CHAPTER 12
John Palmer Ashby was as old as he was rich, and he was very rich. He had been born in a tar-paper shack in a small, dusty West Texas town in the shadow of the very oil derricks that would later make him one of the ten richest men in the United States.
From his earliest days, he had fought and clawed his way through life, expecting and giving no quarter. He quit school at the age of twelve to work the oil fields, and he surprised everyone by waiting until he was eighteen to kill his first man, and that by accident. He beat the man to death with a whiskey bottle after an argument over the number of spots showing on a pair of dice. Afterward, Ashby drained the whiskey bottle, picked up the cash from the floor, and went back to work like nothing had happened.
He had won his first oil lease in a stud poker game, and quickly parleyed that first strike into a dozen producing wells by the time he was twenty-two. He drove his men as hard as he drove himself, making many enemies and few friends on his road to riches. He was fond of saying that you couldn’t find oil without spilling some blood, and few of his wells came in without at least one unmarked grave near the sludge pool. He paid top dollar, and his foreman and top crewmen got a percentage of the wells. No one much cared one way or the other about the men who got in Ashby’s way and died for their trouble, as long as his checks cleared the bank.
When a young man, he had been called J.P., and even today, the initials alone were enough to tell anyone in the state whom was being referred to. Once barrel-chested with arms like tree limbs, age and illness had shrunken and withered his body—but not his spirit, or his temper.
Beverly Luna, his day nurse, entered his room on tiptoe, hoping to check his IVs and escape without awakening him. She bent over the bed and tapped the clear plastic reservoir on the IV bottle with her index finger, checking the level of the fluid within.
“Goddamnit, Beverly! Don’t sneak around like that,” growled Ashby out of the side of his face that still worked. He scooted up in the bed and turned his head to look at her as he talked. “Walk in here with a little authority so a body can hear you coming, without being startled out of a sound sleep.”
Beverly started backing toward the door, mumbling, “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
As she turned and hurried out the door, Ashby just waved a limp hand at her in dismissal. He couldn’t tolerate anyone he could dominate, and that was just about everyone.
He lay there, eyes roaming the room that had become his prison since his stroke. It looked more like a hospital infirmary than a bedroom. There were IV bottles, medicine bottles, and several machines that beeped and wheezed and clicked as they went about their business of keeping J.P. Ashby alive.
He reached for the bell hung next to his bed to summon Beverly back, and he was still surprised when his left hand didn’t obey his command, even though it had been almost a year since the stroke that had robbed him of the use of the left side of his body.
Angry at his body’s refusal to obey his will, he rolled on his side and grabbed the bell with his right hand, ringing it furiously.
Beverly rushed into the room, breathless. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. What do you need, Mr. Ashby?”
“Unhook this goddamn oxygen. I want to have a cigar.”
“Now, Mr. Ashby, you know what the doctor said . . .”
Ashby jerked the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils and threw them at the terrified girl. “I don’t give a shit what that goddamn doctor said. I’m not going to lie here and waste away without even the comfort of a good smoke! Now, turn that blasted machine off and get me my cigar.”
At that moment, a man walked through the door, a lopsided grin on his face. He was dressed in a suit that cost more than most men made in a year, and had coal-black hair and a dark complexion.
“You’d better care what your ‘goddamn doctor said,’ you old reprobate, or I’m gonna quit coming around here trying to keep your sorry ass alive,” the man said wryly.
One side of Ashby’s face turned up in a rare attempt at a smile. “Why, Dr. Tom, what the hell are you doing here?”
Dr. Tom Alexander glanced quickly at the nurse, Luna, and then he just shook his head. “I’ve been hearing reports from reliable sources that you’ve been a bad, bad boy and haven’t been taking the meds that I ordered.”
Ashby cut his eyes at the terrified nurse and pointed an index finger at her. “Goddamnit, Beverly, you’ve been talking out of school again. You’re fired! Now, get your bony ass out of my house!”
Alexander held up both hands, palms out. “Now, J.P., just cool your jets. The nurse is only doing what I told her to do . . . namely, trying to keep an ornery old fart alive so I can keep living in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed.”
He inclined his head at the nurse. “Go on now, Beverly, and don’t pay this grumpy old goat no nevermind. Maybe you could fix us both a cup of coffee—decaf for the grump and leaded for me.”
Ashby nodded his assent and Beverly scooted out of the room, her face flaming scarlet.
Alexander shook his head again at the old man in the bed. “Now, J.P., you’d better be nice to Beverly. She’s the third nurse I’ve had to hire this year, and with the word getting around, pretty soon we won’t be able to get anyone to take care of you.”
“Alright, alright,” Ashby grumbled. “I’ll try to take it easy, but damn it, what’s the use of staying alive if I can’t even enjoy an occasional cigar?”
