Serious Side Effects

By Kenneth Labich

Mark Dolan is reinventing himselfagain. He was a major-league baseball pitcher, a career cut short by an arm injury, and then he became a freelance detective, a career often marked by bloodshed and broken bones. Now, he hopes to take up the quiet life of a suburban husband and father.

His plans explode when his wife contracts a rare virus while working overseas. She is treated with a new drug, marketed by a major pharmaceutical company, and she quickly plunges into a deep coma. While she clings to life, Dolan embarks on a quest to find out more about the drug she took and the people who produced it. The journey takes him from New York to Washington to a ramshackle testing center in Miamiand then ever deeper into the seamy underside of the US drug industry.

The stakes get higher when a relentless killer, hired by the drug companies, arrives to put an end to Dolans search. He and the killer stalk each other from city to city, heading for a final showdown that can only end with one of them dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524502829

Kenneth Labich

Kenneth Labich has worked as a staff writer and editor for various magazines, including Newsweek and Fortune. He is the author of four previous novels—Angry Pigs, Fishing Mishaps (2008), Precious (2009), Moisture Management (2011), and Moving the Meat (2014).

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Kenneth Labich.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016908350

ISBN:   Hardcover              978-1-5245-0284-3

              Softcover               978-1-5245-0283-6

              eBook                    978-1-5245-0282-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/19/2016

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Contents

Chapter 1: Debbie Does Dishes

Chapter 2: Don’t Approach Me

Chapter 3: Lesbians of Lauralton Hall

Chapter 4: Zombie Billionaires

Chapter 5: Bad Pharma

Chapter 6: I’m Still Thirsty

Chapter 7: Mustache on the Mona Lisa

Chapter 8: Rogue Alpha

Chapter 9: Noise In Your Head

Chapter 10: Satan Puked Him Up

Chapter 11: Big Old Bowl Of Wrong

Chapter 12: Nothing Fancy

Chapter 1

Debbie Does Dishes

J ane was standing over the kitchen sink, naked but for the apron that covered her in the front. I can feel you staring at my ass, she said.

Mark Dolan, also naked, sat on one of the high stools that lined the gray granite counter. Well, we probably should have finished what we started on the couch, he said. Then I wouldn’t be over here, panting like a rabid jackal.

She was rinsing off the last of the dinner plates. Once we get into bed, I’m not gonna want to get back up, and I just can’t sleep if I know there’s a sinkful of dirty dishes out here.

Dolan was sipping at a glass of Cabernet. "This could be a scene from a suburban porn movie—Debbie Does Dishes," he said.

Jane laughed, then turned around and pulled off the apron. Later, in bed, she asked him how he felt about their date night, two married people in a big Connecticut house with someone else taking care of the baby. Unalloyed bliss, said Dolan. Her back was to him; he leaned over and began to scratch her shoulders. The pasta was glorious and everything that happened after was sublime. You are a goddess.

Always the irony with you, she said. Anybody ever call you a smartass?

Better than being a dumbass, said Dolan. He stopped scratching. Guy I played with on the Cubs says the perfect date is when the woman holds her liquor, laughs at all your jokes, enjoys a bout of robust sex, and then turns into a roast-beef sandwich at 2 A.M.

That’s stupid and sexist, said Jane. But now I’m hungry. She got up, threw on a robe, and went downstairs to make snacks. Greek yogurt with blueberries and pecans, guessed Dolan. No, walnuts.

The next morning, Dolan was still sucking down coffee and scanning the front page of the Times when Jane went off to work at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She had tried to explain to him what she and her research colleagues were up to at the hospital, but all he understood was that they were looking into certain infectious tropical diseases—bad bugs that are getting worse she called them.

The late-August rain was coming down hard, so Dolan had his run on the treadmill in the mini-gym they had set up in the basement. He ate his breakfast, one-half of a leftover turkey sandwich and a glass of orange-grapefruit juice, while he caught the baseball highlights on ESPN Sportscenter. After his shower, he found an old yellow rain slicker and a battered Bridgeport Bluefish cap and ventured out into the downpour, jogging past the pool and across the wet grass to a break in the hedges and then to his sister’s house, a prewar Craftsman-style place with beige cedar shingles, pea-green shutters, and an elaborate weather vane on the top of the attached garage. The back door was unlocked and he found Mona in the kitchen, dressed in a black running suit and leaning over in her wheelchair to feed the baby some orange goop. The baby, dressed in a red corduroy onesie was waving her arms and legs around and making happy sounds; the bottom of her round face was covered in the goop. She make you crazy last night? said Dolan.

Mona got most of another spoonful of goop into the baby’s mouth. Do not speak ill of the world’s most perfect child, she said.

Well, I will take the anointed one off your hands as soon as you’re done there, said Dolan.

Mona picked up a hand towel and began mopping the baby’s face. That’s good, she said, I’ve got to do some things at the kids’ school.

Need a ride?

No, she said, they fixed the wheelchair lift on the van. Something about hydraulics.

