by Jaime Maddox
The door to this private lounge opened, and Jet turned as Jeannie’s words hit her ear just as hard as an imagined punch hit her gut, knocking the wind from her.
“Oh, shit,” Jeannie said, to which Jet replied, “What the hell?”
Katie had just walked into the lounge, a dark-haired woman not much taller following closely behind. She wore a khaki miniskirt and a bright-green sleeveless sweater, with bright-green matching backless loafers. As always, she was phenomenally beautiful but seemed to have more confidence in her stride, like she was right at home in the hospital and on a mission. The contrast reminded Jet that this woman couldn’t be Katie. Katie was unconscious, fighting for her life just a few yards away in the SICU.
She stood but Jeannie was quicker, a step ahead as they raced across the room.
The woman who held such a stunning resemblance to Katie noticed them then, and her face registered great confusion as she asked, “Aunt Jeannie, what are you doing here? What’s going on?”
Jet caught up to her, and Jeannie looked at Jet, her expression clearly troubled. “Jet, I’d like you to meet my godchild, Nicole Coussart. Nic, this is the head nurse at my office, Jet Fox. And this woman, I’ve never seen before,” she said as Rae pulled up beside Nic.
“Your godchild?” Jet asked, as if it were a complex concept.
At the same time, Nic offered an introduction to Rae.
“Jeannie, what’s going on?” Jet demanded, still staring at Nic.
“That’s what I want to know,” Nic asked, but her tone wasn’t as gentle as Jet’s. She was staring intently at Jeannie.
“How did you find out?” Jeannie asked Nic.
“Find out what?” she replied.
At that moment the doors to the SICU opened, and a doctor emerged. He looked their way and then hurried toward them. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said as he pulled Nic into a tight hug. “Something fucking strange is going on here.”
“You’ve got that right,” Jet said, still staring at Nic.
“Hey, Rae. Hey, Jeannie, how are you?” the doctor said, holding out his hand in greeting.
“I’ve had better days,” Jeannie replied, and then she continued. “Oh, I see. Louis, you called Nic, huh?”
“Yeah. I had to see her. I have a patient back there who looks just like her and not only that—”
“Kathleen Finan? She’s here?” Nic asked.
Louis nodded.
“What happened to her?”
“She was shot.”
“Is that why you called me? You could have just told me on the phone.”
“Nic, you’re not going to believe—”
“Actually, Louis,” Jeannie said, “can we go someplace a little more private? I think Nic needs to hear this from me.”
“You know about this?” he demanded, taking a step forward, his posture both shocked and defensive.
“Yes.”
“What’s going on, Jeannie?” Jet was pleading now. Jeannie wrapped an arm around her waist.
“I’ll explain it all in a moment,” she said as they followed Louis into the surgical residents’ lounge. Fortunately, it was empty.
They all sat and looked at Jeannie, who was studying the ceiling. After a moment she looked at Nic. “Nicole, you have a twin sister. An identical twin. Her name is Katie Finan.”
After Jeannie’s announcement, Nic spoke first. “What the fuck are you talking about?” She looked from the serious expression on Jeannie’s face to the others in the room. They wore mixtures of confusion and concern as well, and Nic drew some small comfort in knowing she wasn’t the only one who thought Jeannie had lost her mind.
“You have a twin,” Jeannie repeated, nodding but saying nothing else.
Nic stared at her again and then at the others in the room. Rae put a hand on her back, and though Nic felt somewhat reassured by her presence, she still couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Jeannie, how? What are you saying? That I was a twin and my parents adopted only one of us?”
“Yessss…no. It wasn’t their choice, Nic. You were the second baby, and the other family didn’t want both of you.”
“What? That’s absurd.” All was quiet for a moment, and Nic silently studied the faces around her, looking for some reassurance, but none came. Her eyes once again found Jeannie. “Tell me what happened.”
