Bada-BOOM!

by Wally Duff

  bada-BOOM!

  By

  Wally Duff

  A Hamlin Park Irregulars Novel: Book 3

  www.HamlinParkIrregulars.com

  www.wallyduff.com

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise — without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  For permission requests, write to the publisher at:

  Attention: Wallace Duff

  c/o K, M & N Publishers, Inc.

  Hamlin Park Irregulars, a Nebraska Limited Liability Co.

  Suite 100, 12829 West Dodge Road

  Omaha, NE 68154

  © 2019 -- Wallace Duff. All rights reserved.

  Visit the author’s website: www.HamlinParkIrregulars.com

  www.wallyduff.com

  First Edition

  ISBN: 13: 978-1-7324652-1-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Kerry, there will be only one first grandchild and only one first book in this series. You are in it and the rest of the series. Macy, you’re up next in book four. Nick and Jetter, you’re in the on-deck circle.

  “Don’t beg for your dignity and your humanity.”

  ~ Tarana Burks, November 1, 2017

  Part 1

  Thursday, September 14th

  Chicago, Illinois

  1

  “Guys, isn’t that the surgeon who does an operation that cures all of his patients of breast cancer?” my friend Molly Miller asked.

  She pointed at a physician getting off the elevator on the OB floor of the MidAmerica Hospital. Two women wearing long white coats followed a couple of steps behind him. They walked toward the nurse’s station.

  “It is,” my other friend Linda Misle said. “It’s Dr. J. Randall Fertig.”

  We were in Linda’s post-partum room. On Monday, she had a C-section to deliver her second child, a boy they named Jason.

  Linda’s room looked like a suite at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel. The walls were painted a muted light violet color. Across from a tan art deco leather couch and matching chairs sat a large flat-screen HD TV which popped up out of a bird’s-eye walnut chest. The aroma from fresh-cut flower arrangements filled the room.

  Fertig was dressed the same way as the last time I saw him when Linda was in this same hospital for preeclampsia. He wore a pressed white scrub suit under a heavily starched, form-fitting, long white lab coat. Cowboy boots added to his height. He had straggly long black hair. Designer sunglasses, Versace this time, covered his eyes and eyebrows.

  Fertig’s head snapped up when he saw another doctor talking to our friend Cassandra Johnson at the nurse’s station. This physician was at least a foot taller than the diminutive Cas. He had a narrow angular face with swept back, graying hair that curled over the collar of his button-down crisp white shirt. His patrician air gave me the feeling that he was a Ralph Lauren model masquerading as a doctor. He wore a white coat, too, but it did not appear to be tailored and was slightly wrinkled.

  And I’d never seen him before.

  Fertig whipped off his sunglasses and glared at the doctor with pure hatred in his black eyes.

  What’s this all about?

  Cas had her back turned to Fertig. She didn’t see the doctor she was with glance over her shoulder and catch Fertig staring at him. She missed the disdainful look the doctor flashed back at Fertig.

  It looked like the stare-down between two cowboys before a gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

  If looks could kill, one of the doctors would be dead.

  2

  Fertig jammed on his sunglasses and stomped off down the hallway. The two females followed two steps behind him.

  It was Cas’s demeanor with the tall doctor that grabbed my attention. My Taser-using, Raid-spraying pit bull had morphed into a giggling teenager. Gone were her twitching jaw muscles, replaced by a wide smile — something she rarely did. Unexpectedly, she gave the doctor a tight hug that lasted a little longer than I thought it should have for what I assumed was a happily married woman.

  Linda and Molly also witnessed the encounter.

  I pointed at Cas and the doctor. “What do you guys make of that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Linda said.

  “Maybe he’s a guy friend from when she worked here as a nurse,” Molly suggested.

  “I hope that’s all he is, but I’ve never seen her act that giddy with any man,” I said.

  “Flirty would probably be a better term,” Molly said.

  Linda rocked baby Jason. “She doesn’t do that with her husband, Joe, that’s for sure. Let’s hope this is a past association from when she was single.”

  “And what if it’s not?” Molly asked.

  “Maybe we’ll have a story we don’t want to work on,” I said.

  Shanda Baker and Alexis Jakkobsen joined us in Linda’s room. They are also moms and our friends, who work as full-time pharmaceutical reps but, today, looked different than when we run into them at our neighborhood’s Hamlin Park. Or when Alexis and I played golf or tennis together, which we did before my daughter, Kerry, was born.

