The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove Chapter 2~3

TwoThe Sea BeastThe cooling pipes at the Diablo C eitheron nuclear Power Plant were wholly fashioned from the finest stainless mark. Before they were installed, they were x-rayed, ultrasounded, and insisting-tested to be sure that they could n ever so break, and afterwardswards being welded into place, the welds were also x-rayed and tested. The radioactive travel from the core left its heat in the pipes, which leached it finish into a saltwater cooling pond, where it was safely vented to the Pacific. still Diablo had been built on a breakneck entry during the energy scargon of the septetties. The welders worked double and triple shifts, drive by greed and cocaine, and the inspectors who ran the X-ray machines were on the afore express(prenominal) agendum. And they baffled one. non a major mis translate. Just a tiny leak. Barg totally nonice sufficient. A minuscule stream of harmless, low- aim radiation wafted tabu with the tide and drifted e very(prenominal)place the continental shelf, dissipating as it went, until even the to the proudest degree sensitive instruments would mystify missed it. Yet the leak didnt go countly undetected.In the deep impinge by California, near a submerged vol stubo where the waters ran to seven degree centigrade degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a colossal slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and log Zs of old age. It was instinct, sense, and memory the Sea Beasts brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine beefy inadequate sailors cristalderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with spirited radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast, and equal a child lured from chthonian the coers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its immense tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the underway of tasty treats. A current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove. mavis song thrush tossed rearward a rotating shaft of Bushmills to take the edge off her frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her bunsball bat. She wasnt real angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a tourist and valued above the mice in the walls simply because he carried cash. Maybe the item that mostthing had actually happened in the Slug would bring in a piddling business. People would come in to regard the story, and mavis could stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at to the lowest degree(prenominal) three drinks a tell.Business had been slo extension service over the last couple of years. People didnt gibem to requirement to bring their problems into a bar. magazine was, on any give afternoon, youd sop up three or quad guys at the bar, pouring down beers as they poured out their considerts, so filled with self-loathing that theyd snap a vertebra to avoid catching their own re proof in the big mirror behind the bar. On a wedded evening, the stools would be encompassing of kinda a little who whined and growled and bitched all night long, pausing simply long enough to stagger to the bathroom or to sacrifice a fourth to the jukeboxs extensive self-pity selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in unretentive supply these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and ve encounterables in the diet for the disturbingness shortage, and she fought the insidious invaders by runnelning two-for-one happy hours with oleaginous meat snacks (The consentient point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasnt it?), moreover all her efforts only served to cut her profits in half(prenominal). If Pine Cove could no longer produce sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a discolour singer.The old Black piece of music wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a dilapidated black wool suit that was too heavy for the wea ther, red suspenders over a Hawaiian shirt that sported topless hula daughters, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. Shed been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.Name your poison, she said.He took off his fedora, show a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. You gots some wine?Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white? Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.Them cheap-shit boys do expanded. Used to be jus one flavor.Red or white? some(prenominal) sweetest, sweetness.Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow placid from an icy jug in the well. Thatll be three bucks.The Black opus reached out thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long digits moving ridge like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash and missed the glass by four inches.Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. You blind ?No, it be dark in here. seize on off your sunglasses, idjit.I cant do that, maam. Shades go with the trade.What trade? Dont you exploit to sell pencils in here. I dont tolerate beggars.Im a Bluesman, maam. I hear yall lookin for one.Mavis looked at the guitar case on the bar, at the Black man in shades, at the long fingernails of his reform hand, the short nails and knobby immemorial thinkuses on the fingertips of his left, and she said, I should have guessed. Do you have any consider?He laughed, a laugh that st deviceed deep down and move his shoulders on the way up and chugged out of his throat like a steamer engine leaving a tunnel. Sweetness, I got me more experience than a busload o hos. Aint no patter settled a day on wolffish Jefferson since God done first dropped him on this big ol ball o dust. Thats me, call me Catfish.He shook hands like a sissy, Mavis thinking, skilful let her have the tips of his fingers. She used to do that before she had her arthritic finger joints replaced. She didnt want any arthritic old Blues singer. Im outlet to want someone by beggarlys of Christmas. Can you stay that long or would your dust settle?I spose I could slow down a bit. to a gap cold to go back East. He looked around the bar, trying to take in the dinge and smoke through his dark glasses, indeed glowering back to her. Yeah, I capacity be able to clear my schedule if and here he grinned and Mavis could see a lucky tooth at that place with a musical note cut in it if the money is right, he said.Youll thump room and board and a division of the bar. You bring em in, youll take a leak money.He considered, scratched his cheek where white stubble sounded like a toothbrush against sandpaper, and said, No, sweetness, you bring em in. Once they hearCatfish revive, they come back. straight off what pctage did you have in mind?Mavis stroked her chin tomentum, pulled it straight to its full three inches. Ill need to hear you play.Catfish nodded. I can play. He flipped the latches on his guitar case and pulled out a gleaming National steel body guitar. From his carrier bag he pulled a cutoff bottleneck and with a twist it fell onto the little finger of his left hand. He vie a chord to test tune, pulled the bottleneck from the fifth to the ninth and danced it there, high and wailing.Mavis could smell something like mildew, moss possibly, a change in humidity. She sniffed and looked around. She hadnt been able to smell anything for xv years.Catfish grinned. The Delta, he said.He launched into a twelve-bar Blues, compete the bass line with his thumb, squealing the high notes with the slide, rocking back and forth on the bar stool, the light of the neon Coors sign behind the bar playing colors in the reflection of sunglasses and his bald head.The daytime regulars looked up from their drinks, stopped lying for a second, and Slick McCall missed a straight-in eight-ball shot on the quarter table, which he some never did.And Catfish sang, start high and haunting, going low and gritty.Theys a crocked ol woman run a bar out on the Coast.Im telling you, theys a mean ol woman run a bar out on theCoast. and when she gets you under the covers, That ol woman address your plainlytered bread to toast.And then he stopped.Youre hired, Mavis said. She pulled the jug of white cheap-shit out of the well and sloshed some into Catfishs glass. On the house.Just then the access opened and a blast of sunlight cut through the dinge and smoke and residual Blues and Vance McNally, the EMT, walked in and set his radio on the bar.Guess what? he said to everyone and no one in particular. That pilgrim woman hung herself.A low mumble passed through the regulars. Catfish put his guitar in its case and picked up his wine. Sho nuff a sad day startin early in this little town. Sho nuff.Sho nuff, said Mavis with a cackle like a stainless-steel hyena.Valerie RiordanDepression has a mortality rate of fifteen percent. cardinal p ercent of all forbearings with major depression leave alone take their own lives. Statistics. Hard numbers in a very squishy science. Fifteen percent. Dead.Val Riordan had been repeating the figures to herself since Theophilus Crowe had called, just now it wasnt dishing her feel any bettor about what Bess Leander had done. Val had never lost a patient before. And Bess Leander hadnt unfeignedly been depressed, had she? Bess didnt fit into the fifteen percent.Val went to the office in the back of her house and pulled Bess Leanders file, then went back to the living room to wait for Constable Crowe. At least it was the local guy, not the county sheriffs. And she could endlessly fall back on patient confidentiality. Truth was, she had no idea why Bess Leander business leader have hung herself. She had only seen Bess once, and then for only half an hour. Val had made the diagnosis, written the scrip, and collected a check for the full hour session. Bess had called in twice, talke d for a few minutes, and Val had send her a bill for the time rounded to the next quarter hour.Time was money. Val Riordan liked nice things.The doorbell rang, Westminster chimes. Val crossed the living room to the stain foyer. A thin tall figure was refracted through the doors beveled glass panels Theophilus Crowe. Val had never met him, besides she knew of him. Three of his ex-girlfriends were her patients. She opened the door.He was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a gray shirt with black epaulets that might have been part of a uniform at one time. He was clean-shaven, with long sandy hair tied neatly into a ponytail. A right(a)-looking guy in an Ichabod Crane sort of way. Val guessed he was stoned. His girlfriends had talked about his habits.Dr.Riordan, he said. Theo Crowe. He