8

On the Border

1996

STRADDLING a bar stool in Tombstone’s famed Crystal Palace, McClellan bought Duxbury a beer and raised the frosty mug in a toast to the paleface.

“Here’s looking at you, bud,” McClellan said. He drank thirstily, white foam coating his dark mustache.

Wearing pressed denim and new Western boots, Duxbury scanned the dark interior of this tourist spot, lingering on the spicy costumed barmaids and the graying gunslingers. “This looks more like the Geritol Palace,” he said dryly.

Tombstone was quite nice in February. Duxbury had left dreary Seattle the day before, flying to Tucson to spend a long weekend with his co-worker and friend. Ostensibly, the RKAS was in town to teach McClellan how to “pull through” an order of Procrit at Tucson Medical Center—the region’s biggest private hospital. The two had headed out Friday morning to meet the pharmacist, and Duxbury had demonstrated how to cement the big new order.

Then they had hopped into McClellan’s car and headed southeast to a corner of the desert that once ate men alive. Speeding past the Whetstone Mountains, they had admired some of the prettiest grasslands north of the border. They had entered rugged Cochise County, named for the legendary Apache leader, and McClellan had repeated some of the stories he’d read in his Time-Life Old West Series. But Duxbury had been uncharacteristically quiet.

As they sat on creaky bar stools, Duxbury related his woes over his cold beer.

By now, he was spending as much time as he could with his daughter, which amounted to every other weekend and whatever weekday he could scavenge. He was also paying a generous $1,000 a month in child support. He still hoped that he and Renee could work things out, but the events of the last few months had angered her and they were arguing again. She believed his testimony would cost him his job and scolded him for not having listened to her in the first place. In the meantime, she had started dating, and he’d taken to calling her ten times a day, first begging, then badgering, her to stop seeing her “boy toy.” Their sniping affected Sojie, who grew increasingly upset at her parents’ fighting. Dropping Sojie off at child care turned into a heart-wrenching routine, with both father and daughter crying good-bye.

Things got ugly. One evening, Duxbury had rushed from work at five P.M. to pick up his daughter at the Tacoma day-care center, as arranged. But Renee was already there, in a foul mood and demanding to talk to Duxbury immediately. She’d heard that he was about to go on a trip with another woman and demanded to know if this was true. Unwilling to expose the toddlers to a scene, Duxbury stepped outside and Renee took Sojie. Duxbury didn’t protest and instead drove off. But that seemed to enrage Renee. She followed him in her car to the freeway entrance and tailed him for several miles as he headed north. At one point, her car was practically riding the back bumper of his automobile. He pulled off the road, stopped the engine, and walked to her window. “Please stop following me,” he said. “This is dangerous.” She started yelling, so he returned to his car and pulled onto the freeway. There she was again, revving the V8 engine of her Pontiac Trans Am, tailgating him at high speed. He slowed down, pulled off the freeway, and again pleaded with her to take their child home. Renee hurled obscenities at him. Then she turned to reach for something—a semiautomatic. Duxbury grabbed her arm, and she winced, saying what he already knew. “I’m carrying my gun.” Duxbury needed help. He jumped back into his car, drove to the parking lot of Lyon’s Grocery Store in Seattle, and ran into the telephone booth.

Renee’s black car screeched into the lot, too, turning a few heads. She got out of her car and made a beeline for her ex-husband, the hem of her dark dress flapping.

“I’m calling the police,” Duxbury said loudly. “Get away from me.”

Duxbury dialed 911 and said, “I’m being harassed and need help.” Before the operator could ask a question, Renee grabbed the phone from Duxbury and disconnected the line. When the operator tried to call back, she got only a busy signal.

By then the two were struggling in the booth and attracting a small crowd. Duxbury pushed Renee against the glass and she punched and hollered. At one point, she kicked him in the groin with her sharp-toed high heel. He doubled over and groaned. But Renee kept socking him in the chest, face, and shoulders. Aghast at the violence, a grocery store employee ran inside to use the store’s phone. Hurry! There’s some kind of fight between a white man and a black woman! Minutes later, two members of the Seattle Police Department pulled up in time to witness Renee’s fusillade of fists. While Sojie sat in the car, an officer managed to calm down her mom. Upon questioning, Renee freely admitted that she had a Walther handgun and handed it over, along with two magazines and twelve rounds. The police seized the cache, handcuffed the woman, and drove her to the precinct, where they booked Renee for assault.

