by Bobby Adair
Tax return fraud seemed like pure genius when it came to him one drunk night, while staring at a dollar-desperate stripper with too much cellulite and listening to eighties hair band metal. In that scheme, it had been surprisingly easy to herd several million dollars into accounts he controlled. Getting that money laundered back into his pocket turned out to be too problematic and expensive.
Through all of it, Jimmy had never been caught—well, not for his income-based crimes. He hadn’t been so lucky with social malfeasance—domestic disturbances, public intoxication, and the like. Perhaps that was the reason Jimmy always figured his next plot would be the scheme that finally made him rich.
In that vein, he was thinking about scams while sitting in a sports bar with his buddy Larry Dean, watching the San Diego Chargers spank his beloved Denver Broncos. He was two months behind on child support to two mothers and a month behind to the third mother. He couldn’t afford his car insurance and was only a week away from a car payment that he didn’t have the cash to pay. Things had been lean for most of a year, and the financial pinch was getting real. He was even casting discreet glances at the security cameras mounted on the ceiling around the bar and seriously considering a robbery. How hard could it be? Walk in with a mask and a gun at the end at a busy night, convince the manager to open the safe, and walk out with twenty thousand dollars—or a handful of credit card receipts. Ugh. Nobody used cash anymore.
The Chargers scored. Everybody groaned. The Broncos were down by three touchdowns late in the fourth. Conversation in the bar notched up as people looked to distract themselves. Jimmy sipped at a warming beer and turned away from the painful video feed to watch orange-ish sauce full of cold grease congeal into a waxy coating on the remaining chicken wings. Without taking his eyes off the wings, he said to Larry, “We gotta figure out how to make some money.”
Larry said, “I saw this movie the other night about this slave guy.”
“The one that got kidnapped and shipped to Louisiana back before the Civil War?” Jimmy asked, wondering why Larry had even watched the movie. It didn’t seem the type to appeal to his limited intellect.
Larry said, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
Guessing that Larry was changing the subject to distract himself from his own financial woes, Jimmy asked, “Did you like it?”
“It was okay.”
Jimmy nodded, thinking it was a good movie, though too depressing.
Larry leaned over the table to get close to Jimmy, and said, “I had an idea.”
Jimmy put his glass down and started to think of a new way to tell Larry why his idea was terrible. They always were. “Yeah?”
“I was putting it together with something else I saw on TV,” said Larry. “These tourists were going to Mexico, getting drunk or something, and waking up with a kidney missing.”
And that was the shitty idea. Jimmy bit back his gut reaction but was stuck for some good way to say that selling stolen kidneys was a suck-ass, old idea.
Into the pause, Larry’s voice turned animated. “I saw on the Internet you can get a quarter million for a black market kidney.”
“Two-hundred thousand dollars?”
Larry grinned and nodded emphatically, oblivious to the mathematical mistake.
Jimmy waited for more on Larry’s idea. He looked away from Larry’s grin, reached over and poked one of the chicken wings, thought about whether he had any antacids at home to counter the spicy seasonings floating around in his stomach. He decided not to eat any more. “That’s interesting. I don’t really get how you made the jump from the kidnapped slave to black market kidneys.”
“That’s the beauty of it, man.” Larry scooted his butt anxiously around in his chair as he tried to lean further over the table. “See, there’s a bunch of rich people who’ll pay a lot of money for a kidney. But waiting for somebody with the right kind of kidney to visit Tijuana takes time. These people don’t have a lot of time to wait around, you know what I mean?”
“I guess,” Jimmy answered. He didn’t know how long someone could live on dialysis while waiting for a kidney.
“What I’m sayin’ is, we find their replacement parts around here.”
“Here in Denver?” Jimmy asked.
“Denver. Kansas City. Tulsa. It doesn’t matter.”
“I think there’s a bunch of genetic matching or something that goes into that,” said Jimmy as he watched Larry’s mood start to sink. “Besides, where do you find a surgeon in the States you can bribe to do the work? I think that’s the reason they go to Mexico.”
Larry slumped into disappointment and muttered. “We’d take the donor to Mexico. Kinda like in the movie.”
Jimmy sat up straight and smiled a lie. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I’m just saying we need to talk it through, is all.”
Larry put on a serious face and said, “You’re good with the details. You’re smart about this kind of stuff. What do we need to talk through?”
Just humor him.
Jimmy thought about it for a second and said the first thing that came to his mind. “You know, if I was looking for a kidney right now, the first thing I’d be worried about is whether it came from a guy who just died of Ebola. With all that going around right now—”
“Did you see the news about Frankfurt?” Larry’s eyes went wide.
Jimmy shook his head.
“They shut down the airport.”
“I think they’ll shut ‘em all down,” said Jimmy. “The point I was making is we’d have to find a way to test for Ebola.”
“Probably something for it on the Internet, maybe a YouTube video,” said Larry.
“Yeah, but...” Jimmy caught himself. Yeah, maybe Larry was right about that. Jimmy hadn’t thought about it. Then real inspiration hit. “Try this on for size. How about, instead of kidneys, we sell blood?”
Larry made a face. “That’s stupid.”
