by Ray Garton
He held a gun and it was aimed at Smurl. The man kept smiling.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Smurl said. His voice was a trembling blend of surprise, anger and fear.
“My name is Oran Rubinek. You don’t know me, but I know you. I’m a professional killer. I worked for the government for awhile, but for several years now, I’ve been an independent contractor. I’m here to kill you.”
Smurl felt dizzy as he gulped. “Who... who hired you? Who sent you?”
“Me,” Rubinek said. “This is my last job, and this time out, I’m my own boss. I visited your legal eagle earlier tonight. Ronald Shelldrake. He’s dead.”
Smurl tried to control the wave of trembling that moved through him, but it only grew worse. “Whuh... whuh... why?”
Rubinek held out his left hand and offered Smurl something. It was a photograph. “Go ahead, take it. Look at it.”
Smurl took the photograph and looked at the lovely young woman in it. She’d taken it herself while lying in bed, her hair spread over the pillow.
“Does she look familiar?” Rubinek said.
Smurl looked at the woman’s face for a long moment, then lifted his head to look at Rubinek. “Yes, I recognize her. It’s been, what—six years? Seven? But I remember her well. Olivia Bello. Right?”
Rubinek gave him a pleasant, smiling nod, his head cocked to one side. “Very good. I didn’t expect you to remember. I’m impressed.”
“I hadn’t been CEO long when she died and the wrongful death suit was filed,” Smurl said.
“Olivia was my fiancée. The love of my life. A clichéd phrase, but totally accurate in this case. I was going to stop killing people for a living—something she never knew anything about, by the way—and marry her, and we were going to... well, live the kind of life people live. The kind of life... people who don’t... kill people for a living... live. But, of course, it didn’t turn out that way.” He looked at them again and smiled. “And you know why.”
“Is... is that what this is about?”
“Part of it. Most of it, actually. But not entirely.”
Smurl stared at Rubinek so intensely that he didn’t notice when his trembling hand dropped the photo. “Money,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.. “I-I can give you money.”
Rubinek chuckled. “No. I don’t want money. I was going to kill you back then, when Olivia died. You and Shelldrake both. But I decided it would be too risky.”
“Then... why now?”
Rubinek walked slowly around the chair and stopped in front of Smurl, grinning. “Paaxone.”
“Oh, no,,” Smurl said. “They’re wrong, the media’s got it all wrong. Everything you’ve heard about what happened is just—”
“Fuck the media. I’m talking about what I know.” He hunkered down again. “I’m the one Gall hired to kill Senator Veltman’s press secretary. That was for you in particular and for the entire pharmaceutical industry in general. A little favor to entice you into the Paaxone deal. Killing Arnold Shipp was meant to send a message to Veltman so he’d back off the drug industry, and it worked. I did that. And I was also the one Gall hired to kill that reporter in California. John Falczek. The one who figured out you guys were up to something.” Rubinek’s grin disappeared. His face took on a cold, hard look that Smurl found terrifying. “I feel bad about that now, Mr. Smurl. I’ve been killing professionally for years, but the idea of killing for you makes me feel... sick. It’s upset the, uh... oh, let’s say the balance of my life. I’m here to fix that.”
* * *
The wipers slapped back and forth over Rubinek’s windshield as he drove away from Smurl’s house.
Ever since that early morning in the office of the Director of the NSA, he had tried to focus on all the possibilities that lay ahead of him, on all the things he might do with his life after retirement. But it had been difficult to do, and for the most part, he had failed because other thoughts—darker thoughts—crowded his plans for the future out of his mind.
But now that he’d killed Smurl and Shelldrake, he was ready to banish the dark, to open the drapes and let in a little sunshine into his life. As he drove down Route 50, he thought about his future, his options, his dreams—dreams he’d had as a teenager, as a college student, things he’d yearned to do back then but had given up on when they seemed out of reach.
For the first time in a long while, Oran Rubinek wasn’t planning on how someone was going to die. He was planning on how he was going to live.
2.
Their feet crunched over the scorched ground as they approached the creek. Blackened pillars that had been flourishing trees only three months earlier stood all around them. The smoke had cleared from the air as if it had never been, although the ghost of an acrid odor remained. Now gray clouds blocked out the blue of the sky. It was a still and chilly Sunday afternoon. Eli and Chloe stood beside Butter Creek and silently watched the babbling water tumble by for awhile.
“First the house, now this,” Eli said as he looked around at all the charred blackness. “Guess that makes it official. My childhood has gone up in smoke.”
Chloe took his hand in hers. “It was gone before that. Our childhoods are over when they’re over. The things left behind... those are just props.”
Eli had spent only the one night in the hospital. After that, he was taken to the police station, processed, and put into a jail cell. He wasn’t there long before Falczek and Roger arrived with Dr. Varadaraj and her attorney friend Jerome Goldman. They bailed him out, took him to Roger’s house, and went to work immediately on his case.
Dr. Varadaraj—”Call me Tara,” she said—was petite and dark-skinned, with a luxurious mane of black hair and large, beautiful brown eyes. To have graduated medical school with Everett, she had to be around fifty, but looked at least ten years younger. Her voice was calm and assuring. “You’re not alone, Eli,” she said. “This sort of things happens far more often than anyone imagines, and we never hear about it. Oh, the initial story is reported—the suicide, the act of violence or murder. But there’s never any follow-up, and we never hear that a prescription drug was the cause. Not a contributing factor, but the cause. And those are only the ones we know about. I’m sure if we could somehow arrive at an accurate number, it would be... well, appalling.”
