The Simpatico Series Box Set (3 books in 1)

by Dermot Davis

  Lily watched him go and shook her head slightly as she remarked to herself that she never expected the dude to turn out to be so strange.

  The following day when Andrew called Fiona to arrange a time to meet, Fiona answered his call cheerfully. “Hey, stranger! What a relief! I’ve missed you so much!”

  “I’ve missed you too, sweetie,” he said lovingly.

  “I called you like a hundred times last night and it kept going to voicemail,” she said then. “I got so worried! Where were you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, unconsciously bracing himself for the worst. “I was in a meeting and had to turn my phone off. Sorry I missed your calls, angel,” he said sweetly.

  “What meeting?” she asked. “You were at work all night? Friday night? That’s not right.”

  “No, yeah, it wasn’t work. I went to my first meeting of the serpent group. I had to, actually, like I didn’t have any choice. It wasn’t what I expected it to be,” he said hoping that if he kept talking, everything would be alright. “They were very much into peace and love and all the stuff you’re into; the guided meditations and everything. I think you would have been surprised as well, as a matter of fact,” he said and closed his eyes tightly while he waited for her response. “Are you there?” he then asked when there was just silence on the phone.

  “I can’t believe you went to…” she said and stopped as if it were too painful to continue. “The very people we were running away from not so very long ago.”

  “We weren’t running from these people,” Andrew corrected her. “These are nice folks, good folks, trust me. They were praying for goodness and for peace in the world,” he explained. “They send prayers for people that are sick and everything,” he said hopefully. “Fiona?” he then asked when he couldn’t hear anything on the line. Looking at the screen of the phone, he saw why: she had hung up. “Dagnation!” he said aloud.

  Twirling the cell phone in his hand, Andrew contemplated what his next move should be. He knew that if he called her back that she wouldn’t answer. If he decided to make the hours-long trek by taking several buses to her house, there was no guarantee that she would let him in or even that she would be there as she might have gone off for one of her customary weekend picnics all by herself.

  Fiona was acting like a spoilt child and she needed to get over it already. She had stuck by her father all these years and had even chose her father over Andrew, so why should he go out of his way to appease her, which, to all intents and purposes, it sure looked like he couldn’t? Her father was a serpent and she lived at home and broke bread, every day, with the man. When she said “the very people we were running away from” she sounded foolish.

  She so needed to get over herself and start acting like a grown-up. Lily was a grown up and knew what working hard in the real world was all about. We grow up, we go to work. Maybe that was Fiona’s problem, right there. She had never worked a day in her life and had no idea of what life was like outside the protected walls of her daddy’s mansion. She sat home and felt Holier than daddy, Andrew, and everyone else, yet she lived off her father.

  Thinking about protected walls made Andrew remember his time in prison. The big difference there was that he wasn’t being protected from the world on the outside; the world on the outside was being protected from so-called criminals like him. And in prison, while the world was protected from you, there was no one to protect you from the other inmates. The guards had merely looked the other way, many times, while someone threatened to puncture his lungs with a fork.

  Remembering his life there gave him a chill and he genuinely pitied all of the poor souls that were still locked up there or any other institution. He didn’t pity the gang members and scumbags, that just seemed to want to make trouble, but he did feel sorry for people like Henry who totally seemed like he didn’t belong there. A guy like that seemed to have gotten a bad shake from a system that was seriously messed up.

  Andrew looked at the clock and smiled. He knew exactly how he was going to spend his afternoon. Changing back into his expensive suit, he wanted to walk back into the prison that he had escaped from looking like he totally didn’t belong there. He would walk back into the wretched building of true misery looking like he owned the place; or, at the very least, he would look like a somebody and not just some faceless dude wearing a standard orange jumpsuit, owning nothing except the shameful number stenciled upon the back.

  Stopping off at the post office to buy some postage stamps (which were replacing cigarettes as the new prison currency) and the day’s newspaper, Andrew decided that he would surprise Henry with an unannounced visit. Who knows, maybe he might bring a little bit of happiness to the poor guy’s pathetically depressing existence behind bars.

  Walking back into the penitentiary as a visitor, Andrew’s senses became more fully engaged. Everything from the lighting to the smells to the sad and gloomy states of both the prisoners and the guards caused his memories of the past to come flooding back to him. Feeling immediately oppressed by the experience, he reminded himself that that was all in the past and he would never, ever experience such humiliation and horrid circumstances again.

  Breathing deeply, and reminding himself to stand up tall and treat the visit like some form of healing therapy, Andrew willed himself to walk and act confidently and without fear. Out on bail, he was a free man and he had nothing to fear. No matter what, even if any of the guards recognized him or became suspicious, they couldn’t lay a finger on him.

  He could shout and scream if he wanted to. The most that they could do was to tell him to leave; to return to the free world beyond the sordid walls of this horrid, surreal world of enforced confinement.

  Along with several other visitors, Andrew sat at the long table he was directed to sit at and smiled warmly when he saw Henry being led through a door from the other side. He was instructed not to stand or touch the prisoner, so he remained seated. Henry paused when he saw Andrew. He needed a second to adjust to seeing his old cellmate wearing a short haircut, an affluent suit and a smile that labeled him as a free man; a successful free man, at that.

