Peeps (8 page)

Fortunately, what I wanted that morning wasn’t quite DNA-complicated. First, I requisitioned some standard equipment, the sort of peep-hunting toys that you can pull off the rack. Then I asked for some information about Lace’s building: who owned it, who had originally rented all the seventh-floor apartments, and if anything noticeably weird had ever happened there. Getting answers to these simple questions wasn’t easy, of course. Nothing ever is, down in the bowels of a bureaucracy. But after only three hours, my paperwork passed muster with the ancient form-dragon behind the bulletproof glass, was rolled into a pneumatic-tube missile, and was launched on its journey into the Underworld with a
swish
.

They’d call me when it came back, so I headed off to meet Lace at my favorite diner. On the way, I realized that this was my first date in six months—even if it was only a “date” in the lame sense of being an arrangement to meet someone. Still, the concept made me nervous, all my underused muscles of dating anxiety springing into action. I started checking out my reflection in shop windows and wondering if Lace would like the Kill Fee T-shirt I was wearing. Why hadn’t I put on something less threadbare? And what was with my hair these days? Apparently, Dr. Rat, the Shrink, and my other Night Watch pals didn’t feel compelled to tell me it was sticking out at the sides.

After two minutes in front of a bank window, trying to stick it behind my ears, I despaired of fixing it. Then I despaired of my life in general.

What was the point of a good haircut when nothing could come of it anyway?

Lace sat down across from me, wearing the same leather jacket as the night before, this time over a wool dress. Under a beret that was the same dark brown as her eyes, her hair still smelled like jasmine-scented shampoo. She looked like she’d had about as much sleep as I had.

Seeing Lace in the daylight, both of us sober, I realized for the first time that she might be a few years older than me. Her leather jacket was brown—with buttons, not black and zippered like mine—and the rest of her outfit looked like something you would wear to an office job. My Kill Fee T-shirt felt suddenly dorky, and I hunched my shoulders together so my jacket would fall across the screaming demon on my chest.

“What up?” she said, feeling my scrutiny, and I dropped my eyes back to the table.

“Uh, nothing. How was your class?” I asked, spattering some more Tabasco over my scrambled eggs and bacon. Before she’d arrived, I’d already consumed a pepper steak to calm my nerves.

“All right, I guess. Some guest lecturer yakking about ethics.”

“Ethics?”

“Journalistic ethics.”

“Oh.” I stirred my black coffee for no particular reason. “Journalists have ethics?”

Lace cast her eyes around for a waiter or waitress, one finger pointing at my coffee. She nodded as the connection was made, then turned back to me. “They’re supposed to. You know, don’t reveal your sources. Don’t destroy people’s lives just to get a story. Don’t pay people for interviews.”

“You’re studying journalism?”

“Journalism and the law, actually.”

I nodded, wondering if that was an undergraduate major. Somehow, it didn’t sound like one. I revised Lace’s age up to the lower to mid-twenties and felt myself relax a little. Suddenly, this was even less a date than it had been a moment before.

“Cool,” I said.

She looked at me like I might be retarded.

I tried to smile back at her, realizing that my small-talk muscles were incredibly rusty, the result of socializing only with people in a secret organization who pretty much only socialized with one another. Of course, if I could just steer the conversation to rinderpest infection rates in Africa, I knew I’d blow her away.

Rebecky—at sixty-seven and three hundred pounds, my favorite waitress in the world to flirt with—appeared and handed Lace a cup of coffee and a menu.

“How’re you doing there, Cal?” she asked.

“Just fine, thanks.”

“You sure? You haven’t been eating much lately.” She gave me a sly wink.

“On a diet,” I said, patting my stomach.

Her standard response: “Wish that diet worked on me.”

Rebecky chuckled as she walked away. She’s amazed by my appetite, but her repertoire of where-does-Cal-put-it-all jokes had shrunk to the bare minimum over the last months. As a guy with something to hide, there’s one thing I’ve learned: People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that’s the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick.

Lace looked up from her menu. “Speaking of funny diets, Cal, what the hell happened in my building last winter?”

I leaned back and sipped coffee. Evidently, Lace wasn’t up for small talk either. “You in a hurry or something?”

“My lease is up in two months, dude. And last night you promised you wouldn’t jerk me around.”

“I’m not jerking you around. You should try the pepper steak.”

“Vegetarian.”

“Oh,” I said, my parasite rumbling at the concept.

Lace flagged down Rebecky and ordered potato salad, while I crammed some bacon into my mouth. Potato salad is an Atkins nightmare, and more important, the parasite hates it. Peeps prefer protein, red in tooth and claw.

“So tell me what you know,” she said.

“Okay.” I cleared my throat. “First of all, I’m not really Morgan’s cousin.”

“Duh.”

I frowned. This revelation hadn’t provided the same
oomph
that it had on my mental flowchart of the conversation. “But I am looking for her.”

“Again:
duh
, dude. So you’re like a private detective or something? Or stalker ex-boyfriend?”

“No. I work for the city.”

“Cal, you are
so
not a cop.”

I wasn’t quite sure how she’d come to this assessment, but I couldn’t argue. “No, I’m not. I work for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Sexually Transmitted Disease Control.”

“Sexually transmitted?” She raised an eyebrow. “Wait. Are you
sure
you’re not a stalker?”

I reached for my wallet and flopped it open, revealing one of the items I’d picked up from the Night Watch that morning. We’ve got a big machine that spits out laminated ID cards and badges, credentials for dozens of city agencies, both real and imaginary. This silver-plated badge was very impressive, with the words
Health Field Officer
curving along the bottom. In the ID case next to it, my photo stared grimly out at her.

