Fallout

by Mark Ethridge

  Josh pressed the “Record” button on a digital recorder and began with an open-ended question that allowed Dorn to talk about why he was running, which was essentially a version of his standard Liberty Agenda speech. Josh took notes in order to appear interested although, as a weekly newspaper editor, his own political focus and that of his readers was more on whether the state was giving the county its fair share of road money or whether voters would approve a bond issue to build a new middle school than it was on the philosophies of the Liberty Agenda. That was stuff for the New York Times and his old paper in Atlanta, material he might use if he gave part of the interview to the Associated Press.

  He was preparing to inquire about Dorn’s future presidential ambitions, when another question popped into his head.

  “Congressman Dorn, what would the Liberty Agenda mean for healthcare?”

  “Healthcare should be a private matter between an individual and his or her physicians, period,” Dorn said. “The responsibility for providing healthcare in this country must be removed from the back of corporate America. Do we ask American business to provide your housing? We do not. Do we ask American business to provide your food? We do not. But we do ask American business to pick up the tab for your healthcare. Where is the logic in that? When did healthcare become a right, say, over food and housing? All that ought be asked is that business pay a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work and give the American people the liberty to do with their pay what they wish.”

  “How will that help high healthcare costs?”

  “It will be like everything else in our great country—a market economy. If not enough people will pay $50,000 for a heart bypass, believe me, the heart doctors will find a way to make it affordable. The free enterprise system will produce the best in healthcare. But not everyone will be entitled to it. I may want a Cadillac, but I may only be able to afford a Ford. I may want a house on a golf course but I may only be able to afford an apartment. I may want a brand name drug but I may only be able to afford a generic.”

  Clendenin scooted his chair forward and whispered in the congressman’s ear.

  “Plus, tort reform,” Dorn added. “A lot of these excessive healthcare costs come from ridiculous liability verdicts. Millions of dollars in pain and suffering because a waitress spilled coffee on your leg. Gotta stop.”

  Josh’s body language must have betrayed him. “Mr. Gibbs, is healthcare a particular concern of yours?” Clendenin asked.

  “You might say that,” Josh shot back bitterly. And having felt invited, he gave Dorn the broad strokes—Sharon’s death and Katie’s cancer.

  Dorn clenched his jaw. His eyes managed to convey compassion, anger and determination at the same time. “Dammit,” he said in a way that suggested this was the strongest epithet he ever used. “That’s just terrible.” He patted Josh on the knee. “My heart’s with you.”

  Josh understood why Dorn had been reelected so many times. The man had done nothing yet he felt oddly comforted in his presence.

  Clendenin signaled that it was time to wrap it up. The men said their goodbyes. Josh watched the entourage make its way to Dorn’s SUV before he returned to work. A minute later he answered a knock.

  Richey stepped inside and handed Josh the congressman’s card. “The congressman wants you to call him if there’s anything he can do to help,” he said.

  Josh thanked the aide. A kind gesture, he thought. But none of his problems had political solutions. He was back at his desk only for a moment when Furbee interrupted. “Composing needs a photo for an inside early page. Pronto.”

  He found a photo of a pageant actor dressed as George Washington talking on a cell phone during a break in rehearsals. Josh typed the caption, “Answering His Country’s Call.”

  “Perfect!” Furbee pronounced.

  Josh decided to forego sales and stick with content. He turned his attention to the Dorn interview. Lucky timing. The story could pass for news and its question and answer format made it a quick edit.

  He finished the transcript and remembered the mail. He resumed sorting through the stack, this time looking specifically for something else—a postcard addressed to him in his own handwriting.

  He knew it was crazy. Katie’d been gone from home—what?—a little more than forty-eight hours? Even if she’d mailed one of the pre-addressed postcards as soon as she’d arrived at camp, it could not have been picked up and delivered to him so soon. He tried not to be disappointed when he found nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Allison’s heart dropped. Her ex’s BMW squatted in front of the Java Joynt. She tucked the Wagoneer in behind a parked truck. A minute later Vince Bludhorn backed out of coffee shop, a trademarked ‘Counselor’ in each hand. His outfit—heavy shoes, khaki pants and an olive field vest—explained the unusual hour. Bird-hunting was best at dawn.

