The Last Goodbye

by Reed Arvin

  After a moment a man came out of the building opposite Michele’s car. He walked toward her, motioning for her to lower her window. My heart froze. It was Pope. He leaned forward, resting his arm on the door. He and Michele talked, but I couldn’t hear a word. What was definite was the tone of the conversation: unpleasant. Both sides quickly grew agitated, and after a couple of minutes, Pope backed off from the car. I slipped my transmission into drive, holding it still with the brake. If anything went down, I wanted to be able to get to Michele as quickly as possible. My options against somebody like Pope would be limited. I was unarmed and he was as deadly as a jungle cat. Unless I drove him over, a fight wouldn’t last long. But driving him over wasn’t something that I was unalterably opposed to doing.

  The argument seemed to flare a moment longer, then subsided. Eventually, Pope moved back toward the car, a thin, shit-eating smile on his face. He reached a hand inside the open window, and I could see him stroke Michele’s hair. I almost retched with nausea. My God, Michele and Pope? Not possible. She said something, and her car started slowly rolling forward. Pope pulled back, watching her car pick up speed away from his building. She turned right a few yards down the street, then headed back toward the entrance to the Glen.

  I opened my car door, which was enough to get Pope’s attention. He turned toward me, peering down the street. I got out and stood. Pope watched me quietly, but his normal affability was gone. I walked away from my car, hands clearly visible to my side. When I was about fifteen feet away from him, he said, “You healed up pretty good.”

  “I need some answers,” I said. “About the woman you were talking to just now.”

  Pope shook his head. “This ain’t a lucky time for you. You got to quit while you ahead.”

  “Listen to me, Pope,” I said. “You’re in charge here, right? Not the police. I mean, nothing goes down in the Glen without your say-so.”

  He shrugged. “That’s right.”

  “So it’s up to you to enforce some decency around here. You can’t let all hell break loose.”

  Pope tilted his head. “What you drivin’ at?”

  “You’re extorting Michele over her own daughter, aren’t you?” Pope’s demeanor darkened, but I pressed on. “Kill me after I finish, Pope. Just let me say this. It’s too much. You have to rein it in. It can’t actually be hell in here, can it? It can look like it, sure. I mean, people can destroy themselves and there can be poverty and despair and all the rest of it but Jesus, Pope. There have to be some kind of limits, don’t there?”

  Pope watched me silently awhile. Like Ralston—his counterpart in the legitimate drug trade—he proved that being a completely amoral killer who made his living dealing death didn’t mean he couldn’t be thoughtful, even philosophical. But his morality was carefully cordoned off, restricted to the nonbusiness areas. Eventually he said, “You and this girl. That ain’t such a good idea.”

  “Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

  Pope pointed to my Buick. “How much gas you got in that piece of shit car?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Pope shrugged. “The thing for you to do is get back in and drive away from here till you run out,” he said. “Just drive as far away from here as you can, so I don’t have to fuck you up.”

  “For the love of God, Pope. Do something for your own people.”

  Pope’s eyes narrowed. “You did a good thing for my boy Keshan a while back,” he said. “But you seriously pushin’ your luck.”

  “But listen to me, Pope. Look around. Seriously.”

  Pope looked around, taking in the Glen halfheartedly. Then he shook his head. “Naw, see, you got this all wrong. I didn’t make this world. I just got to survive in it. Now this here is just business. Your girl tryin’ to find somebody. I told her I’d take care of it for her. It’s like a service. Like a finder’s fee.”

  “Is her daughter in the Glen or isn’t she?”

  “For fifty thousand dollars she will be. That’s all that matters.”

  “It’s a human being, Pope. For God’s sake, Pope, you’re black. Don’t you see the irony?” I was growing exasperated. “I’m sure she’ll pay you anything you want.”

  “That’s pretty much how we left things.”

  “Look, you did a good thing for me once. You let me walk even though I was talking bullshit.” Pope watched me quietly, saying nothing. “So I’ll return you the favor. You’re making a mistake. You’re getting involved with things you don’t understand. Michele has powerful people who don’t want her to find her daughter. Helping her will seriously piss them off.”

  Pope laughed. “Like who?”

  “People from the outside. I’m not talking about a little inconvenience, Pope. There are people who fly around in private jets and have serious money. They’re powerful, and they’ve already killed seven people.”

  I could feel Pope leaning in, listening intensely. “Maybe the price goes up.”

  “For the love of God, Pope, don’t be a fool. It’s going to end like shit.”

  Pope laughed, although his usual bravado was scaled back. “Let them come into my world and try it out for a while,” he said.

  Pope’s intransigent ignorance was grinding my patience to dust. “Derek Stephens doesn’t give a damn about your world,” I muttered, under my breath.

  Pope shrugged. “Derek Stephens is about the only white man I ever saw who did give a damn about my people.”

  I stopped, momentarily startled. “You know Stephens? Derek Stephens? Chief operating officer of Horizn Pharmaceuticals?”

  Pope nodded. “Hell, yeah.”