  “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Henry said as he sat opposite. “They said I had a visitor but darned I wasn’t expecting the likes of you! What in the heck are you still doing in this wretched place? If you had any sense you’d be long gone, living the life in a Mexican village someplace with a cheap pad and a couple of hot Chiquita’s to keep you smiling in the evenings,” he said quickly like someone who hadn’t talked to anyone in quite some time.

  “Great to see you too, Henry,” Andrew said with a smirk.

  “I’m not going to ask,” Henry then said, looking around to see who might be within earshot. A couple of disinterested guards manned the doors and other prisoners and visitors looked to be busily engaged. “I’ve thought about it and I’ve wracked my brains but I still don’t know how you did it,” he said, looking at Andrew like a poker player who just raised the pot. “You escape here not once, but twice, and then you get away scot-free, like someone who’s either too famous or too rich for them to handle. Or you got connections I don’t know about,” he said, almost like he was asking a question.

  “I’m out on bail, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Andrew answered, not wanting to go too much into detail. “I still have a court date coming up so I’m not exactly free and clear. Besides, Mexico never had much appeal,” he then said jokingly.

  “You got that kind of money for bail?” Henry asked like he didn’t want to move on until he got some answers. “That must have been serious money, right? For someone that said they were living at home with their mom and she’s a what, waits tables or something?”

  “She’s a nurse and, yes, I still live with mom, at least for now,” Andrew answered wearily. “What do you want to know, Henry?”

  “I don’t talk to people I don’t trust and I don’t trust people that tell me one thing and it looks like they’re doing something else, know what I’m s
aying?”

  “Of course,” Andrew answered with a nod of his head like he thought that Henry was making a good point.

  “You’ve either got something going on that you’re not telling me about or you’re just not on the up and up, that’s all I’m saying,” Henry said as he sat back in his chair to indicate that he would go no further until he got some answers.

  “Fair enough,” Andrew said, looking to down to his left, as if thinking how much to reveal. “My girlfriend’s old man is rich and powerful. He’s got connections. He put up the bail money and got me a job, a good-paying job.”

  Pursing his lips and nodding his head slightly, Henry looked silently at Andrew as if he was thinking that he had an idea that Andrew’s story would be something like that. “I knew you had to have some connections,” he then said, still mulling it over in his mind. “The rich always knows someone that knows someone,” he said bitterly. “It’s the poor unfortunates that always gets shafted.”

  “I guess,” Andrew said, feeling a little guilty.

  “He hire you the best lawyers?” Henry asked like he knew the rest of the story. “With his money he got the best legal minds scouring over the case, looking for loopholes?” he asked sourly.

  “Something like that.”

  “You can find loopholes in anything, by the way,” Henry said with certainty. “If you’re smart enough and you look hard enough. With so many people involved just to put one person in the slammer, there’s so much that can wrong; it’s basic math,” he said without taking his penetrating eyes from Andrew. “They can always find a hole somewhere; some guy didn’t do his job properly or in a timely manner or some shit. The right words weren’t used when you were being arrested or arraigned. Maybe some evidence got misfiled or went to the wrong lab or got contaminated somewhere along the way.”

  “What about you?” Andrew asked, tired of having to defend himself.

  “What about me?”

  “You never told me what you were in for or for how long,” Andrew said boldly.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “They gave me ten years for practicing medicine without a license,” Henry answered defiantly.

  “That seems like a lot of time for such a—”

  “The crime itself was for like, two years, a year and a half, whatever,” Henry interrupted. “I got like eight years for contempt of court.”

  “Eight years for contempt of court?” Andrew asked, like he wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “Yeah. When he sentenced me to eighteen months I told the judge that I wasn’t accepting his sentence or his lame-ass decision.”

  “You what?” Andrew asked, shocked and amused at the same time.

  “I told him that he had no right or jurisdiction to order me or anybody else in this country, to forbid me from practicing my free and God-given right to give aid to others who were suffering, and that as a caring and compassionate member of this society I will always help out my brother and help alleviate their pain and their suffering in any way I possibly can,” he said proudly.

  “Man,” Andrew said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “He kept shouting at me to sit down and shut up and he was threatening me that he was going to lock me up forever but I told him that I wasn’t going down silently; that someone had to speak out against what’s going on in this country; the stranglehold that the business interests in the medical establishment—the Corporatocracy—have on this nation and I demanded that what I was saying go on the record as my statement of non-compliance and my right as an individual of this great nation to free and lawful dissent, as laid down in the constitution by the founding fathers.”

  “Wow,” was all Andrew could say. “You got eight years for standing up for yourself?”

  “Someone has to stand up and shout up about what’s being going on. It was worth it to speak out and get it on record; tell these punks that I can see them. I know what you’re doing. I know what’s going on,” he said, as if the guilty parties were present.

  “These are for you,” Andrew said, as if remembering. “A few postage stamps so you can write to your representative or buy something nice for yourself,” he said with forced humor.

