Pain Management (31 page)

“For . . . everything. He has over a dozen mutual-fund accounts. He owns about half a million dollars’ worth of Oregon municipal bonds. His personal car apparently requires specialized upkeep, quite frequently. His wife’s vehicle is brand-new, purchased outright. And she has had
very
extensive plastic surgery, on several occasions. There is no mortgage on his home. On vacations, they travel first-class. In summary, his entire family lives well beyond the means of his salary.”

“So that’s
another
way they’d know.”

“Who do you mean?”

“IRS. Even without the cash deposits, he has to declare the income from the mutual funds. Hell, they declare it
for
him. Nobody’s that nuts.”

“Burke. Burke!”

“What?” I asked, shaking my head to clear it.

“You’ve been . . . that place you go . . . for a long time. Almost three hours. I cannot watch you any longer.”

“Was I—?”

“You weren’t
doing
anything,” she said, anger clear in her voice. “But I was afraid you’d . . . fall or something. And hurt yourself. I have been sitting here, watching you. But I am so tired, I am afraid I would fall asleep myself and you would . . . I don’t know . . .”

“I’m okay, Gem. Go to sleep.”

“Are you very tired yourself?”

“I . . . don’t think so. Not now.”

“Then would you carry me?” she said, soft-voiced.

In my life, I’ve slept next to a lot of women who’d been through hardcore trauma when they were kids. Some of them when I was just a kid myself—when you’re on the run, you look for the closest thing to a litter you can find. And I had sex with some of those women, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. One thing you get used to, sleeping with a woman who’s been through a lot, is how they startle so easy. The ones who don’t dope themselves up so they can sleep at all.

But Gem always amazed me. When she was a child, every time she closed her eyes there was the chance of waking up to death—if the class-cleansers Pol Pot had unleashed were merciful enough to make it quick. But she always slept as deep and as trusting as if she’d been raised by wolves.

She’d tried to explain it to me, once. Something about casting her lot and . . . whatever happens. Not quite fatalism. Something about choices. Even if you’re on the roof of a burning building, it’s still up to you to decide which direction to jump off.

Gem had never been anything but good to me. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t feel guilty about Ann.

Once, that was what I wanted. No conscience. How I envied the sociopaths around me. Without moral and ethical baggage weighing them down, without the boundaries that restrain the rest of the world, they’re the most efficient human beings on earth. You can kill them, but you can’t hurt them.

I was a kid then. What I wanted more than anything was not to be afraid all the time. So I tried to go in the other direction—not to be afraid
ever.

I never got there. Wesley did. And what he got was dead. By his own hand, when there was nothing left to play for.

I still remember what he told me about fear. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he said back then. “And it’s not worth it.”

What happened to me was I . . . split. There’s a part of me that would pass every test for “sociopath.” I meet all the criteria . . . when it comes to strangers. I can watch people die and not give a damn. I can
make
them dead, if it comes to that. Nothing goes off inside me—I don’t feel a thing.

Stealing, lying, cheating . . . it’s not just something I
can
do, it’s
what
I do. I’m a man for hire. And, with a few exceptions, there isn’t much you can’t pay me to do.

But there’s another piece of me. The part that’s with my family. The family I chose; the family that chose me. I feel everything that hurts them, or makes them sad. I wouldn’t just kill for them; I’d die for them. They’re all I have. They’re everything I have. And what they give me is . . . that piece of myself that’s clean.

Not the part that worships revenge; I came stock from the factory with that.

I mean the part that told Joel the truth when I said I’d never give Rosebud up.

I looked at Gem sleeping next to me. Wondering if she’d already let me go.

“What shall you do now?” Gem asked me the next morning.

“I have to go to the library.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because, when I was . . . thinking last night, I got an answer. Maybe not the right one, but . . . something I have to check out, anyway.”

“In the library?”

