Lifeblood

by Penny Rudolph

  “Sleep well,” the nurse piped and departed.

  Rachel opened her mouth, reached under her tongue and removed the two tablets.

  Chapter Sixty-four

  The room was almost totally dark when she woke again. Someone had turned out the light next to her bed.

  Rachel wasn’t sure exactly when or how she realized she was not alone in the room. The eerie feeling one sometimes gets that someone is watching from behind made her skin prickle.

  Then she heard four slow, soft steps.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  With a clicking sound, the curtain slid along the ceiling track that drew it in a semicircle around her bed.

  A bright light hit her eyes. Hard. Was the night nurse cruel or only an idiot?

  Blinded, Rachel crossed the backs of her hands over her eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Ah, Rachel…. This is such a shame.”

  A man’s voice. It sounded familiar. But she couldn’t quite place it.

  The flashlight tilted, jerking the beam momentarily to the curtain. He aimed it back at her face immediately. But she had glimpsed the intruder, the somewhat narrow shoulders, neat haircut, shirt and tie. The boyish Tom-Sawyer face.

  “Gordon?” Her voice broke on the first syllable.

  “I am so sorry, Rachel.”

  This was too bizarre for words. Had he come to rape her or something?

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, it seems incompetence is rampant these days. If a job is to be done right, it seems one has to do the job oneself.”

  The flashlight beam shifted a little as he moved closer and Rachel had trouble believing what she was seeing: a gun.

  It wasn’t trained on her, just held loosely in his right hand.

  “You? Wh—why?”

  Gordon’s eyes went hard. “Frankly I wasn’t crazy about the idea. And when it became obvious it would have to be done, I really didn’t think I’d have to do it myself. But hired goons are like everything else these days. You can’t get a good one. They totally fucked it up. Both of them. So now I don’t seem to have much choice.”

  “You hired the guy who shot at us up in the Angeles?” She was still trying to absorb what his words meant.

  “Pretty third rate, the bastard. It was supposed to be a hunting accident.”

  “Who put that tracking device on my car?”

  He gave her a tight smile. “I did that myself. Amazing how easy it was.”

  “And the guy in the skeleton head. He was yours, too?”

  “Another third rate SOB.”

  Rachel was staring at him, trying to read his face. “What have I done to you that you want to kill me?”

  Gordon gave a dry chuckle. “I kept hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but you just had to keep butting into my business.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. “The pharmaceutical business? I don’t have anything to do with the pharmaceutical business.”

  “You had to keep on poking around about those kids.”

  “The kids?” She tried to make these pieces fit together. When he didn’t offer an explanation, she asked, “Are you involved in the black-market organ business?”

  “You could say that.” He set the flashlight end-down on the tray table. The beam shot to the ceiling, giving the space around them a dim yellowish glow.

  “Why?”

  He only stared back at her.

  “There can’t be enough money to make it worth all this.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, sweet lips.” Gordon moved a little closer.

  She could see a small contraption on the muzzle of the gun. Dear God. A silencer? He really meant to put an end to her. Forever.

  Considering kicking out at the hand that held the gun, Rachel tensed her legs. Was she strong enough? No. She might dislodge the gun from his hand, but he would surely pick it up again before she could get out of the bed, much less out of the room.

  “Won’t it be a little messy to explain how a hospital patient got shot?”

  “Not really,” Gordon said. “A lot of crimes are committed in hospitals. They try to keep that quiet. Not just this hospital. Security is mostly old retired guys. Deputy Dogs. You already know that people can get in and out of Jefferson pretty easily. And in your case, the cops already know someone tried to kill you.”

  “A stolen kidney must be worth a lot.”

  “Not all that much, really. Maybe ten grand or so, max.”

  She gave him a long stare. “So how can it be worth…this?”

  “You’re doing the wrong math. I thought you were brighter than that.” The boastful expression on the scrubbed choir-boy face made him look more like a cocky teenager than a middle-aged murderer.

  “What math?”

  “You’ve been talking to Emma. She thinks the problem is that there aren’t enough kidneys available. She’s right, but she’s wrong. If it weren’t for the crazy system we use, there would be many more.”

  “What system?”

  “The way it is now, people willing to be donors have a sticker put on their driver’s licenses. That’s an opt-in system. A lot of people don’t opt in, including kids—who might be the very best donors—and those who don’t have a driver’s license. Then there are those who might be a little squeamish about the idea, those who think it’s bad luck to contemplate their own death. What we need is an opt-out system. Unless you have it tattooed on you somewhere that you don’t want to be an organ donor, you take your last breath and the nearest doc takes whatever he or she can use.”

  “That sounds gross.”

  “If I had more time, I could make it sound prettier. Matter of fact, we’ve been lobbying Congress for years. But those morons in Washington aren’t clever enough to push it through. So we’re trying to see if anything can be accomplished state by state. Unfortunately, that’s a very long process.”

  “What does any of that have to do with you?”

  Gordon scratched his chin with his left hand. “I told you, you were doing the wrong math, Rachel. Right here, from this ward, Emma gets about a thousand extra kidneys a year.”

  “I thought it wasn’t about the organs.”

