First Thrills - Lee Child [59]
I wanted to say something, but I was too stunned to speak. Grove continued.
“When you break the club down, there’s really nothing wrong with what we do. It’s all anonymous, supervised by the competition committee, which changes members every four months. We take pains to remove anything that could tie a record to the actual patient. No names, addresses, hospital, next of kin, exact birthday—none of it. All of that information is removed before it gets posted.”
“How much have you won?” I asked.
“Let’s just say if, like you say, you’re worried about college tuition, a few winning bets in The Dead Club could take care of all that—all four years, both kids.”
“Sounds intriguing,” I said. “But what if the patient dies of something else. A slip and fall, say.”
“Hey, in our world, dead is dead.”
Fast-forward now. Two months slip by since I met Grove and his twisted little club. I had sunk back into my life dominated by sore throats, snoring problems, unexplained and unexplainable chest pains, equally mysterious muscle and joint aches and of course, parents concerned about their teenagers’ smoking and pill-popping habits, refusing to look at their own.
Lee Anne and I fell back into step; that lost week in Vegas is now just a fuzzy memory, made even fuzzier by the routines of life—household duties and shuttling our children (Jake twelve and Max ten) to and from basketball practice, piano lessons, and the like. Then, on Christmas morning, no less, I get this email from tdc0529@aol.com. The message simply read: “YOU’RE IN” and there was a link for me to click. By this time, I had pushed Grove and his crazy betting pool to the back of my mind. I clicked the link anyway, and then panicked when it was clear some application was being installed on my computer. I was about to power off the machine when a Web browser popped open and the Web page that loaded read:
THE DEAD CLUB
Login:
Password:
First-time visitors, click here
When I clicked the first time visitor link, I was asked to enter my social security number, which to my surprise, I actually did. What’s even more astounding is that it recognized my social and then returned a username/password combo, which allowed me to log on to the site successfully. I guess Grove had nominated me and I had been vetted by some committee and approved for membership in The Dead Club.
The site, itself, was a marvel. There were bets being tracked in real time from what I gauged to be nearing a hundred cases, some stretching back several years. The older cases were locked for any new action, but you could still track the current odds to win. To get into a betting pool, you had to bet on the current, active case, which for January was an eighty-eight-year-old man with stage-four pancreatic cancer, which, according to his biopsies, had spread to several adjacent organs, the most deadly of which was his liver. He was already showing signs of hepatic inflammation and obstruction.
My whole body started tingling with a mix of anticipation and excitement, but there was some revulsion, too. It was a feeling I knew well from Vegas, as though a thousand army ants had taken up residence underneath my skin and were now burrowing long tunnels alongside my veins and arteries. Grove was right, I thought, as I read through the anonymous record. There really wasn’t anything wrong with what the club was doing.
The poor patient had endured the usual barrage of treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation, and even biological therapy. I looked up the statistics. Rarely did survival for Stage IVA pancreatic cancer, even with aggressive treatment, exceed one year. I modified the rate of deterioration, taking into consideration the man’s medical history, general condition, and chemotherapy regimen that included Gemzar and Camptosar, both fairly recent. I weighed each factor, most importantly, his advanced age and thirty years of type-two diabetes. For this guy to make it six months would be a miracle.
Lee Anne popped her