Duxbury was left hunched on a curb with a bleeding lip, a ripped shirt, and several bruises. The officer asked if he wanted medical attention, but he declined. Instead, he carried Sojie to his car and, as the officer instructed, drove to the precinct. There he turned his daughter over to one of Renee’s relatives.

When Duxbury finished his story, McClellan’s eyes were as big as saucers. “A gun, a baby, and speeding on the freeway? That’s nuts!” he said. He ordered another round.

Duxbury said he could have decked his ex-wife but had chosen not to. “There’s something emasculating about being beaten by a woman, especially one you love,” he said. It seemed like the more he tried to please Renee, the more foolish he looked. Renee had been ordered to attend anger management class, Duxbury added. “But I haven’t seen much change in her behavior.”

When their beers arrived, Duxbury took a swig, then continued. He told McClellan about the backroom machinations between Ortho and Amgen. Several other reps had testified in Amgen’s suit against Charise Charles, including Susan Beutler of San Francisco, Dorie Good from Pennsylvania, and Oliver Medlock of Kansas City. The first two reps were infamous for making big dialysis sales, but good old Medlock had steadfastly refused to do so. In fact, he had complained so often about how Pearson and Amick had directed the sales force to “go out and sell dialysis,” he had started secretly recording his conversations with supervisors, a form of protection. The summer that Duxbury was in Manhattan, being cross-examined, Medlock was also being quizzed. When the lawyers learned of his secret tapes, they subpoenaed them, too, and spent three full days questioning the Kansas City rep. By the time Medlock had returned to work, he felt vindicated. But his mood didn’t last long. A few weeks after he divulged his managers’ taped dictums, the African-American was fired for “poor sales performance.” Now he was truly cynical, pounding the pavement for another job.

McClellan shook his head at the wreckage. “You could wind up on the street, too, my friend,” he said.

This time, Duxbury didn’t squabble. Staring down at the scratched surface of the bar, he confided to McClellan, “I requested my personnel file a few weeks ago. I thought it might give me a clue about my future with Ortho.”

Then he looked up and saw the elaborate back bar, the ornate mirror, and his own glum expression staring back. “Well,” he said suddenly, in a cheery voice, “enough about me and my problems.” He turned to his friend and said, “Tell me about yours!” The two laughed, and Duxbury started feeling better.

They drained their drinks and wandered into other thirst parlors, comparing the false fronts and dance-hall girls. Tombstone looked much like it did in 1880, when Wyatt Earp owned part of a saloon, his brother Virgil was U.S. deputy marshal, and their self-destructive friend Doc Holliday was a fixture at the card tables. The history buffs passed through the courthouse museum, caught a reenactment of a murder trial, and toured Boothill, so named because many of the three hundred people were buried there, allegedly, still with their boots on. McClellan took pictures of Duxbury smiling next to the graves of those who had been shot during the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Duxbury’s favorite marker had been erected for a Wells Fargo agent who’d perished in a dispute over a package. His epitaph read:

HERE LIES LESTER MOORE

FOUR SLUGS FROM A .44

NO LES NO MORE.

Toward the end of the day, McClellan led his friend to an enclosure surrounded by a high brick wall. In the center of the courtyard stood a replica of the Tombstone gallows where men had been hanged for various crimes. It had a ladder with thirteen steps—one broken—that led to a platform. Above that hung a crossbar with two neatly tied nooses; a sign forbade anyone from climbing up to try on the neckwear, but Duxbury moved closer. “Law’s gonna catch up to big, bad Mark,” McClellan teased him. His friend said nothing. The late afternoon sun cast an eerie rose glow over the scaffold, and a sudden breeze swung the ropes as if ghosts still dangled. Abruptly, Duxbury turned and said, “We’d better head back.”

In the car, they retraced the trails where desperadoes had once robbed stagecoaches and cowboy gangs had rustled cattle. They spent the rest of their weekend fishing in Patagonia Lake, drinking suds, and shooting the empties in a ravine where stray bullets wouldn’t ricochet far. Duxbury’s Colt .45 and McClellan’s .357 Magnum did great damage to the Bud Light cans. After a few hours of target practice, the men loaded the bullet-riddled cans into the car trunk and drove back to McClellan’s, where they took turns crushing the aluminum containers with a new woodsplitter. They played like eleven-year-olds until Sunday morning, when Duxbury boarded a plane for home.