  “You mean to tell me Derek Stephens has set foot in McDaniel Glen?”

  “Naw. I meet him outside, with the needles.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “For the program. I give him the needles.”

  “The needle-exchange program? You mean he picks up the used needles personally?”

  “Yeah, he my boy. Rabbit collects the needles with the names and addresses of all the people who turn ’em in. Stephens showed him how to do it, real organized. You get the needle, have the user put the cap on it. Don’t want to get stuck with that shit. Then you mark down who gave you the needle, his address and all that.”

  I stared at him. “There’s a record that matches individual needles to people?”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’, white boy. So don’t go talkin’ shit about Derek Stephens, ‘cause he my boy.”

  One thing had repeatedly been made clear during all the political debates about the needle-exchange program: it was scrupulously anonymous. Now I was finding out the opposite, and stranger yet, that none other than Derek Stephens was picking up the used needles. Something was wrong, although I had no idea what. All I knew was that if anybody could tell me, it was Thomas Robinson. I was already heading for my car. “I gotta go,” I said.

  “Don’t come back,” Pope said, and I could hear in his voice that he meant it.

  It was a half hour to get home, which made it pretty close to three by the time I arrived. I went to my briefcase and found the list of the people on the Lipitran test. Then, I got a city map and pressed it flat on my dining table. I found the first name: Chantelle Weiss, 4329 Avenue D. Avenue D. That was familiar. I found it on the map and marked it with a black felt-tip pen with a small x. It was in the heart of McDaniel Glen. Jonathan Mills, 225 Trenton Street. I found it, a few streets over from Weiss. Najeh Richardson. Not inside the Glen, but right outside. It was the same with the others. Every person on Robinson’s experimental trial either lived in the Glen or was on the border. Okay. So they lived in the Glen, and they were drug addicts. Which means there’s a good chance they were participating in the needle-exchange program. If they were, that connects them to Horizn. But what the hell does it mean? Suddenly, something flashed all over my brain like Christmas. He was poisoning these people with the needles. He hid something in the cartridges, and when they shot up, they killed themselves. Th
at’s got to be it. I didn’t even bother calling Robinson again. I’m going to that damn park to drag Robinson out of his stupor.

  I stashed the papers in my desk, went downstairs, and got in my car. I made the forty-minute drive over to the park where I had met Robinson before. He was sitting motionless on his park bench. I parked and trotted across the street. He heard me coming, turning toward the noise. When he recognized me, he looked away.

  I skipped all the pleasantries. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded. “I’ve called you twenty times.”

  Robinson looked like he hadn’t slept in a while. He gazed over impassively and said, “Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Great. You’re back in your depression.”

  “Yeah. And you want to know why?”

  “Not really.”

  “It’s because we’re not going to get the son of a bitch, that’s why. Because he’s”—Robinson paused, then spat—“better than me. He’s better, damn it.”

  “I know how Ralston and Stephens killed your patients.”

  Robinson stared. “What are you talking about?”

  “They used the clean-needle program to poison them.”

  Robinson shook his head dubiously. “That’d be a hell of a trick.”

  “Listen to me. It looks like all your patients participated in Horizn’s needle-exchange program. And if that’s true, they all got needles from Ralston. So they showed up for clean needles, and somehow he used the needles to poison them.”

  Robinson’s reaction wasn’t what I had expected. If anything, he looked bored. “That’s it? That’s your theory?”

  “Yeah. There’s more. Stephens—”

  “Save it.”

  “Save it? I’m telling you, this has to be it!”

  Robinson looked up, annoyed. “Except for the part about how it’s impossible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look, this is a federally regulated clinical trial, Jack. We don’t allow our patients to continue taking intravenous drugs while they’re on the test. For God’s sake, they’d just be reinfecting themselves. Think it through.”

  “But if they’re addicts, maybe they—”

  “No, Jack. We don’t take pixie dust and assume they just go along with our request. We put every one of them on oral methadone the day they sign up. Which means that from that day forward, the only needles they get are from us, when we give them the Lipitran. Okay, Einstein? No needles from Horizn. Maybe they participated in Ralston’s bleeding heart program before they signed up, but not after. And even if somebody did slip through the cracks, it couldn’t have been all of them. It’s impossible.”

  I stood, watching my theory blow up into tiny pieces. “Damn it! I was positive I had them.”

  “Yeah, well, get used to disappointment. I told you. If Ralston scuttled the Lipitran test, it means he was operating on a completely unprecedented level.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then don’t come to me with idiotic stories about poisoning people with needles. This is world-class science. If we’re right about the whole thing in the first place.”

  “But...”

  Robinson stood and looked at me skeptically. “What gave you this crazy idea anyway?”

  “I went to see Ralston.”

  Robinson’s look darkened. “You saw him?”

  “Yeah. And then I went to McDaniel Glen. I found out Derek Stephens personally picks up the used needles. Stephens, not some flunky. The C-O-O of the company.” At Stephens’s name, Robinson began to listen in earnest. “That’s not all,” I said. “The used needles are matched to individual users, names, addresses, the whole thing. So the program isn’t really anonymous. They match specific needles to individuals.”

