didn’t bother opening the files. There wasn’t much in them other than their employment histories, and he knew those by heart. Usually, his computer held all the vital and trivial information he needed, but these two files hadn’t been scanned and tucked away in the cyber world, yet.
For a moment he allowed himself to visualize the virtual world that held all of his letters and secrets, big and small, floating in outer space … scattered like pearls of wisdom across a vast and glorious cosmos. He knew it was romantic drivel to view the cyber world that way. Pure logic told him that the information was really in some kind of contained electronic storage that he couldn’t even begin to see in his head.
He tapped the computer keyboard lightly, patted his pants pocket to assure himself that his backup flash drive was where it was supposed to be—safe, next to his body, in his control. He’d been doing that a lot lately. And why not? Every single detail of Zelint’s drug trial AZ-1166 was stored in there. His future depended on presenting all of the necessary evidence of the clinical study—and he needed to get his part done flawlessly. If he didn’t … well, his life would turn to shit again.
He’d sworn he’d never go back to working in a hospital environment.
Never.
No more carving his way through an endless assembly line of dead bodies that flowed through an autopsy lab. No more pressure from the police, hospital administrators, state investigators.
Constant pressure. Constant dead bodies to cut up.
He stared hard at the telephone and thought about his conversation with Jeff a few minutes ago. If there were any kitchen problems he was the one Ethan talked to. Bernie, the other one, was dumb as a fence post. But he did do what he was told. And that’s all Ethan required of kitchen help.
Jeff had called about the new nurse, Gina. It seems she was wandering around the underground floor of the building. Jeff said she was looking for something to eat—something other than the junk in the vending machine. That really irked Ethan. He’d been trying to get the vending machine people to change the food on a daily basis, but they’d refused. Too much trouble, not cost effective to service them more than twice a week.
Heck, maybe she was really only looking for something to eat.
He leaned back into his chair and remembered the couple carrying bags of groceries from the car yesterday after coming back from Carson City.
Am I being paranoid?
No, she was nosing around. Just the edge of panic made him restless.
Ethan tapped out a staccato beat on the two nurses’ files, alternating from one to the other. He was having serious second thoughts about having brought Lucke and Mazzio on board. And he’d even had to really sweet talk Comstock General Hospital’s OB supervisor into changing Mazzio’s travel assignment so he could steal her from the main campus, with its out-patient prenatal clinic. That had been her original assignment—temp nurse-in-charge of the busy, low-income clinic.
Maybe instead of him doing the manipulating, maybe somehow he was being manipulated.
Maybe there was another layer to this whole set-up with Zelint.
Maybe there was an underbelly of hidden currents he was missing?
Hadn’t the OB supervisor given in to Ethan’s request much too easily?
Be careful what you wish for.
His ex- wife used to say that all the time, but Ethan found that wishes never did much of anything for him, one way or the other—and neither did his wife. That realization came to him much too soon after they were married.
What worked for him was being in the right place at the right time, willing to do anything and everything, bad or good. That’s what brought him here to Nevada from a thriving metropolitan hospital in LA. That and a huge pile of money and Zelint stock options. Growing up poor had taught him a thing or two about not taking things for granted; about how not to be a loser, how to turn something into a profitable deal.
He looked back again at the files on his desk: The male nurse seemed more solid and less inquisitive. More compliant. He flipped through Lucke’s file and scanned his employment history. The man had done everything from ICU to rehab.
Soup to nuts—tons of experience.
And he has glowing references.
The woman was the outspoken one, which usually didn’t bother him. Most of the nurses he’d been around in hospitals were always more independent and mouthy. And he needed that kind of person here; someone with self-confidence who could make the right decisions in an isolated environment like this. Besides, it didn’t take much to squelch questions after working a twelve-hour day. They were usually too tired and more than willing to put ethics aside when they were that bushed. All they wanted to do was sleep and try to fit in some kind of life of their own.
Yet, right off the bat, this nurse seemed to be sticking her nose into things.
He opened Mazzio’s file. This was her first independent travel nurse assignment. Did she need a little more time to settle in? After all, it was only day one on the job. But her references were guarded; there was an undertow of something unexplainable. They indicated she was a good nurse, but the language didn’t add up to outstanding. He remembered noticing and ignoring that before.
Maybe I was too hasty bringing her here.
A worse thought:
Could these two possibly be undercover agents from the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations?
Undercover agents!
That would be a disaster. We can’t have the FDA’s criminal unit sticking its ugly nose into our AZ-1166 trial.
He picked up the phone and punched in 06, the autodial to David Zelint.
* * *
The founder and co-owner of Zelint Pharmaceuticals had just come from a board meeting, and was ecstatic. Not how he usually felt after those long, bitter meetings that mostly dealt with the heavy costs of a recent trial failure—a cancer drug that turned out to have only a positive side effect of slowing down an extremely rare disease that he couldn’t even remember the name of. It certainly hadn’t produced the promised remission for Stage lV breast cancer.
The board hammered the Zelint twins about the money that was never going to be recovered from the R & D expenditures. His brother Saul didn’t see it that way; the failed cancer drug could help some people, even though it would become one of those orphan drugs that brought in low returns on their investment; it certainly wasn’t going to rake in the multimillions they’d anticipated.
Saul wanted to continue manufacturing small production runs of the drug to help the people who would benefit from it. David agreed with the board that they should just drop the medication all together.
His brother was a do-gooder and he couldn’t be taken for granted. He was someone who really cared about people.
Maybe someday I’ll be that way… probably not.
Still, David loved his twin brother and AZ-1166 had finally ma
de not only Saul happy, but the board was wild with anticipation about the Alzheimer’s study results. It was going to be a winner—rake in money beyond their wildest dreams, while doing something monumental for the human race.
David Zelint reached for the ringing telephone. He ignored a lot of calls, but never his private line.
“David, it’s me, Ethan. Sorry to bother you, but it’s about AZ-1166.”
He felt the slight stirrings of discomfort. Ethan never used to call unless there was a critical problem. His whole rural Comstock operation had been created with the sole purpose of taking care of AZ-1166 problems. But lately, Ethan had been calling much too often.
“Hi, Ethan. I hope you’re not going to ruin my good mood. Not often I can say that after a board meeting.”
“When are you presenting the lab data to the FDA?”
It was none of Ethan’s business when David did that, or for that matter anything in the step-by-step process he was going through to get AZ-1166 approved.
“Soon, but, of course, it can't be soon enough.”
“I need to run a few things by you. See what you think.”
“Shoot!”
David listened as Ethan reviewed his suspicions about the two nurses he’d just hired.
“I don’t know,” David said. “We’ve absolutely no indication that the OCI is nosing around in our affairs.”
“I think the male nurse is okay, and they are a couple. But she has very little experience in temp or travel nursing, and she’s straight out of the hospital/clinic labor force. Why would she choose to work here? I’m worried that they might be working undercover.”
David thought about all the complications heading their way if Ethan’s suspicion was correct. The company needed a big win with AZ-1166 and they needed it soon, or money was going to become a real issue for Zelint Pharmaceutical’s survival.
David let the silence grow as he thought about losing their company.
Ethan piped in, “Do you think I’m imagining things? I mean I’ve asked myself that question a dozen times. What’s your take, David?”
