Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6)

by James W. Hall

  "Oprah should do a show on us," Ginny said.

  "Too much of a downer," one of the Korea vets said. "Bunch of freaking losers with missing limbs, whatta we have to say to America?"

  "I think we could be very inspirational," Joe David, the 'Nam double amputee, said.

  "Yeah, right," said Ginny. "Cheer up, Mrs. Middle America. Your husband may be running around with young boys, but hey, things could be worse. Your amputated arms could feel like they were boiling in the deep-fat fryer every minute of the day."

  "You should get Oprah's number, call her up. Suggest that for a topic."

  Greta rolled her chair back a couple of feet, faced the group.

  "I'm leaving tomorrow," she announced.

  "Yeah? Giving up on the cure?" Ginny got her chair up on balance, footplates a few inches off the hardwood floor. She held it there with tiny movements of her push rim.

  Randy looked over at Greta. He'd fallen in love with her during her six-week stay. She'd seen it developing early on and had done all she could to keep him from getting serious, but it happened anyway. Randy couldn't understand why she was leaving. For the last several days he was angry all the time, ready to cry.

  "She's going back to Miami," Randy said. "Rent an apartment, sit in the dark all day."

  "No, I'm not."

  "You got any family, Greta?" one of the Desert Storm guys asked.

  She said no, none. Alone in the world.

  "Sit in a dark room and feel sorry for herself," Randy said.

  Ginny was looking expectantly at Randy, seeing a little drama ready to erupt. They erupted frequently around the pain clinic. Somebody screaming the worst words ever said to another human being, filthy, outrageous obscenities. Ten minutes later everyone's watching TV again, the jokes rolling along.

  Greta was going to miss that group.

  Without another word she rolled out of the room, Randy studying the floor with a clenched mouth. No one told her goodbye. Have a good life, it was fun knowing you. None of the pleasantries of polite society. Greta didn't expect it, would've even been a little insulted if they'd made an exception in her case. That was the one rule in the Eaton Street pain clinic. No bullshit. A lot of happy faces, balloons and hugs and kisses, would've been major bullshit. Like everyone else in this room, Greta was in terrible pain. She'd arrived in pain, she was leaving in pain. There'd been no relief. A bunch of happy bullshit was out of the question.

  She rolled back to her room, shut the door. Greta rolled her chair into a swatch of sunlight that was leaking through the untended banyan tree in the adjacent backyard. She was wearing gray jeans today, a white crewneck T, white tennis shoes. The leather purse in her lap was natural cowhide clumsily hand tooled by her daughter, Suzy—a summer camp project from two years before.

  Greta rolled over to the cheap deal desk and pulled open the drawer. She curled her fingers over the guide bar in the back and pinched out the small photograph she'd smuggled along. A fairly dangerous risk, given her situation, but one she felt compelled to take. The snapshot had been taken by Greta's mother. It was a color photo of Suzy and Greta the previous summer at the beach on Key Biscayne. Greta squatting by her trim, blond daughter, holding her around the waist as a wave crashed over their backs. Both of them laughing wildly. Greta stared at her own legs from a year earlier. Muscular and tan. Nothing like the shriveled appendages she had these days. She looked at her daughter's easy laughter and her own. All of it changed now. Nothing easy anymore.

  Greta let her mind wander through some of the other images she'd stored away. Suzy sitting primly at her school desk with her hand straight in the air. Suzy reading a book by the window, so focused and serious. Suzy holding the flower basket out in the sunny backyard at her grandmother's Coral Gables house while Granny clipped roses. Suzy rigidly asleep in the same narrow bed where Greta had spent her own childhood nights.

  For these last six weeks Suzy had been staying with her grandmother. That was the hardest part of Greta's assignment. Just a weekly phone chat to see her through. Stealing down Eaton Street to a public phone at the Laundromat. Watching the door as she talked. Besides that phone conversation, Greta's only other comfort came from invoking Suzy's image every chance she could, hoping her daughter could feel the telepathic tingle of her love.

