Monday, September 17
"We're just here to give you some helpful advice." The short beefy man didn't seem like he ever gave helpful advice. He couldn't even say the words without making them sound sinister. Anyone who listened carefully could detect the threatening subtext, and Nick was definitely listening carefully.
The thug gave an example of the sort of helpful advice he had in mind. "You run a nice little school. All those cute kids running around the playground." He said no more, just narrowed his eyes. Nick understood every word he hadn't said.
I knew something like this would happen. He'd been expecting this visit for weeks. Still, it caught him by surprise when two drug company representatives knocked on his door at home. He expected a visit at school. He also expected them to approach him more professionally, not with film-noir threats. After all, they worked for a pharmaceutical corporation, not the mob.
Few people came to visit Nick in his tiny garage home. He was unprepared for something like this. The three men stood around the folding card table that served as his kitchen table, coffee table, work table, and any other table he might need. They remained standing because Nick didn't even own three chairs.
The taller man in the nice suit was the "good cop." He didn't bother with innuendo. Instead, he stuck to the company line. "We want to give you some brochures about our vaccine." He held out a fan of pamphlets. Nick took them and set them on the table. Good Cop even offered a business card. His name was Oliver Cardwell, a representative of Phresh Air Pharmaceuticals. Nick dropped it on the pile.
Get these guys out of here. Nick itched to kick them out the door, perhaps with a few well placed punches to make his feelings clear. It amused him to think that he could easily take them both. Good Cop was a soft boy who probably never hit anyone in his life. Even Bad Cop didn't seem like much of a threat. The guy would have been trouble fifteen years ago, but now his paunch was starting to show. Of course, Nick would have been more trouble fifteen years ago, too. They both could have thrown some hard punches back then. Today, the only stuff getting thrown around was words.
Don was the one who had caused all this trouble. Nick's brother, now a pediatrician, had gotten him into this situation. Don warned him that the new vaccine was unnecessary and dangerous. And a vaccine against warts certainly seemed more like a joke than a necessity. Still, what did Nick know about vaccines? Nothing. Weren't they miracles of modern medicine? He didn't know that they could be dangerous. Still, he did find it suspicious that the company was pushing the vaccine so aggressively that it had partnered with a local health organization to run vaccination clinics at his school.
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