Bullet to the Brain: Chapter Three: With Friends Like These

Jan 3

(You can find the links to previous chapters below)

I’ve probably visited my good old buddy, Nick Caraway, at work a hundred times. But even if I visit a thousand times more, I’ll never get used to the smell. The only way I can stand it is by dripping benzoin into the center of two cotton balls and sticking one fluffy ball up each nostril.

“Felix,” Nick said, a big smile painted across his face, a fat cigar (its tip aglow) between his teeth.

“Nick,” I said, holding a bottle aloft.

My Spidey senses should’ve started to tingle when I set down the eighteen-year-old bottle of Laphroaig and all he gave back was a fading smile and cool, “Thank you.” He usually gushes over a bottle like that, which would be tough to swing on a coroner’s salary.

“You want to give me a hand with this?” He asked. “It’s right up your alley.”

Nick was doing an autopsy on a thirty-ish year-old guy who’d died after crescendoing episodes of psychosis and mental decline. The differential diagnoses were drug induced mental deterioration versus Mad Cow Disease.

Nick used a fierce looking circular saw to cut out a piece of the guy’s skull, about the size of a soup bowl. Then, he scooped out his brain. It wasn't an untreated brain, which would have oozed out of his head like swamp-mud this far post-mortem. It was preserved in formaldehyde, so it had a firm, putty-like consistency. The brain came out in one big chunk and its extraction made the slurp-sucking sound of a plunger being yanked from a toilet bowl. Then, Nick sliced the cerebrum like a loaf of bread.

“Multiple hemorrhages,” I observed. He’d laid out the brain slices in orderly rows and columns across his examining table. “Hypertensive pattern.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Cocaine induced.”

“Too bad,” I said. “Mad Cow is so much more… horror show.”

Nick scoffed and shook his head.

“Do you mind if we go into your office?” I asked, feeling a little queasy and looking green around the gills. “You can fill out the death certificate there. I’ve got a couple of questions I’ve got to ask you.”

“Sure, sure.” He peeled off his latex gloves and shot them, like rubber bands, into the trash. “You’ve got no stomach for the perfume of the dead,” he laughed. “You always were a bit of a snowflake.” He puffed on his cigar and we walked out of the morgue.

The smell of rotting flesh and bursting bowels is awful enough. But what really got to me was the cloying smell of formaldehyde: it seeped into my pores whenever I stood at the autopsy table and percolated out of my skin for days afterwards.

###

I pushed a finger against each side of my nose and shot the cotton balls from my nostrils. They struck the aluminum trash can and clanged like a cowbell. “Ahh,” I said and settled into the dilapidated sofa. It’s not like Nick’s office smelled like a rose garden, but at least I could inhale without gagging.

He snuffed out his cigar and poured us a couple of drinks.

The second hint (which, like the first, I ignored) there was something rotten in the state of Denmark was the major upgrade to Nick’s scotch collection. He pulled a twenty-five year old bottle of Laphroaig from the cabinet and relegated my eighteen-year-old gift to the shadowy depths.

“The usual?” Nick asked.

“Unless you’ve seen the light and started to stock bourbon.”

He scoffed. He poured out two fingers of eighteen-year-old Oban and handed me the glass.

I appreciate single malt scotch, of course, but I always go for Highland (like Oban). The Islay (like Laphroaig) Nick jizzes over turns my stomach. The peaty flavor tastes like formaldehyde to me, as if I’m drinking cadaver juice.

We raised our glasses and toasted our old med school days.

“To the valedictorian,” I said.

“To the runner up,” he smirked.

After two sips the room started spinning.

“Felix, Felix, Felix,” Nick said, “I knew that you knew when I saw that bottle in your hand.” He shook his head regretfully. “Eighteen-year-old Laphroaig… that’s Christmas or birthday scotch.”

The glass fell from my hand. It shattered on the tiled floor. “Why would you protect a scumbag killer like Tom Joad?”

“Why?” He scoffed. “Because I’m tired of parking my beat up old Ford next to your Porsche.”

“Just for the money?” I slurred. My whole body was tingling and my limbs felt like lead.

“Easy for you to say, Felix.” His thumbs danced across his cell phone as he sent a text message. “I bust my ass day after day; carving up cadavers, writing reports, answering to administrators who aren’t fit to tie my shoes.”

“And you? You come and go like the wind. You charge Metro General fifteen hundred bucks a day.” An offended expression (the injustice of the universe) crossed his face. “Fifteen hundred bucks! Just to carry around a stinking beeper and prance in like a rockstar when a neurotrauma rolls in.”

“I’d call it more of a strut than a prance.” I was drooling. I slumped over sideways.

“You should’ve stuck to your day job,” he scoffed, “instead of making like you’re some sort of Sherlock Holmes.”

Tom Joad and another goon burst through the door. One grabbed my left arm, the other my right and they yanked me from the sofa. My head lolled and my legs dragged behind as they hauled me across Nick’s office and through the labyrinthine basement of Metro General. The last thing I remember is being tossed (like a sack of potatoes) into their white van.