Jeannie cleared her throat. “I was working the night you were born. It was the last month of my residency—my OB rotation. Family docs delivered babies back in those days. Your mom—your biological mother, that is—came in. She was already in advanced labor when I examined her. Her mother was with her, and so was a priest. She was a college student, didn’t tell her parents she was pregnant, apparently was planning to keep you. Her parents had other plans, though, and they arranged for an adoption, through the church. Before Katie was even born, the adoptive parents arrived. I delivered Katie and the placenta, and all seemed well. I went to check on the baby, talked to the adoptive parents, gave them my card, and offered to be the baby’s doctor. A minute later one of the nurses came looking for me. Your mom was having contractions again. A few minutes later, you were born.”
Jeannie took a sip of her coffee and, before she could swallow, Nic spoke. “Well, then what?”
“I went out to talk to the Finans and told them there was another baby. They were shocked, of course. Everyone was. We didn’t use ultrasound routinely back then. No one knew there were twins. Marge Finan would have taken you both, but her husband would have no part of it. He told her no, and she couldn’t convince him otherwise. After a few minutes, she asked if I could find another suitable family to take you.”
Jeannie sipped her coffee and Nic once again spoke up. “So you called my parents.”
Jeannie nodded and looked relieved that Nic seemed to understand. “Yes. First, I talked with your biological mom and told her about your folks. She thought they would be great for you. So then, I called them. Your dad tried to convince Jack Finan to keep you both, but he wouldn’t waver. Then your dad offered to take both of you, and all that did was piss Jack off. He didn’t just refuse to give up Katie. He also refused to allow any contact between your families. The Finans weren’t planning to tell her she was adopted, and he didn’t want her to think she’d got a bum deal by getting them, instead of rich doctors.”
“Jeannie, this sounds like a bad movie,” Nic told her. “You’re kidding, me, right?”
“What’s your birthday?” Jet asked.
Nic looked at her, wondering why Jet was here and what gave her the right to interrupt. Instead of telling her off, though, she answered the question. “It’s tomorrow. Why?”
Jet shook her head, looking as confused as Nic felt. “Then she’s not kidding. Katie’s birthday is tomorrow, too.”
“Just who the hell are you?” Nic demanded. What right did Jet have to be in this conversation? This was between her and Jeannie.
“I’m Katie’s partner.”
Nic noticed the look of surprise on Jeannie’s face but didn’t say anything to her. Instead, she continued to question Jet. “Did she know about me?”
Jet cleared her throat before answering and wiped away tears on the sleeve of her Phillies T-shirt. “She has no clue. She doesn’t even know she was adopted.”
“Jesus, this is unbelievable.” Nic leaned back and felt Rae beside her, and never was she so grateful for the presence of another human being. Rae’s hand moved in small circles on her back, the rhythm like a heartbeat, calm and soothing.
Jet turned to Louis and asked, “So are you Katie’s doctor now?”
Louis nodded. “I did the surgery. I’m sorry I couldn’t get out to talk to you earlier, but another trauma came in and I had to go back to the OR. Someone spoke to you, right?”
Jet nodded. “Yes, a woman. She told us the surgery went well but Katie was still critical.”
Louis nodded again. “That’s right. I had to remove her spleen, and she lost quite a bit of blood.
But she’s stable now. She’s holding her own. You guys can go back to see her if you’d like.”
“Jeannie, do you want to come with me or stay here?” Jet asked.
“Are you okay by yourself?”
Jet nodded. “I’ll be fine. The initial shock is over.”
“Okay, then you go. I’d like to talk to Nic.”
Nic watched Jet’s back disappear through the lounge door, uncomfortable in the silence. Finally, Jeannie spoke. “Nicole, listen to me. Your parents did nothing wrong. They’ve loved you—”
“Couldn’t they have told me? When I think of all the times I said my prayers at night, begging God for a brother or sister, I…I…I could scream!”
“It was evident by the time you were two years old that reasoning with you would be a challenge. They couldn’t have told you without breaking their promise to the Finans. You’d have hopped on your bike and ridden to Philly to try to find her.”
