BLIND TRIAL Brian Deer (best novels for beginners TXT) 📖

of them, unless you want your next laptop delivered up your nose. You say nothing to anyone. Nothing.”

“Sure. Not saying anything to anybody. Got it.”

Hoffman moved to the front of the car and tugged another tie. “Yeah… Okay… Now I think I’m coming out there. I’ll call Corinna now… But watch out for the old girl. She’s one dangerous lady. Don’t tell her any of this.”

He couldn’t wait another minute: this was worse than Christmas morning. No Sanomo guy would wreck the occasion. The general counsel signed off, tore at more ties, and the silver cover slithered onto oil-stained concrete from a masterpiece in blood red steel.

THE KEYS in his hand felt bigger than they ought to. But the leather fob and split ring hadn’t grown. Rather, Hoffman shrank to the day he found them: a gift to his daddy from friends. They felt the way they felt at the Jeffries Homes housing project, next to the John C. Lodge Freeway, Detroit. They felt the way they felt when he pulled them from the mailbox when he, Teddy Hoffman, was ten.

His father came down, eleven floors to the street, and stood almost fainting to see it: a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, V-8, SD-455. Direct from the factory; vintage 1979; dealer plates; nine miles on the dial. With the Shaker air scoop and the ducktail rear spoiler, T-top removables, and aluminum dash. With the big bird insignia—a rising phoenix on the hood—and chrome exhaust splitters. The car.

He unlocked the driver’s door and slid behind the wheel. The look of her. The feel of her. The smell. Insurance: unbelievable. Gas consumption: terrifying. But this car? This car changed his life.

Hoffman twisted the ignition: once, twice, and again. The engine fired: the truckers had fixed it. Then he squeezed into the back—the place he knew best—clamped shut his eyes and breathed.

How much of himself was tied up with this coupe? So much would be different without it. Nobody in the family could drive when it came. His mother was first to get the knack. Then his daddy wised-up—“Never hit nothing once”—and in ’79 the Hoffmans went Motown. They went supermarket shopping, took Sundays by the lake. His father’s getting-to-work time was slashed. This car brought freedom, revealed a world beyond the projects. Teddy Hoffman hoped for better than he knew.

Eyes shut, he reached forward and gripped the driver’s seatback, and now caught the breath of the Jeffries. The odor of city housing: meat frying, squash boiling, urine on the stairs, disinfectant. And catching in his throat, an indefinable stale smell: the indefinable stale smell of being poor.

As he breathed, he listened to sounds at a window: his mother, sitting high, looking low. “See how she walks… Betcha dollar that’s a Bible… Can tell that man’s a pimp… Know what that is?”

And all the while, the freeway hummed, showcasing the latest: Porsche 911s, Corvette Stingrays, Lincoln Continental Mark Vs.

HE SQUEEZED from the car, bumped shut the door, and spread his fingers wide on the hood. Was it more than three decades since he looked through that windshield and saw his youth burning full whack? Had he seen Henry Louviere with Rose Daws and Christine Bray, yelling at the streets, Saturday nights? Had they ever been young in that shambling old city, with everything to happen still to come?

And now he saw Henry, with piano-white teeth, his sapphire-sharp eyes never resting. Hoffman’s buddy was the student, looking up from a torts primer, bastardizing some nugget from his dad. “Don’t forget we’re children of the Great Society, Teddy. We’re on a mission in the people’s cause.”

Hoffman raised his hands, and the decades snapped forward in less time than his fingers took to fold. He locked both doors, shrouded the pony car with silver, crouched, and re-threaded the ties. Then he walked to the elevator, hit 33, and in two minutes was inside a closet.

He lifted an alloy case: twelve by nine inches, by four-and-a-half inches deep. He blew a skim of dust, sprang a pair of combo locks, and gazed without affection on the only firearm he’d ever owned: a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson, model 3953, pressed snug in egg-crate foam. Double action. Eight plus 1. Aluminum and stainless. With the Hogue synthetic grips.

Eighteen

TRUDY’S HANDS trembled as she stabbed at the keyboard of a workstation in consultation suite 7. She’d left her medications in her room at the Hyatt, and this morning her Parkinson’s flip-flopped back and forth, switching between off and on. What she most needed now was 50 milligrams of Sinemet.

What she’d got was Frank Wilson’s damned files.

She’d propped back the door so Dr. Honda, across the corridor, could monitor the work in progress. Trudy wanted things right, to make an honest effort. She wouldn’t cut corners. Even now. The troublesome young clinician could see for herself the lengths the company went to for integrity.

An hourglass icon froze on the screen: a frustrating start to the day. But what were seconds or minutes compared with thirteen years since her quest for the vaccine got serious? Naysayers muttered that such a feat was hopeless. Many sneered, “She’ll never do it.” Yet the research went forward with mice, rabbits, and macaques. Then the government let her try it in humans. She designed a phase I trial—124 volunteers—and the phase IIs: 8,227. Finally, the phase III—the randomized double-blind—with 26,712.

Any time, she might have failed. Many times, she thought she would. She’d never been rashly optimistic. So often it seemed like casino roulette, with her loading each win onto red. The work went forward—the wheel had spun—as she waited, fists clenched, heart pounding. And each and every time the ball clattered to rest, it clattered to rest on red.

Ten minutes back, Dr. Honda stepped in and left five sheets of paper on the desk. They listed names, addresses, birth dates, and ID numbers for volunteers who’d gone lost to follow-up on the trial. Trudy counted fifty-six, from more than sixteen hundred enrolled at the