Lee Child - First Thrills

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 head inside my home office. I was so engrossed in reviewing the medical file that I didn’t even hear her calling my name.

“Bobby, are you going deaf?” she said. “Dinner’s on the table.”

I jumped at the sound of her voice and quickly hid the browser with a well-placed click of my mouse.

“Just give me a minute,” I said, without bothering to turn around.

My heart pounded in my chest. Lee Anne departed with my assurance that I’d follow, but I went back to the site as soon as she had left the room. The betting system for The Dead Club was even more ingenious than Grove had described. It was a kitty-based system, five-thousand-dollar uniform bet for all players wagering on an open case. Players were allowed to pick a time period from the options given, in this case, every two weeks for a year, and then every month. And just like The Price is Right, the winner had to be the closest without going over. There were already at least twenty doctors involved in this case, because the kitty was up to one hundred thousand dollars.

At risk was my five grand. If I won, I’d split with any doctor who picked the same time period as I did. Whoever was behind this operation possessed some serious computer chops to make the site so sophisticated, but still easy to use.

I had a bank account with ten grand in it that Lee Anne didn’t even know existed. I was planning to use it for a surprise mega-trip to Italy in celebration of our fifteenth wedding anniversary. My mouth went dry thinking about what we would do in Europe when I won this bet, and every nerve in my body told me I was going to. I never for a moment considered we might end up celebrating our anniversary at an Outback Steakhouse.

The Dead Club wasn’t luck, it was skill.

I imagined gondolas, floating down a river of champagne, with Lee Anne nestled in my arms, and then the two of us touring the lush English countryside in a rented Bentley. I felt a sudden rage at all those arrogant surgeons in The Dead Club with their gilded lives, looking down with disdain on my chosen specialty. But what they didn’t know was that I possessed skills to interpret medical records in ways the other docs simply could not. I decided then and there that I’d mail a bank check, as required, to the post- office-box address provided, to give myself a minimum kitty of five-thousand dollars to play with.

One measly bet couldn’t hurt.

I won.

John Doe died two months and twenty-five days from my first Dead Club bet. I wasn’t the only winner, though. Competition was tougher than I had anticipated. Fifteen of us split a hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar kitty. Just like that, I had doubled my money, and those army ants were now dancing the Lambada in my head, but at 75 r.p.m.

I hadn’t bet on another case since my inaugural John Doe play, but now I couldn’t wait for April the first to arrive, because that meant a new record would be posted for betting. The pool would be open again and I was ready and willing to take the plunge.

I won again.

This time, I split the kitty with only two other docs who agreed with me that the woman, halfway into her fourth year with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, would be gone in four months. The safe bet would have been eight months, given that the average life expectancy for ALS sufferers was between three and five years. But this Jane Doe had a subtle abnormality on her cardiogram and an elevation in her serum calcium that I decided was worth at least a deduction of six weeks.

It was a tough bet, given that 10 percent of ALS patients live ten years or longer. Still, there were enough indicators that, like me, two other skilled docs had calculated death would soon be knocking on her door. Her demise netted me sixty-three thousand dollars. Forget gondolas. Now, it was the Riviera that was flooded with champagne.

But winning streaks, even a streak of two, run the risk of ending and mine came to a crashing halt that August. I lost four in a row. Four! Two Jane Does and two John Does. It would have been a twenty-five-thousand-dollar loss, five thousand dollars per bet. But I didn’t bet five thousand dollars. The Dead Club also had a high rollers game with a thirty-thousand- dollar minimum ante and my winnings qualified me for that club membership as well. For a man of my income and means, the rush of placing a thirty-thousand- dollar bet was indescribable. I was sure my winning ways were going to continue. I never would have started playing the thirty-thousand-dollar kitty game otherwise. Never has being wrong about a hunch hurt so much.

A mere twelve months after placing my initial wager on the stage IVA John Doe, I had blown not only my winnings, but a second mortgage on my house and a chunk of my kids’ college fund. Lee Anne hadn’t found out just yet, but she was suspicious, that’s for sure.

Confessing to her my involvement with The Dead Club would be akin to signing my divorce papers. Just when I thought my luck had officially run out, I saw the January bet.

The unimaginable had happened.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The name of a consulting neurologist for a terribly ill man had been left in at the bottom of his note. Ivan Dworsky, a neurologist I knew well. Barring an incredible coincidence, the case was a patient at my hospital! All I had to do was determine and confirm the identity, and that I was quickly able to do. The gondolas were floating again.

Richard Generoso-sixty-seven years old with invasive glioblastoma multiforme, a grade-four malignant brain tumor.

I had only three days to place my bet. This was like betting blackjack while seeing the dealer’s hand. It was one thing trying to predict the outcome by reading a medical record, but another thing entirely to have access to the actual patient. I could review his CT scans with the best radiologists around.