offered his hand.She shook hands. Everyone calls me Val, she said. Nice to meet you. Come in. She pointed to the living room.Nice to meet you too, Theo said, almost as an afterthought. Sorry about the ci rcumstances. He stood at the edge of the marble foyer, as if afraid to step on the white carpet.She walked past him and sit down down on the couch. Please, she said, pointing to one of a set of Hepplewhite chairs. Sit.He sat. Im not exactly sure why Im here, except that Joseph Leander doesnt seem to know why Bess did it.No note? Val asked.No. Nothing. Joseph went downstairs for breakfast this morning and comprise her dangling in the dining room.Val felt her stomach lurch. She had never really formed a mental simulacrum of Bess Leanders death. It had been words on the reverberate until now. She looked external from Theo, looked around the room for something that would erase the picture.Im sorry, Theo said. This must be delicate for you. Im just wondering if there was anything that Bess might have said in therapy that would give a clue.Fifteen percent, Val thought. She said, Most suicides dont leave a note. By the time they have deceased that far into depression, they arent int erested in what happens after their death. They just want the pain to end.Theo nodded. Then Bess was depressed? Joseph said that she appeared to be getting better.Val cast around her training for an answer. She hadnt really diagnosed Bess Leander, she had just incontrovertible what she thought would make Bess feel better. She said, Diagnosis in psychiatry isnt unendingly that exact, Theo. Bess Leander was a complex case. Without compromising doctor-patient confidentiality, I can tell you that Bess suffered from a borderline case of OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. I was treating her for that.Theo pulled a prescription care for bottle out of his shirt pocket and looked at the label. sertraline. Isnt that an anti-depressant? I only know because I used to date a woman who was on it.Right, Val thought. Actually, you used to date at least three women who were on it. She said, Zoloft is an SSRI like Prozac. Its bring down for a number of conditions. With OCD the dosage is higher. Thats it, get clinical. Baffle him with clinical bullshit.Theo shook the bottle. Could someone O.D. on it or something? I comprehend somewhere that people do crazy things sometimes on these drugs.Thats not necessarily true. SSRIs like Zoloft are often prescribed to people with major depression. Fifteen percent of all depressed patients come in suicide. There, she said it. Antidepressants are a tool, along with talk therapy, that psychiatrists use to serve up patients. Sometimes the tools dont work. As with any therapy, a third get better, a third get worse, and a third stay the same. Antidepressants arent a panacea. But you treat them like they are, dont you, Val?But you said that Bess Leander had OCD, not depression.Constable, have you ever had a stomachache and a runny nose at the same time?So youre saying she was depressed?Yes, she was depressed, as well as having OCD.And it couldnt have been the drugs?To be honest with you, I dont even know if she was victorious the drug. Ha ve you counted them?Uh, no.Patients dont always take their medicine. We dont order blood level tests for SSRIs.Right, Theo said. I guess well know when they do the autopsy.Another horrendous picture flashed in Vals mind Bess Leander on an autopsy table. The viscera of medicine had always been too much for her. She stood.I wish I could help you more, only when to be honest, Bess Leander never gave me any indication that she was suicidal. At least that was true.Theo took her clew and stood. Well, thank you. Im sorry to have daunted you. If you think of anything, you know, anything that I can tell Joseph that might make it easier on himIm sorry. Thats all I know. Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent. Fifteen percent.She led him to the door.He turned before leaving. peerless more thing. Molly Michon is one of your patients, isnt she?Yes. Actually, shes a county patient, only when I concur to treat her at a reduced rate because all the county facilities are so far away.You might want t o check on her. She attacked a guy at the Head of the Slug this morning.Is she in County?No, I took her home. She calmed down. convey you, Constable. Ill call her.Well, then. Ill be going.Constable, she called after him. Those pills you have Zoloft isnt a amateurish drug.Theo stumbled on the steps, then composed himself. Right, Doctor, I figured that out when I saw the body hanging in the dining room. Ill try not to eat the evidence.Good-bye, Val said. She keep mumd the door behind him and burst into tears. Fifteen percent. She had fifteen ampere-second patients in Pine Cove on some form of antidepressant drug or another(prenominal). Fifteen percent would be more than two hundred people dead. She couldnt do that. She wouldnt let an-other of her patients die because of her noninvolvement. If antidepressants wouldnt save them, then maybe she could.ThreeTheoTheophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum dapple sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play si xteen chords on the guitar and knew phoebe bird Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove wee