Silent Treatment

by Michael Palmer

  “Go ahead, say it. Just like Evelyn DellaRosa and heaven only knows how many other patients with expensive diseases.”

  Kevin felt ill.

  “Did Lancelot make it sound like Lionel’s death was something they engineered? I mean, did he say it like a threat?”

  “I don’t know for sure. He’s got this smile that’s impossible to read.”

  Kevin nodded. He’d had the same response to Pat Harper.

  “Well, he just kept smiling through the whole Lionel story. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it gave me the creeps. I didn’t know what to say to him.”

  “So how was it left?”

  Stallings looked away again.

  “I have until tomorrow night to come up with the first set of names and transfer the funds.”

  “Oh, no. And who gets the money? The knights? The guy who … who does it?”

  “I don’t know. But if you multiply my two or three clients by two or three for each of the others, that’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  “And every one of those people just … dies?”

  “They’re all pretty sick. And there are so many hospitals and patients in the city that apparently no one really thinks about there being anything out of the ordinary going on.… Loomis, what are we going to do?”

  “Listen, maybe the whole thing is just some sort of loyalty test,” Kevin offered desperately.

  “You know you don’t believe that.”

  “Jim, I don’t know anything. Why couldn’t you just blow the whistle?”

  “On what? On who? I have no proof of anything. Not even the name of a single patient. Besides, if The Roundtable does get exposed, I go down along with the rest of you. What about my family, my kids?”

  “Well, what then? Show up at the meeting and just beg them to stop?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “What about Sir Lionel and his food poisoning?”

  “That’s why I decided to chance sharing all this with you. If there are two of us, I think as long as we stick together, we might be able to convince the rest of them to stop.”

  “I need to think about this.”

  “Just don’t take too long. I only have until tomorrow to give them the names and … and I don’t think I can do it.” He checked the time. “Listen, I’m due back at the office in a few minutes. Please, Loomis, please. Don’t say a word to anyone until we talk again. Okay?”

  “I promise.”

  “Not to your boss, not to your wife, not to anyone.”

  Stallings was genuinely terrified. And if he was right about The Roundtable, Kevin had no trouble understanding why.

  “I’ll call you before tomorrow night,” Stallings said. They exchanged business cards, and each wrote his home phone number on the back. “And Kevin, please wait five or ten minutes after I go before you start back.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Sir Gawaine took his briefcase and headed off toward the subway station. Kevin stood there, numb and unseeing, his mind unwilling to sort through what had just been shared with him, except to acknowledge that if the situation was as Stallings believed, the possibilities open to them were all unacceptable.

  “Mister! Hey, mister!”

  Kevin turned, startled. Two youths in shorts and Yankee caps stood on the sidewalk. They looked about ten—his son Nicky’s age. Each wore a baseball glove.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “Our ball, mister. It’s right by your foot. Could you throw it to us?”

  Kevin picked up the scuffed, grass-stained hardball and tossed it back. The taller of the two boys snagged it easily, in a way Kevin had watched Nicky catch a thousand of his throws.

  “Thanks, mister,” the youth called. “Nice arm. Nice arm.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The night was warm and extremely muggy—the sort of night that invariably brought out the most vivid versions of the dream. He lay facedown on a sheet that was already drenched. His fists were tightly clenched and every muscle in his body was taut. At some level, he knew that it was all in his past, that he was only reliving the hideous experience in his mind.

  But as always, he was powerless to wake himself.

  “… Hyconidol almost matches, atom for atom, the pain fiber neurotransmitter chemical. That means I can fire those nerves off all at once and at will. Every single one of them. Think of it, Mr. Santana. No injury … no mess … no blood. Just pain. Pure pain. Except in the work I do, hyconidol has absolutely no clinical value. But if we ever do market it, I thought an appropriate name for it might be Agonyl. It’s incredible stuff, if I do say so myself. A small injection? A little tingle. A larger one? Well, I’m sure you get the picture.”