  I understand getting dressed up for work, but this was taking it to a new level. Shanda wore a blue suit with a high-necked white blouse. Her three-inch-heeled black pumps, artfully applied makeup, and curled long red hair were in stark contrast to the way she looks when she brings her two kids to the park. There, she usually wears a baggy warm-up, with her hair in a ponytail and no makeup.

  Alexis had taken it up a notch further. She’d previously told us she was competitive with her fellow female drug reps, and her “look” proved it. She wore a bright red suit with a short skirt and red pumps that were at least two inches higher than Shanda’s. Her pink silk tank top was cut lower than anything I would wear as a female businesswoman.

  Shimmering long blond hair was kept off her face by the Aviator sunglasses on her forehead. Her makeup, especially around her eyes, was even heavier and more dramatic than Shanda’s.

  They ogled the baby.

  I was still puzzled about Cas’s behavior. “Do you guys know the doctor Cas is talking to?” I asked.

  Shanda glanced out of the window of Linda’s room at Cas and the doctor, who still stood together at the nurse’s station. “It’s Dr. Peter Warren, but I don’t carry any of his drugs so I don’t call on him.”

  “Before I started representing oncology drugs, I had eye meds and antibiotics,” Alexis said. “Dr. Beautiful was one of my prescribing doctors.”

  “Interesting nickname,” I said.

  “He’s had it since he was a resident physician,” Alexis said.

  “Is that when Cas knew him?” Linda asked.

  Alexis laughed. “From what I’ve heard, I don’t think ‘knew him’ would be the way to describe their relationship.”

  3

  Cas entered Linda’s room. Shanda and Alexis said their goodbyes and went back to work without mentioning Warren to her.

  Cas is about six inches shorter than my five eight. Her skin has an olive tone, and she is a buffed one hundred five pounds with minimal body fat.

  She no longer works as a nurse. Instead, she is a part-time exercise instructor at XSport Fitness, our neighborhood workout facility in Lakeview, a north Chicago suburb. To say that she runs her classes like a marine drill instructor is a massive understatement.

  I met Linda, Cas, and Molly at Hamlin Park. They are
the core members of our playgroup, recently dubbed the Hamlin Park Irregulars by one of our neighbors. He thought of the name when my friends helped me research a story about him and his family. My friends liked investigative journalism so much, they asked to help out with future stories too.

  Cas took Jason out of Linda’s arms. “Let me see this little guy!” she gushed.

  What?!

  Cas is the least gushing person I’ve ever known. She walked around the room with the baby in her arms. “He’s so adorable!”

  This was getting nauseating. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Why would you even ask that? I’ve never been better.”

  “Who was that doctor you were talking to?” Linda asked.

  “Doctor?”

  “The tall one who looked like a male model from the Robb Report,” Molly said.

  “He’s an old friend.”

  “Please,” Linda said. “He’s way more than your old friend.”

  Cas was so startled by Linda’s statement that she almost dropped Jason. She quickly handed the baby back to his mom.

  “We want to know who the doctor is in case Linda has an emergency here at the hospital and needs to call him,” I said.

  “Fat chance of that,” Cas said. Her voice now had a hard edge. “Dr. Peter Warren is an ophthalmologist. I seriously doubt Linda will have a vision crisis on the OB floor.”

  “Then why was an eye doctor up here?” Molly asked.

  I had never seen Cas blush before, but underneath her olive skin I was positive her face was burning. “I, ah, called him to let him know I was coming up here. That’s all there is to it.”

  She quickly changed the subject. “Did you guys see Dr. J. Randall Fertig?”

  “We did,” I said. “When we were here last time, you told us he does an operation that cures all his patients of breast cancer.”

  “That was one of the things Peter and I talked about. The Illinois Department of Public Health demanded that the MidAmerica Hospital surgical staff appoint a special committee to investigate Fertig’s results. If they didn’t, the department would bring in outside surgeons to audit his records. Peter was appointed to head the committee.”

  “Why was he selected?” I asked.

  “He went to law school before med school,” Cas answered. “Since he has a J.D. degree, he is frequently appointed to the medical committees that deal with potential legal issues.”

  “Which are?” Linda asked.

  “Fertig has never published his surgical technique or results for a peer review in a medical journal, or presented his cure rates at a scientific meeting,” she said. “Everything he’s reported has been in the press, online, or on TV.”

  “Guys, there might be a story here for us to work on,” Molly said.

  “Only if Peter and the committee can prove Fertig’s results are false,” Cas said.

  “What are you going to do now?” Linda asked.

  “Take a couple of weeks off,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

  4

  “I am so happy to get out of the hospital,” I exclaimed.