Later, McClellan placed the photos from that weekend in one of his leather-bound albums. He lingered on a picture of Duxbury, standing in front of Tombstone’s scaffold with his back to the camera. McClellan hoped his friend could turn himself and his career around and avoid the gruesome fate that McClellan foresaw in that picture. What McClellan missed, however, was that the gallows held twin nooses. There was rope enough to strangle two.

WHILE Duxbury tooled around Arizona, his boss grappled with work. Because of family responsibilities, Mike Barton found it difficult to leave Salt Lake City as often as he wanted. He oversaw dozens of reps in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and Oregon and, as district manager, was expected to spend at least a hundred days a year on the road. Yet he managed to do his job while traveling about sixty days a year. In fact, he was in his Salt Lake City office consulting with one of his managers out West when he took a frantic call from his boss, George Mooney.

Mooney claimed there was a “crisis” involving Mark Duxbury. Evidently, Pat Buchsel had registered her reluctance to work with Duxbury, due to his “inappropriate and sometimes sexist behavior.” Mooney told Barton to contact Buchsel and another female employee to determine whether Duxbury was, in fact, sexually harassing women. “You have to take this matter seriously and investigate immediately,” Mooney insisted. As soon as Barton hung up, he pushed aside his other pressing matters and focused on the investigation.

He called the female rep with whom Duxbury had worked, but she didn’t have much to say. Yes, Mark sometimes pulls juvenile pranks. But as soon as she tells him to stop, he does. Next, Barton called a few of Duxbury’s other co-workers, but none of them knew of any untoward conduct. Finally, he dialed Buchsel, explained why he was calling, and heard the surprise in her voice. “That’s weird,” she said. “I’ve never made a complaint of sexual misconduct against Mark to George Mooney.” Sure, Duxbury could use some “grooming,” but she had never seen him offend anyone and had certainly never seen him exhibit sexual misconduct. “In no way should he be removed from his position,” she emphasized.

Barton couldn’t find anything to corroborate a “crisis,” and he wrote a two-page memo to Mooney detailing this. Duxbury was among his best sales reps and was too valuable to lose without good reason. Barton therefore suggested that the salesman undergo a training program to improve his professional behavior, especially with the teaching institutions. If the RKAS didn’t improve in sixty days, “I recommend that this be a considered a human resource issue and be managed accordingly.”

Mooney wasn’t happy with Barton’s solution, and neither was Bill Pearson. As the field executive responsible for Ortho’s sales force, Pearson had good reason to dislike Duxbury. He wasn’t a “team player.” Who could forget Duxbury’s sarcastic remark about management’s new, watered-down bonus pool at “the People’s Republic of Ortho Biotech”? In the spring of 1996, as Pearson worked in his home office in a master-planned community near Houston, he mulled over the Duxbury “problem.” The rep had produced documents for the Charise Charles v. Amgen lawsuit that proved his bosses had told him to convert Amgen business. Duxbury’s testimony had been so damaging that on August 31, 1995, six days after he’d left the stand, Amgen had filed yet another suit to terminate Ortho’s licensing rights. The biotech company had tried this three times before—in late 1988, when Ortho performed a dialysis trial; in February 1989, when Ortho failed to develop two other drugs it had promised; and in January 1992, when Amgen accused it of failing to develop the cancer market. In each case, divorce had been denied.

But now, Amgen claimed that its partner had purposely stomped on the PLA by selling epo to freestanding and hospital-based dialysis centers for several years. “Ortho’s breach is substantial, continuous, and company-wide [and] has been carried out with the active participation, encouragement, and direction by all levels of Ortho’s management,” the new suit claimed. If the biotech company could break up this commercial union, it would sound the death knell for Ortho and Procrit. J&J would have to fire hundreds of Ortho workers, including Duxbury and McClellan, and shut Ortho’s doors forever. If Judge McGarr were to grant this divorce, rival Amgen could wind up with exclusive rights to the fastest-growing sector of the entire market—cancer—and reap the fruits from years of J&J’s research, development, and promotion. J&J’s attorneys at Patterson Belknap pleaded with the judge not to end this lucrative, albeit oppressive, relationship, for that “would be devastating to Ortho Biotech.”