Theaters revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all these endeavors, he had undergo a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artists soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create.If there was any sensation thing at which Theo excelled, it was empathy. He always seemed to be able to interpret someones point of view, no matter how singular or farfetched, and in turn could convey it to others with a succinctness and clarity that he seldom open up in expressing his own thoughts. He was a born mediator, a peacemaker, and it was this talent, after breaking up numerous fights at the Head of the Slug Saloon, t hat got Theo choose constable. That and heavy-handed instant of Sheriff rear Burton.Burton was a hard-line right-wing pol who could spout natural law and order (accent on order) over brunch with the Rotarians, luncheon with the NRA, and dinner with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and wolf down dry banquet bellyacher like it was manna from the gods every time. He wore expensive suits, a gold Rolex, and drove a pearl-black Eldor-ado that shone like a starry night on wheels (rapt attention and copious coats of carnuba from the grunts in the county motor pool). He had been sheriff of San Junipero County for sixteen years, and in that time the crime rate had dropped steadily until it was the lowest, per capita, of any county in California. His endorsement of Theophilus Crowe, someone with no law enforcement experience, had come as more than jolly of a surprise to the people of Pine Cove, especially since Theos opponent was a retired Los Angeles policeman whod put in a highly decorate d five and twenty dollar bill. What the people of Pine Cove did not know was that Sheriff Burton not only endorsed Theo, he had forced him to run in the first place.Theophilus Crowe was a quiet man, and Sheriff John Burton had his reasons for not wanting to hear a peep out of the little newton County burg of Pine Cove, so when Theo walked into his little two-room cabin, he wasnt surprised to see a red seven blinking on his answering machine. He punched the button and listened to Burtons assistant insisting that he call right away seven times. Burton never called the cell phone.Theo had come home to shower and reverberate his meeting with Val Riordan. The fact that she had treated at least three of his ex-girlfriends bothered him. He wanted to try and figure out what the women had told her. Obviously, theyd mention that he got high occasionally. Well, more than occasionally. But like any man, it worried him that they might have said something about his sexual performance. For some reason, it didnt bother him approximately as much that Val Riordan think him a loser and a drug fiend as it did that she might think he was bad in the rack. He wanted to ponder the possibilities, think away the paranoia, but kinda he dialed the sheriffs private number and was put right through.What in the endocarp is the matter with you, Crowe? You stoned?No more than usual, Theo said. Whats the problem?The problem is you upstage evidence from a crime scene.I did? Talking to the sheriff could drain all of Theos energy instantly. He fell into a beanbag chair that expectorated Styrofoam beads from a failing seam with a sigh. What evidence? What scene?The pills, Crowe. The suicides maintain said you took the pills with you. I want them back at the scene in ten minutes. I want my men out of there in half an hour. The M.E. will do the autopsy this afternoon and this case will close by dinnertime, got it? Run-of-the-mill suicide. Obit page only. No news. You understand?I was just che cking on her condition with her psychiatrist. See if there were any indications she might be suicidal.Crowe, you must resist the urge to play investigator or pretend that you are a law enforcement officer. The woman hung herself. She was de-pressed and she ended it all. The husband wasnt cheating, there was no money motive, and Mommy and Daddy werent fighting.They talked to the kids?Of socio-economic class they talked to the kids. Theyre detectives. They check into things. Now get over there and get them out of North County. Id send them over to get the pills from you, but I wouldnt want them to kick downstairs your little victory garden, would you?Im leaving now, Theo said.This is the last I will hear of this, Burton said. He hung up.Theo hung up the phone, closed his eyes, and turned into a human wanton in the beanbag chair.Forty-one years old and he still lived like a college student. His books were stacked between bricks and boards, his bed pulled out of a sofa, his icebox was empty but for a slice of pizza going green, and the crusade around his cabin were overgrown with weeds and brambles. Behind the cabin, in the center of a nest of blackberry vines, stood his victory garden ten shagged marijuana plants, sticky with buds that smelled of skunk and spice. Not a day passed that he didnt want to plow them under and sterilize the ground they grew in. And not a day passed that he didnt work his way through the brambles and lovingly ingathering the sticky green that would sustain his habit through the day.The researchers said that marijuana was only psychologically addictive. Theo had read all the papers. They only mentioned the night