Bad Medicine (43 page)

So instead of walking over to pet Magnum where he was curled up by the dryer in the laundry room, she simply headed into the family room and sat back down on the floor.

"Were you serious about that sick part?" Lance asked.

Molly didn't bother to look over at him. "Dead serious. Pardon the pun. How long are we waiting?"

"Not long."

"God preserve me from amateurs."

"He'll be here soon and this will all be over."

Molly almost laughed all over again. "Just tell me one thing, Lance. What the hell is it that sets Transcend off?"

"Sets it off?"

"Oh, that's right. You probably haven't read the real transcripts. It mimics a massive bi-polar episode, at the end of which the user seems to slam into the ground like a crashing jet. It also seems to be addictive as hell. For some people. You don't know what it reacts to?"

"Hell, no. What do I care? The final study looks great, and the FDA is gearing up to approve, which means Grace is going to be launched into the major leagues of national drug trials. And I'm poised to get the inside scoop on all of it."

"Yeah, life couldn't be much sweeter."

Molly was just thinking that she wasn't going to last much longer when Magnum went back on alert. He was growling again, and this time he sounded oddly adult and menacing. Appropriate. Maybe she should have gotten him a long time ago. He seemed to know who the real bad guys were.

Molly closed her eyes. She heard the shuffle of footsteps at the back door; she heard Lance get up to answer it. She smelled pipe smoke and realized that the person she'd trusted most in her life had just come to kill her.

Molly actually made it back to her feet. She'd be damned if she'd face him at a disadvantage.

"I'm here," he said, his voice still so gentle and tired. "What do you want from me, Molly?"

Molly faced him then. "I want you to tell me why, Gene."

Criminals should look evil. They should look aggressive, have lantern jaws and small eyes, and smell like day-old fish. Gene Stavrakos looked like a teddy bear who'd been left out in the rain.

He stood there in her family room as if he were in church looking for answers. Huddled, rumpled, small. Molly wanted to hit him. She wanted to pummel that sweet, kind face until she didn't recognize it anymore, because he'd held her secrets in the palms of his hands so carefully for so long, and now he'd just shattered them on the floor.

"You don't understand," he said.

"Obviously not."

He took in a breath, looked away, seemed to snag his attention on the woman on the wall. "I'm tired, Molly. I've been fighting my way upstream for over twenty years hoping it would get better. It never gets better. Budgets get cut, and managed care doesn't recognize psychiatric conditions. The newest generations of drugs are taking the patients away at the internist level, and the government is throwing chronic patients out on the street. I can't practice my craft."

"So you sell it out?"

"So I find a way to get major grant money for the hospital, a retirement account for me, and some recognition as a researcher."

Molly nodded. "I know. I saw the letter. When were you going to tell Bart Banerjee that you were going to steal his research?"

"Not steal it," he insisted in tones of perfect rationalization. "I'm going to be the medical spokesman for the product. I have a higher profile name than Bart, which Argon needed. I research for them after this, and Bart gets the empty chair at the college." Gene, so healthy-looking only a few days ago, was blanched the color of paper. "I don't have a choice anymore, Molly."

Molly nodded. She walked out of the family room without a word, all four men following behind her, and she headed for the Tang Dynasty vase in the front hallway. It was there, at the bottom of the vase, that she'd hidden the disk. She said nothing more, just handed it over to Gene.

Reaching into his pocket, Gene produced a magnet. A couple of passes over the disk, and whatever had been stored there was history.

"What was it?" Molly asked, watching passively. "It never says here. What is the trigger that sets off Transcend?"

Gene actually smiled. "Testosterone."

Molly gaped. "You're kidding."

"Do you know what they called the lunch group before it became the Shitkicker's Club?"

It all became so absurdly clear. "The Testosterone Club, because trial lawyers have an excessive amount in their systems."

Gene nodded. "If it had just been that, we would never have had a problem. We could have restricted it. After all, in the drug trials, Transcend did perform spectacularly. But it seems that one of the reasons people become more decisive and aggressive on Transcend is that it somehow increases testosterone levels. So it starts working really well, and then after an extended period..."

"Whammo."

"Whammo."

Molly shook her head. "No wonder Argon is terrified."

She just got that same, sweet, tired smile.

"Who else?" she asked. "Who else is involved from the hospital?"

"Oh, nobody. Not deliberately. Not more than they would be for any other drug trial."

"What about Tim McGuire?"

"The alderman?" he asked. "Well, that's a funny thing. He came to the people at Argon and helped convince them to make use of Pearl's indiscretion to keep the attention away from the drug. He knew about it from Mary Margaret Ryan."

"Peg," Molly said automatically. "Her name was Peg."

Peg, who had called Tim McGuire ineffectual. So ineffectual that he'd taken full advantage of an opportunity like Pearl's death to put a power squeeze on the enemy whose job he wanted, all the while putting several major local powers in his pocket.

Molly couldn't handle any more. She had the most horrible feeling that if she asked many more questions, she'd find out that it had been Sam who'd sneaked around emptying out all those computers.

Molly was sure there was something else she needed to know. More of the conspiracy theory to unravel. She'd lost her impetus, though. She knew that the time for polite conversation was just about over. Especially when Gene reached into his pocket and pulled out six bottles of pills.

