The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (5 page)

“
Also, without getting
killed—assuming the two men weren’t local teenagers, and you’re not
in the least paranoid, and light was indeed reflected from a gun
instead of a cellular phone or bracelet or maybe nothing else in
the real world.”

Hernandez didn’t take
offense—which was one of the things I’d wanted to find out by
asking the somewhat insolent question. Instead he tilted his head
back and was silent a moment before he said, “I affirmed that I was
not certain of the object’s identity. But I in truth believe it was
a pistol. Certainly it was something from which the light beams
flashed, something held in his hand.”

“
Okay, so why then did you,
soon after this, drive stupidly up the driveway—to borrow your own
phrase—and dash about where perhaps one armed man, if not two of
them, might have been lurking to conk-crush you or blow you
away?”

“
Conk-crush?”

“
Hit you on the head, beat
you up, or shoot you.”

“
Inside the house was my
beloved Eleonora, my forever wife. Had I attacked the men before
the police call, I could have been demolished, assassinated,
leaving no one—no police or anyone else—to aid Eleonora, or warn
her, or do whatever remained possible. But when it was concluded
that police in their car were dispatched to this destination, I
rapidly came back, of course.”

I said, with somewhat less
belligerence, “What makes you think one or both of the men might
have been in that green van nine days ago? Surely you didn’t have
time to catalogue their features if you were leaping head over feet
through the air.”

He smiled, apparently
amused, or pleased, by my question. And when he smiled widely,
exposing those large sparkling white teeth, it was almost like a
ray of sunshine dispelling gray shadows and brightening his entire
face, and he looked at least ten years younger than when he was
frowning and going on about the stupids.

“
A glimpse of them—or one
of them—I had, after I leaped, and focused my eyes upon their
leaving vehicle. The individual on the side nearest me, the one not
driving, stared from his open window back at me. He was with a
large round face, completely bald on the head, but possessed of a
large dark mustache with the ends drooping downward toward his
chin. Like...”

“
Like Fu
Manchu?”

“
Fu who?”

I got away from that one
immediately, saying, “Large mustache with the ends drooping down,
got it. Anything else?”

“
Nothing else. That is all
I saw. It was enough. One of the men in my driveway Wednesday night
had such a mustache, and was possessed only of skin on his head. It
is possible the other man was driver of the murderous
vehicle.”

“
Maybe probable,” I said
half to myself. Which told me I was already thinking of this guy as
my client, even if I hadn’t told him so yet. “You said you don’t
have any idea who might want to kill you, that area is
a...blankness. You mean you don’t have any enemies?”

“
Enemies? Everywhere you
look. Just about every allopathic physician is an enemy of me, they
would like to put me in prisons—in again. That’s maybe half a
million. How’s that for enemies?”

“
Hank—”

“
But only a few of them do
the dirty workings, those high up in the AMA, the FDA, the ACS,
NCI, CDC. But that is just how the medical business is, the medical
monopoly of the allopathic bug killers. Can’t have a monopoly of
something unless you monopolize it, true? Which means they are very
vigorous in getting people like me, and those who practice healing
similar to me, out of it.”

“
Hank—”

“
But not even those would
kill me. Take away my medical license if they can do it, even
making up false charges, yes; sue me with many lawyers, yes;
deliver me into bankruptcy, yes. They have a long, very long,
history of doing this to anyone who actually cures patients
afflicted with profitable diseases owned by the monopoly, a history
which can be examined by anyone willing to be curious. But not
premeditated murder. No. None of these would kill, none would
murder me.”

“
If you’ve told me the
whole truth, somebody tried to.”

“
True. Is true.” He
shrugged.

I let it ride. “Wednesday
night, you saw those two men in your driveway. After that, did the
cops come here?”

“
Yes. Again, they could
become acquainted with no evidence except what I myself described
to them. It is perhaps unfortunate that the two officers were the
same ones to whom I had spoken a week earlier of the green van
aimed at me with murderousness. It became evident to me that they,
though sympathetic in manner, believed me to be a fruit
basket.”