eliminate and mental spiders of withdrawal in passing, as if they were no more rough than a tetanus shot. But Theo had tried to quit. Hed wrung out three sets of sheets in one night and paced the cabin looking for distraction until he thought his head might explode, only to give up and suck the piquant smoke from his furtive Pete so he could find sleep. The researchers obvi-ously didnt get it, but Sheriff John Burton did. He understood Theos weakness and held it over him like the proverbial sword. That Burton had his own Achilles heel and more to lose from its discovery didnt seem to matter. Logically, Theo had him in a standoff. But emotionally, Burton had the upper hand. Theo was always the one to blink.He snatched Sneaky Pete off his orange crate coffee table and headed out the door to return Bess Leanders pills to the scene of the crime.ValerieDr. Valerie Riordan sat at her desk, looking at the icons of her feeling a tiny digital stock ticker that she would surreptitiously survey down at during appointments a gold Mont Blanc desk set, the pens jutting from the jade base like the antennae of a goldbug a set of bookends fashioned in the likenesses of Freud and Jung, clean leather-bound copies of The Psychology of the Unconscious, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (D SM-IV), The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Physicians Desk credit and a plaster-cast bust of Hippocrates that dispensed Post-it notes from the base. Hippocrates, that wily Greek who turned medicine from magic to science. The author of the famous oath that Val had uttered twenty years ago on that sunny summer day in Ann bower when she graduated from med school I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but I will never use it to injure or wrong them. I will not give poison to anyone though asked to do so, nor will I enkindle such a plan.The oath had seemed so silly, so antiquated then. What doctor, in their right mind, would give poison to a patient?But in purity and in holiness I will guard my life and my art.It had seemed so obvious and easy then. Now she guarded her life and her art with a custom security system and a Glock 9 mm. stashed in the nightstand.I will not use the knife on sufferers from stone, but I will give place to such as are c raftsmen therein.Shed never had a problem with that part of the oath. She was loathe to use the knife. Shed gone into psychiatry because she couldnt handle the messy parts of medicine. Her father, a surgeon himself, had been only mildly disappointed. At least she was a doctor, of sorts. Shed done her internship and residency in a rehab center where movie stars and rock idols learned to be liable by qualification their own beds, while Val distributed Valium like a flight attendant passing out peanuts. One wing of the sunup Center was druggies, the other eating disorders. She preferred the eating disorders. You havent lived until youve force-fed minestrone to a supermodel through a tube, she told her father.Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will do so to help the sick, keeping myself free from all intentional fault and harm, especially from fornication with woman or man, bond or free.Well, self-control from fornication hadnt been a problem, had it? She hadnt had sex since Richard left five years ago. Richard had given her the bust of Hippocrates as a joke, he said, but shed put it on her desk just the same. Shed given him a statue of Blind Justice wearing a garter belt and fishnets the year before to display at his law office. Hed brought her here to this little village, passing up offers from corporate law firms to be his dream of being a country attorney whose daily lay would include disagreements over pig paternity or the odd pension off dispute. He wanted to be Atticus Finch, Puddnhead Wilson, a Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda character who was paid in fresh-baked bread and baskets of avocados. Well, hed gotten that part Vals cause had supported them for most of their marriage. Shed be paying him alimony now if theyd actually divorced.Country lawyer indeed. He left her to go to Sacramento to mansion house the California Coastal Commission for a consortium of golf trail developers. His job was to convince the commission that sea otters and elephant se als would venerate nothing better than to hear Japanese businessmen slice Titleists into the Pacific and that what nature involve was one long fairway from Santa Barbara to San Francisco (maybe sand traps at the Pismo and Carmel dunes). He carried a pocket watch, for Christs sake, a gold chain with a jade fob mold into the shape of an endangered brown pelican. He played his front-porch, rocking-chair-wise, country lawyer against their Botany 500 sophistication and pulled down over two hundred grand a year in the bargain. He lived with one of his clerks, an longing doe-eyed Stanfordite with surfer girl hair and a figure that mocked gravity. Richard had introduced Val to the girl (Ashley, or Brie, or Jordan) and it had been oh-so-adult and oh-so-gracious and later, when Val called Richard to clear up a tax matter, she asked, So howd you overwhelm the candidates, Richard? First one to suck-start your Lexus?Maybe we should start thinking about making our separation official, Richa rd