A Whole Nother Story (6 page)

CHAPTER 6

T
hat Monday, Ethan and Olivia returned home after dropping the kids off at school to find a long white limousine with dark, tinted windows parked in front of their house.

When they walked inside, they were startled to see a small woman and a large man sitting in their living room. The large man had proportionally large hands and rings on every finger of his right hand, which held a brown leather briefcase. The woman was tight-lipped and had long red fingernails. She wore a ring as well, which bore a letter
P
made up of wavy blue lines. Ethan thought the wavy letter
P
looked very familiar.

With his non-ringed hand, the large man was petting Pinky’s head, which at the time was still very scruffy, as most dogs’ heads are. She enjoyed having her head rubbed nearly as much as she enjoyed drinking from the toilet and she sat there, wagging her tail happily. Pinky was not much of a watchdog in those days.

“What are you doing in our house?” Ethan demanded.“Who are you?”

“Relax, Mr. Cheeseman. We mean you no harm,” said the small woman. “We’re here to make you a very generous offer.”

“If you’re talking about the LVR, it’s not for sale,” said Ethan.

“Don’t get excited here. We’re not about to purchase some contraption that is half finished and that we have no idea how to operate. What we’re offering, Mr. Cheeseman, is a job. A very high-paying job with considerable fringe benefits.”

“And who is ‘we,’ exactly?”

“I work for a company called Plexiwave. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Olivia said. “You manufacture weapons. And we have no desire to have our inventions turned into something that might harm or kill people.”

“You forget, Mrs. Cheeseman, we’re also the world’s leading manufacturer of refrigerators and microwave ovens.”

Ethan now realized why the woman’s ring looked so familiar. That same wavy letter
P
could be found on their microwave and their refrigerator in the kitchen.

“Well, our ‘contraption,’ as you say, will do nothing to keep food cold or heat up a frozen burrito,” said Olivia.

“Don’t be so naive, Mrs. Cheeseman,” sneered the woman. “All great inventions will eventually be used to make weapons. I imagine the club was first invented as a means of cracking a nut. It was inevitable that one day it would be used for cracking skulls. That’s just the way of the world, I’m afraid.”

“Thank you, but we’ll happily leave the business of skull cracking to people like you,” said Olivia defiantly.

“How does two million dollars a year sound?” said the woman, ignoring what Olivia had just said.

“Two million dollars a year?” said Ethan.

“To start. With the first year’s salary paid in advance.”

The woman nodded to Mr. 29, who opened the briefcase revealing stacks and stacks of U.S. currency totaling what certainly looked to be two million dollars.

“Plus, you’ll be entitled to benefits too numerous to list,” the woman continued. “For starters, you and your family will be put up in a beautiful estate on a tropical island where the schools are second to none and there is absolutely no crime.”

“The crime is people like you,” Olivia shot back. “People like you devising new and innovative ways of hurting others and then selling that technology to the highest bidder. We will have no part of it, thank you.”

Olivia walked over to the door and opened it.

“I will thank you to take your ill-gotten money, get back into your limo, and return to your factory of death,” she asserted. “And furthermore, be advised that I fully intend to report you to the authorities.”

With that, the small thin-lipped woman and the large man got up quietly and walked to the door.

“Very well,” the woman said. “But I guarantee you’ve not heard the last of us.”

The man and the woman walked out of the house and Olivia quickly slammed the door behind them and locked it.

“Well, that’s it,” Ethan said to Olivia. “I guess it’s time for us to think about leaving.”

“Leaving?” asked Olivia. “What do you mean?”

She looked out through the curtains and watched the man and the woman climb into the back of the limo as a driver in dark glasses held the door open for them.

“I mean we should pack up everything and move somewhere far away where nobody knows us. Someplace the children will be safe.”

“I am not about to let those thugs force us out of our home. What kind of message is that for the children— that every time a bully confronts us, we run away? Now, just to be on the safe side I’m going to scramble the code to the LVR, in case it should fall into the wrong hands.”

Ethan watched as his wife hurried off to her study. Maybe she was right, he thought. After all, she usually was. Maybe he was overreacting. Then again, daring to defy high-ranking officials from powerful multinational corporations like Plexiwave could be dangerous.

And, as Ethan would soon find out, it would be dangerous. In fact, it would be deadly.