  Ray’s mouth becomes desert dry. The pounding within his chest is so forceful that he feels certain The Doctor can see it.

  Please don’t do this, he screams silently. Please …

  Perchek’s thumb tightens on the plunger.

  “I think we’ll start with something modest,” he says, “equivalent, perhaps, to nothing more than a little cool breeze over the cavities in your teeth. Our interest is in the identities of the Mexican undercover agents, Mr. Santana. Mr. Orsino will write down any names you choose to give. And I should warn you. Some of the names we wish you to give us we already know. It would be most unpleasant for you should we catch you attempting any sort of stall or deception.”

  “Go fuck yourselves. How’s that for a stall or deception?”

  The Doctor merely smiles.

  The last voice Ray hears before the injection is Joe Dash’s.

  There are three ways a man can choose to handle dying.…

  The plunger of the syringe is depressed just a bit.

  In less than half a minute, Ray experiences a mild vibration throughout his body, as if a low-grade electric current has been turned on. His scalp tightens. The muscles in his face twitch. He rubs his fingertips together, trying to rid them of an unpleasant numbness. Perchek, meanwhile, has taken a handheld stopwatch from his valise.

  “I would expect that minuscule dose to last one minute and twenty seconds,” he says. “Higher doses persist somewhat longer. Although in this business, for you, time will become quite relative. A few seconds will seem like an hour. A minute like a lifetime. Have you some names for us?”

  “Cary Grant, Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe …”

  Perchek shrugs and depresses the plunger once more. The sensation doubles in intensity and quadruples in unpleasantness. This time, the pain is more burning than electric. Hot knives cut into Ray’s hands and feet, into his abdomen, groin, and lower back. Sweat bathes him with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm, stinging his eyes, soaking his T-shirt.

  “Just a slightly higher dose and we’ll hold it at that level for a while,” Perchek says, checking Ray’s blood pressure and pulse. “We’re in no particular hurry, are we, Mr. Orsino?”

  From outside, above and just beyond the walls of the chamber, Ray can hear the revelry of the Fiesta de Nogales. The fireworks and the music. The noisy celebration will go on throughout the night. It is doubtful he will be alive by the time it ends.

  The Doctor is right. For Santana, the hour that follows is an eternity. Twice he nearly passes out from the pain. Each time, Perchek uses a shot of some sort and an increase in the IV infusion to bring him around for the next series of injections. Ray becomes used to the sound of his own screaming. Somewhere along the way he wets himself. In between injections, his muscles now continue to spasm uncontrollably. Several times he groans out names. Perchek glances over at Orsino, who shakes his head. Ray’s punishment for lying is an increase in the dosage. His response, more screaming.

  … Three ways a man can handle dying … three ways … three ways, … three ways …

  His head lolls back. His vision blurs. Staring at the light from the bare bulb overhead no longer bothers his eyes. It is as if the hideous pain has dulled his sight Sweat continues pouring from his body. His nervous system is shatte
red, his mind ready to snap. He has to give them a name they can verify—something, anything to stop Perchek’s chemical onslaught, even for a little while. He has done his best to drag out Joe Dash’s first two stages. Now, his resistance is gone. He has to give them something that will stop the pain.

  “You bastard!” he screeches as the dose is increased once more. “You fucking bastard! Okay. Okay. No more. I’ll—”

  He is cut short by the tunnel door behind him scraping open. Through a dense haze, he hears a man’s breathless voice.

  “Anton, there are government troops outside!” the man exclaims in perfect English. “Dozens of them. I think they have Alacante. U.S. agents just raided the Arizona house, too. The tunnel entrance is still closed, but it’s only a matter of time before they find it. They’re after you, Anton. I don’t know how they found out, but they know you’re here.”

  The voice. Ray strains to pull together the floating fragments of his thoughts. He knows the voice.

  “Orsino, is there another way out of here?” Perchek asks.

  “Through that door, Doctor. There’s a short tunnel to a house across the street. Alacante had it built.”