###

When I woke up, my head throbbed like a blister ready to burst. My eyes drifted into focus and locked onto a squat figure stalking, back and forth, back and forth, like a penned up wolf. I blinked a few more times and saw the Manhattan skyline beyond him, through floor-to-ceiling windows. It was a foggy night and the lights from all the skyscrapers melted together like ice-cream. Though the buildings were on the other side of the Hudson, they seemed close enough to touch.

My host was dressed for the cover of GQ; he even had one of those little handkerchiefs (which matched his socks) peeking from his jacket pocket. He bent his globular head and watched a ferry load up on passengers; nighttime revelers headed to the heart of Gotham. His square face wore a sneer, as if every last one of them ought to be paying him a toll for breathing his air.

“You’re Joseph Kurtz,” I said, recognizing him from frequent cameos on Page Six of The New York Post.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. He sat down across from me on a suede chair (which matched the seat in which I slumped) and refilled his glass from an elegant decanter. He held the wine aloft. “Hair of the dog?”

I figured it was my last drink. So, I said, “I’d take a bourbon, neat. Blanton’s, if you have it. Hold the Rohypnol.”

Kurtz nodded and someone handed me a drink. Kurtz rested his Gucci shod feet on the mahogany table, which separated us. He lifted his glass (his ruby-red wine sloshing) towards the skyline, “That view never gets old.”

“I’m more the outerboro type, myself.” The whiskey eased my headache. “Manhattan has too many a**holes… I guess some of you moved to New Jersey.”

Kurtz laughed.

I sipped my bourbon. It wasn’t Blanton’s but it was very fine. I tried not to think about whether Kurtz was going to kill me quickly or slowly. But my mind kept drifting back to Quentin Compson and how he lingered in a coma for weeks and weeks. I said, “Do me one favor.”

Kurtz raised his eyebrows.

“If I’m getting a bullet in the brain, do the job right.”

“You’re not very bright for a brain surgeon,” he said. “If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have wasted the Pappy van Winkle.”

I sipped the bourbon with a new appreciation.

“I’ll wager you’re wondering why I’d go through so much trouble… tampering with evidence, kidnapping a neurosurgeon… for a cretin like Tom Joad.”

“Birds of a feather?”

“You’re closer than you think.” Kurtz laughed. “Joad was one of my bodyguards until he started showing up to work high as a kite. Rather than give him the sack, I flipped his job description. Something more in line with his proclivities. He became a guinea pig for our new line of inhalable drugs. They work with JUUL vaporizers, by the way. In my business, you’ve got to change with the fashion to remain relevant.”

I lifted my empty Waterford crystal tumbler and an invisible hand poured me a refill. Unfortunately, Kurtz’s man was not as heavy handed as Holly.

“Anyway,” Kurtz continued. “I got a touch too curious and stepped in a tad too close. Joad exhaled a big cloud of mist and I sucked it down to the depths of my lungs. When I next looked in the mirror, my eye color had changed.”

I sat forward. “Hmm.” I shone my cell phone light at Kurtz’s face. It was as if I were on the witness stand again, looking at that scumbag sitting at the defense table. “Those are Joad’s eyes!”

“Bingo,” Kurtz said. “And that’s just the beginning… Have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?”

I wondered whether this conversation was really happening. Maybe the Pappy was spiked, too. It tasted so good that it didn’t matter. I took another sip and answered, “Subatomic particles, despite being separated by vast distances, can change each other’s properties, an effect that moves faster than the speed of light.”

“Close enough,” Kurtz said. “Well, that designer drug entangled our life forces; mine and Joad’s. So, if he dies, so do I.”

“So, you sprung him from Ryker’s to protect your own skin.”

“I’ve heard it said that a lot of nasty sh*t goes down in prison.”

“Especially if your name is Jeffrey Epstein.”

He laughed.

I shook my head in wonder. “Quantum entanglement designer drugs.”

A burly dude brought him a plate of cheese, which smelled like sweaty feet.

“I know, I know,” Kurtz said, noting my crinkled nose. “But it pairs divinely with the wine.” He savored some food and drink and then said, “You might imagine that I’m not thrilled to be entangled with anyone, least of all a cretin like Joad. Unfortunately, the lady who synthesized the entanglement drug ran off when she caught wind of my displeasure.”

“So,” I asked. “Why am I still breathing?”

“You, my friend, are like a lemon,” he answered. “You’ve got a lot of juice yet.”

“And you’re going to squeeze. But where, exactly, do I fit in?”

“You are going to fetch my little chemist. My associates caught up to her in Prague. I need someone with a squeaky clean passport, such as an esteemed physician, who won’t raise any eyebrows at customs, to toodle over there and escort her back… And don’t even think about getting cute. Until you get back here, Joad’s going to be sticking to your little girlfriend like sh*t to a shovel.”

“She’s not my girlfriend anymore,” I said and a wistful smile crossed my face. “She’s joined the long line of my Ex’s.” I drowned a little sorrow with a gulp of Pappy. “Her choice, not mine.”

Cady Compson... The sweet perfume of her silky hair filled my nostrils and the angry taste of her spit filled my mouth.

I’ll make it right, Cady. I swear.

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