  “Sweet,” Henry said, taking them with thanks.

  “They messed up the sections when they went through it looking for weapons or whatever it is they hope to find in a newspaper,” he said, trying to put the proper sections in order.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s all lies, anyway,” Henry said, uninterested. “What?” he then asked when he noticed Andrew staring at something in the newspaper.

  “There’s a picture of this guy,” Andrew said, recognizing a photograph of the Asian businessman he had seen in the serpents’ meeting. It was in the obituaries’ section of the newspaper. “Looks like he didn’t make it,” he said, skimming the byline beneath.

  “Sorry, dude,” Henry said consolingly.

  “Oh, I didn’t know him personally, just some dude they had us pray for… in church.”

  “You go to church?” Henry asked, a little shocked and surprised by the admission.

  “Founder and CEO of Quanta Systems. He was found dead in his penthouse apartment. A heart attack, that’s weird,” Andrew said as he read out snippets.

  “What’s weird?”

  “No mention of him being sick or suffering with his heart; just says it was sudden,” he said, thoughtfully.

  “Dude, what’s going on?” Henry asked, smelling a rat. “You don’t go to church meetings, do you?”

  Looking up at Henry with a disconcerted look, Andrew frowned. “He founded Quanta Systems,” he said as he tried to remember the details of the rec sheet he had discussed with Lily. “He had no prior illness,” he said as if trying to piece together a puzzle.

  “What?” Henry asked, looking impatient for inclusion.

  “You know when you pray for someone to get well?” Andrew asked.

  “Yeah?” Henry asked back.

  “Is it possible to pray for someone to get sick?”

  “Yeah, of course,” Henry answered, bursting from curiosity. “What are you mixed up with, kid?”

  Looking furtively around, Andrew leaned in closer. “Those secret societies you talk about?” he asked in a hushed whisper. “I went to a meeting,” he admitted. “Just one meeting,” he then said to make matters clearer.

  “I knew it!” Henry said, like the truth was staring him in the face. “I knew you got mixed up in stuff you don’t understand. They got their claws into you, haven’t they?”

  “They got the money for my bail.”

  “They own you, don’t they?” Henry asked, like he knew the answer already. “That’s how they operate.”

  “But everyone at the meeting looked, I don’t know, like they were good people, like they really did want to help,” Andrew said, still sounding puzzled.

  “Sure they do; of course they’re good people,” Henry said emphatically. “It’s the working stiffs that work for these people that don’t know what’s going on. The guy on the ground doesn’t know shit; they’re just trying to pay the bills and get by, just like everybody else. You think they have any clue what the guys at the top are doing? Does a bank clerk know what goes on in the board room in the head office in Zurich or some shit?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Same thing happened with the Freemasons. The general members were good people; hadn’t a clue what they were doing, of course, all those ancient rituals they enacted at their meetings. Got infiltrated from the top and all the hard work the good guys were doing on the bottom got used for the wrong purposes by the bad apples at the higher levels. Friggin’ ingenious, when you think about it.”

  “So, the members are good people,” Andrew asked, wishing to be consoled and thinking especially about Lily.

  “It’s a pyramid, dude,” Henry said, looking around and whispering even more softly. “The guys at the top run the show; everybody el
se is in the dark. Watch yourself,” he said worryingly. “What are you going to do?” he then asked.

  “What are my choices?”

  “Run the heck away,” Henry said, like it was a no-brainer. “Don’t get involved. You found out early so count your blessings and say ‘thanks but no thanks’ and pack your bags.”

  “Yeah,” Andrew said, like he wished it were so easy.

  “You got a pen?” Henry asked.

  “No, they took it at the gate.”

  “R. Juna,” Henry said, over-enunciating so that Andrew could hear him better. “R. Juna,” he said again. “R. Juna of Twentynine Palms. When you get in over your head, which is pretty much like now, look him up. He taught me everything I know. He was my mentor.”

  “Okay,” Andrew said, making an effort to seem interested but secretly not so much. “I will.”

  Chapter 6

  Fiona did not go on any picnic over the weekend. Despairing of her situation with Andrew, she mostly lay in bed both days feeling sad and depressed. Lost for any kind of plan with which to replace the current path that her beloved was on, she felt hopeless. It didn’t take too much speculation on her part to see where Andrew was headed. With her father as a role model, she could see clearly that the career path that he was on was a slippery slope to ever-increasing temptations and the further erosion of his innocence and basic goodness.

  Try as she might to stand by his side in togetherness, in full conscience, she just could not support him in that way. To do so would probably make her an enabler or at the very least, an accomplice to the death of his very soul.

  She didn’t blame him for being blind to the dangers that lay ahead; it was only because she had lived with her father all through the years that she was allowed a front row seat. Slowly, yet inexorably, she had watched the deathly erosion of her father’s inner core of goodness.

  Yes, her father was a good man once. He possessed a rabid idealism and enviable passion where he truly wanted to do good in the world. It was hard to remember that he too was naïve in the beginning. Although he set out with goodness in his heart, it was his mind, his thinking, that maybe let him down.