The three nurses walked in, and the skinny one began laying out a series of wicked-looking medical tools on a metal tray attached to the foot of the bed. Ynez was not only screaming but trying to escape, instinctively attempting to protect her unborn baby. The two overweight nurses held her down and strapped her into the bed while the masked doctor spread apart her legs and fastened them in stirrups.
Jorge wanted to help her, wanted to rescue her, wanted to get them both out of this funhouse hospital, but his muscles had gone slack. If he had not been supported by the orderlies, he would have slumped to the floor. He could not even seem to make his mouth work.
But he could see.
Oh yes, he could see.
And hours later, long after he’d been deposited in a chair facing the bed, after Ynez had passed out from the pain and could no longer scream, while the nurses cleaned up the blood and took away the tools, the doctor came over with a bundle in his hands. Jorge stared dumbly for a moment at the blood-spattered black gown, then looked up at the mask with its laughing cherub mouth. The eyes peering through the holes in the mask appeared to be laughing, too. The doctor held out the bundle and showed Jorge the baby, which was screaming and kicking and flailing its arms. Blood flowed from a gaping wound between its legs where the penis had been crudely severed.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor said.
2
Jorge was not the same after the birth of his child. He didn’t talk much about the baby, but when he did, his voice was filled with a haunted sadness. There was anger, too, but he didn’t express it, and in place of the carefree easygoing jokester Jorge had always been was a dark troubled man who seldom spoke unless spoken to, and sometimes not even then.
It had been the lead story in the paper and on all of the local TV newscasts for several days. Police and special investigators talked to everyone at Desert Regional who could have conceivably come into contact with Jorge and Ynez, interviewing men and women from all shifts, but no trace of either F. Hamlin the admissions nurse or the two ambulance attendants who drove them to the other hospital was ever found. Waltzer Community did not even seem to exist—authorities could find no record of it and no one in the medical community who had even heard of the facility—and gradually the tone of the articles and news stories had changed from horrified outrage to cynical disbelief, and by the end of it, Jorge’s credibility was completely shot. Rumors were circulating that Jorge and Ynez would soon be charged with the mutilation of their infant and a whole host of other crimes.
Hunt and Edward, of course, believed their friend completely. As did Beth and Joel and Stacy. Most of the other tree trimmers were on his side also, although Len, perhaps inhabiting Steve’s role a little too well, seemed to make a special effort not to show any sympathy for what had happened.
A week after returning to work, Jorge did not show up at the corp yard, and while drinking his morning coffee, Hunt was paged over the loudspeaker. Jorge was out on stress leave, Len told him in the office, and he was being reassigned. Until further notice, he’d be working with Mike Flory. With Edward out on disability and now Jorge on stress leave, they were shorthanded, so his and Mike’s respective three-man crews would become two-man crews.
Stress leave.
Had Jorge bought extra insurance for that?
Hunt tried to call his friend, but the phone seemed to be permanently off the hook, and when he went by the Marquezes’ house, no one answered the door.
“Leave them alone,” Beth told him. “Give them some time.”
“Yeah,” he said. But he thought of Edward, laid up in bed, Jorge, out on stress leave.
Two down, Hunt thought. One to go.
3
“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Hunt said. “I can’t help thinking that, despite everything that’s happened, we’ve been lucky. We’ve gotten off easy.”
Joel knew exactly how he felt.
They were out back, on the patio. The women were in the kitchen, Lilly was playing a video game in her room, and all of the windows were closed, so they had some privacy and were able to speak more freely than they could inside the house. “We haven’t even told Lilly about the baby,” he said.
Hunt nodded. “She doesn’t need to hear that.”
“But are we doing the right thing, shielding her from what’s going on around her?” Joel sighed. “You’re lucky you don’t have to worry about those kinds of things.”
Hunt lowered his voice and looked behind them to make sure no one was coming outside. “Has he come to you lately? Have you seen him?”
“No thank God. In fact, he’s never come to our house. Only to my office. Once.”
“Maybe he’s forgotten about you,” Hunt said. “Maybe he passed you by, maybe you’ll be okay.”
Joel certainly hoped so. He’d been following exactly the train of thought, although it sounded odd to hear it spoken aloud. He turned to the side, looked over at Lilly’s closed window. She was the one he was worried about. She was seeing a grief counselor to help her deal with Kate’s death, and the counselor said she was doing extremely well, but at home around them she continued to pretend as though nothing had happened, continued to act as though everything was fine and they lived in a Very Brady world.
She even acted normal around Hunt—which was nice because he believed his friend to be completely innocent of all charges, and she obviously did too. But at the same time, Kate had told her some pretty awful things, in detail, and it seemed strange to him that there was no residual effect.
And all of this made him wonder whether there would be any signs or whether she would tell them if she encountered the insurance agent someplace. That’s what he was really worried about.
No. That was not true. What he really worried about was that she would fall through the cracks, that she would not be covered by one of their insurance policies and her vulnerability would lead to…
He could not even think it.
