The Carbon Murder(14)

Another subject line, dated the week she left Houston, caught her eye.




From: Alexsimpson@hpbp.edu





To: galig@hpbp.edu





Subject: Trouble





MC read carefully.




There’s good news and bad news. Our contact sees no problem delivering the package, but one unfortunate outcome-the bute that’s not bute-might bring trouble.





“Unfortunate outcome.” “Trouble.” Could be trigger words for something confidential. Or not. “Package” meant illegal drugs in a lot of the movies she’d seen. And there was that movie with Gene Hackman where Tommy Lee Jones was the package.

MC tapped her fingers on the keyboard, lightly, not pressing them down. Making that almost musical sound she liked. “Bute that’s not bute.” She thought about butane, butyl. Nothing she’d ever worked with. It could even be a misspelling, for all she knew.

If it hadn’t been for Wayne Gallen’s so-called warning, this note wouldn’t be the least bit suspicious. She wished Wayne were around. This time she’d force him to give her details.

MC sighed deeply. What a life. Four in the morning and she was sitting on a hand-me-down rocker above a mortuary. Moreover, she now had to ride her nephew’s bike across town to get back to her parents’ house before they knew she was missing. She’d just waltz down to breakfast in a couple of hours, as if she’d been tucked in all night with the old panda that Robert won for her at Skeeball before the wrecking balls destroyed the amusements on the boulevard.

MC felt the frustration in her jaws, behind her eyes, in the joints of her fingers. She was no wiser than before this wacky bicycle trip, except she’d found an email about some vague “trouble.”

She felt younger than William, but older than Mrs. Cataldo, her retired chemistry teacher.

She got up and headed for the door.

For good measure, she looked out the window one more time. The sedan was still there. This time she saw the tiny glow of a cigarette in the front seat.

Her throat constricted, suddenly dry after almost thirty-two ounces of water.

Come off it, she told herself. No one is watching you.





CHAPTER FIVE

Matt and I entered the North Shore Clinic and signed in. We took seats on thinly upholstered chairs, a pattern of greens and blues not found in nature, two of a long line that had been welded together and bolted to the floor, as if an outpatient might be tempted to walk home with a few for her dining room. I tried to keep my breathing shallow, lest I absorb a sickness or an inappropriate medicine, simply by inhaling one of the unpleasant odors that surrounded us. I wished Matt hadn’t chosen to see Dr. Abeles during his shift at the clinic, but I figured he preferred being in Everett, his hometown, a few miles from Revere. I felt almost as uncomfortable in a regular doctor’s office anyway.

The waiting room was full, serving a long list of doctors with different combinations of letters after their names. No one looked especially ill, but I felt sorry for each and every one.

Matt twisted his body and leaned across the shiny metal connector between our chairs. He stroked my hand. “Everything’s going to be fine, Gloria.”

An observer would have assumed I was the patient, not Matt; that I was the one waiting for a needle to be inserted into the wall of my rectum.

“Did you make a list of your symptoms?” I asked Matt, suddenly recalling a piece I’d read on-line. “You know, frequent urination could be caused by a benign prostatic hyperplasia.” I nearly tripped over the words, so much more complicated than phrases like “nuclear magnetic resonance,” or “the alpha particle tunneling effect.”

Matt smiled. “You’ve been doing research. On-line I suppose.”

I nodded. I’d spent hours searching out information from the National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, the National Cancer Institute, and the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide. Any site that seemed reputable. I read comparisons between the side effects of surgery and radiation therapy and tried not to retain the fact that 31,500 men would die of prostate cancer this year.

I’d checked out sites for the latest in hard-science news, objectively, with no hidden agenda. But now, searching the health sites, I had a different approach. I looked for good news only. Unlike other cancers, I read, a man is more likely to die with prostate cancer than of it. On average, an American male has about a thirty percent risk of having prostate cancer in his lifetime, but only about a three percent risk of dying of the disease.

Whew.

But statistics have never given me long-lasting comfort. In that three percent was someone’s husband, someone’s brother, a teacher, a cop.