“A newspaper morgue would be better. Or even the AP wire. I’m looking for a—”

“—pattern?” Gem asked, maybe remembering my search for the humans who had tried to kill me. A search that took me all the way back to my childhood stretch in an institution for the insane. To a crazy, god-faced genius who makes a living finding patterns in chaos. And spends his life in a futile quest for the answer all Children of the Secret seek: Why did they do that to me?

Lune had unraveled the failed murder plot’s tapestry for me. And I’d made a noose out of the threads.

“Yeah,” I told Gem. “If I’m right, it won’t be that hard to pick up. Just take a long time.”

“I could help.”

“You’ve already helped. A ton. And I know you want to . . .”

“What?” she asked, sharply.

“I don’t know,” I finished lamely. “Go back home.”

“Burke, it is you who wants to go back home.”

“This place, it isn’t for me.”

“I know.”

“But
I
don’t know how things are back home anymore. I don’t know how I’d . . . make a living. I was working off a . . . reputation, I guess. But the street thinks I’m dead. Been gone for a while. I wouldn’t want people thinking I’m a goddamned ghost. I’ve been through that one already—when that maniac I told you about decided to bring Wesley back.”

“Home is not a place.”

“That sounds better than it plays, little girl. My family, they’re
rooted
there, understand? That’s where they’re . . . safe. Where they know how things work. There’s things you just can’t . . . relocate, I guess.”

“So—what, then? You go back and . . .”

“. . . and maybe put them
all
in a jackpot. Don’t you get it, Gem? Word gets out that I’m . . . back, I guess, and who knows what that kicks off? My family, they’d be right in the middle of it.”

“That would be their choice.”

“No. You
don’t
get it. They wouldn’t see it that way. If I was in it, they’d be in it. I’m the one who has to decide. Nibble around the edges, maybe. Test the waters. . . .”

“So why have you not, then?”

“I want to finish this thing here.”

“The missing girl?”

“Yeah.”

“And that is all?” she asked, her dark, fathoms-deep eyes empty of accusation.

“That’s right.”

She got up, left the room. In a few minutes, I heard the shower going.

“If you are going to search newspapers,” she said later, “there is a database.”

“Like NEXIS?”

“Yes. Or one could check Reuters and the AP and even various international services easily enough.”

“You mean with the computer?”

“With the Internet, yes.”

“It’s probably not that simple.”

“I am not simple, either,” she said, a trace of annoyance showing in her voice.

The cell phone in my pocket made its noise. Gem stalked off. Maybe to give me some privacy, maybe to underscore how little I was pleasing her.

“What?” I answered.

“It’s Madison. Ann vouched for you. And I have the proverbial good news and bad news.”

“Can you say it on the phone?”

“Sure. The person you were asking about got in touch.”

“And . . . ?”

“And she says someone she trusts is going to set up a meeting between you and her.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, you were right. There
was
a connection between my work and what she was looking for. But it doesn’t have anything to do with her. Not with her
self,
see?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s the bad news. I can’t tell you what she told me. I promised not to. But it is very,
very
serious.”

“You wouldn’t have called me if you couldn’t tell me
something,
” I said.

“Do you know what ‘empathy’ means?” she asked.

“It’s when you feel someone else’s pain.”

“Close enough.
That’s
her problem. And that’s all I can tell you,” Madison said.

I was just starting to ask her another question when she hung up.

“I need to get in the street,” I told Gem.

“I understand. Do you not want me to—?”

“I do want you to help. I apologize if I gave you any other impression.”

“You are very formal to a woman who has you inside her.”

“I . . . That doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“You act like a very stupid man sometimes, Burke. You know I was not talking about your cock. Or you
should
know.”

“I’m just screwing this up, Gem,” I told her, feeling hollow.

“Then do what you
know
how to do.”

“I . . .”

“You know how to hunt. That’s what you do. What you are. I will get my pad. I will write down what you tell me. And then, while you are doing whatever it is you . . . must, I will get the information you want. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said, not wondering where the guilt had gone to anymore. Not with it sitting on my shoulder like a fucking anvil.