The kitchen window slid up. “Time to eat!” Stacy called. “Come in and wash up!”
He waved. “Okay.”
Hunt smiled wryly as they turned to go inside. “If I could buy an insurance policy to protect your family and keep you out of everything, I would.”
“Don’t say that,” Joel told him, shivering. “Don’t even joke about it.”
SEVENTEEN
1
Sirens woke them up in the middle of the night. Sirens and the smell of smoke. Hunt pulled aside the curtains, looked out the window and saw flames leaping from a hole in the Bretts’ roof next door.
He’d been expecting something like this to happen. Waiting for it. Hoping it wouldn’t but knowing it would. Ever since Steve had been put into a coma and the board of supervisors had been forced to resign, he’d know that the so-called “Good Neighbor policy” embedded in his homeowner’s insurance would bring about ruin for the Bretts.
No, that was not true. It hadn’t been since Steve and the board. He’d known even as the agent had promised to activate it.
So why hadn’t he said something?
Part of him wanted Brett punished, no doubt, but that was a small raging piece of id buried way the hell down. He hadn’t really wanted anything bad to happen to anyone. Not to that moron Steve, not to that asshole Ed Brett. But something had compelled him to be silent, to keep the insurance, a nagging itch at the back of his mind, a drive to be ever safer, ever more secure, to protect himself by guarding against any and every calamity. It was like people who got tattoos. They started out with just one but were soon getting every square inch of their body inked. They couldn’t help themselves.
He’d even found himself lately inventing new forms of insurance, thinking up types of coverage that he would like to have: barbecue insurance, so that when he grilled steaks or chicken the meat would never be burned; sleep insurance, so that he would always get a decent night’s sleep and be well-rested each morning; photo insurance, so that he would always take good snapshots.
&nbs
p; Beth had been thinking along the same lines, only her ideas were nowhere near so benign.
“I’ve been wondering something,” she’d said the other day, and Hunt could tell from her tone of voice that he did not want to hear what she had to say.
“What?” he asked.
“Betty Grable had her legs insured for a million dollars. I think Mary Hart did, too. And didn’t Jennifer Lopez or someone insure their butt?”
He could see where this was leading. Insurance coverage for body parts. “I don’t think we have to worry,” he said. “We don’t have any famous body parts.” But he was starting to worry.
She leaned closer, voice still low, almost a whisper. “What if he comes to us? What if he offers to insure my breasts?”
“Don’t.”
“You know what’ll happen. I’ll get breast cancer. Or I’ll be in an accident—”
“Beth.”
She grabbed his shoulders, and he saw the hysteria building in her eyes. “What if he wants to insure my vagina? Or your cock?”
“Jesus Christ!” He pulled away from her. “Get a grip. We can’t start overreacting. We can’t let him get to us. We have enough real problems to worry about without inventing fake ones.”
“I’m not inventing fake problems,” she said. “I’m brainstorming. Trying to plan ahead so we’ll be prepared.”
Now, staring out the window, he thought that maybe she was onto something. Maybe they should try to think outside the box in an effort to prepare themselves for whatever came next.
As he watched, a fire engine stopped in front of their house, two firemen running toward the Bretts’ home carrying a hose hooked up to the truck, two others grabbing a second hose and connecting it to the nearby hydrant. Another fire engine immediately pulled up behind it. An ambulance came to a catty-corner stop in the middle of the road.
Were any of the Bretts hurt? He hoped not, although it would be hypocritical of him to pretend that he was concerned about any loss to their property. He didn’t give a damn if Ed Brett lost his house, his car and everything he owned. Still, he did not want anyone injured.
Or killed.
How had the fire started, he wondered. Faulty wiring? A short in a small appliance? Ed Brett smoking in bed? Hunt was sure that there’d be a legitimate reason, an easily recognizable and understandable cause. At the same time, he knew the real reason for the blaze, a reason that no inspector would guess in a million years.
Good Neighbor policy.
He looked across his pillow at Beth, who was also watching the scene out the window. She met his eyes. Neither of them said a word.
2
I’ll rip your cunt out you dried up bich.
Beth read the letter, then tore it up and threw it away, feeling both angry and frightened. They’d been getting threatening mail for the past several weeks, though she had yet to tell Hunt that she’d also started receiving letters at work. And the ones that came to her work were scarier, more vicious. One had vowed to kidnap her and take her anally with a cucumber and then make her eat the cucumber so she would know what it felt like to be molested. Another had promised to gut her and feed her innards to a javelina.
She thought about the message she’d just thrown away. It had been delivered by the post office—with no return address, of course—and had not come through the interoffice mail. The misspelling of “bitch” seemed suspicious to her, however, and while she was not a profiler, only watched them on TV, she thought that the error was a conscious attempt by the letter writer to make her think that someone less intelligent and less educated had sent it.
Which meant that it was probably one of her coworkers.