  Bludhorn set the steaming paper cups on the trunk which Allison knew contained his shotguns. He opened the door, retrieved the coffee and settled in. The BMW roared away. She counted to one hundred and stepped out of the Wagoneer.

  Allison joined the order line at the Java Joynt, catching her reflection in a full-length, Victorian-era mirror that stood near the counter. She saw she was scowling. No surprise. Even Hippocrates had given her wide berth on his way to the food dish while she tromped around the house getting ready.

  She had reasons. Her buddies at the state police headquarters in Charleston, whom she had gotten to know after an injured driver was brought in without i.d., hadn’t gotten back to her about tracking Spike through his license plate. None of her other jewelry patients had surfaced. Coretha had learned late Monday that the state health director and the assistant director were traveling to a Hong Kong conference on flu pandemics.

  She unclipped her tortoise shell barrette and shook her light blonde hair until it touched her shoulders. Closer to the mirror, she fluffed her bangs and examined her turquoise eyes. Just a few crow’s feet. From Vince, undoubtedly. She looked at her profile. Suddenly, she felt too exposed. She tugged down on her black skirt and forced a smile that had faded by the time she left the coffee shop.

  The task waiting for her at the clinic—fighting with insurance companies over reimbursements—did nothing to improve her mood. She had not gone into healthcare to return calls from clerks with absolutely no medical training who presumed to question whether a drug or a procedure she had prescribed was really medically necessary. Or to explain that, yes, her charges for a particular treatment were indeed “reasonable and customary” for the region, particularly given that she was the region’s only full-time doctor. Or to deal with what were the insurance companies’ obvious errors—like the very file she was looking at now regarding Katie’s scheduled surgery.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Another case,” Coretha said. “In the examination room.”

  Spike’s jaw dropped so far the jewelry in his lower lip almost disappeared when she walked in. He was wearing yellow rubber dish gloves. “You were at Lil’ Bob’s! You’re a doctor? The sign said Horace Wright.”

  Allison could not believe her good fortune. “Horace was my father. But, yes, I’m a physician. Dr. Allison Wright. Hands getting worse? Let me see.”

  “My fingers aren’t working right.”

  Spike’s swollen fingers oozed blood and pus. She wasn’t sure she could save them.

  She examined his facial piercings. No signs of inflammation, so if the problem was body jewelry, it wasn’t all body jewelry.

  She looked into Spike’s eyes and saw a scared kid instead of a cocky entrepreneur. “What’s happening to me?” he croaked.

  “That’s what I want to find out. We tried to warn you, but you took off. Some of your customers are also ill, like Mr. Scruggs.”

  “So he claims. But that’s bull!”

  “You have an infection and so does he. Possibly, it’s MRSA.
I’d like to test the possibility it’s from metal you’ve been working with.”

  Allison took blood samples. She gave Spike a prescription for clindamycin and the MRSA-effective salve, a proactive step since it would take at least forty-eight hours for test cultures to grow and reveal if MRSA was the culprit. She explained that if the lab confirmed MRSA, he might have to be hospitalized. Vancomycin, a powerful antibiotic known as the treatment of last resort, could only be administered intravenously.

  Spike stared at his fingers. “From the metal? Damn that sonofabitch!”

  “Who?”

  “Darryl. I’m gonna kill that cockroach!” Spike stood as if he were ready to go after Darryl that minute. Allison guided him back to the examination table. “I don’t know about killing him but we’re definitely going to want to find him right away—as well as anyone you sold jewelry to.”

  “I don’t exactly keep credit card receipts.”

  “What about Darryl? What’s his last name?”