He cradled the baby inside his slicker on the way back to his house, then put her on the floor of the den with a half-dozen of her favorite stuffed animals. He watched her pummel and chew on the fuzzy beasts for ten minutes, until she made a grunting noise that signaled she would need a diaper change.

The baby’s official name was Bridget Callahan Dolan, but everyone called her Bee, because almost from birth, she had pounded her own chest with her tiny fists and made the sound b-b-b, announcing her presence to the world at large. Bee was a sweet and tranquil baby most of the time, but every two hours or so she would summon an angry look on her chubby face and cry hard for thirty seconds, as if testing the darker aspects of her nature in case she needed them later.

Dolan had moved from Manhattan to Connecticut when the baby was still a small, shriveled thing, not fully baked, a preemie with a so-so chance of making it. Bee had announced her imminent arrival on a frigid early December night as they sat watching Miracle on 42nd St., trying to get psyched for Christmas, in the second-floor living room of Dolan’s West 16th St. townhouse. Jane was suddenly wracked with labor pains that they first thought were false, but then her water exploded onto the brown leather couch. Bee was born at Beth Israel Hospital on First Avenue less than two hours later, and she spent the next seven weeks and three days on a respirator in the neo-natal unit, swathed in breathing and feeding tubes. She still seemed frail and vulnerable when they took her home.

A week later, Dolan got a phone call from a man he drank with at Ben Benson’s, a Midtown steakhouse with a pleasant upstairs bar. The guy was a white-collar specialist in the New York FBI office, a career government man, with a big-time gambling addiction. He approached Dolan at Benson’s one evening and said he was on a very bad streak betting on NFL games and he owed unsympathetic people just under $250,000, which he didn’t have. You know, you’ve got a file at headquarters an inch thick, he said to Dolan. Couple guys down there pull it out every once in a while.

Dolan was working on a Cuervo-soda, trying to kill some time before meeting some people for dinner. I don’t know what that’s supposed to make me feel, he said. Am I supposed to be intimidated?

The guy was tall and skinny, just about bald with a pockmarked face. No, no, he said. Lemme buy you a drink.

The guy told his tale, describing the two femur breakers who had showed up at his house in Riverdale one night. They scared the hell out of my wife, he said. I gotta do something here and I can’t go to the cops or I lose my job, maybe a big chunk of the pension.

Dolan’s free drink arrived and he took a hit. Ever occur to you that you’re a really terrible gambler?

Yeah, it did, said the guy. Right about the time the bank turned me down for a second mortgage. Anyway, I’ve got to get someone to help me make a deal with the people who are holding my paper. I took a peek in your file and you appear to be a person who does that sort of thing now and then.

The middle guy, said Dolan. Yeah, I have been there.

Dolan told the man he would set up something if he took a run at Gamblers Anonymous and agreed to a reasonable repayment plan. Dolan also said he would help him dig out of the hole, send him a cash donation each month, if he provided a piece of information now and then—a name or a place or a phone number or whatever.

Dolan made some calls and found out that the man he needed to speak to on behalf of the FBI guy could usually be found on weekdays at a round rear table in a bar called Chapman’s just off Madison Avenue in Midtown. The guy—35ish, narrow face, slick black hair, sallow complexion, wearing a slim-fit gray suit—was businesslike, and he eventually agreed to terms. The FBI guy stopped gambling and, when his wife received a family inheritance, he paid off the debt in full. He went to the GA meetings and settled into his job. He got promoted to supervising agent and his older daughter was accepted at Yale. He told Dolan to stop the monthly payments, but he would still help out whenever he could.

The FBI guy called on a sunny Monday morning to say that the Cuban-American men who had hired people to kill Mona’s husband were dead, shot down as they left a night club in Caracas. The local cops said it was about drugs or human smuggling or both. For almost four years, since two gunmen had burst into Mona’s Central Park West apartment, spraying the bullets that killed her husband and shattered her spine, Dolan had been obsessed about her safety. The FBI guy said that Mona’s husband, who handled money for wealthy clients at a bulge-bracket Wall Street firm, maintained a private sideline keeping track of cash for a Miami-based import-export company owned by the Cuban-Americans. At some point, Mona’s husband was contacted by an FBI agent who introduced him to two Justice Department lawyers. His clients would soon be indicted on a gaudy array of Federal felonies. They could easily pencil in his name on a warrant as well, unless he became talkative. Mona’s husband and his lawyer were working out a deal with the Feds when the gunmen showed up. The fact that they left Mona alive was puzzling, said Dolan’s FBI guy, and they might want to rectify that at some point. Mona’s husband had been a loose end, and so was she.

