The Good Father by Noah Hawley Read Free Book Online Page B

after time to be true.
    Two years ago I’d had a patient who came into the hospital complaining of chest pains. Tests showed an inflammation of the pericarditis. He complained of weakness and loss of appetite. His CBC and ESR were elevated, as was his blood pressure. The resident who saw him diagnosed classic heart disease and called in a cardiologist. For two weeks they treated him as a heart patient, and his condition got progressively worse. After noticing signs of livedo reticularis on his arms and legs, the original doctor called me in.
    We reviewed the symptoms together. Then I spoke with the patient. He told me that a few months earlier he had contracted hepatitis B. When his kidney function test came back with a BUN greater than forty milligrams per deciliter I knew that the problem wasn’t his heart. The patient suffered from polyarteritis nodosa, which is a disease of unknown cause in which immune cells attack a patient’s arteries. We treated him with prednisone and cyclophosphamide, and he began to improve immediately.
    Every doctor who saw him swore the problem was his heart. But in medicine you have to look past the easy assumptions. The facts can be misleading. There is a tendency to recognize only the symptoms thatadd up to the diagnosis in your head, but it is the symptom that doesn’t fit you should be following.
    We drove north on I-95. My cell rang. I answered. It was Dean.
    “You’re booked on a flight from JFK to LAX. It leaves in an hour. Can you make it?”
    I looked at Murray.
    “JFK,” I said.
    Murray swerved across three lanes of traffic, took the exit at fifty, blew a stop sign, made a U-turn, and merged back onto the highway going the opposite direction. My heart was somewhere in my armpit.
    “They’ve taken Danny to Cedars-Sinai Hospital,” said Dean. “In the morning they’ll move him to a federal penitentiary, and then it will take weeks to see him. I have assurances that if you arrive before then you will be allowed to see him.”
    “Thank you, Dean.”
    “Keep my name out of this,” he said. “I’ve spent my life serving the Democratic Party. The last thing I need is the press to get hold of this.”
    “I’ll take it to my grave,” I said.
    “Well,” said Dean, “maybe not to the grave. None of us should carry anything that far.”

 
    We made JFK with fifteen minutes to spare. Dropping me off, Murray said he would drive straight to my house. He told me he would protect my family as if they were his own. In his eyes I could see him calculating the billable hours. To reach the terminal we had to pass through three security checkpoints. Murray was told to pop the trunk, not once but twice. One of the officers explained that Homeland Security had raised the threat level from yellow to red.
    “ ’Cause that kid shot the senator,” he said.
    That kid . Already the story was taking hold. It had a hero and a villain. How long before my son’s life was beyond saving?
    Inside, the terminal was a chaotic, bubbling cauldron of madness. A bug-eyed hysteria had gripped the crowd. Armed guards and soldiers were everywhere. Modern air travel had already become a metaphor for the refugee experience. Tonight there was an added sense of desperation to our flight. We, the nation’s travelers, were Africans chased into the desert by drought, Albanians running toward tent cities, hounded by the deafening whumpa of bombs. We were herded together clutching our things, menaced by men with guns. We stripped off our clothes, passed through scanners, our every possession analyzed, our bodies wanded by humorless men in uniform, watched over by soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs. We showed our travel documents, our IDs, praying our names had not made it onto some kind of list.
    As the father of the country’s most notorious gunman, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was recognized, before men in white shirts with automatic weapons pulled me aside and escorted me into the darkbowels