  “You have any idea the annual cost of immunosuppressants and other medications for a thousand kidney transplant patients?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “Ballpark, maybe one hundred million.” His voice put spaces between the words.

  “Jesus Christ!” Rachel caught her breath and added slowly, “And you provide all of those drugs.”

  “Zyrco manufactures just about everything a transplant patient needs. Of course, some of the other companies have their own brands, but we’re very competitive, and the transplant teams know they can rely on us.”

  “And how much of that money is yours?”

  “Only about twenty percent is bounced back to me.”

  Twenty million a year? It was mind boggling.

  “You said, ‘we.’ We who?”

  “Christ, Rachel, you don’t think I could do this on my own, do you? For one thing, this isn’t our only operation. There are a couple more cooperative transplant teams in California and two more in Arizona and Texas.”

  “Your whole company is in on it?”

  “Don’t be silly. It really doesn’t take a huge number of people. There’s a little shadow operation at Zyrco that gets run through books kept at an off-shore subsidiary, and ninety-five percent of the people at headquarters are none the wiser.”

  “I don’t see how you could keep things like smuggling kids from Mexico, hiring thugs, a huge increase in transplant medication sales—how could you keep all that secret?”

  “Money is a great little persuader. And if that doesn’t work, there are ways to arrange accidents. We’ve only had to do that once.”

  “And there are more of these…these organ snatching schemes?”

  “This, however, is our Lexus enterprise. Which is to say the head surgeon he
re is something of a pain in the ass.”

  “Emma.”

  Gordon nodded. “Dr. Johnson has the conscience of a nun. She insists on having only kidneys-on-the-hoof so she can do all the pre-op tests and post-op care. It’s an expensive way to go, but the organs are top quality, with such good graft survival rates that this particular supply is in high demand.”

  “You make it sound like a factory.”

  “What would you call it?”

  Rachel narrowed her eyes. “No one wonders why there are so many organs available here?”

  “You’re forgetting the desperation,” he said. “The transplant teams don’t like to see their patients die. They may suspect something is a little out of the ordinary, but they’re willing to look the other way. They believe they’re saving lives. And they are.”

  “So you’re talking five hundred million a year?” Rachel asked, running trembling fingers along the edge of the bed.

  Gordon smiled. “Somewhere between that and a billion. Of course, that isn’t all profit. And don’t forget, the sales are perfectly legit, so a lot of it goes to a good cause—the research and development of life-saving medications.”

  “That’s bullshit.” A hand swept aside the curtain behind him, startling them both. Even in the dim glow that spilled from the flashlight beam still trained on the ceiling, Rachel could see Emma’s eyes were blazing. “Zyrco spends at least three times as much on advertising as it spends on research. Far, far more if you include the sponsoring of continuing medical education courses for doctors, which amounts to hours and hours of lobbying the very people who prescribe your wares.”

  “That doesn’t seem to stop the docs from accepting invitations to our courses, which just happen to be given aboard cruise ships.”

  “I don’t,” Emma said.

  “I grant you that. You, my dear Emma, help us in other ways.”

  The doctor backed up a step, as if she had gotten too close to something rotten, then said in a stronger voice, “Now please explain exactly what the hell you are doing in this room.”

  In apparent surprise at the outburst, Gordon had taken two steps toward the head of the bed.

  As he turned to face her, Emma’s eyes caught on the gun in his hand. “Dear God in heaven!”

  She put her arms out toward him, palms forward, as if they could stop a bullet.

  “You’ve become a greater and greater liability, Dr. Johnson, with your picky ways and your aversion to the Mex mob’s coyotes, to say nothing of your objections about what to do with Ms. Chavez here.” Two sounds, more like puffs of air than shots, came from the gun.

  Emma’s expression contorted. She slumped to the floor, blood spurting from somewhere near the lapel of her otherwise spotless white coat.

  Gordon swung back toward the bed. “I’m afraid it’s your—”

  He stopped short as Rachel rammed the muzzle of her old thirty-eight up under the chin of Gordon’s little-boy face.

  Chapter Sixty-five

  She didn’t shoot. She didn’t have to.

  Gordon’s gun, silencer and all, clattered to the floor. In his stunned face, the eyes bulged.

  Rachel drew a cell phone from under the covers and pressed the number seven, the code she had programmed days ago for the hospital’s main number.

  “I am in a room in the west wing of the fourth floor. A man here has shot Dr. Johnson…. No, he has dropped his gun and I have mine where it will make a mess of his head if I fire it….” Her voice had a slight quaver and she struggled to steady it. “Please send someone up here to help me. Someone armed…. The west wing. There’s a sign that says it’s closed, but it is quite full and busy…. Thank you.”

  Chapter Sixty-six

  “I’m very sorry to disturb you.”

  Rachel rolled over and blinked at the face near her shoulder. Six security people had come and taken Gordon away, and then two nurses had rolled her onto a gurney and through what seemed like endless darkened hospital halls to another room. The linen of the bed they rolled her onto was cold and she had lain there unable to sleep for what seemed like a long time. But finally, she had dozed off.

