Moonbird Boy (4 page)

Rising stiffly from a leather orthopedic chair expensively designed to hide its adjustable lumbar support, vibrators at seven shiatsu points, and heating coils throughout, he stood and gazed through the office's glass wall at Phoenix twinkling twelve stories below. He'd just placed an antiarrythmia medication beneath his tongue to slow an uncomfortable fluttering that seized his heart more often than anyone knew. As the regular beat resumed in his chest, he pondered the situation before him.

MedNet could eat the loss incurred in the judgment by selling off its chain of immensely profitable geriatric centers. Even without final approval from the other three executive board members, he'd leaked the tentative plan to a few key people. And shares in MedNet stock had already jumped two points on the big board. No, Alexander Morley was no fool.

MedNet would keep buying up every little drug company with a patent on anything that looked promising for Alzheimer's and every other brain disease, but dump the seventeen GentleCare centers. Bob Thompson was the only board member still opposed to the plan. But Bob Thompson would just have to get used to it. The U.S. departments of Justice and Health and Human Services would get their money. And MedNet would stay in the black. Just as long as Alexander Morley was running the show.

The chanting surged and ebbed, making of the starkly elegant office a stone-floored cloister where a man's soul could stop fighting and soar. Morley imagined his soul alive again in the music. The boy who wanted to be a doctor, who wanted to save people. That was his soul and he kept it secret and apart in ancient chants he shared with no one.

But that boy wouldn't survive ten minutes in the real world, Morley knew. He'd learned the lesson early and never forgotten it. To succeed you had to watch the big picture and be prepared to make a few sacrifices along the way. And in this business those sacrifices were likely to be people. Alexander Morley took pride in having no illusions about life or his role in it. He'd accept the responsibility for those sacrifices, pay up, and get on with business. He hadn't made the rules. He just lived by them.

Turning back to his desk he silenced the music with a slender black remote control, and studied the projections outlined on the laptop screen. He'd long ago seen where medical profit would be made by the twenty-first century, and he'd amassed a fortune pursuing that vision. Now the rest of the world was catching up and would have to pay Alexander Morley for seeing it first.

The brain. Where the quality of every life is determined. He'd seen where the technology was leading even then, when the only computers were monstrous mainframes capable of little more than uninspired mathematical filing. He'd seen it when his fellow med school students were sampling every morphine-based medication they could pilfer, searching for euphoria. Life was uncomfortable and certain chemicals in the brain could make it less so. For some, life was worse than uncomfortable; it was hell. And their loved ones would do anything, pay anything to relieve their suffering.

In time, computer technology would explore and map the chemistry of the brain and new drugs would follow. Drugs that would end psychic misery. All Dr. Alexander Morley had to do was track that misery with well-diversified investments.

And now two foreign medical management concerns—one German and one Japanese—had shown him a new track. And a way to recoup all and more of the millions MedNet would pay the government because its chain of private psychiatric hospitals, each called Silvertree, had been a little overzealous in confining people until their insurance ran out. Confining people who in reality had no psychiatric illness at all, and confining them against their will.

It was unfortunate that the Los Angeles Silvertree had overdiagnosed and detained a man whose brother happened to be an attorney. The Silvertree hospitals were deliberately marketed to a lower-class clientele traditionally awed by doctors and unlikely to file lawsuits. The attorney had orchestrated a class-action suit, and the government had caught on. These things happened.

Morley clicked off the laptop and smiled as he buzzed for his car to be brought up from the building's parking area. The Germans and Japanese were bickering openly about a franchise on a unique new psychiatric program. Something put together by an unheard-of tribe of Indians in Southern California. Morley hadn't known there were Indians in California, not that it mattered. The Indian craze was just starting in Europe and Japan. He'd buy this place out, then sell individual franchises for whatever it was they did to foreign medical entrepreneurs. At the same time he'd redesign the Silvertree chain along the same lines and sell all fourteen hospitals. The potential profit from the sales of the GentleCare chain now and modified Silvertree chain later could be ten times the money this judgment was costing MedNet. And he'd already hired just the man to negotiate an attractive deal with the Indians.