So Dolan moved Mona and her two kids to a house in the Litchfield Hills of northwest Connecticut, hired an Israeli couple recently retired from Mossad and adept with small arms to keep an eye on things, and he put in a top-line security system—cameras and alarms everywhere, sound and motion sensors imbedded throughout the two-acre property. He wanted to be able to handle himself if bad people did show up in their lives, so he spent a year in training at Brill Associates, the biggest and baddest security conglomerate in the world—learning how to follow people in a car or on foot without being noticed, how to break into secure buildings and bug the walls and phones, how to disable a large man with only a ball-point pen. He found a Ghanaian man who taught him, at $1500 per session, a Hong Kong-style of close-in street fighting, and he became very good at it. When he drove up from the city to see Mona, he switched cars two or three times and drove ten miles under the speed limit, checking his rear-view mirror every twenty seconds.

Now, all that was over. Dolan had a drink with the FBI guy a week after that first call. The identity of the two dead men in Caracas had been confirmed, the guy said. In all likelihood, Mona was no longer in any danger.

She took the news calmly, then began making plans. She called Dolan a week later and declared that she would be selling the Litchfield house and moving south, closer to the city—some nice normal suburb, not too snotty, where the kids can go to the public schools and see a tree now and then.

She started in New York, visiting more than thirty houses in Westchester County, then looked at another twenty further north along the Hudson. Jane liked a sleek glass place in Dobbs Ferry and a big converted barn in Rhinebeck, but she wanted to cross the border into Connecticut and look some more. She found what she wanted in a town called Fairdale, a community of 50,000 souls on Long Island Sound, squeezed between Westport, a leafy haven for Wall Street and Madison Avenue commuters, and Bridgeport, a decaying post-industrial city with a hollowed-out downtown dotted with empty factories and abandoned office buildings. Fairdale reflected both extremes. An affluent minority commuted to New York, and some of them lived in multi-million-dollar mansions along the shore and in the hills north of downtown. But there was still a sizeable population of longtime Yankees who had been there for generations, before the town was a commuter destination; most of them lived in blue-collar neighborhoods along the border with Bridgeport.

The Craftsman house Mona found was on the east side of town, halfway up a hill overlooking a private golf course. There were only three bedrooms and a smallish backyard, but the rooms were of generous size and lined with gleaming mahogany. A large laundry chute that extended to the top floor could be easily converted into a small elevator for her chair. The asking price was $1.2 million and Mona’s $950,000 bid was accepted promptly. She got $750,000 for the Litchfield house.

A month of so after Mona moved to Fairdale, on a brisk April weekend, Dolan and Jane drove a rental Jeep up from the city to spend the day. Halfway through lunch, Mona mentioned that a gray-stone house on the next street over was for sale. There was a pool and a guesthouse in the back yard, which abutted her own. After they had cleared the table, Mona told Dolan and Jane to take a walk over and look at the place. She and the kids wanted some time to play with the baby.

The house was big, twelve rooms on three full floors, with a 50-foot-high foyer and a twin circular staircase, a living room with twelve-foot windows overlooking the pool, a deck with a wet bar and a massive fire pit. The real-estate agent, a 45ish blonde in a too-tight blue pantsuit who was holding the Sunday open house on the place, described it as a classic center-hall Colonial, with Georgian accents. On the way back to Mona’s house, they laughed about the three of them rattling around such a place, Bee with a whole floor of her own if she wanted.

They settled into their lives in Manhattan, joining the neo-hippie parents pushing strollers through the playground at Union Square and all over the streets of the West Village, cooing at their babies between text messages. They took Bee to MOMA and the Guggenheim, walking her past the Renoirs and Gaugins in her snugglie, little legs dangling out the bottom. By the age of four months, she had been to the Bronx Zoo twice and had ridden the Central Park Carousel at least six times.

Moments they had found mildly disturbing about life in the city now terrified them. Every crazy man walking down the street talking to himself seemed a mad killer. Every gaggle of three or four teenagers was a drug-addled gang ready to pounce on them. One day on Sixth Avenue, Dolan and Jane were pushing the stroller across 14th Street when a disheveled black man in front of them suddenly pulled down his pants and began defecating on the sidewalk.

A few days later, they got stuck in a hot subway car for an hour on the way back from Coney Island and arrived home to find that a broken water pipe had flooded the kitchen and was leaking into the office on the ground floor. There would be plumbers, painters, and dry-wall experts around the place for at least three weeks.

Dolan and Jane had found a superb baby nurse/nanny, an elegant Bahamian woman who moved into one of the guest bedrooms, and so they got out to the theater or a movie or dinner at Frank Manion’s bar, around the corner on Fifth Avenue, two or three times a week. The old barkeep was slowing down a bit, taking more guff from obnoxious customers than he had in the past. But he still showed up every day in a crisp white shirt, black bow tie, and red-and-black striped vest, thick white hair slicked back, and a skeptical look on his doughy red face. He also still ran a tight bar, suspending or banning customers who got too loud too often or used language he found offensive. The restaurant, the whole ground floor of a former dress factory on Fifth Avenue, had gone through culinary permutations over the years—New American pub grub, neo-red sauce Italian, classic bistro Greek. But Frank’s polished-oak bar, separated from the dining room by a low glass wall, had always been a world apart, a haven for local regulars who revered