I headed south on I-90 toward I-57. Half an hour later I was outside of the city. When I stopped in Kankakee again for lunch, I called Fred. He agreed not to make fun of me for seeing a Juju priest. He also told me to keep the gun; he figured I needed it more than he did. I feared he was right. I thanked him for all his help and promised not to visit again, unless I was there to have fun.
I was glad to be home. After putting on a clean t-shirt and shorts, I grabbed a bottle of Coke from the refrigerator—one of those eight-ounce varieties commemorating a great basketball season. I was pleased to find that there were no body parts in the refrigerator and that my fridge-o-phobia seemed to be under control.
I watched an old episode of The Munsters. Apparently Herman lacked dancing ability and so decided to take lessons rather than rely on Grandpa’s potion. I would have taken the magic elixir. Why go to all that trouble when your problems can be solved through chemistry? This, of course, made me think of my friend Mr. Johnson. I decided to call my office and check for messages. It seems people on television always choose the hard way, while real people take the easy way out. I guess if a problem were easy to solve, the process wouldn’t take thirty minutes, minus commercials.
I wondered why a hottie like Lilly would ever marry a monster like Herman. And why a vampire and a Frankenstein monster would have a werewolf for a son. Also, and even more implausible, how a good looking woman like Marilyn could not know she was good looking. That only happens in country songs and the movies.
I knew a guy who was friends with the actor who played Herman Munster. He was a law professor on the East Coast. Apparently Herman went to Harvard and was smart as hell. Things are not always as they seem. I realized I was stalling. I was afraid to listen to my messages.
Finally I called work. There was a message from a newspaper reporter; we’d sent her a disc of the break-in, and she was asking about its significance. There was a message from Chris Johnson, who had moved to a hotel and had been following Rudolf Friedrichs, the head of the Chemistry Department at the university. Apparently Dr. Friedrichs had been spending a lot of time at a chicken coop near the campus. Chris provided the address and said that he was going to break into the chicken coop tonight to find out what was going on. That message had been left yesterday, so it was too late to stop him. Bob called to see how my trip had gone. Susan wanted to know if I would be back at work on Monday. No more messages. What had happened to Chris? Had he been arrested?
I decided to avoid the real world. I took a warm bath, taking care to scrub the cut on my chest, which was healing quickly. That was going to be a difficult scar to explain. Maybe I could convince the ladies I’d been in a knife fight. Although at the moment Chloe was the only lady interested in me. Maybe I should say Marinette-Bwa-Chech. No, she would always be Chloe to me. Too bad she was more interested in my dead body than my live one.
At dinnertime it took courage to open my refrigerator again, even though I’d already fetched a Coke. It had been a while since I’d been home. I found some stuff in my crisper bin that made the heart look tasty. Then I remembered the new Thai restaurant downtown and ordered chicken curry take-out. On the way over to pick it up, I stopped at the natural food store and bought cheese, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of cranberry juice. A half hour later I was in my underwear on the couch eating rice and curry chicken while drinking cranberry juice out of the bottle. The remote control was in my left hand, the juice in my right. A man in his natural habitat.
When I finished eating I put the leftovers in the refrigerator and retired to my bedroom.
I awoke in a small room with two twin beds and a television set. It reminded me of the motel room where I had mashed up Thomas’s head. The picture on the wall was different—a botanical print of some kind of orchid. The color of the carpeting and drapes was similar, if somewhat less garish.
Chloe lay on the bed. She wore a black leather dress with a long zipper down the front. She must have needed a shoe horn to put it on. She motioned for me to sit beside her.
“I heard you inquired about me? That’s okay, no hard feelings. In fact I have a present for you. An entertainment of a sort. Sorry, no popcorn, but please sit, shhh, it is about to take place.”
The door swung open and a large Hispanic man entered carrying an enormous black trunk. When he got through the door he opened the trunk and pulled out Chris Johnson. I ran over to help, but my hands went right through him; he might have been a ghost in a bad movie.
“If this is a dream, wake me up!” I pleaded.
“Not yet ... you will miss the end.”
Mr. Johnson had a bandage on his head saturated in blood. The man carried his body into the bathroom and removed the bandage. Blood started to leak onto the carpet.
“Stop this! He will bleed to death.”
“Oh, he’s already dead. His body just doesn’t know it yet.”
The Hispanic man donned a pair of rubber gloves and removed a plastic syringe from his pocket. I watched as he injected my client’s forearm.
“How does he find a vein, no rubber cord or anything? That man is good,” Chloe teased.
The man took a plastic bag with a little dirty white dust in the bottom and left it on the nightstand. He then dragged the empty trunk from the room. “This can’t be good for business; all your clients keep killing themselves,” Chloe said coquettishly. “Enough about business, what do you like to do for fun?” As she continued to speak she opened the window and then the screen. “Poor kid. Such a promising future, destroyed by drugs.” She began to unzip her dress but was having trouble getting past her ample cleavage. “Care to give me a hand? No, don’t bother. I can do it.”
She disappeared before my eyes. In her place was a small brown owl, which made a screechy noise and flew out the window. Didn’t owls hoot?
I awoke to the smell of eggs and toast. Susan was in my kitchen. Her long red hair was tied back in a light-blue scrunchy, and she wore a matching light-blue skirt and a white cotton t-shirt decorated with a picture of an American flag.