  Robinson was focused on me completely now, his eyes an unblinking stare. He began pacing, grating out words between his teeth, like he was arguing with himself. After several minutes, it was all I could do not to grab him by the neck and force him to tell me what he was thinking. He ground to a halt, turned toward me, and whispered, “Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  “How could a person even think of something like this? What kind of mind would it take?”

  “What, damn it?”

  “He used the needle-exchange program to kill my patients.”

  I almost hit him in frustration. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

  “No, Jack. Nobody got poisoned. I knew that was impossible. For God’s sake, there would be residue around the puncture marks. It’s infinitely more elegant than that.”

  “Then tell me.”

  Robinson stood quietly, his face ashen. After a second he said,

  “Be quiet and listen to how a psychopath thinks.” He began pacing in front of me, as though he was beginning a lecture. “The human body has a way of handling toxins. It’s called the cytochrome P-450 system. Ever hear of it?”

  “No.”

  Robinson stared at me. “Yeah. Well, you ever wonder what happens when you take an aspirin?”

  “You lose your headache.”

  “No, I mean what happens to the aspirin itself. Four hours later, it’s gone from your system. What happened to it?”

  “I just figured it wears off.”

  “It’s metabolized by the cytochrome P-450 enzyme system.”

  “Aspirin’s a toxin?”

  “What happens if you take a bottle of it?”

  “It messes you up.”

  Robinson shrugged. “Toxin.”

  “Okay, I get that.”

  “Good. So a toxin enters the body, and the P-450 system analyzes its chemical structure. Then it turns on a few genes—two or three out of thirty thousand or so—and tells the body to manufacture the correct enzymes necessary to metabolize the intruding compound. Pretty impressive, considering you don’t even know it’s doing it. You’re sitting on your butt eating Cheetos.”

  “Okay, but what does this have to do with Ralston killing your patients?”

  Robinson gave me a haunted look. “Remember thalidomide?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “All those babies born with deformed limbs.”

  Robinson nodded. “That’s the P-450 system running into something new and giving up. See, the system has been honed for millennia to handle what happens in nature. But we’re inventing things and putting them into bodies, things that have never existed before. All that fine-tuning doesn’t add up to shit when you’re talking about synthetics.”

  “Okay.”

  “Lawyers gave the manufacturer a hard time over what happened on that, but the truth is, there wasn’t any way to see it coming. They tested, sure. And for ninety-nine percent of the people, it was fine. Only one problem. If you happened to be pregnant, your baby didn’t have arms.” He paused, giving me a dark look. “Look, Jack, what do you think a clinical trial is, anyway? We give it to people. That’s the test.”

  Robinson’s stark admission hung in the air. “I thought things were more predictable.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s important because if people didn’t think that, we’d never get anybody to let us try things on them.”

  “But what does Ralston have to do with this?”

  “It’s not just thalidomide, Jack. Every drug has a tiny universe of people who can’t metabolize it. Maybe it’s only one percent, maybe less. The more powerful a drug is, the higher the number. Lipitran packs a hell of a wallop. So it’s inevitable that some small percentage of people are going to lack whatever enzymes are necessary to metabolize it. If they take it, bad things are going to happen.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Robinson turned away from me, confronting something he didn’t want to face. He stared across the park, his body still. “What if you could find those people in advance?” he asked quietly. “What if you knew enough about genetics that you could actually figure out who a drug was going to kill before they even took it and make sure they got on a clinical trial?”

  “Is somethin
g like that possible?”

  Robinson turned back to me. The blood had drained from his face. “Ralston could do it. He would need two things, and I’m just realizing he had them both.”

  “Which are?”

  “First, he would need Lipitran. Thanks to Townsend’s hack of Grayton, Ralston had all the information he needed to manufacture a small batch.”

  “And second?”

  “He would need the DNA of hundreds of addicts. Maybe even a thousand.”

  “The needle-exchange program.”

  “Yeah. The big, I’m a hero to my people needle-exchange program.” Robinson retched back a wave of nausea. “He wasn’t helping those people. He was using them as cannon fodder.”

  “Tell me how it worked.”

  “Like everything, it’s simple once you figure it out. Ralston makes a batch of Lipitran and gives a dosage to one of the addicts. It would only take one, and the guy wouldn’t even have to know he was getting it. The victim’s P-450 system starts grinding out the enzymes a normal person produces to metabolize the drug. Then the addict comes back a few days later for a clean needle. He gives Stephens the old one. Ralston washes it out with physiological saline, and swimming around in the blood components left in the syringe is the precise human enzymatic response to Lipitran. The rest is just screening.”

  “He uses the turned-in needles.”

  Robinson nodded. “Every one of them contains the DNA of the addict who used it. And inside that DNA is everything Ralston needs to know. He spins it out, looks at the proteomics, and sooner or later, he finds a small universe of people who don’t have the enzymes they need.”