Nic sniffed. “That’s probably true. But when I got older, I wouldn’t have done that.”
“When you got older, Katie’s life was a mess. I didn’t even know where she was for about four years after she ran away.”
“She ran away? Like seriously?”
“Oh, yeah. It hasn’t been a picnic for her.”
“So, is the news right? Did she shoot her boyfriend?”
“No, she didn’t shoot him. Whoever shot him came back and got Katie tonight.”
Nic rubbed away the tension that had formed at both temples, trying to ward off the migraine she felt coming. “Wow. I don’t know what else to say.”
Nic looked at Rae. All the while they’d been talking Rae had been beside her, silently supporting her with a hand on the back and a pat now and then. Nic offered her a little smile. “I guess you’ll never forget this date, huh?”
Rae nodded. “This is going down in history, just like that time you met your ex at Dalessandro’s.”
Nic couldn’t hold back a laugh, but it was bitter.
“Nic, do you want to see her?” Jeannie asked.
Nic rubbed her forehead as she pondered the question. “I don’t know proper etiquette for a situation like this. But I suppose I should, huh?”
“It’s up to you. No pressure here.”
“Will you come with me?” she asked Jeannie, then looked to Louis. “You, too?”
When they both nodded, Nic turned to Rae. “Can you wait for me?”
“Of course.”
Nic and Jeannie followed Louis through the doors into the sterile, cold environment of the SICU. It was like an anthill, bustling with activity, people hurrying in every direction. It was brightly lit, and the lights immediately caused Nic to cringe as the migraine began to take hold.
Louis took them to room three, where Jet sat at the bedside, holding a small hand in her large one. Nic took one step toward the bed and then stopped as she saw Katie’s face, the mirror image of her own, but pale and sickly and penetrated by that awful endotracheal tube. Even though a glance at the monitor told her Katie’s vital signs were normal, she was still a frightful sight, and one that Nic didn’t want to see. She stepped back and turned, looking at Jeannie as she began walking back the way she came. “I have no business here, Jeannie. This isn’t my sister. I’m an only child.”
Not bothering to wait for a reply, Nic began running back toward the SICU doors, eager to get back into the real world and away from this madness. She found Rae in the lounge. “Can we please go?”
“Is everything okay?” Rae asked as she hurried to match Nic’s pace.
“No, it’s not. I need to get away from here. I have no obligations to that woman, Rae. The only thing we share is a common thread of DNA, and that’s not enough to get me involved in her sordid life.”
“Okay, okay,” Rae said, patting Nic’s back again.
“Just please take me home, Rae. Please?”
Chapter Twenty-three
The Candy Dispenser
Simon pulled his Ford into the underground parking garage beneath the headquarters of the Happy and Healthy Pharmacy, LLC, and parked it beside his Lexus. He’d returned the borrowed car he’d driven to the attorney’s office and eliminated the garage attendant who’d lent it to him. Katie Finan was finally dead, and Simon now could go about his business without further distractions.
As he walked to the elevator, he had a bounce in his step and hummed as he used his key to call the elevator. Once inside, he again used his key to direct the elevator down, into the floor below ground that very few people knew existed.
The door opened into a corridor, a cube-shaped area only large enough to accommodate the elevator doors, two other tall, wide, solid doors that stood closed before him, and a hand truck that carried supplies. To his left was the narcotics storage area for the Happy and Healthy Pharmacies, all thirty of them in operation in the Philadelphia area. Twice weekly, shipments of controlled substances arrived and were stored in the vault behind that door until they were distributed to each of his stores.
He always kept a week’s supply on hand, in the event of a hurricane or other emergency that shut down the avenues of supply that kept his business running. Depending on the day, between 750,000 and 3,000,000 tablets of controlled substances were stored here, with a potential street value of $15,000,000. Unfortunately, Simon wasn’t selling those pills on the street. One day, when he was ready to skip town, he would consider raiding the narcotics vault, but only if the police were already suspicious. If they weren’t, the simultaneous disappearance of him and all those drugs would definitely arouse their interest in him.
