by John Farrow
“Condom!” she instructed breathlessly. “Condom!”
“Oooo, maybe yes, maybe no.”
He took his penis and rubbed the head against her sex, and she fought him and squirmed underneath him. “Andy, no!”
He laughed that maddening laugh again and rubbed her pubis and that felt so good, but no, she couldn’t. “Andy! No! Andy!” His laughter so infuriated her that she could just kill him, and then he was reaching into his cast-off trousers and retrieving his wallet. She watched as he pulled the condom over his penis and asked him again, “What are you doing here?” Then suddenly there was no time for talk and he entered her and held her arms pinned, and she moved with him. She let him do the work for a while, until he squatted above her and said, “Your turn,” and now she was responsible for the movement, twisting and bending and humping her body against him, against his penis, until suddenly he slipped out and in the same movement he flipped her over, clutching her legs at the right moment and entering her from behind. She loved this attention and realized how much she had missed him, or this, or anyone, health, life, any respite from sickness and death, and her orgasm was upon her, and she reached back with one hand behind his muscled thigh and pulled him deeper, harder into herself, and when she came she knew that she was waking up the motel guests but she didn’t care, she wanted to be loud and she could not help herself anyway.
She flat out yelled.
Andy wasn’t done with her. He teased her to desire again, and made love to her again, more violently the second time, with her head pounding up against the wall, and this time when her release overwhelmed her he immediately followed. They lay in one another’s arms, warm and spent and delighted.
“Andy,” she asked after they had both napped awhile.
“Mmm?”
“What are you doing here?” She could hardly tell where her body ended and his began.
“What do you think? We got the word. You needed more product. So I’m here. Your delivery man.”
She found this curious. “Who sent you?”
“I’m probably not supposed to say.”
“You’re moving up the ladder pretty quickly.”
“I’ve got a nose for what’s going on. To tell the truth, I begged for the job.”
She liked the sound of that.
“So how’s it going?” Andy asked.
Snuggling into him, she made a few noises he couldn’t interpret.
“What does that mean?”
“Luc, for one thing. He’s sick. I’m treating him, and he thinks the fever he caught was caused by the cocktail I made for him—”
“You’re treating Luc?”
“He’s full-blown, Andy. He’s not just pos, he’s full-blown.”
“Shit,” Andy said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just, it must be crummy for you with Luc not feeling well.”
“It’s a drag, yeah. I’m sure he’ll be better soon. How long are you staying?”
“I’m allowed to make the delivery, that’s it.”
She lightly traced his arm with her fingers. “I’m glad you came,” she said.
“Is that some kind of pun?”
Lucy giggled. “No. Maybe. Yes! Why not? I meant, I’m glad you’re here.”
They kissed awhile before turning themselves to sleep.
In the morning, Lucy was disappointed but not surprised to find herself alone in the room.
After washing and dressing, she went in to see Luc. He related astonishing news. “Andy told me. Something’s wrong with the drugs. I’m not supposed to take them no more.”
She stood there, stunned, shaking. “What?” Lucy asked. “What?”
“They’re killing people,” Luc said. “The same as me, they’re dying.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Your drugs, they’re killing people. They’ve been killing me. Andy, he said he just came in from New York. Everybody’s dying there, Lucy, from this, everybody you treated. It’s a terrible thing that’s happening.”
She felt herself go light, woozy, faint. She could only dimly make out Luc’s face, only vaguely discern his voice. Seeing him, she tried to tell herself, she tried to convince herself, that she could not possibly have been killing him all along. Luc. Dying. Not just sick, but dying. Because of her. Then she thought of the others, so many others, and Lucy Gabriel slumped to the floor and folded her knees up against her chest, and she rocked herself, and no matter what Luc did or said, she would not stop rocking. She sat on the floor of the motel room in Baltimore and continued to rock.
Where? she wondered. Where’s Andy? Why did he go?
7
HOMECOMING
Ten days later, Sunday, January 30, 1999
Overcome with rage, and with a rumbling panic inside her, Lucy Gabriel had first cared for Luc Séguin before returning home. Erratic, distraught, she didn’t know if she should run or hide or confront someone, understood only that the world was not as she had imagined. Her instinct to forge passionate bonds, so long nurtured within her culture and her political experience, warred against a renewed conviction that no one could be trusted.
The assault weapon that she had defiantly deployed during the Oka crisis had been stripped from her the day the army had negotiated its advance onto the reserve, but she still owned a shotgun for hunting mallards in season. She had arrived home on a Friday, and when Andy Stettler called on Sunday and insisted on paying her a visit, she waited for him in her apartment above the garage, the shotgun across her lap, a finger crooked around one of the twin triggers.
When he knocked, she didn’t respond.
When he entered, she aimed both barrels at his belly.
“Easy, girl,” he said gently, raising his hands chest-high.
“Fast-talking man,” she warned him, “you better have something to say.”
“Don’t go off half-cocked. Aim the gun down, Lucy.”
“At your balls?”
“Where’s Luc?”
“None of your business.”
“He’s my friend,” Andy pointed out.