Not one to rush judgment, Judge McGarr delayed a decision until he could determine if Amgen had followed the rules for termination. Had it given its partner, Ortho, proper notice of a default, as outlined in the licensing agreement? The arbitrator was forced to put that question on hold to address another long-standing dispute over the spillover formula.

Duxbury, of course, had no clue about the legal maneuverings and their impact on J&J. Nor could he know about the gathering storm headed his way.

Outside of Houston, behind a street canopied by pines and magnolias, Pearson strategized with Mooney on how to contain Duxbury. The trumped-up sexual harassment charge had been their solution, but Barton had snipped that bud, and now they had to “handle” him too. A few weeks after closing the Duxbury investigation, Barton flew to Spokane to meet with his boss, Mooney, and interview candidates for a sales position. In between appointments, Mooney casually suggested that Barton fire Duxbury. The Utah manager froze. “I know he’s a bit unorthodox,” Barton responded, “but he’s bringing in more money than anyone else in my district.

“Why do you want him fired?”

Mooney didn’t answer. But he suggested that Barton needed to improve his own leadership skills and “identify more with the management team.” Firing Duxbury would go a long way to proving your commitment to your role as district manager.

“I work for you, George,” Barton began. “If you want to me to fire someone, I’ll do it, but not without first following some ethical and legal guidelines.” J&J had a written policy on terminations that specified how to proceed: Provide warnings, place worker on probation; create a time by which the worker must improve. None of that had happened yet with Duxbury, Barton explained.

“How would you feel if someone fired you out of the blue, for no specific reason other than the fact that you’re a little different?”

Mooney didn’t reply. But Barton had just flunked his test.

A few days later, Mooney recounted this episode to Pearson. In a confidential letter, the two decided that Barton was failing in his duties. They had given him both “written and verbal directions” on how to improve his field activity and administrative chores, to no avail. About 90 percent of Barton’s responsibilities lay beyond his home base in Utah, and now, after eighteen months, that was suddenly a handicap. Since Barton couldn’t—or wouldn’t—move to the district’s hub in Seattle, Pearson decided to demote Barton as soon as possible.

Around Memorial Day 1996, Ortho held a biregional district meeting in Denver. Later, Mooney asked Barton to share a cab back to the airport. On the way, Mooney informed Barton that he was being demoted immediately and had three choices: take a sales position in Salt Lake City; move to another firm within the J&J family; or leave the company entirely. Barton accepted the demotion. But a few weeks later, after a very difficult spell, he resigned. Ortho gave him a generous severance package of nearly seven months’ pay; in return, he agreed not to sue J&J. Before long, Raritan began searching for a new manager to live in Seattle.

When Duxbury learned of Barton’s resignation, he called him to wish him well. His former boss was gracious, then paused. “Watch your back, Mark.” Barton described the past few months of executive plotting, beginning with Mooney’s bogus charges against Duxbury and his order to fire him. “My demotion,” Barton explained, “was due largely to me refusing to fire you.” For once Duxbury was speechless. Before he ended the call, Barton warned him again: “Be wary of George.”

From that day on, Duxbury descended into a memorably horrid summer. Two weeks later, Renee called and invited him to lunch. Pleasantly surprised, the rep dressed up to meet her at a restaurant. After placing his order, however, he was served with a restraining order preventing his visitations with Sojie. Renee worried that Duxbury’s work troubles were impairing his fatherly duties. “You’re putting so much pressure on Sojie, I’m concerned about her emotional well-being,” she explained. Harsh words were flung across the table, until Duxbury abruptly left. He had to hire an attorney to defend himself against his ex-wife’s allegations and wound up selling his favorite saxophone to pay his legal bills. But it was worth every penny. The following month, his visitation rights with his three-year-old daughter were restored, along with their Saturday morning ritual of watching Blue’s Clues over bowls of milk and cereal rings.