Simon turned away from the vault and keyed the lock of an even more secure area. After passing through the doorway, he then opened two more locks and entered the lab. It was here Simon made his money, where the legitimate pills that arrived in those bottles in the vault were smashed into powder, adulterated with other chemicals, and then pressed again into the tablets sold in the pharmacy and on the streets.
The concept was really simple—so basic he’d made his first narcotics tablets when he was in pharmacy school. He’d gained the trust of his father-in-law, who saw him for the bright and ambitious young man he was, and was given a tremendous amount of responsibility for the three stores he had then. Simon was only a twenty-year-old clerk, but even then he understood the value of the narcotics and set about finding a way to capitalize on his unique opportunity.
Simon knew about the manufacturing of pills—they all learned it in school. He began combining basic drugs with binding ingredients and fillers that he could get his hands on—diphenhydramine, glycerin, and cornstarch—and he carefully mixed his first batch of counterfeit cold medication. It was a paste, which he pressed into an empty lip-balm tube, and after it dried for several days, he held in his hands a solid roll of medication, which promptly shattered when he attempted to free it from the cylinder. It took more experimentation to figure out how to actually remove it and then how to cut the final product so it resembled a pill. In the end, though, he manufactured what would pass as a genuine tablet.
After playing around in his basement lab with other medications, he finally worked up the nerve to remove tablets of oxycodone from the pharmacy. He couldn’t very well give a patient half a bottle of legitimate medicine and half counterfeit. Even the most trusting person, if they noticed the difference, would be concerned. So he took twelve tablets, which was the number doctors commonly prescribed, and crushed and adulterated and recast them into new tabs, each with slightly less oxycodone than the originals. When they were dry, he smuggled them back into the pharmacy in a Happy and Healthy Pharmacy bottle. He waited for the right opportunity, and when he saw it, he made the switch. A college student with a legitimate prescription, one whose wisdom teeth were no longer in their sockets, took home Simon’s first batch of homemade oxycodone.
Simon couldn’t sleep for days, worried that someone would discover his scam. But when three days went by and no one arrested or fired him, he decided to act aga
in, this time creating twenty-four pills from twelve. Half left the Happy and Healthy Pharmacy in the hands of another dental patient, and he sold the remainder to a drug addict for fifty bucks.
When he calculated the total hours he’d labored to produce those twenty-four tablets, including those early fumbled attempts, he concluded the hourly wage for the production of his product was about five cents. This number wasn’t discouraging, however. He’d already improved his process since his first trial, and he was constantly perfecting his operation. The twenty-four tablets, and the fifty dollars, were only the beginning.
Over the years, his operation expanded tremendously, to the current state overseen by a pharmacist, who wasn’t likely to kill people by substituting dangerous chemicals when their stock ran low, as he’d known street dealers to do. His pharmacist worked three evenings a week, arriving at headquarters just after the staff of accountants and secretaries and computer people had left for the day. He’d descend into his subterranean lab, and, using additives like ibuprofen and diphenhydramine (to mimic some of the natural properties of the oxycodone) he’d transform 140,000 pills a week into a slightly larger number. Their margin was eight percent. The roughly 150,000 tablets his pharmacist created in the lab all contained ninety-two percent of the drug their labels claimed.
The originals were all replaced and sold to unsuspecting customers at the Happy and Healthy Pharmacies. The extra 11,000 tabs were Simon’s, and he distributed them to a carefully chosen network of sales people throughout the area. His return was about $25,000 a week on these illegal drugs. He could increase his profits, he knew, by reducing the oxycodone content per tablet, but that would increase the risk of discovery. He could also pay his pharmacist and his distributors less. But he wasn’t buying just their loyalty, but also their intelligence. They understood that they were well compensated, and, like him, they were cautious. None of them were greedy, and that was why they were still in business almost twenty years later. Other than Billy, they’d all done their jobs well.