“Good thing you didn’t forget that. If you hadn’t told him he was dying I would’ve killed more people. Nice of you to let me know, Andy.” She crossed an ankle over a knee, and balanced the weapon across her calf, aiming now at the vicinity of his crotch, as promised.
“I let you know as soon as I found out.”
“How do you figure that? You said diddly-squat to me!
“Can I sit down, at least?”
“Suit yourself.”
“Will you put the gun away?”
“No.”
Andrew Stettler pulled up a wooden chair that long ago had lost its finish. Facing Lucy, he positioned himself the wrong way around on it, resting an elbow on the back and feeling more secure, perhaps, to have bits of wood between himself and the shotgun. Even now, she loved the way he moved his body, folding his long limbs with the easy confidence of a snake coiling itself on a rock. They confronted one another under the steeply sloped roof of the garage. At either end, the windowpanes were blotted with frost and windblown snow. Wind squealed around the walls.
“I’d been to New York. Luce, the news there was pretty grim. That morning with you, I called Camille for the latest report—the morning after we made love. I had to catch her early, before she went on her rounds. She gave it to me straight, and it was then, it was only then we decided to face facts. Camille and me. We couldn’t call certain things coincidences, or accidents, any more. We couldn’t kid ourselves that some people were having a run of bad luck. The evidence was mounting. We had to face facts. I didn’t wake you. All right, maybe I should’ve. I went straight to Luc and gave him the word instead. Luc could tell you everything. I had a plane to catch. All hell was breaking loose.” Andy grimaced at the bad memory. “To be perfectly honest with you, Lucy, I chickened out. All right? I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. It was hard enough telling Luc. I was a wreck af
ter that. Anyway, I had to shake a leg. I had to get home, find out what was going on.”
“What was?”
“Lucy—”
“Don’t Lucy me! I got you hired, not the other way around. The next thing I hear, you’re telling Camille I’d make a good doctor. Well, thanks! Like you’re giving me a pat on the back. How come is that? Since when are you directing things? You came in on this as a fucking lab rat, Andy, a lab rat. Suddenly, you’re in tight with Honigwachs? He sends you to New York? To Baltimore? For what? When did this happen, anyway? Who the hell are you? How come, all of a sudden, you know more about everything than I do? Explain it to me. I really want to know.”
Snow was melting off his boots, creating a puddle on the floor. He held one forearm across the chair back and another along a thigh, a rattler sliding over rock, his gaze cool and animal-like and sexual, even with a shotgun aimed at his vital organs. She loved his hands, those long, curled fingers.
“Lucy, listen to me,” Andy started, and now his tone was grave. “I’m your best chance right now, so you have to figure this out in a hurry.”
“You’re my best chance?” she sneered. “Now I know I’m really fucked.”
“I’m in tight with Honigwachs because I’m his security director right now. I got promoted. When he found out what I could do for him, he boosted me up the ladder.”
“What can you do for him?”
He put both hands on the back of his chair now, as though to slither around it, to cover it with his full length, his legs coiled around the base. His long, black hair fell down one side of his face, casting a shadow across the other. “Bad boys don’t grow on trees, contrary to public opinion. We’re a breed apart. I know the criminal stuff, except I’m not interested in being a criminal no more. That’s old, it’s not for me. You know what they say, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. I can’t do the time, Lucy. I won’t do the time. I’m sick of being inside. I want to live for a change. I want to be around girls, you know? But for somebody like me—I don’t fit in this world, there’s no place for me. As it turns out, I’m somebody Honigwachs can use, and that’s been all right, until now.”
“Now what, a crisis of conscience?” She jerked her shotgun up and down in rhythm with her words. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”
He pushed a hand through his hair, tucking the longer strands behind an ear. She could see his face much better now, and it seemed that he had wanted that, that he had wanted to indicate that he should be trusted in this circumstance. “Lucy, you’re in trouble here. You’re in deep. Do you know that much? You brought drug cocktails down to seventy, eighty guys. Half of them are dead now.”
She did not respond to his question right away, her gaze travelling off, and when she did speak she inquired, in a quiet voice, “Half?” Fear cascaded through her.
“About half, yeah.”
“So we had guys who were going to die and a control group, placebo boys?”
“Could be,” Andy acknowledged. “Something like that.”
“That was never our thing. We promised no placebos. We told our people we would give them the best shot available, no control groups, no dummy drugs.”
“Yeah, well,” Andy noted, “maybe this time it was lucky.”
That might be true, fewer men were dead, but she wondered where the larger betrayal began and where it ended.
“I know how much trouble I’m in,” Lucy confessed. “I always knew that something could go wrong, that a drug might not work. But never, never in my wildest imagination could I picture this. I never signed on for this horror story.”
“You weren’t part of it,” Andy said, “you couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”
“Of course I wasn’t!” she threw back, offended by the suggestion. “I mean, I was part of it, but I didn’t know what was really happening. Oh God. I know a judge and jury won’t care about the difference.”
“Where’s Luc?” he asked her abruptly.
Lucy looked down, at her shotgun, then up. “He’s dead, Andy.”
They were quiet awhile, letting that news resonate between them.
“Tell me about it,” Andy asked.