Jimmy was unfazed. “I saw this thing on TV about the Ebola epidemic in Africa. They said that taking the blood serum out of somebody who recovered—”
“How’s blood serum different from regular blood?” Larry asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jimmy answered. “We can figure it out. But the point is, if you’ve got somebody who recovered from Ebola, their blood can be used to cure the next guy. Their blood is like liquid gold to somebody who’s sick. They’d pay anything, because if they don’t, they’ll die. Ebola kills everybody, just about.”
“They would pay anything,” Larry mused.
“Exactly.” Jimmy nodded vigorously. “It’s easy to get blood out of someone. It’s easy to put it back in someone else. I’ll bet you could even get those instructions off the Internet, too. Best of all, we might have millions of customers if this Ebola thing keeps going like it is.”
“Yeah,” Larry nodded, smiling. “Yeah. All we have to do is find the people who’ve been cured.”
“That’ll be easy,” said Jimmy. “It’s a big deal when somebody makes it. It’s all over the news when it happens. We just find one at home, pump out his blood, and sell pints of it to as many people as we can.”
Shaking his head, Larry said, “Wouldn’t we want to keep him alive and maybe harvest a little at a time?”
“Oh, no.” Jimmy was emphatic. “That’s the beauty of it. We get a few gallons out of the first guy—and hand-deliver that to our customers. A couple of weeks later, we check on our customers to see which ones survived. We pick the easy marks from the survivors, we take ‘em out and drain ‘em, and sell that blood too. At every cycle, our inventory goes up. The blood from one person treats another twenty or thirty people. From those twenty, we get maybe four hundred doses. From those four hundred...well, you get a bunch.”
Larry said, “But...our donors will die.”
Jimmy raised his eyebrows and asked, “Will that bother you?”
“Not really. You?”
Jimmy shook his head. “You know me. I don’t give a fuck. Tough shit for them.”
>
Chapter 36
Paul was back in his truck, jittery from all the coffee he’d drunk. It was two a.m. He was sitting in the parking lot of a low-rent apartment complex, looking down and across the street at another shabby complex with a few broken down cars in front, dead shrubs, and unkempt trees. Most of the buildings in the complex needed paint, and the grass looked like it hadn’t been watered all summer.
A big section of the parking lot in front of one particular building was cordoned off with yellow DO-NOT-CROSS police tape. Two police cars sat on the outside of the barrier parked driver’s side-to-driver’s side, the cops inside whiling away the dull hours of the night with war stories and talk about their wives.
It had been an easy apartment complex to find, once he recalled the name on the sign he’d seen in a television news story about some cabby in Dallas who’d had the misfortune of picking up the wrong fare. He wasn’t the first victim in Dallas, though he was among the first infected. The news liked him because he had a compelling personal story. Now the cabby, the wife, and their infant son were all in the hospital fighting for their lives.
Good luck to him and his kid.
And his wife.
Paul had parked outside a Starbucks, close enough to pick up their Wi-Fi signal. He opened an incognito browsing session on his computer and began searching for the apartment complex by name. Forty-five minutes later, he’d driven by several times and finally parked himself across the street to see what he could see and to make his plan. Or, that’s to say, to make his plan B.
He’d started at the hospital, which—if news reports were accurate—housed six Ebola patients. He knew before he’d arrived he wouldn’t easily be able to go into a patient’s room and get himself infected, but he felt pretty confident about finding a way.
It turned out that more than confidence was required for success.
He’d loitered around the hospital for most of the evening, trying to wheedle and sneak his way into places where he shouldn’t have been. He wasn’t sure if he’d broken any laws anywhere along the way, but he was sure, as he sat in his car looking at the near-vacant apartment complex, that he was about to break at least one law. The cabby’s apartment had to be crawling with live Ebola virus, and the only way in was illegal.
Paul thought about his hoodlum days again as he started up his truck and pulled out of his parking space. He drove out onto the street and made an immediate right turn. The primary reason he’d never been arrested back in those days for anything but unpaid speeding tickets was that he was careful and smart. Now he was going to break into an apartment, so he needed to put his truck in a safe place, several blocks away.
After finding what looked like a good spot on a dimly lit street, Paul parked and got out of his truck. He stashed his car keys under the fender, crossed the road, and walked into the darkness of a large, adjacent vacant lot. He checked his pockets to make sure he had all he needed, and none of that which he didn’t. He carried no identification. He did carry a flashlight, latex gloves—no prints, no evidence—and a screwdriver. All he needed.
Finally getting back to a spot where he could see the apartment complex, Paul watched the two policemen in their cruisers, still talking in the glow of their dashboard lights, taking no interest in anything around them.
The apartment complex backed up to an empty field across from a deserted industrial park made up of tin-walled tumbledown buildings, surrounded by pieces of rusting machinery and stacks of barrels and buckets. A tall chain-link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire surrounded the old lot, and in many places the fence was draped in vines or grown through with bushes—it looked like a good way to sneak behind the apartment complex. There’d be no light to silhouette Paul if either of the policemen happened to be looking between the two-floor apartment buildings.