“How did you get in?”
“You always leave a key in your dead plant on the porch.”
Bob was right. I needed to get a living plant.
“What are you doing here?”
“I am making you breakfast and making sure you’re not dead.”
“Thanks.”
“Also, I haven’t been able to get a hold of you.”
“Sorry, I was in Chicago the past couple of days.”
“Well, that reporter friend of yours has called a bunch of times. I left the rest of the mail at the office, but this one was shoved under the door with ‘URGENT’ written across the front. I thought you would want to see it. I assumed someone’s wife took the marital microwave, but you never know.” Handing me the letter, she added, “That suicide at the jail is making all kinds of news. People are pretty freaked out.”
The letter was from Chris Johnson. I opened it. The writing was scribbled in black ink.
I am sure of what I previously only suspected. They are setting me up because I know too much. I called a friend of mine who still works in the Chemistry Department. She wouldn’t say much other than that Schlangenol Pharmaceuticals has been testing a product and they are ready for it to go worldwide. Whatever this product is, it is big. They have purchased about $400,000 in new lab equipment. I asked a friend of mine to save the disc of data I found on the Nazi experiments I talked to you about earlier. She said she wouldn’t get involved. I hope she changes her mind, but somehow I doubt it.
“Did you hear me?” Susan asked.
“No, I’m sorry, I was reading this letter. What were you saying?”
“You got a call from a guy about a Federal drug case.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Conspiracy to distribute cocaine.”
“How much cocaine?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Hard or soft?”
“What do you mean?”
“I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, because they changed the law.”
“What do you mean?”
“It used to be that in the Federal system, when it was cocaine base or crack as opposed to powder, the potential sentences were higher. You have been working in state court too long. Don’t you remember that one of the civil rights leaders claimed the system was racist because black people tended to use crack and white people tended to snort powder?”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“It is all kind of silly at this point. Pretty much everyone who uses cocaine uses crack. In the seventies rich white people did tend to snort cocaine. Crack didn’t really exist until the mid-eighties, when someone figured out that if you heated up cocaine with water and baking soda you could make rocks potent enough to smoke. You would get a stronger high than freebasing with no needles or fuss. Society has been in a nose dive ever since.”
“Thanks for the history lesson,” Susan said, “but I know what crack is. I work for the Public Defender, and the guy didn’t say.”
All of a sudden it clicked. There must have been a light bulb over my head, because Susan was staring at me.
“What are you thinking?”
“I think I just figured out what all this is about. I think I know what the problem is.”
“That must be nice.”
“No, ‘nice’ would be if I’d figured out the solution.”
“Are you going to tell me or make me wait?”
“I’m going to make you wait, but I’ll let you know. I just need time to puzzle it out a little more.”
We finished breakfast and Susan took off with a promise on my part that I would sit her down and fill her in soon. My life was in danger, and I didn’t want to put Susan’s life in danger too. If my hunch was correct, I was dealing with some very rich, powerful and evil people.
It’s funny; you can deal with a problem for a long time and never see the whole, only the pieces. Sometimes you learn by examining a piece at a time until you see the whole, like building a puzzle. Yet sometimes you can consider all the pieces and, without putting them together, visualize the image all at once. One second you don’t know, the next you do. Like turning on a light. This was a Gestalt moment. I was able to put the pieces together all at once in order to form the whole.
There had been no crack cocaine in World War II. The Nazis didn’t ever experiment with synthetic crack. Why would they? They’d needed morphine for pain. If a stimulant was called for, there were plenty of synthetic drugs that would work. Cocaine could be used to numb injuries, but other drugs would work better. The studies Mr. Johnson stumbled upon had been done recently using human beings in Champaign-Urbana. The company was not hiding its Nazi past but its evil present. Mr. Zan had been a subject in an experiment, as had everyone else in that apartment complex. The drug had been provided free of cost in unlimited quantities. To discover the drug’s impact, they had been spied on in their apartments, thus explaining the cameras and the doctors’ visits. The doctors would record the results and make modifications. They could completely control the environment the subjects lived in.
It also explained why the lab technician had not been able to analyze the drug. The sample contained some cocaine but very little. Most of the substance was a brand new synthetic version of the drug. There would be no known sample to test it against; thus it could not be identified. The subjects wouldn’t tell. Why should they? They had all the free crack they wanted. Free room and board. Free medical care. This was an addict’s dream come true. Not to mention, who would believe a crackhead? If someone did get out of line and had to be killed, the death of a drug addict was not going to raise a lot of suspicions.
It also seemed that this new synthetic crack was more powerful than ordinary crack. People have said that powdered cocaine compared to crack is like a firecracker compared to a stick of dynamite. Well I suspect that ordinary crack compared to this synthetic crack was like a stick of dynamite compared to a two-ton bomb. Mr. Zan said this stuff was the best. While on it, he had aged ten years in a couple of months. I suspected that this drug was more potent and addictive than any formerly known to man.
I didn’t have all the answers, but I knew who did. People think we’re losing the war on drugs. Compared to what is coming the war on drugs is just a playground skirmish. If I’d been given the opportunity to kill Hitler prior to World War II, wouldn’t I have felt morally compelled to do so?
Here I was at a new crossroads in history. I might not be able to stop this world epidemic, but I would give it a try. Even at the cost of my own life.
Let the battle begin.