All of the letters took as their central premise the idea that she aided and abetted child molestation because she supported her husband. The missives they received at home were primarily aimed at Hunt, and they were basically death threats with some fairly graphic plans for torture and sexual mutilation thrown in. Neither she nor Hunt had any idea why these letters had suddenly started arriving, but they were pretty sure that radical children’s rights advocates were making them the target of an e-mail and letter-writing campaign.
She wouldn’t be surprised if the insurance agent or his company were behind it.
Maybe they were about to be offered mail insurance.
And e-mail insurance.
It was surprising how fast her perceptions had been altered, how quickly both she and Hunt had adapted their worldviews to encompass the concept of an all-powerful insurance company. These days there were very few events in their lives that they did not relate somehow to insurance.
Edward had suggested to Hunt that their current fast-track acquisition of strange and unwanted coverage was connected to their previous insurance problems. Such a conclusion was unavoidable, but it also suggested an even wider conspiracy, not merely a treadmill onto which they had inadvertently stepped, but a pervasive insurance cabal that had been stalking them, targeting them, trying to recruit them. She and Hunt had discussed the implications ad nauseam, and they’d always ended up exactly where they’d started, in a state of gloom and hopelessness, unable to think of a way to break free.
Five letters with no return addresses and intentionally generic block printing were waiting in the mailbox when she arrived home. Hunt pulled into the driveway seconds after she did, and together they checked their e-mail. Fifty-five messages, all with lovely topic headings like “Die!” and “Child Molesters Rot in Hell.”
Hunt deleted them unopened.
She was fired the next day.
Beth had been expecting to lose her job ever since she declined the employment insurance, but the timing of it was still a surprise. A Thursday? If asked, she would have guessed that it would happen on a Monday or a Friday.
And the way it was done was surprising as well. She walked into her office to find that all of her personal effects had been stripped from the walls and taken from their drawers and placed in boxes stacked neatly atop the desk. Next to the boxes, in a sealed envelope on which was printed her name, she found a letter of termination as well as her final paycheck.
The termination letter was signed by Earl Peters, Thompson’s vice president in charge of personnel, and she decided to confront him in his office, make him fire her face-to-face instead of taking the coward’s way out. She had nothing to lose. She hadn’t bought employment insurance, so she doubted that another company or institution was going to hire her, especially with the bad recommendation she knew Thompson Industries would provide despite her years of outstanding service and excellent work. Whether she slunk quietly away or went out in a blaze of glory, she would not be employable again until they defeated the insurance company and all of this insanity was stopped.
Until they defeated the insurance company?
Yes. She didn’t know how or when, but she realized that destroying the insurance company was their unspoken goal, was the end she envisioned. She had no idea how to go about such a thing—she wasn’t some plucky heroine in a novel—but it was what she believed would eventually happen, and she knew that when the time came and an opportunity presented itself, she and Hunt would act without hesitation.
She looked down once again at her termination letter, at the hastily scrawled signature of Earl J. Peters, and she thought that this would be a good time to start honing her fighting skills. Letter in hand, she strode purposefully out the door of her office.
The news was already common knowledge. In the hall she was met with concealed smirks and amused whispers. She heard the word “witch” spoken under a man’s breath, heard the word “whore.” Just before the elevator, Stacy ran up almost in tears and threw her arms around her. “How can they do this? I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”
Beth suddenly felt tears welling in her own eyes. She pulled away from her friend, not wanting to cry, needing to keep her edge. “I’ll call you later,” she said. “We’ll talk about it tonight.”
“But—”
Stacy nodded. She understood. “Where are you going?”
“Up to see fat boy.”
Her friend nodded, tried to smile through her tears. “Give him hell.”
That she would, Beth vowed. That she would.
3
Edward did his exercises energetically, smiling, talking, trying his damnedest to impress the pretty little physical therapist the hospital had sent over. But the minute she helped him into the bed, gave him his shot and left, he slumped back on his pillow in misery and defeat.
“Just shoot me now,” he said aloud.
He lay in bed, too tired even to turn on the television. Not only could he feel the agonizing pain accompanying every one of his multiple injuries, but his remaining muscles were unbelievably sore and strained. He closed his eyes for a few moments, hoping to fall asleep, but he was too miserable to doze, and he once more opened his eyes. Sighing heavily, he felt a sharp pang in his rib cage.
This was going to be a long fucking afternoon.
He glanced around his converted living room for about the millionth time. He was sick of this space, sick of this furniture, sick of these decorations, and once he was out and about again, he was going to renovate the whole damn place from top to bottom.
Things were not what they seemed.
He closed his eyes again. No, not that.
Things were not what they seemed.
That thought had occurred to him often over the past few weeks and it seemed to gain greater currency each time.
Things were not what they seemed.
He knew that was crazy thinking, knew he was being paranoid, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something different about his house, something wrong. He remembered reading a story where a family’s possessions were substituted with identical objects in the middle of the night, and that’s what this felt like.
THE POLICY Page 26