  ***

  Greta had fallen. That was how it began. Last September, balanced atop a brick wall, four feet above her patio, she had been stretching up to prune one of her new orchids, onddium, the dancing lady. Reaching out to snip off one of the cascades of blooms—an inch from her grasp, no more than that. On her tiptoes in the white Keds with the pebbled soles, on the bricks that were always damp and coated with the green slime of mildew from Miami's perpetual hothouse climate. Reaching up for a cluster of blooms, something she'd done a thousand times.

  Only thirty-two years old, for godsakes. In the best physical shape of her life. Just out of DEA boot camp at Quantico, where for four months she'd jogged five miles a day, done countless push-ups, stretching, weight lifting, target practice. She was an excellent marksman, with better scores than all but one of the men in her class. She was no tomboy, had never even held a handgun before—no father around to show her how to shoot. But it turned out she was a natural. Never wavered as she squeezed, never flinched at the blast or winced at the recoil.

  That was Greta Masterson's major skill. She didn't flinch. Didn't dodge, didn't try to sidestep or bullshit herself. A spade was a spade was a spade. A failed eight-year marriage ended in a weekend of battering. She nearly lost an eye, nearly lost Suzy. But she didn't cringe, didn't feel sorry for herself. Greta had the bastard hauled off to jail, stayed around till the trial was done, looked him in the eye when they took him away. Then she went home to Miami, to her mother's galling told-you-so's. She hadn't flinched at any of it. Did what she had to do, got on with it, never second-guessed, never winced as she pulled the shrapnel out of her gut, piece by piece.

  How she decided on the DEA she couldn't say. One of Miami's growth industries. Maybe it was her ex-husband's love affair with amphetamines, maybe her mother's medicine cabinet always crammed with a bright array of mood adjusters. In any case, Greta Masterson was an exceptional shot and studied hard, and graduated second in her class at Quantico.

  Everything was going so well. Good money for the first time in her life. Able to move out of her mother's suffocating house, rent a two-bedroom cottage on a South Miami avenue, a house where the patio was always in shade, the bricks growing green slime. Five orchids, six orchids, seven. Blooming. Everything blooming for Suzy and Greta. Daughter with blond ringlets, mother with dead aim.

  Until slick pressed against slick, the blooms just an inch away and Greta lurched backward, dropped four feet through the air and cracked her spine against a ficus tree's gnarled root that thrust up from the earth like an iron fist. She lost contact with her legs, everything below her navel. Lying there on her back looking up at the perfect blue Miami sky. Her rented backyard, her rented clouds, her bricks. Feeling nothing where her legs had been.

  Conus medullaris. Severe violation of the sacral cord and lumbar nerve roots within the neural canal. Dead from T-4 down. An emergency operation—steel rods implanted to steady her spine. Then a week into rehab, a wheelchair for life, the pain began—a fire raging in her numb legs. Violent cramps in muscles that were no longer operable, pain that roared through the senseless flesh. Each toe burning separately. For a week she woke every morning with her legs drawn into a brutally tight fetal curl. Except they weren't truly drawn up. Her legs were paralyzed, lying flat and dead on the mattress. But they felt that way. Cramped and burning with her knees locked hard against her chest.

  It came and went when it pleased. No warning. A phantom that poured scalding oil on her flesh and made the dead nerves howl. Greta writhed in her bed. It took her breath, burned for hours, then disappeared as abruptly as it came. The medical staff tried all the drugs, but none of them could touch the pain. They looked at her, the d
octors, her mother, her friends, they stared at her legs and listened to her groans, and she could see they didn't fully believe. As if it were something in her head. Greta, the hypochondriac. How could she possibly feel her legs? They were dead.

  But no, they were not dead. They burned and burned as though the flesh were turning to charred cinder. There was a scale they used to measure pain, zero to fifty. One of her young doctors had informed her of it. Amputation of a digit was at the top, a 41, childbirth a few slots lower, then phantom limb pain at 27. Twenty-seven. Not as intense as childbirth, which Greta remembered vividly. Only difference was, this pain was forever. There was nothing out there to stop it. No drugs, nothing. Never going to be an end to the fire, no healing, no soothing salves, no return to normalcy. And to make it worse, they told her it was a problem in her brain, her neural map still showed two legs down there, a lifetime of neurological habits, the brain still sending electrical messages down the circuitry of nerves every split second to verify the legs' existence and every split second those messengers came howling back with garbled screams, the white noise of pain. If she'd lost her legs from the slow death of frostbite or even gangrene, her brain would have had time to redraw its diagram and there would be no phantom pain. But with sudden traumas like her fall, or a gunshot wound or car accident, the brain held on to the old map—forever showing a continent that no longer existed. There was no way to instruct the brain to let go of its faulty script. There was nothing Greta could do at all, nothing but lie on her bed and feel her dead flesh boiling. A 27.