IN August 1996, Duxbury’s career took a puzzling turn. A rep from northern California named Keith Wood was promoted to Northwest District manager. The first sign that something was amiss was the fact that Wood was promoted at all, Duxbury thought. A slight, pale figure with red hair, Wood had maintained an undistinguished Ortho career. Moreover, he worked some eight hundred miles away from Seattle, in the San Francisco area, which was a hundred miles farther than Salt Lake City was. Duxbury ignored the signals.

He started off by giving Wood a tour of Swedish Medical Center and Seattle’s Pill Hill, with its old buildings and stunning views of Elliott Bay. Duxbury provided a historical commentary of the neighborhood too. In the 1890s, it had been a leafy retreat for Seattle’s upper crust. King County’s first official courthouse had been built here, forcing attorneys to hike from their downtown offices up this steep hill, cursing all the way. They called the summit Profanity Hill until the courthouse moved, and now the spot was full of churches, universities, and medical facilities. Wood chuckled at all the right places in Duxbury’s spiel. After accompanying him on his rounds, Wood took the rep aside.

“I know about the difficulties you’re having with your ex,” he said solicitously. To try and relieve some of the pressures, he was going to realign the rep’s territory. “How nice,” Duxbury thought. But a few weeks later, he saw the realignment, and his heart sank. Wood had shrunk his territory to a small fifty-mile area between South Seattle and Olympia. Even worse, his new turf excluded most of the oncology clinics in Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia—the places he’d been serving for the past few years. Staring at the map, he realized, “This is clearly designed to make my sales figures look bad.”

There was no time to take up the matter with Wood, as a few days later, Duxbury joined half of Ortho’s national sales staff at a biregional meeting in Tucson. In the lobby of El Conquistador Golf and Tennis Resort, he met McClellan. After lugging their bags to their rooms, the two friends arranged a reconnaissance of the five-hundred-acre resort. They grabbed some drinks and a canopied golf cart, and tooled around the eighteen-hole golf course, the lush gardens, and the hiking trails in the Sonora Desert. As the hours passed, Duxbury experienced déjà vu. The setting sun turned the swimming pools into pewtered plates and the mountain’s red outcroppings into charcoaled flames. In the ebbing light, his mind turned to that night in Palm Springs eighteen months ago, when he and his friends had glided over fairways after being honored by their chiefs. How Duxbury longed to recapture the mood from that magical desert trip!

This particular meeting was devoted to seminars revolving around 1996 sales objectives such as “Meeting our profit commitment to Johnson & Johnson by achieving our forecast.” The most important goal seemed to be growing the “Phase IV trials” that could expand a new Procrit market.

Ortho often used “minitrials” and so-called Phase IV studies—postapproval studies—to promote its drug. In 1996, the big campaign centered on a “quality of life” trial. QOL, however, was an ambiguous term at best. A poor quality of life wasn’t a disease per se. Rather it referred to symptoms ranging from physical ones, like fatigue and insomnia, to psychological ones, such as unhappiness and ennui. Quality of life was medically defined as the degree to which a person enjoys the possibilities of life, and Ortho’s marketers contended that Procrit could induce a better QOL.

Amgen had already managed to squeeze that term onto Epogen’s label, under the heading “Clinical Response to Epogen, Chronic Renal Failure.” The product insert stated that Epogen patients experienced “statistically significant improvements” in most QOL parameters, such as more happiness and better sex. Ortho wanted a similar sentence under the cancer heading, and understandably so. By now, about one million Americans a year were diagnosed with cancer and they suffered from fatigue, poor quality of life, and anemia due to lack of iron, among other factors. Imagine how Procrit sales would soar if we could promote our drug for those patients.

But the company had two problems. One was the law. While doctors are free to prescribe medicine for any use and dosage they see fit, drug companies are forbidden from promoting a drug for indications not listed on the label. If caught pushing an off-label use, a company could pay a steep fine, suffer criminal sanctions, and even lose its license to sell products. The second problem was regulators. The FDA had approved Procrit only for chemotherapy-related anemia. As Dr. Patricia Keegan of the FDA explained, “The drug was approved so patients could avoid blood transfusions. And fatigue is not an indication.” If J&J marketeers wanted to add QOL to the drug label, they’d have to provide compelling scientific evidence. So that’s what they tried to do.