  “I’m thrilled the doctor finally released you,” my husband, Carter Thomas, said. “Kerry and I missed you.”

  “No more than I did, honey.”

  He had picked me up at the hospital. I’d been admitted on Monday with trauma to my abdomen. The bomber who blew me up in Arlington, Virginia, when I was pursuing a story about him a little over five years ago, had injured me again. This time he had repeatedly hit me in the abdomen with a rifle.

  He didn’t kill me that first time, and on Monday he failed again. We fought to a draw. He escaped. I wound up in surgery to stop internal bleeding. The surgeon was able to use a scope to identify the bleeders which he cauterized. The end result was my abdominal muscles ached, but other than a low red blood cell count from the bleeding, I was fine except when I moved too quickly.

  We live with our two-year-old daughter, Kerry, in West Lakeview, an upscale North Chicago neighborhood. Carter pulled into the driveway of our two-car, detached garage on North Paulina and parked. Home is a three-story structure with all floors above the ground. It faces West Melrose, which is perpendicular to North Paulina.

  Carter helped me out of his Toyota 4runner and up the nine steep steps into our home.

  “MOMMA, MOMMA, MOMMA!” Kerry yelled, when I walked inside.

  I hadn’t seen her since I had the emergency surgery, and I couldn’t help it, I started crying. This was the longest I’d been away from her since she was born.

  I reached down to pick her up as she ran toward me, but I felt Carter’s hand on my shoulder. “Do you think you should do that?” he asked.

  “Try and stop me,” I said.

  He was right. My abdomen screamed in pain as I stooped down to pick her up. But I did it and took her into my arms.

  I nuzzled her, Elmo, and Ralph. They are her two constant companions, a twelve-inch, baby-glop-stained, red stuffed toy and a pink flannel blanket.

  “Whoa,” I said. “I think my little girl has grown.”

  “Momma’s funny,” Kerry said.

  Carter paid Liv, one of our regular babysitters, and she went home, which is across the street from us. As I watched him do it, I marveled at how much Kerry has inherited Carter’s sandy hair, blue eyes, and strong angular face. He is a tick over six feet two, and she’s at the top of the growth chart, proving she inherited her daddy’s height DNA.

  “WANNA PLAY!” she yelled. She is firmly entrenched in the terrible twos. She has only one volume: loud. But the good news is her potty training is starting to go better, at least most of the time.

  I knew what I was going to do for the next three weeks; take care of my sweet little girl and my husband. I would do all my mommy chores, just a little slower than before. And instead of running, which my surgeon refused to let me do, I would walk every morning to build up my strength.

  There was one other item on my agenda. I was going to research Dr. J. Randall Fertig.

  Saturday, October 7th

  5

  “Swides!” Kerry exclaimed.

  It was Saturday afternoon. While the Chicago fall weather was still nice, Carter suggested to Kerry some father-daughter time at Hamlin Park. It was obvious what they would do there.

  “Momma, come!” she yelled.

  “Honey, Momma has to stay home and do some laundry,” I said. “You go have fun with Daddy.”

  She still isn’t used to me not being the active mommy I was before my recent surgery. But I am better, and I am now able to walk my usual six-mile circuit around the neighborhood.

  They left, and after I did my mommy chores, I went down to our lower-level computer room and reviewed what I’d discovered about Dr. J. Randall Fertig over the past three weeks. I’d read article after article about his amazing surgical results and his international humanitarian medical trips.

  He started traveling to small African nations a year or two after he finished his general surgery residency and continued to do it when he went into a solo private surgical practice in Chicago.

  Ho hum.

  My reporter’s instincts told me there was something strange about Fertig, but I hadn’t found it. I hated to admit it, but I needed help.

  Linda had been discharged from the hospital the day after I was. I texted her, our Hamlin Park Irregulars’ computer guru, to see what she was doing. One minute later, my cell phone rang. It was Linda.

  “I wasn’t sure you would have time to talk,” I said. “How is baby Jason doing?”

  “He’s asleep, and our nanny is helping me, so truthfully, I don’t have much to do right now. How are you doing?”

  “Better. Made the full six miles this morning.”

  “Running?”

  “Not yet, but soon.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Dr. J. Randall Fertig.”

  “You’ve had three weeks to thoroughly investigate him.”

  “I did, but I did
n’t find anything out of the ordinary or compelling enough to justify wasting any more of my time researching a story about him.”

  “Do you want to get this story published on the front page of a major newspaper?”

  Duh?

  “You know I do.”

  “I’ll send you what I have. Let’s see if it changes your mind.”