  “Listen,” the voice says, “I’ve got to get back before they find the main tunnel and me in it.”

  “I am grateful for the warning, my friend.”

  “You know how to reach me if there’s anything I can do.”

  The tunnel door scrapes shut. There are a few seconds of echoing footsteps, then silence. But in those moments, Ray’s clouded mind locks in on the voice.

  Sean Garvey!

  “Garvey, you bastard! … You son of a bitch!” he shrieks, remembering the moment he and his boss had been hauled off by Alacante’s men.

  The signs that something was rotten with Garvey had been there a dozen times over, he thinks now. How careless it had been not to have picked up on them. How stupid.

  “Mr. Santana, it appears our business must come to a premature closure,” Perchek says.

  From somewhere on the floor above them comes the sound of a door being smashed in. Then there is gunfire.

  “Doctor, I think we should go,” Orsino says.

  “You are right, Mr. Orsino,” Perchek replies. “But only up to a point.”

  His back turned, he reaches into his valise. When he turns back, he is holding a snub-nosed revolver. Before Orsino can react, he is shot through the bull’s-eye that is his half mouth. His head snaps back. He spins full-circle in a graceless pirouette, then crumples to the dusty floor.

  The shooting upstairs has stopped. The footsteps are closer now, and they can hear voices. The Doctor levels the automatic at the center of Santana’s forehead. Ray clenches his teeth and forces his eyes to remain open for the last moment he will ever see anything. Then, with the smile Ray has come both to fear and loathe, Perchek lowers the revolver, steps forward, and empties the still nearly full syringe into the intravenous line.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “You should die from this dose long before it has its full effect.”

  He whirls, steps over Orsino’s corpse, and hurries toward the escape tunnel.

  “Garvey!“ Santana screams, his final fury fixed not on the madman, but on the friend who has betrayed him. “Garvey, you’ll rot in hell for this!”

  A moment later his nervous system explodes in a volcano of pain. He shrieks again and again. He thrashes his head about. He bites through his lip and hurls himself sideways onto the floor. The agony, in every nerve, every fiber of his body, intensifies.

  “Garveeeey!”

  Soaked in sweat, Walter Concepcion sat bolt upright in bed. After more than seven years, he had almost become inured to the nightmare. But some journeys back to the basement sessions with The Doctor were still worse than others. And this one—his first in the weeks since arriving in Manhattan from his home in Tennessee—had been a motherfucker.

  It was the pain that had brought on the flashback. It usually was. The electric nerve pain that had been part of his life for almost every moment of the seven years since The Doctor emptied the syringe into his body. Ray wiped off his forehead and face with the sheet and fumbled through the bedside table drawer for the Bible he had hollowed out to hold his Percodans. He could stand to have everything he owned in the rented room ripped off, even his gun. But not his Percodans. His doc at home understood. After years of neurologic consultations, psychotherapy, AA, NA, and hospitalizations, the man had given up trying for a cure, and now just wrote the scripts. The local pharmacist understood, too, and just filled them. To those men and the others who knew the whole story, Ray was a legend. The man who had captured Anton Perchek.

  Santana had brought along enough pills to last a month, provided the chronic pain didn’t get any worse than it had been. He had no desire to take to the streets for drugs, but he would if he had to. Anton Perchek was alive and plying his miserable trade in New York. And there was no way Ray was leaving the city until the man was dead.

  He had heard from Harry about the successful session with the hypnotist. Next, Maura would be meeting with the criminologist her brother knew. Together, they would make computer renderings of her drawing in a variety of disguises. Those drawings would be put up in hospitals throughout the city. Santana’s plan was simple. Keep jabbing at The Doctor. Irritate him enough, and sooner or later, he would do something rash. Sooner or later, he would make a mistake.