“
Fruitcake—strike that, do
you remember the officers’ names?”

“
Arthur Murphy and Wallace
Devincent.”

I knew both officers, Art
Murphy quite well. “I’ll check it out,” I said. “What more can you
tell me about that van—or anything else that might give me a handle
on why somebody might want you dead?”

He smiled that bright
happy smile again. “This means you will help? I have employed you,
Sheldon?”

I grinned back at him, as
much in response to that almost childlike smile as the open and
unconcealed pleasure in his voice. “Yeah, you have employed me.
And, Hank, I hope nobody kills either of us.”

“
No problem. You will
protect us fiercely. Now, I feel very good. Thank you for
assisting, Sheldon. I will tell you what little more I can think
of.”

Unfortunately, there
wasn’t much more he could give me. He did recall that the green van
had only two windows, one on the driver’s and one on the
passenger’s side, but behind them only metal, no windows in the
back. Also, he was dimly aware that something had been printed in
white or light-colored letters on the green metal of the van’s
side. That was when he’d lamped the Fu Manchu guy, so it would have
been the passenger side. But Hank now had no idea what those
printed words might have been. More importantly, when the speeding
van passed through the nearby intersection a car entering from the
right had braked and skidded, and there had been “a collision
sound.”

“
Not a crashing,” Hernandez
went on, “more like a click-clack. But that car of the assassins
did somewhat strike the front of the other vehicle, glancing upon
its front bumper or fender, but without serious consequences to
either one.” He shrugged. “This other car vanished soon after. And
nothing was remaining in the street as clues regarding the near
mishap, which officers Murphy and Devincent told me with
sympathy.”

“
They didn’t appear to
believe there was a near accident at the intersection, or even a
click-clack?”

“
No. They have become
convinced all of it was a my imagination. It transpires that,
following my first discussion with them on the preceding Wednesday,
they looked for me in their computer, and knew already that I had
been in their jails.”

“
Jails? You’ve been
arrested?”

“
Si—yes, sure. Twice, both
times resulting from malicious charges and lies concocted by my
enemies, in hope of ruining me. But they, Murphy and Devincent,
also knew of the other unpleasant incidents of notoriety, or some
of them.”

“
Others?” I was starting to
become uneasy. “Incidents of notoriety? Some?”

“
It is difficult to explain
to a layman. Please, take no offense, many doctors consider this
word—layman—a purposeful insult, a knockdown, description of a mere
mortal, but with me it is a compliment, mainly. What for my
purposes I must gradually acquaint you with are matters fully
comprehensible only to other physicians who are not orthodox
physicians, not allopathic doctors.”

Maybe because I was
already a little uneasy, something in what he’d just said struck
me. It was that, “What for my purposes I must gradually acquaint
you with....” What purposes? And why “gradually”? But I already had
plenty of other questions, so I merely commented, “I hate to get
into this, I think. But you’ve said ‘allopathic’ several times now,
and I’m not sure I know what it means. It sounds like some kind of
disease.”

“
It is. It is what everyone
automatically thinks of when somebody says ‘doctor,’ or
‘physician,’ or ’medicine,’ or ‘M.D.,’ or ‘health care’ and so
forth, because it—allopathy—is the only official medicine we have
here in the United States, the so-called legitimate medicine. It is
what nearly everyone believes is the only kind of real doctor there
is, although there are many, many other kinds of doctors and
healers—like me, for example. But they believe this because
allopathy is ninety-nine percent of what we are allowed, what is
‘authorized and approved’ for medical treatment in these United
States of ours, which also—most importantly—means this official
authorized-and-approved stupidness becomes ninety-nine percent of
what we hear or read or are told by talking dummies on
television.”