Alexander Morley brushed the sleeves of his British-tailored suit jacket with arthritic fingers and pushed the button that would open his double office doors. His wife would have been asleep for hours by the time he reached the estate he'd built in Scottsdale. They hadn't talked to each other in years. At sixty-nine, after forty years of marriage, they simply had nothing to say. A tremor of distaste brought a frown beneath his well-groomed silver hair, but he shook it off. Nothing really mattered except what existed in this room. Success. Power. And the memory of his boyish soul.

During the night Bo awoke sweating from a dream in which the desert sky had cracked. She'd heard it, she was sure. A sound that shattered the dome of stillness outside and sent whining aftershocks to throb in her ears. But the sky beyond her window was as immense and silent as ever when she looked. Nothing moving but a falling star so distant that its brief arc seemed merely an illusion. The night desert. Bo was certain no other living thing had seen the star fall, and the awareness filled her with a familiar, lonely exaltation. And a sense that she was going to make it through.

"Could it be death ye've been courtin'?" asked the voice of her long-dead Irish grandmother from somewhere in her head. "And with no priest in sight, a disgrace it is to think!"

"I cut my hair instead," Bo whispered in the dark. "And besides, there are plenty of priests here, Grandma Bridget. Indian priests. No problem."

Great, Bradley. Now you're talking to dead relatives in the middle of the night. Lying to dead relatives. What next?

But in the greater psychic privacy of her bed Bo grinned. Bridget Mairead O'Reilly would be proud that her granddaughter had thwarted the suicidal goblin called depression one more time, even though she'd be horrified at the "pagan" setting in which the battle had been won. Bo made a mental note to make a donation to something of which her grandmother would have approved, just to even things out. Maybe sponsor a pennywhistle competition.

In the morning she woke to a silence that seemed odd until she realized Old Ayma wasn't in the bathroom between their rooms, muttering noisily as she brushed her teeth. Bo had grown accustomed to using Ayma as an alarm clock. And the whole lodge seemed eerily quiet, as if everyone had left during the night.

After pulling on jeans and a clean T-shirt she hurriedly downed her usual morning pill. The one that would keep her mood swings in the same arc with everybody else's mood swings. Hah. That one had clearly fallen on its face. Then she took the other pill, the antidepressant that would enable her to remember to wash her hair and smile sweetly when people said banal things like "good morning." Even when not depressed Bo found nothing good about morning. Any morning. And this one was weird.

Padding barefooted down the earthen-tiled corridor, she listened for voices, the clatter of dishes from the dining area, somebody playing a flute, anything. From a paloverde tree beyond an open door at the end of the hall came the scratchy cooing of a white-winged dove.

"Who cooks for you all?" rasped the bird in sounds that seemed words. "Who cooks for you all, who cooks for you all?"

The effect was creepy. An empty building and one dove repeating the same question over and over in the bright morning air. Bo blinked in the sunlight spilling through the door and steadied herself by touching the wall. A sculptor had carved random animal forms in the layered earth walls, and she noticed that her hand was touching the ear of a jackrabbit half emerged from a band of red-brown clay. The rabbit seemed to be listening to the dove. It occurred to Bo that perhaps she'd heard one too many Indian stories. And where in hell was everybody, anyway?

In the lodge living room the portrait of John Crooked Owl stared out from the fireplace wall. His dark eyes looked through the front wall and into infinity. Bo followed the track of his gaze and hurried through the garden courtyard beyond the front door. What she saw made no sense.

Everybody was outside. All the Neji, the children, and eight of the other guests who were already up. Old Ayma, swathed in what looked like several tablecloths with a flowered blouse over her head, hunched near the door. Only her eyes were visible beneath layers of fabric. Dura stood holding Cunel, the youngest of her and Zach's five children. The little boy was fidgeting in her arms, but making no noise. Zach, Bo noticed, was holding Mort's son, Bird, whose blue eyes looked flat and way too big. She didn't see Mort anywhere.

"What's going on?" she asked.

Dura handed Cunel to her oldest daughter, Juana, and motioned Bo toward the shade of a mission fig tree.