“There’s not much to tell.” Lucy looked away as she spoke. “I brought him to a hospital in Baltimore. He made a call down to Florida and the next day this hairy guy knocked on my motel room door—big hairy guy—and paid me cash for the truck. I took my stuff out and paid Luc the money. I knew about the deal. He was to get the truck. Luc put up the truck money for his hospital bills but he went down fast. I stayed for the five days he was alive. He could see the ocean from his room. That gave him an idea about his funeral. I took his ashes down to the harbour and floated them on a falling tide.”
Andy had expected the news, but he had to adjust to the image. A friend—someone he had not known well, but they had been in the can together, and that counted for something—had been reduced to ash. He’d floated out to sea. Andy had drawn him into this escapade, and to this end.
“Lucy,” he started up momentarily, then stopped. He put his hands on his widespread knees, thinking. “Lie low for a bit, okay? Say nothing to no one. Do nothing. No one should know that you treated Luc. If the wrong people find out, they’ll guess that you know too much. Tell them only that Luc got sick and died. No details. He had AIDS, it happens. It upset you and that’s what brought you home.”
Lucy aimed her shotgun at the ceiling, the butt-end tucked into the base of her hip. Then she stood, paced, and put the gun down on her kitchen counter. She had her back to Andy and looked at him over her shoulder. “I can’t just do nothing.”
He stood as well, pulling the chair out from under him and setting it aside. “What’s there to do?”
Lucy was gazing out her back window. The blackness outside reflected back her own image, but she wasn’t seeing it. She saw only space, the dark, a void. “We can lie low, like you said, but we can also gather information. Figure out what happened, why, who was responsible.” She turned around to face him. “We have to gather evidence, Andy. It’s the only way.”
“Dangerous, Lucy. If you just lie low—”
“Lie low, with the deaths of those poor men on my mind? Who knows how many? A few were my friends. I can’t live with it. Besides, I don’t want to go to prison for this, Andy, it wasn’t my fault.” Her body shook as she breathed deeply, a mix of rage and sorrow overtaking her. “I told them, I told my boys, leading-edge medicine is dangerous. Nothing’s been tested. You take your chances. But, the worst I ever counted on was failure. Failure means my boys would die, but they would have died anyway. This wasn’t mere failure, Andy. God. The drugs made them sicker. The drugs killed them a whole lot quicker than just having AIDS would’ve!” She breathed heavily, willing herself to calm down, without letting go of her anger. “I’m not a frigging martyr, Andy, but I sure don’t want whoever’s guilty—Honigwachs, presumably, but whoever—I don’t want anybody getting away with this. I’ll lie low, but I want justice for those dead men, for each and every one of them.”
“Lucy, it’s so risky right now—”
She turned to face him, putting her hands back on the rim of the counter behind her. “Choose, Andy. Whose side are you on?”
“Lucy, come on, I’m with you.”
“Are you? Don’t forget, it’s risky and dangerous, quote, unquote.”
“Come here,” he invited.
That was difficult for her, to cross that expanse of floor, although she wanted to go there. She hesitated at first, crossing her arms under her breasts. Eventually, she put her arms down, and her feet stepped on the area rug, and she moved cautiously across the floor, circling him somewhat, not going straight to him. When they met, she pressed herself against him, and they held onto to one another, and she was grateful for the contact, for the pressure of his arms and the warmth of his body. She did not know whom to trust, she did not know whom to love, but she had to have this also, she craved affection right now. She
had killed people, inadvertently she had destroyed many lives, and she needed to affirm that she was not the evil one, not the criminal here. Lucy sought justice for the dead. She wanted to uncover and expose the hard truths, she would see to it that the truly responsible were identified. But clasped in the arms of Andrew Stettler she also required absolution, and needed, desperately, to be touched, now, here, to be comforted.
Emile Cinq-Mars drove up to the rectory and parked along one side. Modest shelter from the wind was available there as he walked to the back door, his head bent forward and turned away from the stiffer gusts. One of the things he had liked about this priest from the outset had been his generous, friendly invitation to drop by anytime, and to use the kitchen door in the rear.
A light was on, and Father Réjean quickly responded to his visitor’s knock. A night owl, he had been up with a book and a coffee.
“Come in, come in, Emile. Out of that weather. My goodness.”
Cinq-Mars dusted the snow off his chest, then slapped his wool cap against his thigh to knock it from both the cap and his coat. “I hope I’m not intruding, Father Réjean. I know it’s late.”
“Nonsense. I’m delighted to see you, Émile. I’m pleased to have the company. I hope that you can assure me, though, that you haven’t arrived with dire news.”
“No. It’s not that, Father.” Cinq-Mars pulled his coat off, and the priest helped him with it and hung it on a hook. The detective unwound his scarf, stuffed it into the coatsleeve, and plunked his wool cap on the hook to dry. “My dad had a difficult time yesterday, so I came up. But he was much better by this evening.”
“That’s good to hear. It’s a trial, I know. You’re heading home?”
“Yes, Father.” Cinq-Mars nodded with resignation. “No rest for the wicked. I have to work tomorrow.”