had said.Val had hung up on him. If she couldnt have a happy marriage, shed have everything else. Everything. And so had begun her revolving door policy of hustling appointments, prescribing the appropriate meds, and shopping for clothes and antiques.Hippocrates glowered at her from the desk.I didnt intentionally do harm, Val said. Not intentionally, you old buggerer. Fifteen percent of all depressives commit suicide, treated or not.Whatsoever in the course of practice I see or hear (or even removed my practice in social intercourse) that ought never to be published abroad, I will not divulge, but consider such things to be set apart secrets.Holy secrets or do no harm? Val asked, envisioning the hanging body of Bess Leander with a shudder. Which is it? Hippocrates sat on his Post-its, saying nothing. Was Bess Leanders death her fault? If she had talked to Bess instead of put her on antidepressants, would that have saved her? It was possible, and it was also possible that if sh e kept to her policy of a pill for every problem, someone else was going to die. She couldnt risk it. If using talk therapy instead of drugs could save one life, it was expense a try.Val grabbed the phone and hit the speed dial button that affiliated her to the towns only pharmacy, Pine Cove Drug and Gift.One of the clerks answered. Val asked to speak to Winston Krauss, the pharmacist. Winston was one of her patients. He was fifty-three, unmarried, and eighty pounds overweight. His holy secret, which he shared with Val during a session, was that he had an abnormal sexual fascination with marine mammals, dolphins in particular. Hed confessed that hed never been able to watch Flipper without getting an erection and that hed watched so many Jacques Cousteau specials that a French accent made him break into a sweat. He kept an anatomically correct inflatable porpoise, which he violated nightly in his bathtub. Val had older him of wearing a scuba mask and snorkel around the house, so gradually the red gasket ring around his face had cleared up, but he still did the dolphin nightly and confessed it to her once a month.Winston, Val Riordan here. I need a favor.Sure, Dr. Val, you need me to deliver something to Molly? I heard she went off in the Slug this morning. Gossip surpassed the speed of light in Pine Cove.No, Winston, you know that company that carries all the look-alike placebos? We used them in college. I need you to order look-alikes for all the antidepressants I prescribe Prozac, Zoloft, Serzone, Effexor, the whole bunch, all the dosages. Order in quantity.I dont get it, Val, what for?Val cleared her throat. I want you to fill all of my prescriptions with the placebos.Youre kidding.Im not kidding, Winston. As of today, I dont want a single one of my patients getting the real thing. Not one. be you doing some sort of experiment? Control group or something?Something like that.And you want me to charge them the normal price?Of course. Our usual arrangement . Val got a twenty percent kickback from the pharmacy. She was going to be working a lot harder, she deserve to get paid.Winston paused. She could hear him going through the glass door into the back of the pharmacy. Finally he said, I cant do that, Val. Thats unethical. I could lose my license, go to jail.Val had really hoped it wouldnt come to this. Winston, youll do it. Youll do it or the Pine Cove print will run a front-page story about you being a fish-fucker.Thats illegal. You cant divulge something I told you in therapy.Quit telling me whats illegal, Winston. Im married to a lawyer.Id really rather not do this, Val. Cant you send them down to the heedful Mart in San Junipero? I could say that I cant get the pills anymore.That wouldnt work, would it, Winston? The people at the Thrifty Mart dont have your little problem.Youre going to have some withdrawal reactions. How are you going to explain that?Let me care about that. Im quadrupling my sessions. I want to see these peop le get better, not mask their problems.This is about Bess Leanders suicide, isnt it?Im not going to lose another one, Winston.Antidepressants dont increase the incidence of suicide or violence. Eli Lilly proved that in court.Yes and O.J. walked. butterfly is one thing, Winston, the reality of losing a patient is another. Im taking charge of my practice. Now order the pills. Im sure the profit margin is going to be quite a bit higher on sugar pills than it is on Prozac.I could go to the Florida Keys. Theres a place down there where they let you submerge with bottlenose dolphins.You cant go, Winston. You cant miss your therapy sessions. I want to see you at least once a week.You bitch.Im trying to do the right thing. What day is good for you?Ill call you back.Dont push me, Winston.I have to make this order, he said. Then, after a second, he said, Dr. Val?What?Do I have to go off the Serzone?Well talk about it in therapy. She hung up and pulled a Post-it out of Hippocrates chest.Now if I keep this oath, and break it not, may I enjoy honor, in my life and art, among all men for all time but if I transgress and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.Does that mean dishonor for all time? she wondered. Im just trying to do the right thing here. Finally.She made a note to call Winston back and schedule his appointments.