Gary Braver - Elixir

Ross sipped his drink quietly.

"We're trying to reconstruct assays on the compound from old notes, except it's like trying to build a car from memory."

"That's not why I called you," Ross finally said. He got up and put another log on the fire. "I'm asking for your resignation, Quentin."

"My resignation? You've got to be joking."

"I'm not joking. I want you out by Friday."

"Why, for god's sake?"

Ross handed him printouts of downloaded files. "Over the last year you transferred 3 million dollars of earnings from overseas clients to corporate accounts in Caribbean banks-bogus outfits with nothing more than an account line. My guess is that you used the funds to pay off your drug pals from Apricot Cay. I'd like to believe it's not true, but the evidence is sitting in your lap." Ross looked down at him and simply asked, "Why?"

A long moment of silence filled the room as Quentin struggled to fabricate explanations. But he had none. Finally he cleared his throat and said in a soft voice of defeat, "They threatened to kill Robyn if I didn't pay."

"You could have come to me. We could have gone to the authorities. We could have done something. God Almighty, Quentin, you had options other than fraud and theft."

"You don't understand."

"No, I don't, because you violated everything that's important-your family, career, your future, your sense of self."

Quentin silently stared into the fire. There was nothing else to say. Next week Ross would begin an outside search for a replacement. Quentin stood up. "I'm sorry about this, Ross."

"You're sorry! Is that it? Is that all you have to say? No explanation why you embezzled money from your own family's company to pay off drug barons? A company I nearly killed myself to build? A company that was going to be handed to you, to build for your own child and grandchildren? Nothing more than a little 'sorry about this,' as if you'd spilled your drink?"

Quentin locked his eyes on Ross's and his face shifted as if something large and dark had passed behind it. "I guess not."

Ross sighed as if his heart were breaking.

Quentin started toward the door then stopped. "I'd appreciate it if you would not tell Margaret. It's my problem, and my job to tell her."

Ross nodded. He had not told her. Nor did he want to. It would be like delivering a death warrant. And he was already at the edge of despair. Seventy-four years old, at the threshold of retirement, and facing the biggest crisis of his life. "One more thing," Ross said. "They're saying that the plane was sabotaged. Do you know anything about that?"

Quentin slammed his glass down. "No, goddamn it! And you're not going to pin that on me, too."

"I'm not pinning it on you, but you've been dealing with the kind of people who don't think twice about killing others."

"Well, you're wrong, Ross. Dead wrong! That was your golden boy, and when the cops bring him in they'll fry his ass."

Quentin left and slammed the door behind him, leaving Ross standing there with tears in his eyes and feeling very old and tired and desperately missing his wife. He turned off the lights, and went upstairs and took a double dosage of Xanax to help him sleep. At his age, sleep was a reluctant friend.

He settled in bed and felt a warm mist fill the pockets of his brain, blotting out the last look on Quentin's face before he stormed out the door-a look that said he was lying.

Tubarine chloride is a salt derived from the curare plant found in humid tropics of South America. A woody shrub (curarea toxicofera), the plant's bark is used by the Jamandi Indians of Brazil and the Kofans of Ecuador and many other tribes as the chief ingredient in the poison of their blowgun arrows. Known simply as tubarine, the chloride is mixed with sterile water before being injected. An overdose causes respiratory failure, which begins with a heaviness of eyelids, difficulty in swallowing, paralysis of the extremities and the diaphragm, a crushing substernal pain, and ends in circulatory collapse, and death. The effect is immediate-within ten to twenty seconds-and the drug remains in the body only a brief time after expiration. Unless there is suspicion otherwise, death appears as a heart attack.

In his pocket Quentin carried a capped syringe containing five cubic centimeters of tubarine, enough to send a bull elephant into cardiac arrest.

He drove around replaying the meeting with Ross until he had worked up the necessary resolve. Then he headed back to Belmont Hill.

Ross's house was black. And being that it was a weekday, the street was dead with no traffic or midnight strollers.

Quentin pulled into the driveway and slipped on the surgical gloves. Because Ross had trouble sleeping, he had come to depend on Xanax. He also had drunk at least two glasses of brandy, making a dangerous combination.

Using Margaret's key, Quentin slipped in through the kitchen. The only sound was the hum of the refrigerator. Because the place was old, the floors creaked as he made his way to the front stairs. There he slipped off his shoes, then climbed, stopping with every step to listen. Nothing but the occasional creaks of the house settling. He was nervous but resolute. There were no options, he reminded himself.

"A mission with no margin for error."

"A mission whose stakes are beyond mortal."

Elixir was the one thing separating him, maybe even Robyn, from the grave. Something Ross could never appreciate.

The bedroom door was open, and the light of the clock radio cast a green glow on the hump of Ross's body. It would have to be quick and precise. Fortunately the upstairs had wall-to-wall carpet which allowed him to move with catlike stealth.

Ross lay on his back, the only comfortable position given his lower lumbar problems. From the fluttery sounds, he was in deep chemical sleep.

For a moment Quentin watched the man and cleared his mind of all but his resolve.

no margin for error

Quentin snapped on the light. Without waiting for a reaction, he spread open the lids of Ross's right eye and rammed the needle of the syringe high into the white of the eyeball above the iris, pressing the plunger all the way in.

By reflex Ross's head snapped to the side as he let out a hectoring cry. So as not to tear the eyeball or pop it out of its socket, Quentin let go, horrified at how the needle stuck in Ross's face and flopped as he screamed and convulsed. Ross's hands rose to grasp the syringe but froze in the air, paralyzed from the shocking pain.

Quentin threw himself full-body onto Ross, pinning his arms and legs to the mattress. Ross continued to shriek as his face contorted in agony and his head flopped about with the needle still buried in his eyeball.

Die, goddamn it! Die! Quentin screamed in his head.

Tubarine was rated six out of six on the scale of toxicity. It was supposed to work within twenty to thirty seconds. Ross was supposed to experience total paralysis-total muscle depression. Instead, he was still struggling, his mouth moving, and his lungs still pressing out long hideous squeals.

Then he remembered the Xanax-alprazolam, a muscle relaxant like tubarine. Over the years, Ross had built up a tolerance intensified by the alcohol. Christ! This could go on forever.

To stop the awful cries, Quentin clamped one hand onto Ross's mouth and pulled the needle out with his other-only to find himself inches from his eyes, one huge and gaping, the other spurting ocular fluid. Through his gloved fingers he felt Ross groan. It was maddening. His muscles were supposed to be useless by now. Yet his legs still twitched and his pelvis rose in an obscene parody of sexual intercourse.

For what seemed an interminable spell, Quentin lay on top of Ross's body, until, at last, he felt it go into neuromuscular paralysis. His mouth slacked open and his upper torso relaxed, rendering his diaphragm useless and his lungs dead pockets of air. In reflex, Ross's head twitched to catch a final breath, then settled against the pillow, a final gasp rising from his throat-a corrupt miasma of brandy that passed into Quentin's own lungs.