  Then one rainy afternoon Brad Madison came to visit, no fanfare, just pushed open the hospital room door and walked in, smiling but serious. Special agent in charge. Ran the entire Miami office of the DEA, responsible for several hundred agents, all of Florida and the Bahamas, toughest drug beat on the planet. Greta knew who he was, of course, but never suspected Brad knew her.

  He stood beside her bed for a few awkward minutes, condolences, all that, then offered her a new assignment. He'd found a spot for her in one of the MET operations. Mobile enforcement team. A service provided to local law enforcement agencies around the country—some sheriff in over his head calls, they go.

  Greta listened, her gloom lifting slightly. The impossible weight of her despair. Brad Madison himself doing her a favor. Or maybe not. Looking at him, she wasn't sure, his anxious smile.

  Here's how it would go, he said. You finish your rehab down in Key West. There's a doctor there, your injury fits his profile. He runs a clinic with ties to the VA system. He's doing some sophisticated pain treatment. Trouble is, he's been prescribing some big numbers—narcotics, opiates, in quantities that wouldn't make us flinch if he were a licensed pain clinic. But he's not. Like maybe he's using the VA system as a cover, big bureaucracy, get lost in the paper shuffle, working with dead-end guys everybody else has given up on. He specializes in amputees, paraplegics. Focused on the same kind of phantom limb pain you've got. Guy's a highly trained specialist, Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins postdoc. With all that going for him, the man's decided to work with vets, taking government wages. Regular Father Teresa, this guy.

  Or maybe not.

  Greta would rent a room right in the clinic, go through his process, listen, keep her eyes open. They'd clean her up, a new identity. No living relatives, no child. She'd be Greta Masterson, Marine Corps lieutenant. Injured in a training exercise at Lejeune. A fall, nothing fancy. Keeping it as close to the truth as possible.

  This doctor, he's not a quack—nothing like that, Brad Madison said. You'll be perfectly safe. Hell, he might even do you some good.

  What it is, the VA internal police are convinced he's diverting Schedule Two drugs, writing way too many scripts, then recruiting some of these sad sacks to go sell the Percodan, Darvocet, pure morphine on the street, kickback his share. The money's there. If he takes his time, goes slow, he could get rich selling just a fraction of what he writes. Down in Key West, who would notice, a few more drugs floating around? But this is serious, and we need to check it out.

  Who're you trying to kid? she said.

  What?

  I'm sorry, Greta said. But this is make-work. Trying to be nice, distract me. You don't send someone undercover for that. You call in the Medicaid Fraud Unit, or you seize his records, refer him to the state medical board, or you use informants. That's not what Mobile Enforcement is for. Anyway, this is a Diversion Program issue. If the guy's diverting drugs for profit or self-medication, it's Echeverria's bailiwick.

  Lecturing her boss, like he didn't know already.

  Well, yes, he said. That's true normally. But this is a sensitive case, Greta. It requires some nonstandard arrangements. I couldn't just drop this on Echeverria's desk.

  Sensitive? What's that mean? Nonstandard?

  It means there are some toes we can't step on here. Sensitive toes.

  What? Our doctor is some U.S. senator's son?

  Something like that, he said. But trust me, it's serious business. If this guy is dirty, I don't care whose son he is, we're going to nail his ass to the wall. No fudging, no sweetheart deals. We're playing this straight. The last week or two I've been working on this, trying to come up with a plan, a way to run an undercover operation, then this happens to you, your fall, and I'm thinking, this is perfect . . . well, perfect's not the right word, of course, but it's a good matchup. You know what I'm trying to say, Greta.

  Pardon me, she said, but how come you're here? Special agent in charge. You're working street-level cases all of a sudden?

  I have a personal interest.

