Page 11 of Hanging and Burning

The Egyptian nurse closed the door behind her on the way out.

“How’s the treatments feelin’?” I asked.

“They don’t feel like nuthin’. With this immunotherapy shit it’s like takin’ Kool-Aid for the chicken pox. It already cost five times more than my insurance would’a covered and now they say I’m’a start on what they call stem cell therapy.”

I knew from Roger that he’d spent more than nine million dollars on the treatments alone. They’d done a gene profile on Brenda and came up with a highly advanced non-chemo cocktail that the doctors seemed sure would heal a ninety-six-year-old woman of one of the rarest cancers there was.

“That’s a lotta money,” I’d said to the billionaire a few weeks before. “Must’a been hard to convince B to accept it.”

“You’d better believe it,” the tall, preternaturally thin, ninety-four-year-old white man said. “And I didn’t even tell her that I promised to install a new wing if she survives.”

“That’s a good idea, though,” I said. “You could tell her that wing is the way you’ll help people like her.”

Laughing, he said, “That’s not even a lie.”

“How you doin’, baby?” Brenda asked me.

“Takin’ it easy, B. California got a lot to brag about.”

“But it still ain’t like down home,” she said, wrapped in that mink. “Down there, people say hello even if they don’t like you. You talk to Arman?”

“Just got back from him. You didn’t tell me he was a gangster.”

“That was a long time ago, Joe. Nowadays all he’s tryin’ to do is make it one more day. And he’s worried about his granddaughter while goin’ through it. You gonna help him?”

“Gonna try.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand if I find her. Nuthin’ if I don’t.”

“You gonna bleed a dyin’ old man like that?”

“Oh yeah. And maybe not just him. I’m gonna come to you if he refuses to pay.”

“Help him out, Joe.”

“Did you know that his granddaughter is Black?”

“She is?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh, ain’t that sumpin’. No, I didn’t know.”

“How’d you guys start talkin’?”

“You questionin’ me, Joe?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, then. Me and him would sit in the waitin’ room in between the different kindsa treatments they give on Tuesdays and Fridays. I stayed because’a the magazines and he did because he liked it there more than his room.

“I knew from the first hello that he was from Brooklyn, so we started talkin’. One thing led to another, and he told me about how he had lost touch with his granddaughter, and he was worried sick about her.”

“And you decided to volunteer my services?”

“I asked Roger. He said that you were the best he could think of.”