  “Dunn.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  “Out Betheltown Road.”

  At lunch, Allison left a message with Furbee for Josh who was meeting with an advertiser. Then she dialed the number Spike had given her for Darryl.

  A woman answered.

  “Darryl Dunn, please. This is Doctor Wright in Winston.”

  “He’s on a run.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Later today. Don’t never know exactly. He’s a trucker.”

  “Does he have a cell phone number you could give me?”

  “He’d beat the crap out of me if I gave that out.”

  “Please. This is important.”

  “Okay. But you didn’t get it from me.”

  Allison dialed Dunn’s cell phone and got voice mail. She left a message saying she needed to speak with him about metal he may have sold and asked if he was experiencing any medical problems.

  The afternoon brought a deluge of patients but no more progress. Every half hour meant another call to Darryl Dunn but always with the same result.

  Josh returned her call just as the clinic closed at 5 p.m. Allison told him about Spike showing up in the clinic and how he had named Darryl Dunn as his source. “Dunn won’t call me back,” she concluded. “He lives out toward Betheltown. If I don’t hear from him soon, I’m going out there tonight.”

  “It’s safer if Darryl comes to you. Plus, you could examine him.”

  Allison decided Josh had a point. “Maybe he’d return a call from you,” she suggested.

  “Why would he?”

  “You could use the old Woodward and Bernstein technique, ‘Talk to me or I’ll put your name in the paper.’”

  His pain reawakened. Decades after their work, everyone still knew of the famous Watergate reporters from the Washington Post. Their names were part of the vernacular, their techniques familiar to journalists and non-journalists alike. The continuing recognition, Josh believed, was a well-deserved reward for notable public service.

  But it also had never failed to be a bitter reminder of what could have been, what would have been in Atlanta.Were it not for his failure.

  Rumors of suburban cops shaking down Atlanta prostitutes and stealing drugs from dealers had reached the newsroom. A six-month investigation by Josh’s team yielded a blockbuster series with pictures that ran across the top of the front page for three straight days.

  The experience was the highlight of his professional life. The interviews, the stakeouts, the thrill of the story hitting the streets, the competition forced to chase tail, the grand jury, accolades from his colleagues, the prizes—first local, then state—those were things that reporters lived for. Everyone was confident the series was a lock for the Pulitzer Prize.

  Until an alternative weekly followed up with one of the prostitutes who casually disclosed that one of the newspaper reporters had paid her. The article implied that the payment was for information or sex, or possibly, for both. Josh was sick when the story came out because the reporter had been him.

  This was not checkbook journalism, he explained to his bosses. And he had never paid for sex. But the woman had asked for payment after the interview. She was desperate for money. Josh believed her when she said she had a baby to care for. And, he reasoned, she was accustomed to being paid for her time. So he had given her $300.

  Josh’s bosses suspended him for a month and demoted him from the investigative staff to general assignment. He had made a serious professional mistake, they decided, although not one deserving of dismissal.

  But the damage had been done. The Atlanta media morphed the story from one about extortionist cops into one about the prostitute and the reporter. Although no one ever disputed the accuracy of the newspaper’s series, the revelations about Josh’s payment tarnished the story. The following April, the Pulitzer was awarded to an entry with less baggage, denying Josh and his cohorts journalism’s highest honor.

  His colleagues were understanding. Some would have done the same thing. But within a year, Josh had resigned and moved with Sharon to West Virginia and exile. He regarded himself a pitcher who gives up the winning run in the seventh game of the World Series and walks away from the game.

  He pushed the ‘stop’ button midway through the whole terrible replay and set his feelings aside. No, he realized, not the ‘stop’ button, the ‘pause’ button. For such nightmares could not be so easily ended.

  “I’m not sure . . .” he said. “I’ve been happy to help until now but I’m not seeing this as a story. The threat isn’t exactly one I can back up.”

  “A MRSA epidemic caused by contaminated jewelry isn’t a story?”

