hurried out of her cubicle and took Carl’s left arm. “Let’s get you right in.”
Carl irritably shook the girl off. “Leave me alone, will you?” he rasped, his voice querulous. “I’m not dying, young lady.”
Jolene fixed him with an exaggerated glare. “Well, you couldn’t tell by me,” she said. “You look gray as a ghost. If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you were having a heart attack.”
“Well, I’m not!” Carl snapped, moving toward the corridor that led to Warren Phillips’s office. “Ted, you stay here. I don’t need you fussing while I’m talking to Warren.”
Ted, ignoring his father’s words, started after the older man, but Jolene stopped him. “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” she said. “I’ve seen your pa like this before, and he’ll bite your head right off if you cross him. Just sit down. He won’t be but a few minutes.”
Ted looked at the nurse curiously. “This has happened before?” he asked.
Jolene shrugged. “Not often. Your pa’s real good about making his appointments.”
Ted felt a twinge of foreboding. “How often does he come?”
Jolene shrugged. “Every other week, regular as clockwork. And don’t you worry. Dr. P will fix him right up.”
Ted sank into a chair, his mind spinning. What was going on? His father had never been sick—in fact, as far as Ted knew, he was in perfect health. But if he was taking shots every other week …
He sat numbly, waiting for his father—or the doctor—to reappear.
Fifteen minutes later Carl walked back into the waiting room, smiling now, his color back to normal. “See?” he teased Jolene Mayhew. “Fit as a fiddle. Even had Warren give me an EKG, just to prove to you that I was right. Probably cost me fifty bucks, but what the hell?” He turned to Ted. “Come on, boy. Let’s not waste the day sittin’ around here waiting for people to die. There’s work to be done.”
Ted stared at his father, stunned. It was as if the incident had never happened. Carl’s breathing was back to normal, there was a spring to his step again, and he was once more the man he’d been early this morning.
As they left the hospital and returned to the truck, Ted had the uncomfortable certainty that he knew why. “Dad,” he said as he started back to the construction site, “about those shots …”
Carl chuckled. “I know what you’re going to say,” he interrupted. “You think Warren Phillips is a Dr. Feelgood, and your old man’s hooked on drugs, right? Well, forget it—he’s not!”
Ted pursed his lips. “Whose word do you have on that?” he asked. “Seems to me that if Phillips was shooting you up with something, he’d be the last person to tell you.”
Carl laughed out loud. “Well, I guess we know whose son you are, anyway! First time he gave me one of those shots, way back when my arthritis first hit, I got suspicious. Never thought I’d say this, but I felt too damned good. So the next time, soon as I was done with him, I hied myself up to Orlando and got a blood test. Didn’t name any names—just told them I’d been given a shot and wanted to know what was in it.” He chuckled softly. “Figured it was amphetamines, at least, and probably a whole lot else. Well, score one for Warren Phillips. All they found was cortisone, along with some traces of hormones.”
Ted stared at him incredulously. “Hormones?” he repeated. “What kind?”
“How the hell would I know?” Carl boomed. “I don’t know shit from hormones, and don’t want to. Probably some kind of sheep’s balls or something, like that guy in Switzerland used to use on the movie stars. All I know is, it keeps me feeling good and looking good, and the doctor in Orlando said there was nothing wrong with it. And there damned well shouldn’t be, considering the price Phillips gets for it.” He grinned at Ted. “Who knows? If I can afford it, maybe I can live forever.”
Ted said nothing more, but his father’s words didn’t sound right. If the shots were nothing more than hormones, how could they have made his father rebound so quickly? And why did they cost so much? From what his father had said, the shots didn’t sound like they should be that expensive.
But drugs were.
And only drugs, as far as he knew, could affect anyone the way Dr. Phillips’s shot had affected his father.
“How the hell do you know where you are?” Tim Kitteridge