As early as 1994, Ortho began sending reps into oncologists’ offices to try to persuade them to enroll patients in “minitrials” and Phase IV marketing studies. Unlike independent Phase IV scientific trials, these studies had no protocol, no efficacy or safety endpoint, lawsuits would later allege. These sales trials had no FDA registration numbers. Duxbury and McClellan claimed these fatigue studies were just a way to get doctors to prescribe the drug in a risky off-label manner.

Ortho paid each oncologist about $550 for every patient up to five, or nearly $3,000. The cash was supposed to compensate doctors and nurses for filling out the study’s paperwork. But reps like McClellan routinely did that, reviewing confidential patient files to select the subjects and recording their personal information. “I got a good start on [Dr. X’s paperwork] this week and should be able to get five [patients] enrolled,” McClellan reported to his bosses. It wasn’t until years later that reps realized they’d been violating patient confidentiality laws.

The expensive national sales campaign convinced oncologists to enroll 2,300 of their patients in Ortho’s study. A few doctors took grants of $10,000 and more to write articles about the QOL trial. In May 1994, the journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology published one such piece, and, anticipating another, Ortho announced a “promotional preparation [and] SALES TRAINING!” to teach reps how to parlay the article into QOL drug orders.

Around the same time, Ortho found a well-respected researcher willing to write yet another piece about the QOL study. Dr. John Glaspy, a professor at the School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), had taken grants from both Amgen and Ortho to study epo and its effects. Ortho surmised that if Glaspy’s piece about its study landed in a prestigious medical journal, regulators might be persuaded to add QOL to Procrit’s label.

So McClellan, Duxbury, and the others promoted the off-label use for fatigue. Years later, both men would learn that off-label promotion is a federal crime—something that the lawyers and leaders in New Jersey certainly should have known.

Throughout the week, Duxbury couldn’t help but notice the disturbing number of new faces. At night in the bar of El Conquistador, he searched for old friends. But he couldn’t find the reps who had sold so much Procrit for dialysis, nor those who’d testified in an Amgen case. “Didn’t you hear?” McClellan asked. “A lot of those guys have been fired or resigned.” The two estimated that about 50 percent of the sales force had been replaced by newcomers, many of them fresh out of college.

Every Ortho sales meeting came with a keynote address, and this time national sales manager Tom Amick took the podium to deliver a rousing one. In what would soon be called the “come to Jesus” speech, Amick sternly lectured the troops on ethics. He emphasized the importance of Amgen’s litigation and how seriously it needed to be taken. He scrunched his face into a scowl, paced the floor like a drill sergeant, and enunciated his words clearly. From this day forward, he barked, market share would no longer be used to measure sales performance. “Contrary to any previous understanding there is no such thing as ‘market share,’ only ‘market share growth,’ and anyone who tries to convert dialysis business will be terminated immediately.” Sitting in the audience, Duxbury witnessed the backs of the assembled stiffen; a few shellacked heads swiveled to check their neighbors’ response. Could this be true? The entire room of salespeople had just been put on notice that overall epo growth in their zone would be the only standard of performance. Exactly how that would impact bonuses had yet to be revealed, but insecurity settled on the crowd like smoke on artillery. Amick repeated himself in raspy, staccato bursts. “I never want to hear the words dialysis or market share again.” By the way, he added, “there’s been no infraction of the marketing agreement. And no one has lost their job because of that.”

Duxbury leaned into McClellan and whispered, “What a bunch of BS.” Later, in the bar, they joined other reps, who chortled over Amick’s message about “fair play.”

“That was an unbelievable performance,” said one man. “What a joke!”

One rep reminded the group that Amick hadn’t acted alone. “Longstreet and a lot of other people had the opportunity to stop the conversions, but they didn’t.” Duxbury just listened, nursing his drink. In this murmuring cave of speculation, he realized that none of these guys had as much to lose as he did, and, for the first time, he saw both sides of his impossible position. Over the years, he’d received numerous written advisos indicating that Procrit should not be promoted or sold for dialysis use. At the same time, he (and others) had been given verbal orders to do the exact opposite. Duxbury had tried to leave a trail of his objections to those orders, only now it hit him: Amick, Pearson, and other leaders had been conspicuously silent on the issue, at least on paper. How clever of the professionals, he thought.