  He tossed two Percodans into the back of his throat and washed them down with a glass of water. Then he set out clothes for his meeting with Page. He would wear his sports jacket so that he could conceal the shoulder holster and his .38. He didn’t expect trouble, but he anticipated it. Since his betrayal and capture in Nogales, he always anticipated it.

  He reached beneath the pillow, withdrew his pistol, and unscrewed the silencer. It was bulky, and although it had worked just fine that evening in Central Park, it tended to cut down on accuracy. Besides, he thought, when he finally stood face-to-face with Anton Perchek, when he finally leveled the .38 at a spot between his eyes and pulled the trigger, he wanted The Doctor to hear the sound.

  CHAPTER 27

  “This hearing isn’t going to be pleasant,” Mel Wetstone said to Harry as they drove across town to the hospital. “But I promise you we are not going to take any bullshit from these people.”

  He had picked Harry up in the Mercedes Philip had sold him—the one that Phil claimed defined the man as an attorney. The four doors as well as the trunk had electronic closing mechanisms, and the rear couch—seat hardly did it justice—reclined. It was certainly reassuring to see that Wetstone was successful enough to afford such transportation. But today the Mercedes had tapped into Harry’s midlife feelings of inadequacy. And block by smooth air-conditioned block, it was inflating them like a Thanksgiving Day float. Gratefully, there were just a few more blocks to go.

  “Did Sam Rennick say what they were going for?” he asked.

  “Sam plays things pretty close to the vest, but it was clear that he isn’t willing to concede any of the points we’ve presented to him—not the sketch from Ms. Hughes, not the floor buffer theory, not the call to your office from the killer. They want you off the staff until the case is resolved.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Probably. There are a few spots in the hospital bylaws where the language about who can do what to whom is vague—purposely vague, we think. The bottom line is that if they vote you out—and believe me, we’ve got some cards to play before they do—we can try for an injunction. But we’d better get a damn sympathetic judge. A far better idea would be to beat them back right here and now. That’s what I intend to do.”

  Harry stared out the sun-sensitive window at the passing scene. He had no desire to be booted from the MMC staff. For one thing, his patients were his emotional and financial lifeblood; for another, being barred from practice in the hospital would make it that much harder to put the pressure on the killer. And they had made enough progress since connecting with
Walter Concepcion to believe that before long, some sort of strategy for putting pressure on him might actually evolve.

  Maura was on her way to meet with her brother’s friend, Lonnie Sims. The Dweeb had access to the latest in the graphics software being used to assist witnesses in creating drawings of suspects. Together they would enhance Maura’s sketch and add photographic quality, coloring, and detail. The result would be, essentially, a full-color mug shot, front and side views. They would then add and subtract, mix and match, until they had similar photos of the man with his appearance altered.

  When Harry and his lawyer entered the executive conference room for the second time since Evie’s death, the atmosphere was distinctly more formal—and more threatening. Recording microphones had been placed at several spots around the massive table. The players from the first drama were all there already, along with a number of notable newcomers including members of the hospital board of trustees, the department heads who made up the medical staff executive committee, the head nurses from Alexander 9 and Alexander 5, Caspar Sidonis, and a legal stenographer. There was also a man sitting beside the hospital attorney whom Harry did not know—a rough-hewn man in an ill-fitting blue suit.

  Steve Josephson squeezed Harry’s hand as he passed. Doug Atwater smiled uncomfortably and came over.

  “Harry,” he whispered, “I’m glad I got this chance to talk with you. I hope you understand that the other day I was only suggesting what I thought would be best for you. Obviously, I upset you, and I’m sorry for that. I wanted to be sure you know that I’m behind you a hundred percent in this thing.”

  Half a dozen snide responses sped through Harry’s head. None of them made it to his mouth. Atwater didn’t deserve it. Over the years he had been most supportive of Harry and his struggles to keep family practice a respected option. Suggesting that Harry take a voluntary leave from the hospital was the only way he could think of to avoid the hearing that was about to take place—a hearing in which Harry seemed destined to be humiliated and ultimately swept aside.