"There should be plenty here," he said, handing them to the one masked man.

"No," Molly said, stepping up to him. "You do it."

Gene started away from her as if she'd asked him to rape her. "What?"

"You want me dead, you face me. You do it. Don't give it to somebody else so that later you can say that you didn't really know what was going on. I
want
you to know."

"No, Molly. I won't do that."

"Then you're not just a thief, Gene. You're a coward."

"Yes, Molly. I'm a coward."

Gene turned away, and out of nowhere, Molly came to terrible life. The old 'Nam rage swamped her, and she launched herself at him. Nails and teeth and shrieks.

"I trusted you, you son of a bitch!" she yelled, pushing him back toward the kitchen.

Gene never lifted a hand to defend himself. The big guy yanked Molly off him like a jacket.

"I'm sorry," Gene said, and the awful thing was, Molly believed he meant it.

She made another try for him. Gene sidestepped her like a boxer and let the big guy take care of business. The big guy punched Molly in the face.

Molly went down like a rock. Somewhere through the fog of alcohol, she knew she was going to hurt like hell in a minute. She was going to puke all over her kitchen floor, which she thought might be under her left cheek. She was still trying to watch Gene, who had deliberately turned away from her to walk out the back door.

"This is what medicine is about?" she demanded, trying so hard to see. Her head was reeling and her heart thundered with scalding fury. Gene was leaving her with a guy who didn't just like to kill women, he liked to hurt women. "Gene!"

"You're gonna make this hard, aren't you?" the big gunman said over her head.

Molly tasted blood in her mouth and spat it at him. "You bet your ass I am."

Not because she thought it would change the outcome. Not that she cared anymore whether it did. But she couldn't abide the idea of simply letting Gene give her to somebody else so she could be quietly disposed of. She was going to have to leave her mark any way she could. She was going to try like hell to pay Gene back for doing this.

The gunman pulled her up by her hair. "Good," he whispered in her ear. "I like it that way."

Magnum never barked. The first time Molly knew she had another visitor in this endless night of surprises was the sound of a laconic voice and the smell of Lagerfeld cologne.

"Oh, shit, Saint Molly. You know this kind of thing is against my religion."

Molly bucked against the big guy. "Get the hell out of here, Frank!"

She saw him then. Standing there, just inside the back door in jeans and T-shirt and tennis shoes. Grinning over at Gene as if the two of them shared a great private joke. "She's wild about me."

And then, he simply swung.

Gene went down even harder than Molly had. Lance screamed like a pig and the guy who held Molly raised the hand with the gun in it.

"Frank!" Molly yelled, literally lifting herself off the ground and slamming into her assailant. "Duck!"

Molly connected. Frank ducked. The shot went wide. The one from the other gunman, though, didn't.

Chapter 21

Molly saw the bullet hit Frank high in the chest. He grunted and slammed back against the cabinets. Molly heard a terrible howling sound and realized it was coming from her own throat. They'd killed him. They'd killed Frank, when he'd just come to try and proposition her. When he'd seen what was going on and stayed to help.

They killed him, and that changed everything.

Molly forgot her assailant had a gun. She just remembered that he had eyes and testicles and tender knees. She punched and jabbed and slammed as hard as she could. She heard his surprised oaths as she connected, and heard the scuffling on the floor beyond. She heard his partner yelling for him to move so he could get a clear shot.

Molly knew she was going to lose. The guy was just too big for her. When he got over the surprise, he was going to pummel her to death. It didn't matter.

"Move, J.T., move!" that high voice shrilled.

Lance was slamming out the screen door like his hair was on fire. Gene staggered to his feet and looked down at Frank. Somehow Molly could see them, even as she focused on those cold eyes beneath that knit cap. Even as she bit and kicked and scratched to get that mask off and the stupid charade over with.

"This is against my better judgment," she heard on a rasp.

Frank's rasp.

Frank wasn't dead.

Gene was trying to follow Lance out the door. If he did, there would be no way Frank would survive. No way Gene would allow it, especially since he wouldn't be there to see it happen.

"Gene, he's hurt!" Molly screamed. "Help him!"

The minute she lost her focus, her assailant brought the gun down against the side of her head.

Molly toppled sideways into the kitchen table, sending the whole thing clattering to the floor. She landed and heard the big guy gasping and cursing as he followed.

"It's not your shot," he was saying to his partner. "It's mine."

Molly couldn't move. She couldn't breathe or see. She knew that fifteen minutes ago, she'd been waiting for this moment to happen. That she should just shut her eyes and look forward to oblivion.

She couldn't let Frank get himself killed.

She heard her assailant coming and rolled into him.

A bullet crashed into the cabinets inches from her head. She heard a guttural curse and felt the guy struggle for balance, like a sawed tree about to go. Molly reached straight up for a handful of testicle and yanked with everything she had. She heard not just one scream, but two.

"My eyes, my eyes, what did you do?"

It was the little guy. Shrieking like he was on fire and hopping around. Molly didn't pay attention. She was trying to scrabble away from the big guy with the gun, and kept slipping over the stuff she'd lost from her purse. Combs, brushes, checkbooks, pens. Comb, brush, checkbook, pen, stun gun.