Pain Management

I was just starting to ask her another question when she hung up.

“I need to get in the street,” I told Gem.

“I understand. Do you not want me to—?”

“I do want you to help. I apologize if I gave you any other impression.”

“You are very formal to a woman who has you inside her.”

“I . . . That doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“You act like a very stupid man sometimes, Burke. You know I was not talking about your cock. Or you should know.”

“I’m just screwing this up, Gem,” I told her, feeling hollow.

“Then do what you know how to do.”

“I . . .”

“You know how to hunt. That’s what you do. What you are. I will get my pad. I will write down what you tell me. And then, while you are doing whatever it is you . . . must, I will get the information you want. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said, not wondering where the guilt had gone to anymore. Not with it sitting on my shoulder like a fucking anvil.

The way Madison had related the information told me her conversation with Rosebud hadn’t been over the phone. The girl was close by; I was sure of it.

Anyway, I knew enough about her now. Rosebud wouldn’t ever get too far away from Daisy.

And she had said she was going to talk to me.

I just didn’t know what I was going to do when she stopped talking.

“I’m not doing it,” I told Ann.

“Why?” she demanded, hands on her hips.

“I don’t need you anymore. There’s no chance of a payoff. I’m in contact with the girl—through other people—and she’s going to come in.”

“Just like that?”

“I never said I would—”

“The money isn’t enough?”

“A hundred grand, against the hundred years I’d have to do if I got popped? No.”

“But that’s not the real reason, is it?”

“No. I already told you the real reason.”

“That you think I want you for a fall guy.”

“Or you’ve got a martyr complex.”

“The opposite,” she said. “I lose these”—flicking a hand across her breasts dismissively—“I might as well have had plastic surgery. Nobody who knew me here would ever recognize me. Once this is done, so am I.”

“How could that be? No matter how big the score, it can’t be enough to take care of all the—”

“I’m not giving up the struggle. I’m just going after it in a different way, once this last job is done. It’s not as if we’re alone. Some places—VA hospitals, for example—they know how to deal with pain. And they do it. There’s also—”

“VA hospitals?”

“Don’t look so surprised. The VA hospital system probably knows more about pain management than any other place on earth. Some of them, like the one in Albuquerque, they’re like . . . beacons in the night, for us. And Sloan-Kettering has been lobbying for changes in these stupid DEA laws that won’t allow them to administer enough—”

“Politics?”

“That’s right, politics. That’s where the change is going to be made. But I said politics, not politicians. You think there’d be any difference, no matter who was in office?”

“Me? I think the last two guys who ran for president were a pair of mutants.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’d been line-bred for generations, like the way you’d do a bird dog or a racehorse. They never had any other purpose, right from birth. Problem is, you breed a dog to fetch birds, he might do it perfect, but he couldn’t shoot the birds, see?”

“No.”

“Politicians are bred to run for office, not to run the office once they get it. That, they don’t have a clue about.”

“That’s right!” she said, her voice juicy with promise. “They’re all whores.”

“I don’t think that’s fair to whores,” I told her. “All they do is fuck for money. Most of them would draw the line at the stuff the average politician takes in stride.”

“You think all politicians are sick?”

“Like mentally ill? No. What they are is litmus paper. They turn color depending on what’s poured over them. You think any of them actually have a position on anything? George Wallace first ran for office with the backing of the NAACP. After he lost, he vowed he’d never get out- niggered again. The only ones who truly have a position are the fascists. They’re for real . . . which is why they’ll never get elected. And neither will that narcissist Nader. Some ‘green’ party he’s running—all he accomplished was to vampire enough dumbass liberal votes to elect a guy who’d sell the Grand Canyon to a toxic-waste dump operator.”

“You’re right. Which is why I’m going into a new line of work.”

“What’s that?”

“Fund-raising,” she said, with a truly wicked grin. “You know how it says, ‘God bless the child who’s got his own’? Well, people dying in pain in America don’t have their own. But we can buy some for them.”

“That’s a better plan,” I agreed. “If the gun people can do it . . .”

“Yes! I know. We’ve all been thinking about this for quite a while. Things have to change. Even when there’s a huge market for a drug—like the so-called ‘abortion pill’—it took forever to get FDA approval. Not because of science—remember, this is something they’d tested on humans, and for years—but because the politicians were afraid of the anti-choice lobby. With pain medication, it’s a thousand times worse. The only market for new painkillers is for the ‘nonaddictive’ type. But the very reason for taking pain medication dictates that you become dependent on it. If it keeps you from being tortured, why shouldn’t you be dependent on it?”

I stepped away from her a little. Obsessives make me nervous. Maybe that’s why I scare people, sometimes. About some things.

“I’m not arguing with you,” I said, gently.

But it was too late to derail her train. “Do you know why dealers started cutting heroin with quinine?” she said, her voice shaking. “The U.S. government taught them. The military used to mix quinine into the morphine styrettes soldiers carried into battle in the Pacific Theater, because of the malaria threat. Nothing too good for our fighting men . . . until they come back home. The government doesn’t care. And neither do the drug companies. The only real R and D going on is for the illegal stuff, anyway. Like Ecstasy. You get a real quick turnaround on the research—instant profits—plus, you don’t have to pay the human guinea pigs; they pay you.”

“I know,” I said. Thinking about the morphine pump they’d hooked me to while I was recovering from the bullets meant to kill me. That magic pump that fired a little bit of painkiller into my veins every time I squeezed it. But I could only squeeze it six times an hour. And every time I did, the hospital’s billing computer went ka-ching! That machine hadn’t been developed to kill pain; it had been designed by an accountant.

“But don’t you get it, B.B.? The DEA creates the market for new ways to get high. The pious, hypocritical—”

“I get it, Ann. But what good is one big score—even a humongous one—against that?”

“We need that shipment,” she said, adamantly. “We need something to sustain the ground effort, while the rest of us pull back and put the pressure elsewhere.”

“I can’t help you.”