  What? This is your operation? You're running it by yourself, is that what you're telling me?

  He considered that for a minute. Then, okay, yeah. It'd be just you and me. Official, but not official. A gray area. Please, Greta. You'd be doing me a personal favor. That's how it is. You find out anything, it's between us. No reports, no paperwork. But if this guy is dirty, he doesn't get a pass. We jump on him with both feet. Ride him to the ground.

  Not even thinking about it, weighing what it would mean to Suzy, not really caring if it was make-work or not, Greta said, sure, why not. Thread me on the hook, throw me in, see what bites. Sure, what the hell else've I got to do?

  ***

  It was a short-term operation, six weeks max. She had a tiny room, a hot plate, had her run of the building all day. She could watch, sniff around. Talk to the other patients. Perfect vantage point. A couple of weeks into it, what she found was, she liked the doctor. A good guy, doing damn good things. Treating the vets with chronic, intractable pain dumped on his doorstep by VA hospitals all over the country. Guys who'd had all the operations, all the rehab and therapy and were still hurting like hell. No one knew what to do with them anymore. Some old warhorse guzzling a gallon of morphine a day, he's still screaming and complaining, so they ship him off to Key West, end of the road. Good-bye and good riddance. But the doc took them in. Worked his ass off for them. "Father Teresa" was right.

  As the weeks passed, the doctor seemed to take a special interest in her condition, tried different approaches with her phantom pain. A few things dulled the burning for an hour or two. Epidural injections, the trigger point shots, deadening nerve junctures in her back.

  To be perfectly honest, she'd have to admit, after six weeks of seeing him every day, she'd fallen a little. Early forties, lanky athletic body, handsome, very natural, with an easy smile, always joking around. Shaggy blond hair and dark blue eyes that every once in a while took all the accumulated pain that had settled in them and sailed off to some warm place and returned a moment or two later refreshed. But most important, this man absolutely believed in Greta's pain, the only one of all her friends and family whose sympathy never wavered.

  Greta decided the only reason he was writing a lot of scripts for Schedule Two drugs was that he was up to his neck in intractable pain. That's how much narcotic it took to make a dent. Way more than the DEA guidelines. The man wasn't diverting. She was sure of it.
She talked to his other patients, listened, snooped a little, file cabinets, even prowled in his computer late one night. The guy was clean. What he was prescribing was what he was injecting, nothing getting siphoned off for street sales.

  The only thing wrong were the guidelines. Written by puritan assholes back in Washington who'd never been on a pain ward, heard the screaming, the nightmare agonies of excruciating suffering. So worried about addiction and diversion, they had no idea what it was like in the trenches. Six weeks in those trenches, Greta was a convert. Let the narcotics flow, dole out the opiates, whatever it took. Quit counting cc's. Why should anyone have to suffer, for godsakes?

  Of course she knew why. That's the way the world worked. People in quiet offices with their pie charts and their religiously uptight constituencies, deciding policy for blood-and-gristle people whose pain was unimaginably brutal. Let them eat aspirin. Lots of aspirin, if that's what it took. Stiff upper lip. Bite the bullet. All that stoic bullshit.

  But then Greta's tenure was finished. The six weeks up, she was turning back into a civilian, headed home to Suzy. Greta wondering if she should say something personal to the doc before she left, give him some sign how she felt. But deciding, no, she'd go home, have her conference with Brad Madison, give the doc a clean bill of health, write her report. Then she'd see how she was feeling a month later, and if the emotions were still there, she could always come back down, pop in the clinic one day, ask him out for supper. Greta, the modern woman.

  ***

  At five-thirty, as Greta was finishing packing her bag, Pepper Tremaine, Dr. Wilson's head nurse, tapped on her closed door and said the doctor was ready for her. One last injection for the road. Greta rolled quickly over to the desk and slipped the snapshot into the drawer and closed it. When she swiveled around, Pepper was standing in the doorway, smiling at her innocently.

  Greta followed her down the hallway to the treatment room, and Dr. Wilson was there, in rumpled khaki trousers and a blue work shirt. Looking more like a classy beachcomber than an anesthesiologist. He helped her out of her chair, up onto the examining table, his strong hands on her, giving her that tingle.