“Headquarters,” said the thin-lipped woman into her tiny cell phone as the limo sped away from the house.

“Headquarters. Go ahead, Ms. 4.”

“Yes,” said Ms. 4. “I need to speak to Mr. 1 immediately.”

“Right away,” said the woman at the other end.

Ms. 4 rode in silence as she waited a few moments until the deep, whispery voice of Mr. 1 came through the cell phone earpiece.

“Please tell me you were successful, Ms. 4,” said Mr. 1.

“Not at this time, I’m afraid.”

“And why not?”

“It’s the woman,” said Ms. 4. “I believe Mr. Cheeseman could be persuaded eventually. But his wife seems quite opposed to the idea.”

“Then we must do something about that, mustn’t we?” said Mr. 1.

“I understand,” said Ms. 4. “I understand completely.”

Several mornings later, Olivia awoke before the rest of the family and went downstairs to the kitchen, where she made a pot of coffee as she did every morning. Actually, to say she awoke before the rest of the family isn’t entirely true, since to awaken you must first be asleep. Anxiety had been keeping Olivia up most nights since the encounter with the large man and the thin-lipped woman.

As the coffee brewed, she walked to the front door to fetch the newspaper. It was still dark outside and, for the first time in her life, she did not feel safe opening the door to her own house. She decided she would read the paper later and sat down to drink her coffee without it.

Not long after finishing her morning coffee, she began to feel ill. As she got the children up and ready for school, it got worse. She had a splitting headache and felt as though she might be running a fever. And so Olivia went off to see the doctor regarding her increasingly painful headache.

She sat in the waiting room, shielding her eyes from the bright fluorescent lights, until her name was called and she was told to wait for the doctor in the examining room. She waited for what seemed like a very long time until suddenly the door swung open and in walked a bald man with large reflective sunglasses and exceedingly shallow cheeks. His bare head glistened with sweat.

“Hello, Mrs. Cheeseman,” he said. “What seems to be troubling you today?”

“You’re not Dr. Spencer,” she said.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your vision,” the man joked. “Dr. Spencer has gone home sick. Even we physicians aren’t immune to a little sickness now and again.”

With that he chuckled and pulled a tiny flashlight from his pocket.

“I’m Dr. Fiverson,” the man said, shining the small light into each of Olivia’s eyes.

“Dr. Fiverson?”

“Yes, it’s . . . Swedish. Your eyes are very dilated. And you seem to be running a fever. I have just the thing for you.”

The man calling himself Dr. Fiverson moved to the counter and began preparing a hypodermic needle.

“What is that?” Olivia asked.

“Something to help with your migraine,” he said.

“But I never told you I had a migraine.”

“Uh . . . yes. Well, before Dr. Spencer left for the day, he mentioned you had a history of migraines. And this is a new drug that works wonders on them.”

And because this man said he was a colleague of their trusted family doctor, Olivia was only slightly suspicious of him. But she should have been much more suspicious. Especially when the doctor raised his arm to inject her with whatever was in that hypodermic needle. Because when he did, his sleeve rode up, revealing a strange tattoo on his left wrist. A tattoo that read
3VAW1X319.
And if she had seen that tattoo reflected in his mirrored sunglasses, she surely would have run from the room and gone straight to the police. For when seen in a mirror, that strange tattoo read
Plexiwave.

ADVICE ON CHOOSING A DOCTOR

T
here comes a time in everyone’s life (being born, for instance) when he or she will require the help of a qualified physician. When this time does arrive, you’ll want to make sure you end up with a good one because, for one thing, doctors aren’t cheap.

Gone are the days when the old country doctor would drive out to your house and amputate your infected leg in exchange for a basket of goose eggs and a rhubarb pie.

Nowadays, such a procedure would cost you quite a bit more. By the time you managed to bake enough rhubarb pies, your leg would probably fall off by itself.

At today’s prices, you can’t afford to entrust your health and well-being to anyone but the best doctors available. I have therefore put together a short list of warning signs to indicate that perhaps you have selected a bad doctor.

He listens to your heart by holding a drinking glass to your chest.

The skeleton in his office has one arm.

The aquarium in the waiting room contains two or more dead fish.

He advises you to drink plenty of solids.

He has a sweaty, bald head and a tattoo on his left wrist that, when seen in a mirror, forms the name of an evil international weapons conglomerate.