"We're waiting for the sheriff," she said, smoothing her long cotton blouse with large hands. Dura smelled like flour and oranges, Bo noticed. She'd been preparing breakfast when something drew her outside. But what?

"Let's sit down," Dura went on, selecting one of the benches beneath the tree. "Something terrible has happened."

Bo felt a contraction beneath her lungs, followed by a chemical taste at the back of her throat. The vitaminlike taste of the medications dissolving in her stomach.

"What?" she whispered.

"Mort Wagman has... has died," Dura said. "He went for a walk late last night, to Yucca Canyon. When he hadn't returned by the time we got up, Zach went looking for him. He found Mort's body at the rim of the canyon."

Bo gasped. The news was too shocking to internalize immediately, but her mind quickly created reasons, made sense of the unthinkable.

"Was it the Clozaril?" she asked.

The medication that stood between Mort Wagman and the distorted thinking of schizophrenia could be dangerous. People using it had to have weekly blood tests and had to be scrupulous about taking every dose at the prescribed daily intervals. But Bo knew the answer even as she asked the question. Mort had been fanatically careful about his meds.

"No, I'm afraid it was—"

"A rattlesnake," Bo finished Dura's sentence, the syllables desperate. "Mort and I walked out to Yucca Canyon all the time. We kept watching for them. But Mort knew to make noise on the trail and keep his eyes open. I can't believe ..."

A clammy hand seemed to be closing around her heart, and her breath felt stringy and shallow. Across the pale blue sky a dull curtain fell like a fine-meshed screen. Beyond the shadow cast by the fig tree a tumble of pink, daisylike fleabane turned gray against a backdrop of murderous cholla cactus. What was the point in fighting to keep going? Death was everywhere. You couldn't win.

"Mort was shot," Dura said softly. "Zach saw a wound in the middle of his chest. That's why we phoned the sheriff. Zach sent Ojo back out there with a rifle to guard Mort's body until the sheriff gets here."

"Yes," Bo answered, seeing Zach and Dura's oldest boy in her mind. The vultures that would soon come. The other predators. A difficult task for a boy of eleven, but Ojo was a man in Kumeyaay terms. He'd been through the ceremony that ended his childhood; he'd do what was expected of him. Bo wasn't sure why the image was so comforting, but it was. Nothing would vandalize Mort's body. Nothing would disturb what she'd just realized was a crime scene. Mort Wagman had been murdered!

"I heard a sound during the night," she told Dura. "It woke me up. That must have been the shot that... that killed Mort."

Inside her head the gray landscape was turning to flickers of pale gold and then deepening to oranges, reds. Anger. It felt like a flood of electricity blasting through the depression, the medications, the whole structure of her being. This was not a natural death like Mildred's, ordained by the cycles of life. This death was unnatural, unnecessary. And this death had stolen a friend. The anger cooled to flecks of steel Bo could feel hardening behind her eyes.

Dura noticed. "This is a terrible thing for you," she said. "I should call Dr. Broussard. Maybe a sedative..."

"No," Bo answered. "I'm all right. And I can help with the arrangements for Bird. The sheriff will take him, you know. Bird will have to go to the receiving home in San Diego and then to a foster home until Mort's family can be located. He can't stay here unless the mother or some other relative is notified and on the way by the time the sheriff arrives."

In Dura's puzzled silence Bo recognized the cultural gap between Indians and the dominant culture, whose rules were often cruel and always unassailable. "You'll have a file on Mort, or the psychiatrist who's monitoring his meds will," she thought aloud. "We can get phone numbers for the family from that."

Dura frowned and led Bo to the lodge office adjacent to the kitchen. As she unlocked a filing cabinet Bo admired the array of photos adorning the office walls. John Crooked Owl with an Indian man Bo thought must be Catomka. Zach as a boy, holding up a dead snake. Various men and women, hundreds of them, who had been guests of the Kumeyaay since John Crooked Owl learned that San Diego County would pay money to people willing to care for those nobody wanted— the chronically mentally ill.

"There's nothing listed in the file under 'next of kin' but a theatrical agent in Hollywood," Dura said uncomfortably. Then she grabbed a portable phone from its cradle and hurried through the kitchen and out through a back door.