  Now there were eyes peering at her anxiously. Early morning light was beginning to glow at the window. When the stranger’s face swam into sleep-fogged focus, she gasped, half sat, pulled the sheet to her neck, eyes searching him for anything that looked like a weapon.

  Was this another attempt to silence her? Gordon had said it wasn’t a one-man operation. Why hadn’t she asked for a guard? How could she have been so stupid? How could the security people be so stupid? But the orderlies had whisked her off so quickly to her new room, and left her alone.

  “Who are you?” she asked, staring straight into the man’s face. “What are you doing in my room?”

  She ran her hand along the side of the mattress. Where was her gun? Then she remembered that the security cops had taken that, too, promising to keep it for her in a safe.

  Her visitor was tall but looked slight, hollow-chested, past middle age, with a too-short haircut. Pale brown eyes were somewhat enlarged behind thick-lensed eyeglasses.

  A hit man didn’t have to be a wrestler. One who looked like this might find it easier to get into a hospital.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, looking ever more like an absent-minded professor.

  “What do you want?” Rachel’s eyes kept darting to his hands, but nothing resembling a weapon appeared.

  “Hamilton Baker,” the man answered her earlier question in a surprisingly take-charge, but not intimidating, voice. He handed her a business card that gave his name above Attorney at Law.

  In spite of herself, it was hard to maintain her distrust. He looked so Midwest-decent. An Indiana farmer fresh from Sunday church. “What do you want?” she asked again, her tone less tense.

  “A small business deal. Nothing more.”

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “Like what?”

  “A business deal that will provide you quite a lot of capital.”

  Wondering where her cell phone was, she tried to digest his statement. “In exchange for what?”

  “Very little,” he said, nodding. “Just your cooperation.”

  “What kind of cooperation?”

  “That you don’t talk to anyone about recent events—detectives, attorneys, the media, anyone at all, about recent events.”

  “Recent events,” Rachel repeated, trying to figure out exactly what he was talking about.

  “Specifically, the unfortunate finding of OxyContin in your jacket pocket, the tracking device that somehow got attached to your car, your acquaintance with one Gordon Cox, and most especially, anything at all about a certain group of rooms on the fourth floor in the east wing of this hospital.”

  Rachel’s tired brain tried to assimilate all the possible meanings. “You’re offering me hush money?”

  He nodded, apparently pleased that he would not have to go into further detail. “You could call it that.”

  “From whom? Hush money from whom?”

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  “Maybe I can guess. Gordon Cox.”

  Baker looked down at large-knuckled hands that nevertheless were too well manicured to belong to an Indiana farmer. “I’m afraid Mr. Cox isn’t with us any longer.”

  “Isn’t with you? What does that mean?”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. Cox tried to escape from the police station. Apparently, he grabbed an officer’s weapon. He was shot by another officer. I’m told this happened in the men’s toilet.”

  “Holy shit. Gordon is dead?”

  “Correct.”

  “You know that he shot a doctor here in this hospital, in my room, the room I was in before they moved me here?”

  “I believe that is why he was at the police station.”

  “And now, you’re telling me I should forget that someone here at Jefferson planted OxyContin on me, virtually destroyed my good name, to say nothing of costing me a hell of a lot of money
for bail? And I’m supposed to forget the whole organ scheme that was taking place here, right under everyone’s noses? To say nothing about Gordon’s drug company underwriting the rest of the enterprise. Plus the connection to hired thugs who tried to kill me, which he admitted a few hours ago.”

  “That is correct.” Baker gave her a thoughtful look. “In exchange for your cooperation, that bail bond will be taken care of.”

  “Who planted that bottle on me?”

  “LAPD already has what amounts to a confession from Dan Morris, head of Jefferson Medical Center’s security department. Apparently, his adult daughter has a brain tumor. She doesn’t have insurance, she isn’t covered by his, and the drug needed to shrink it costs nineteen hundred dollars per dose.”

  “And Gordon supplied it.”

  “So it appears.”

  “In exchange, Morris ignored that ward on the fourth floor, and planted the OxyContin on me.”

  Baker gazed at her, neither confirming nor denying.

  “What about Zyrco?”

  “They know nothing about any of this. They have no idea why Cox killed Emma. Perhaps he was partaking in some of his own samples.”

  “They never noticed the up-tick in his immunosuppressant sales?”

  Baker shrugged. “Ignorance is a beautiful thing. It almost let Ken Lay get away with something even bigger.”

  “What about the thug who tried to kill me, who tossed me into the trunk of his car like a sack of garbage?”

  “Hard to say, unless Cox named him. And he probably did not have sufficient time.”

  “So he’s free to come after me again?”

  “But why would he do that? I’m sure he had no personal grudge against you.”

  Baker leaned a little closer. “You haven’t asked about the amount of the monetary benefit.”

  “Okay, consider that I’m asking now.”

  “One million dollars.”

  “Jesus God!” She gave a hollow whistle. “You people must have one hell of a lot at risk.”

  “You could say that. There are federal agencies, law suits, to consider. Entire corporations at stake. I’m not trying to hide that from you. I admit it.”

  “That makes my silence worth a lot. Why don’t you just have me killed?”

  “This has been much too messy already. The less said and done now, the better.”