The way Madison had related the information told me her conversation with Rosebud hadn’t been over the phone. The girl was close by; I was sure of it.

Anyway, I knew enough about her now. Rosebud wouldn’t ever get too far away from Daisy.

And she
had
said she was going to talk to me.

I just didn’t know what I was going to do when she stopped talking.

“I’m not doing it,” I told Ann.

“Why?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

“I don’t need you anymore. There’s no chance of a payoff. I’m in contact with the girl—through other people—and she’s going to come in.”

“Just like that?”

“I never said I would—”

“The money isn’t enough?”

“A hundred grand, against the hundred years I’d have to do if I got popped? No.”

“But that’s not the real reason, is it?”

“No. I already told you the real reason.”

“That you think I want you for a fall guy.”

“Or you’ve got a martyr complex.”

“The opposite,” she said. “I lose these”—flicking a hand across her breasts dismissively—“I might as well have had plastic surgery. Nobody who knew me here would ever recognize me. Once this is done, so am I.”

“How could that be? No matter how big the score, it can’t be enough to take care of all the—”

“I’m not giving up the struggle. I’m just going after it in a different way, once this last job is done. It’s not as if we’re alone. Some places—VA hospitals, for example—they know how to deal with pain. And they
do
it. There’s also—”

“VA hospitals?”

“Don’t look so surprised. The VA hospital system probably knows more about pain management than any other place on earth. Some of them, like the one in Albuquerque, they’re like . . . beacons in the night, for us. And Sloan-Kettering has been lobbying for changes in these stupid DEA laws that won’t allow them to administer enough—”

“Politics?”

“That’s right, politics. That’s where the change is going to be made. But I said politics, not politicians. You think there’d be any difference, no matter who was in office?”

“Me? I think the last two guys who ran for president were a pair of mutants.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’d been line-bred for generations, like the way you’d do a bird dog or a racehorse. They never had any other purpose, right from birth. Problem is, you breed a dog to fetch birds, he might do it perfect, but he couldn’t
shoot
the birds, see?”

“No.”

“Politicians are bred to run
for
office, not to run the office once they get it. That, they don’t have a clue about.”

“That’s
right
!” she said, her voice juicy with promise. “They’re all whores.”

“I don’t think that’s fair to whores,” I told her. “All they do is fuck for money. Most of them would draw the line at the stuff the average politician takes in stride.”

“You think all politicians are sick?”

“Like mentally ill? No. What they are is litmus paper. They turn color depending on what’s poured over them. You think
any
of them actually have a position on
anything
? George Wallace first ran for office with the backing of the NAACP. After he lost, he vowed he’d never get out-niggered again. The only ones who truly have a position are the fascists.
They’re
for real . . . which is why they’ll never get elected. And neither will that narcissist Nader. Some ‘green’ party he’s running—all he accomplished was to vampire enough dumbass liberal votes to elect a guy who’d sell the Grand Canyon to a toxic-waste dump operator.”

“You’re right. Which is why I’m going into a new line of work.”

“What’s that?”

“Fund-raising,” she said, with a truly wicked grin. “You know how it says, ‘God bless the child who’s got his own’? Well, people dying in pain in America don’t have their own. But we can
buy
some for them.”

“That’s a better plan,” I agreed. “If the gun people can do it . . .”

“Yes! I know. We’ve
all
been thinking about this for quite a while. Things
have
to change. Even when there’s a huge market for a drug—like the so-called ‘abortion pill’—it took forever to get FDA approval. Not because of science—remember, this is something they’d tested on
humans,
and for
years
—but because the politicians were afraid of the anti-choice lobby. With pain medication, it’s a thousand times worse. The only market for new painkillers is for the ‘nonaddictive’ type. But the very
reason
for taking pain medication dictates that you become dependent on it. If it keeps you from being tortured, why
shouldn’t
you be dependent on it?”