  “Well, that would probably be a story,” Josh conceded. “But you have what? Three or four cases? And no confirmation?”

  “Maybe five,” Allison said. She explained that a woman who said she was pregnant had called the clinic for advice on a stomach rash. Coretha had recommended an oatmeal bath but wished later she’d asked her to come in.

  “Not much to go on,” Josh said.

  “Please. I have to talk with Darryl. And this could be a story someday. MRSA is serious stuff.”

  Josh, too, got Dunn’s voice mail. He identified himself, told him he was working on a story about jewelry being sold locally and that his name and the name of his suppliers might appear in an article unless he could explain some things. At Allison’s request, he gave Dunn a deadline of 8 p.m.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Allison slapped her cell phone shut. “No service.”

  A mile later, Josh eased the Volvo onto the exit ramp. The towering signs of an Exxon and a Petro-Go station loomed like two electric palm trees over an island of illumination—the service stations, a Waffle House with its bright yellow sign, an EZ-Mart convenience store awash in fluorescence, a Days Inn and a Marriott Courtyard, their facades bathed in floodlights like multi-story billboards.

  “Petro-Go,” Allison said. “They’ll have lots of phones.”

  A dozen tractor-trailer rigs idled in formation in an asphalt lot on the truck side of the Petro-Go Auto and Truck Plaza. On the car side, a battery of twelve gasoline pumps stood empty beneath a white aluminum overhang. In between sat the Travel Store, a large single-story, brown-roofed building with glass windows much of the way around. Josh pulled into a spot near the front.

  Josh followed Allison inside. “Need some help?”

  “I think I can handle this part myself.” She smiled and headed toward a door marked Heifers.

  Josh surveyed the brightly lit interior as he waited—to the left, telephone cubicles and a neon sign pointing the way to showers; in the back, a good-size restaurant with a bank of three televisions mounted above the grill, one tuned to the Country Music Channel, one to ESPN and one to The Weather Channel; up front, a store featuring an astounding range of items f
rom belt buckles and cowboy hats to satellite radios, American flag towels and perfume. Josh wasn’t surprised to find country music amply represented among the racks of CDs, including compilation CDs bearing the label ‘Not Available in Stores.’ He was surprised that the collection had a decent selection of the kind of music Katie listened to.

  At a booth a few feet away, a younger man with a shaved head punched keys on an iPad. He wore a black t-shirt, black jeans and a gold earring. His cell phone sat within arms reach on the Formica table so it took him only a second to answer when it trilled. “You find a load?” he asked. A new generation of trucker, Josh reflected. Blackberrys instead of CBs. Hip-hop instead of Merle Haggard.

  The smell of pot roast permeated the restaurant, reminding Josh of how long it had been since he had eaten. His hunger dissipated quickly as he remembered Sunday pot roast dinners in the old days with Sharon and Katie. Nothing had been allowed to interfere, not school work, not the ball game, not the Winston News. Nothing, he thought bitterly, except death.

  Allison’s voice knocked him from his reverie. “Still going to voice mail at Dunn’s but my state police buddies came through. Dunn’s got brown hair, brown eyes and isn’t an organ donor. Plus, I got a better handle on his address. All Spike gave me was some vague directions.”

  Josh nodded—unenthusiastically, it seemed to Allison. “I appreciate you coming with me,” she said. “Dunn wasn’t going to call and with him on the road during the day, this is the best time to find him.” She approached the trucker with the iPad. “I wonder if I might borrow your machine?”

  “For you?” he winked. “Anything.” Allison smiled, but Josh didn’t like the way he said it. The trucker handed the tablet to Allison who searched the address on Google Earth. In seconds, a satellite photo materialized of what Josh took to be Winston, from the familiar bend in the river. Allison zoomed in on a grove of trees outside of town.

  “Can’t tell much from this.” Allison switched to Mapquest and repeated the process. A map appeared with a red star in the middle. She sketched a copy by hand on a napkin.