When Eli expressed concern and anxiety about the charges against him, Mr. Goldman was reassuring. “Do you have any idea how many people in California are in the same position you find yourself in right now? A lot. All because Paaxone was withdrawn from this market. Most of them are in a lot more trouble than you. They’ve killed people under the influence of this withdrawal. Like you, they’re horrified by what they’ve done once the symptoms pass and they’re clear-headed again. The California legal system is going to bottleneck with these cases. On top of that, this whole story about Paaxone and Braxton-Carville is so hot right now, you could grill enough burgers on it to feed an army. The mood in this country has not been favorable toward drug companies for a while. People were angry to begin with, and this story has just pissed them off even more. It’s like dropping a lit match into a pool of gasoline. To think that doesn’t make a difference would be absurd, because juries are made up of those people. They’re on your side.”
The story had ignited a firestorm. It came out in disjointed bits and pieces at first. Then, a month later, the definitive account of the whole thing was published in Vanity Fair—the first of a three-part article by John Falczek. It was meticulously researched, brilliantly written and included comments from as many of the players as Falczek could interview. He was now a busy reporter and no longer retired. Since the article’s publication, Falczek had appeared on numerous TV talk shows and was being courted by every major media outlet in the country. Three movie studios were interested in adapting the Vanity Fair piece into a feature film, and HBO thought it would make a compelling miniseries. Falczek had hired representation to handle all the a
ttention.
The revelation that a pharmaceutical giant had intentionally deprived patients of a prescription drug—a mood-altering psychiatric drug—to snag a lucrative government contract when the company knew of the dangerous withdrawals that could result infuriated the public. That fury was made even worse as some media outlets researched the topic and revealed that drug companies often manipulated the results of studies meant to determine the safety and risks of drugs in development in ways that downplayed or even concealed the risks those studies uncovered; that they often hid possible side effects from the public and from the doctors who prescribed them; that they poured billions of dollars into slick, manipulative marketing campaigns designed to convince consumers they should be taking dangerous drugs they didn’t really need, and that some of those marketing campaigns were deceptively disguised as education and research. It was as if the moment the Paaxone story broke, it became open season on the pharmaceutical industry and everyone was armed and ready to hunt.
Talk radio raged with the angry voices of callers who had their own stories to tell—horror stories of how prescription drug side effects had rendered friends and loved ones sick or dead, personal accounts of experiences with bizarre behavior and frightening symptoms caused by taking prescription drugs. Panels of experts discussed the problem on TV. Latenight comedians joked nightly about prescription drug side effects and the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry.
Drug company media representatives had first tried to reassure everyone that things had been blown out of proportion, that prescription drugs were relatively safe when prescribed and taken properly, that pharmaceutical companies rigidly followed all regulations and laws and only had the health and well-being of consumers in mind. But as the public became more hostile, the reps became more defensive, finally claiming that drug companies were the victims of smear campaigns and fear tactics. One harried representative famously said, during an impromptu interview that became confrontational, “After all the pharmaceutical companies have done for all you people, you should show a little gratitude!” The latenight comedians pounced on that remark and “show a little gratitude” became the punchline of endless jokes.
Doctors were flooded with requests from patients to take them off of their prescribed antidepressants, and with worried questions from patients who were taking any prescription drugs. The fact that it had popped up during a nationwide discussion of the broken healthcare system made it even more relevant.
Now, after three months, the public discussion of prescription drugs and pharmaceutical companies was only louder and angrier. For awhile, politicians stood in front of cameras and microphones and made grandstanding proclamations, but they said little of substance. It took some time for them to decide what they liked more—votes or the fat, juicy donations and kickbacks they received from drug companies. Finally, some of them started talking about passing new laws and regulations that would crack down on drug companies, while others simply suggested rigidly enforcing those laws and regulations already in place.
“I’m amazed they’re still talking about it,” Eli said as he and Chloe stood by the creek. “Three months and they still haven’t been distracted by the leak of some celebrity sex tape or a politician tapping his foot in a men’s room stall.”
“It’s hit a nerve,” Chloe said. “Everybody takes prescription drugs at one time or another. If they can’t trust the manufacturers and their own doctors to tell the truth about them... well, that’s disturbing. And I think that’s good. They should be disturbed, and the drug companies should be worried. So should the doctors who’ve gone along with this for so long.” She let go of his hand and slipped her arm around his waist. “And all of this happened because of you.”
He smiled down at her. “You, too. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.” He looked around at all the charred blackness and added, “Well, actually, I’d be right here, to be exact. A pile of ashes.” He sighed as he continued to look around at what was left of his childhood hideaway. “I’m gonna miss this place.”
“We could’ve had the wedding here,” Chloe said. “That would’ve been nice. In fact... we still could. I mean, I know it’s all burnt out, but we could decorate it, spruce it up.” She became enthused by the idea. “We could have Farley’s cater it. Annabelle would love that, wouldn’t she?”
Eli turned to her and wrapped his arms around her, held her close. “That’s very sweet of you. Thank you. But no. It’s too ugly here now. I need to let go of it. Finally. I won’t be coming back here.”
“Then where do you want to get married?”
“Anywhere you want. Anywhere at all. I’m just relieved you still want to marry me.”
“Still?” She pulled back a little and looked up into his eyes. “I want to marry you even more now, silly.”
They stood kissing beside Butter Creek for a long time.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ray Garton
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-2759-8
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
RAY GARTON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Find a full list of our authors and
titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@OpenRoadMedia