Paul walked down the block, pushed his hands into his pockets, and crossed the street far from any functioning streetlight. He crossed the field, worked his way around a warehouse, and finally found himself walking along the fence by the industrial park, doing his best to look like just another transient on a casual walk, searching for a dumpster to dive into or a sheltered place to sleep. However, if the police approached him, he’d have to come up with a different story. A missing ID could only get him so far. A trip down to the local drunk tank and a fingerprinting would reveal who he was. How does an upper-middle-class white man who lives and works in Denver explain why he’s walking around in the small, dark hours of the morning in the bad part of Dallas?
No explanation came to mind.
All Paul could think to do was simply say nothing beyond identifying himself. As of yet, he’d broken no law—or rather, no law for which he could be detained longer than overnight.
He came to a stop and looked at the backside of one of the buildings, which was wrapped in a few strands of yellow plastic tape. That appeared to be the extent of the deterrent on this side of the building. Sufficient? Why not? Who, seeing the police tape, would want to cross? Especially given the publicity of the Ebola cases and the high probability of death?
Nobody.
Nobody except for dumbass Paul Cooper.
He pushed that thought aside. He’d been through this a million times—he’d fought with Heidi too many times to back out now.
He glanced to his left, then looked to his right. He listened, but mostly heard traffic noise from the highway on the other side of the industrial park. He inspected the building and figured it held maybe eight apartments: four on each floor, one on each corner with a central stairway. There was a breezeway, open on both sides. The apartment he suspected to be the one the cabby lived in was on the backside, bottom floor, to the right. It was out of direct view of the cops out front. Paul only needed a little luck to get inside. If he was careful, he’d be in and out, and nobody would ever know.
Feeling a strong urge to pee, Paul took a deep breath and ran across a hundred and fifty foot-wide strip of dead grass between the industrial park fence and the apartment complex. He reached the light gray brick wall and stopped. He backed against the wall, looking back and forth and gasping. He squatted down to hide himself in the twiggy skeletons of several dying bushes. Drought had been hard on the shrubs in Dallas.
Paul listened. He looked.
No new noises. No movement.
No time to waste.
Paul removed the heavy flat-tipped screwdriver from his back pocket and pried off a screen, letting it fall to the ground beside him. He cringed at the metallic twang and froze while he looked around. Nothing bad happened because of the sound. He’d gotten away with his first mistake. He jammed the screwdriver beneath the lower edge of the window frame, pried and pushed. Aluminum bent. Metal scraped dully on metal. A windowpane cracked with an audible plink, causing Paul to freeze and look around. He held his breath and listened.
He waited.
Still safe.
He breathed again.
He went back to work on the window—more vigorously, less careful about the noise. He was standing out in the open, easily seen by anybody coming around behind the building to investigate unusual noises. He needed to hurry.
With a loud crack, the locking mechanism on the inside of the window popped off the frame. The window slid up with some difficulty on its gritty channels. Paul peeked between the curtains, and seeing no one inside, flung himself through the window. He got back to his knees, grabbed the screen, and pulled it in behind him, closing the window as soon as he leaned the screen against an inside wall.
Breathing rapidly from the adrenaline rush, Paul kept an eye out the window to see if anybody had come around to the backside of the building. He waited for what felt like five or ten minutes, but given the nervous energy and pounding in his heart, it may only have been twenty or thirty seconds.
He pulled the curtains closed and looked around at a messy bedroom that looked pretty much like any bedroom in any apartment. No sign hung on the wall telling him Ebola victims had lived there.
He peeked into another bedroom; a queen-sized bed was unmade, clothes strewn on the floor. He checked a hallway bathroom. An air freshener generated an invisible fog of harsh lilac that couldn’t quite mask the junior-missed-the-toilet undertones. The rest of the apartment smacked of something musty with an insinuation of rotten.
Note to self: don’t open the fridge.
In the kitchen, cockroaches skittered over dishes in the sink and hid under the edges of those cluttered across the countertops. In the living room some kind of disposable apartment carpet had a matted trail of grime fanning out from the front door.
Paul started to fear what he might catch besides Ebola.
Still, there was no sign anywhere that this was the apartment where the Ebola victims had lived. He knew he was in the right building; the yellow tape and the two police cars guaranteed that. He thought how he’d decided to break into this apartment, realizing in his nervous walk along the industrial park fence and his frantic race across the field, he’d only made a guess.
In the dim light coming through the windows, Paul’s gaze fell on the front door. He took a few slow breaths and thought. If this was the Ebola victim’s apartment, outside the front door would be at least a few more strands of police tape and probably other signs to warn people away. He’d have to take a look outside. That was his answer.
He crossed the living room. The door chain hung limply from the doorjamb, unattached. It had to be that way—it could only be attached from the inside. He checked the deadbolt, which thankfully had a little knob lock, rather than a key on the inside as some doors did.
He turned the tiny lock on the doorknob. It clicked open with a muted sound that adrenaline amplified to a firecracker pop in the dark silence of the apartment. Paul grasped the doorknob and turned. The door cracked open and he was happy to see strands of yellow police tape strung tautly across the open doorway. He had the right apartment.