First Thrills

“It’s sort of a global club.”

“And you’re all betting on terminally ill patients?”

“That’s right. We’re using our considerable doctoring skills to wager, based solely on the information in their medical records. Like I said, we bet on precisely when they’re going to die.”

“That’s a quite a new twist on the old line, ‘I’m sorry Mrs. Smith, but I regret to inform you you’ve only got six months to live.’ ”

Grove’s smile was far from his signature warm grin. This one was etched with profound mischievousness.

“See, that’s how the club started, Bobby,” he said. “A bet between two docs on just that and, well, it’s sort of grown from there.”

Right then and there I wished I had introduced myself as Robert, or at least Bob. But I kept thinking- How can I get in on this action?

“How many in the club?” I asked.

“I have no idea. Don’t even know how long the club has existed. Membership is on a trial basis and you have to be nominated by an existing member to be considered. Then you get vetted by a committee, all secret stuff, don’t ask me how they do it and if you make it past them, which apparently few do, your name goes before the board for approval.”

Grove was shockingly cavalier describing the club, given that it crossed fairly broad ethical lines.

“Where do the records come from?” I asked.

“Member-supplied. I have put up a few records myself. Of course you can’t bet on your own.”

I wanted to say something, but I was too stunned to speak. Grove continued.

“When you break the club down, there’s really nothing wrong with what we do. It’s all anonymous, supervised by the competition committee, which changes members every four months. We take pains to remove anything that could tie a record to the actual patient. No names, addresses, hospital, next of kin, exact birthday-none of it. All of that information is removed before it gets posted.”

“How much have you won?” I asked.

“Let’s just say if, like you say, you’re worried about college tuition, a few winning bets in The Dead Club could take care of all that-all four years, both kids.”

“Sounds intriguing,” I said. “But what if the patient dies of something else. A slip and fall, say.”

“Hey, in our world, dead is dead.”

Fast-forward now. Two months slip by since I met Grove and his twisted little club. I had sunk back into my life dominated by sore throats, snoring problems, unexplained and unexplainable chest pains, equally mysterious muscle and joint aches and of course, parents concerned about their teenagers’ smoking and pill-popping habits, refusing to look at their own.

Lee Anne and I fell back into step; that lost week in Vegas is now just a fuzzy memory, made even fuzzier by the routines of life-household duties and shuttling our children (Jake twelve and Max ten) to and from basketball practice, piano lessons, and the like. Then, on Christmas morning, no less, I get this email from [email protected]. The message simply read: “YOU’RE IN” and there was a link for me to click. By this time, I had pushed Grove and his crazy betting pool to the back of my mind. I clicked the link anyway, and then panicked when it was clear some application was being installed on my computer. I was about to power off the machine when a Web browser popped open and the Web page that loaded read:

THE DEAD CLUB

Login:

Password:

First-time visitors, click here

When I clicked the first time visitor link, I was asked to enter my social security number, which to my surprise, I actually did. What’s even more astounding is that it recognized my social and then returned a username/password combo, which allowed me to log on to the site successfully. I guess Grove had nominated me and I had been vetted by some committee and approved for membership in The Dead Club.

The site, itself, was a marvel. There were bets being tracked in real time from what I gauged to be nearing a hundred cases, some stretching back several years. The older cases were locked for any new action, but you could still track the current odds to win. To get into a betting pool, you had to bet on the current, active case, which for January was an eighty-eight-year-old man with stage-four pancreatic cancer, which, according to his biopsies, had spread to several adjacent organs, the most deadly of which was his liver. He was already showing signs of hepatic inflammation and obstruction.

My whole body started tingling with a mix of anticipation and excitement, but there was some revulsion, too. It was a feeling I knew well from Vegas, as though a thousand army ants had taken up residence underneath my skin and were now burrowing long tunnels alongside my veins and arteries. Grove was right, I thought, as I read through the anonymous record. There really wasn’t anything wrong with what the club was doing.

The poor patient had endured the usual barrage of treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, and even biological therapy. I looked up the statistics. Rarely did survival for Stage IVA pancreatic cancer, even with aggressive treatment, exceed one year. I modified the rate of deterioration, taking into consideration the man’s medical history, general condition, and chemotherapy regimen that included Gemzar and Camptosar, both fairly recent. I weighed each factor, most importantly, his advanced age and thirty years of type-two diabetes. For this guy to make it six months would be a miracle.

Lee Anne popped her head inside my home office. I was so engrossed in reviewing the medical file that I didn’t even hear her calling my name.

“Bobby, are you going deaf?” she said. “Dinner’s on the table.”

I jumped at the sound of her voice and quickly hid the browser with a well-placed click of my mouse.

“Just give me a minute,” I said, without bothering to turn around.

My heart pounded in my chest. Lee Anne departed with my assurance that I’d follow, but I went back to the site as soon as she had left the room. The betting system for The Dead Club was even more ingenious than Grove had described. It was a kitty-based system, five-thousand-dollar uniform bet for all players wagering on an open case. Players were allowed to pick a time period from the options given, in this case, every two weeks for a year, and then every month. And just like The Price is Right, the winner had to be the closest without going over. There were already at least twenty doctors involved in this case, because the kitty was up to one hundred thousand dollars.

At risk was my five grand. If I won, I’d split with any doctor who picked the same time period as I did. Whoever was behind this operation possessed some serious computer chops to make the site so sophisticated, but still easy to use.

I had a bank account with ten grand in it that Lee Anne didn’t even know existed. I was planning to use it for a surprise mega-trip to Italy in celebration of our fifteenth wedding anniversary. My mouth went dry thinking about what we would do in Europe when I won this bet, and every nerve in my body told me I was going to. I never for a moment considered we might end up celebrating our anniversary at an Outback Steakhouse.

The Dead Club wasn’t luck, it was skill.

I imagined gondolas, floating down a river of champagne, with Lee Anne nestled in my arms, and then the two of us touring the lush English countryside in a rented Bentley. I felt a sudden rage at all those arrogant surgeons in The Dead Club with their gilded lives, looking down with disdain on my chosen specialty. But what they didn’t know was that I possessed skills to interpret medical records in ways the other docs simply could not. I decided then and there that I’d mail a bank check, as required, to the post- office-box address provided, to give myself a minimum kitty of five-thousand dollars to play with.

One measly bet couldn’t hurt.

I won.

John Doe died two months and twenty-five days from my first Dead Club bet. I wasn’t the only winner, though. Competition was tougher than I had anticipated. Fifteen of us split a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar kitty. Just like that, I had doubled my money, and those army ants were now dancing the Lambada in my head, but at 75 r.p.m.

I hadn’t bet on another case since my inaugural John Doe play, but now I couldn’t wait for April the first to