Hank leaned forward,
placing his clasped hands atop the desk, and fixed his bright
almost-burning eyes on me. “Allopathy, or conventional medicine, is
a therapeutic system based on the bassackward belief that
expressions of so-called disease must be treated by different or
unlike expressions—which, incidental but important, is the exact
opposite of my homeopathy, which embraces the truism similia
similibus curantur, or like cures like. Essentially, aside from the
wonderful technical skills of trauma surgeons or surgery to repair
or remove malfunctioning or injured body parts or tissues—not so
wonderful if those body pieces are okay or repairable without
irreversible operations, which most of the time they are—allopathy
embraces the continuing use of unnatural chemical compounds alien
to the body’s constitution, thousands of synthetic drugs and pills
and shots and serums, to treat symptoms of bodily disease or
disorder. In practice, it is the upside-down medical philosophy
that disease must be attacked by its opposite expression, that
disease symptoms must be fought, warred upon, suppressed at all
costs.”

“
So? What’s wrong with
that?”

I had, apparently, not
asked a wonderful question. He scowled hugely, pulling his lips
sideways, and appearing to clamp his teeth tightly together. But
then he smoothed his features, forcibly it seemed to me, and said
slowly, much more slowly than before, as though to be sure I didn’t
miss anything, “Perhaps you were not listening cleverly. I am
explaining that allopathy is a crazy upside-down as I
mentioned—bassackward system of medicine based on the unproven and
unprovable assumption that diseases are foreign invaders”—his voice
rose half an octave—“like killer bacteria and viruses and various
evil malevolences from outer space, which must be attacked and
destroyed with fire and sword and fierceness, with lightning bolts,
lasers, poisons, giant hammers and maybe even H-bombs, whatever
might kill the disease!”

Again, though somewhat
tentatively this time, I said, “Uh, that’s wrong? There’s a better
way?”

“
Almost anything except
suicide would be better. But there is an infinity of better,
including everything else, everything not allopathic.” Hernandez
nodded briskly, that sharp nose and the pointed ends of his gray
mustache appearing to slice through the air. “But there is not time
for me to inform you of all the gazillion better ways. Perhaps
there never will be time.” He paused, gazing across the room for
several seconds, then nodded briskly again and looked directly at
me.

“
There is not sufficient
time, not now. So I will say only this.” Those dark glowing eyes of
his seemed to become even brighter, as though some inner rheostat
had turned up their power, and I remembered thinking, earlier, that
his piercing gaze was almost that of a far-out visionary, or a
madman.

“
There is a wonderful,
unmeasurable, almost unimaginable power within each of us, which is
part of us. Of you, Sheldon, me, each, all. It is the power that
formed, from the union of a tiny egg and a single microscopic
spermatozoon, the incredible growing universe of being each has
become—the universe, if you will, that is you, me, the patient in
my outer office, the sick one. This power, which began each of the
miracles of us with those two tiny cells and formed or helped to
form the universe of us now does not, when this job is part done,
disappear, vanish. It does not die. It is still there, alive and
burning within us. And if we—or allopathic stupids—do not violently
oppose it, it is ready to heal us of everything except death, and
perhaps even of that also.”

He picked up a pen,
twirled the cylinder in his fingers. “No doctor can cure these sick
or suffering patient-universes. I cannot. But the true physician,
who I say must cooperate with nature, with God, or with that force
within instead of opposing it with his puny lightnings and
thunders, can sometimes help the patient to cure himself. That is
all we can do. But we should not do anything else.”

Hernandez paused, curled
his lips as if to continue speaking, but then closed his mouth,
nodding several times, slicing the air again vigorously with his
nose, and at length said to me, “Those of us who believe this, or
something of a friendly similarity, and thus practice unorthodox,
unapproved, un-allopathic methods for hopefully restoring ease to
the dis-eased are, by that ninety-nine percent of our medical
colleagues, described or defamed as salesmen of snake oils, or
fools misguided. Or, usually, as quacks.”