Another water-cooler item bubbled up. There was talk that Raritan wanted to erase dialysis sales from all forecasts. If true, it didn’t console Duxbury. William Ball, Michael Barton, Bob Nelson, and a lot of other people who were no longer at Ortho had tried to eliminate those sales years ago. “That idea’s been driven from the bottom up, not from the top down,” he told McClellan. But coming from headquarters, it sounded like money laundering—washing past sales from official records. Duxbury grew worried.

A LINE of buses pulled to a stop on the back side of the Santa Catalina Mountains, behind El Conquistador, and disgorged about a hundred pharmaceutical salespeople amid the dust, exhaust, and diesel fumes. Once the air cleared, Duxbury, McClellan, and their friends smiled. They were all dressed casually and several people wore Western gear of Levi’s, Tony Lama boots, Stetsons, and bandannas. The group was corralled toward an open bar and barbecue grill, where the grease of red meat splattered onto hot coals. An organizer welcomed them with trays of cold drinks and announced that, after the cookout, they’d move to the shooting range for the highlight of the evening, a quick-draw contest. The crowd buzzed over the prospect of a Wild West gun-slinging competition.

Contestants were given authentic holsters to wear. The leather sat low on the hip and angled down on one side where the gun hung. The bottom of the holster had a rawhide thong that tied around the thigh, so that when you drew your gun, your holster would remain in place. Organizers handed out real Colt Single Action Army revolvers, which had been the weapon of choice in the West since the 1870s, when the Colt SAA was introduced. Some called the guns Peacemakers, but Duxbury preferred the term Equalizer because “having a Colt on your hip made you equal to any man.” They had cylinders that tilted out of the frame for loading, but these revolvers held not real bullets but blanks. “When I shoot, I like to make sure I hit something,” Duxbury complained.

“Like a sales target?” someone ribbed, and his circle burst out laughing.

“I’m trained for accuracy, not speed,” he replied good-naturedly. On occasion, he’d spend a Sunday afternoon at a firing range, shooting five hundred rounds of ammo. But he didn’t perform well in quick-draw contests, which would be clear soon enough. He, McClellan, and the others grabbed some drinks while they eyed the juicy steaks on the grill. Here was a chuckwagon buffet as envisioned by corporate team builders: smooth wooden benches arranged around tables of checkered cloth; lanterns propped up on boulders and stumps; aluminum pots of steaming buffalo chili, cowboy beans, and Indian fry bread. After dinner, the crowd was divided according to region, then split further into districts. Each team faced off against another, and after a few rounds, the Seattle District was eliminated, much to Duxbury’s relief. “Now I can sit back and enjoy the show.” It was at times like these that Duxbury reveled in the emotionally satisfying bond of his fellow reps. Lone-star sales folks and deputized detailers could face off against one another in lighthearted diversions that didn’t threaten one another’s survival. As Duxbury looked around, he saw J&J’s drug distributors thoroughly enjoying themselves on the edge of the Mexican border, drinking, singing, and shooting pistolas into the clear night.

McClellan, meanwhile, was on his fourth drink when he took another turn. Each shooter had to wait for a light to appear; that was the signal to pull the trigger. The pistols were single action, meaning that you had to pull the hammer back to cock the gun while you drew it from the holster, then fire when the muzzle was aligned with its target. Dueling against McClellan was his boss, Dwayne Marlowe, who at one point handed the rep yet another drink, hoping that more liquor would skewer his aim. McClellan cheerily accepted the cocktail, took a sip, drew his gun, and hit the cardboard bull’s-eye. “Ah,” the crowd exclaimed, not quite believing what it had just seen. Marlowe seemed to be getting mad: The more McClellan drank, the faster he drew. Pretty soon it was just the two of them standing in the dirt, McClellan and Marlowe, going mano a mano. The boss stopped, got himself a glass of water, and brought his opponent another gin and tonic, his sixth drink of the night. Each man gulped from his glass and waited. The green light flashed and Marlowe drew. But by that time, McClellan had already pulled his gun out of the holster, cocked the hammer, aimed, and fired. He hit the target dead center in 0.48 of a second, less than a half a second, beating his boss by a long shot and winning the evening contest. The crowd erupted in cheers, and Duxbury ran over to shake his buddy’s hand. McClellan took home a bronze plaque—and Marlowe’s enmity.