“Occasional is okay. Ten a day is overdoing it,” Alexander replied with a smile.
As he took a seat next to Ashby’s bed, the doctor thought back to their first meeting two years previously. Alexander had been walking through the emergency room of the heart hospital in Corpus Christi when he heard a nurse shout, “Code blue! Code blue!”
He entered the nearest treatment room, where an elderly man on a stretcher was writhing, gasping for breath, and slowly turning blue.
Alexander, a cardiologist, quickly went to work, and after a touch-and-go thirty minutes had the man stabilized, though it was obvious that he had suffered a massive stroke.
Over the next fifteen days, the two men had become fast friends, primarily because John Ashby had finally found a man he could not intimidate and who seemed to be immune to his constant carping and bluster.
When Ashby had recovered as much as he was going to, he moved back to his favorite city, Houston. He bought a two-million-dollar home in River Oaks and had it fitted out as completely as any first-rate hospital suite.
He also put Dr. Alexander on a six-figure annual salary to be at his beck and call, and he gave him the use of his private jet so that the doctor could continue his practice in Corpus Christi while still traveling back and forth to Houston at least once a week to keep tabs on Ashby.
Their friendship had deepened over the past two years, to the point that they were as close as brothers.
Alexander set up a bed tray and thanked Beverly as she placed two china coffee cups on it, one with a glass straw in it so Ashby could sip the coffee without it running down his chin.
After the nurse had quickly left the room, Alexander took a drink of his Colombian brew and smiled. “You have the best coffee in Houston, J.P., even better than Starbucks.”
“It oughta be,” Ashby grumbled around his straw. “The damn stuff costs more per ounce than gold.”
Alexander chuckled. “You can afford it, you old skinflint.”
The corner of Ashby’s mouth turned up again. “Yeah, I can, can’t I?”
“By the way,” Alexander said, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Beverly wasn’t within earshot, “I heard something interesting from my sister this morning when I took her to breakfast.”
One of Ashby’s eyebrows rose. “That the one whose kid I’m putting through graduate school?”
“Yes, Kevin’s mother.”
“What did she have to say?”
Alexander pursed his lips, his eyes gleaming. “Well, it seems Kevin’s working for a research scientist over at BioTech, a neurosurgeon who is working on a formula that might be of interest to us.”
“Yeah, what kind of formula?”
“Kevin told his mother that they have had some recent success in making older rats act young again, and, in fact, it even seems as if the rats not only act younger, but they act smarter, too.”
Ashby wagged his head, a look of disgust on his face. “So fuckin’ what? I don’t have any old rats I want made younger or smarter.”
Alexander finished his coffee and set the cup aside as he leaned closer to Ashby’s bed. “Listen, J.P., I’ve done about all I can to keep you alive, but I know this kind of life is unsatisfactory to you. If this formula does all that Kevin says it does, it might just be a way for us to get you up and out of this bed. Making rats smarter means the formula affects the brain in a positive way, and it might just mean it would help reduce the symptoms of your stroke.”
Now he had Ashby’s full attention. “Yeah, but if they’re just now working on rats, human trials are probably years away.”
Alexander nodded slowly. “In the normal course of events, that is probably true. However, most researchers I know are starved for cash, especially now that government funds are so scarce.”
Ashby’s eyes narrowed. “So, if someone with more cash than the government were to offer some to this starving researcher, you think they might part with the formula for some reasonable consideration?”
Alexander shrugged. “With the right amount of persuasion, anything is possible.”
Ashby lay back on his pillow, his eyes wet. “Tom, whatever it takes, whatever Kevin needs, I want you to find out if this fountain of youth is real, and if it is, I want to try it.”
“It might be dangerous, J.P. Just because it works on rats doesn’t necessarily mean it will work on humans, and even then we don’t know what effect it will have on a damaged brain.”
Ashby rose off the pillow, his eyes hard. “Then, whatever it takes, get this researcher to try it on someone else first, and if it works on them, then by God, I’m gonna be the second one to use it!”
Alexander nodded. “Okay then. I’ll take Kevin to dinner and let him know that the sky is the limit as far as what it will take to get his boss to do a human trial as soon as possible, and to let him know that his future is secure if he can manage to get us some of it if it works.”
“Not only his future, Tom, but yours, too, if you can get me out of this fuckin’ bed.”
He put his good right hand out and grasped Tom’s. “You know what this will mean to me, don’t you?”
“Yes, J.P., I do, and I’ll get to working on it right now.”
“Good, then get that lazy nurse in here with a bottle of champagne and two of my Montecristos and we’ll celebrate in style.”
Alexander smiled. It was the first time he’d seen J.P. happy in over twelve months.