She stared at it for a moment, then said, “You know you’re wearing the same shirt today as in that picture?”

I froze for a second, realizing that, yep, I hadn’t changed since that morning. In a brilliant save, I glanced down at my Kill Fee T-shirt and said, “What? You don’t like it?”

“Not particularly. So what’s that job all about? Do you, like, hunt people down and arrest them for spreading the clap?”

I cleared my throat, pushing my empty plate away. “Okay, here’s how it works. About a year ago, I was given a disease. Um, let me put that another way—I was
assigned
a specific carrier of a certain disease. I tracked down all his sexual partners and encouraged them to get tested, then I tracked down their sexual partners, and so on.” I shrugged. “I just keep going where the chain of infection leads me, informing people along the way. Sometimes I don’t get enough specific information about someone, so I have to poke around a little, like I was last night. For one thing, I don’t even know Morgan’s last name.” I raised my eyebrows hopefully.

Lace shrugged. “Me neither. So let me get this straight: You tell people they’ve got STDs? That’s your
job
, dude?”

“No, their doctors do that. All I’m allowed to do is tell them they’re at risk. Then I try to get them to cooperate and give me a list of people
they’ve
slept with. Someone’s got to do it.”

“I guess. Wow, though.”

“So far I’ve spent a whole year tracking down the offspring—or rather, the infections from that one carrier.” I smiled at my cover story’s cleverness. Nifty how I worked the truth in there, huh?

“Wow,” Lace repeated softly, her eyes still wide.

Now that I thought about it, the job I’d chosen for myself did sound pretty cool. A little bit of undercover work, some social consciousness, an air of illicit mystery and human tragedy. One of those careers where you’d have to face life’s harsh realities
and
be a good listener. By now, she had to figure I was older than nineteen—more like her age, and probably wise beyond my years.

Her potato salad arrived, and after a fortifying bite of carbs, she said, “So what’s your disease?”

“My disease? I didn’t say I had a disease.”

“The one you’re
tracking
, dude.”

“Oh. Right. I’m not at liberty to say. Confidentiality. We have ethics too.”

“Sure you do.” Her eyes narrowed. “And that’s why you didn’t want to talk in front of my friends last night?”

I nodded. My cover story was sliding into place perfectly.

She put down her fork. “But it’s one of those sexually transmitted diseases that makes people
paint stuff on the walls in blood
?”

I swallowed, wondering if perhaps my cover story might have a few loose ends.

“Well, some STDs can cause dementia,” I said. “Late-stage syphilis, for example, makes you go crazy. It eats your brain. Not that syphilis is what we’re talking about here, necessarily.”

“Wait a second, Cal. You think all the people on the seventh floor of my building were shagging one another? And going all demented from it?” She made a face at her potato salad. “Do you guys get a lot of that kind of thing?”

“Um, it happens. Some STDs can cause … promiscuity. Sort of.” I felt my cover story entering the late stages of its life span and suppressed an urge to mention rabies (which was a little too close to the truth, what with the frothing and the biting). “Right now, I can’t be sure what happened up there. But my job is to find out where all those people went, especially if they’re infected.”

“And why the landlord is covering it up.”

“Yeah, because this is all about your rent.”

She raised her hands. “Hey, I didn’t know you were all into saving the world, okay? I just thought you were a stalker ex-boyfriend or a weird psycho cousin or something. But I’m glad you’re the good guys, and I want to help. It’s not just my rent situation, you know. I have to
live
with that thing on the wall.”

I put down my coffee cup with authoritative force. “Okay. I’m glad you’re helping. I thank you, and your city thanks you.”

In fact, I was just glad the cover story had made it through the worst of Lace’s suspicions. I’d never really worked undercover before; lies aren’t my thing. She frowned, eating a few more bites of potato salad, and I wondered if Lace’s help was worth involving her. So far, she’d been a little too smart for comfort. But smart wasn’t all bad. It wouldn’t hurt to have a pair of sharp eyes on the seventh floor.

And frankly, I was enjoying her company, especially the way she didn’t hide her thoughts and opinions. That wasn’t a luxury I could indulge in myself, of course, but it was good to hear Lace voicing every suspicion that went through her head. Saved me from being paranoid about what she was thinking.

On top of which, I was feeling very in control, hanging out with a desirable woman without having a sexual fantasy every few seconds. Maybe every few
minutes
or so, but still, you have to crawl before you can walk.

“Dude, why are you scratching your wrist like that?”

“I am? Oh, crap.”

“What the hell, Cal? It’s all red.”

“Um, it’s just…” I ransacked my internal database of skin parasites, then announced,

“Pigeon mites!” “Pigeon whats?”

“You know. When pigeons sit on your window and shake their feathers? Sometimes these little mites fall off and nest in your pillows. They bite your skin and cause…” I waved my oft-pinged wrist.

“Eww. One more reason not to like pigeons.” She glared out the window at a few of them scavenging on the sidewalk. “So what do we do now?”

“How about this? You take me back to your building and show me which apartment used to be Morgan’s.”

“And then what?”

“Leave that to me.”

As we passed the doorman I made sure to catch his eye and smile. If I came in with Lace a few more times, maybe the staff would start to recognize me.

On the seventh floor, she led me to the far end of the hall, gesturing at a door marked 704. There were just four apartments on this floor, all the one-bedrooms you could squeeze into the sliver-thin building.

“That’s where she lived, according to the two guys upstairs. Loud and freaky in bed, they tell me.”

I coughed into a fist, again damning my fugitive memories. “You know who lives here now?”

“Guy called Max. He works days.”

I knocked hard. No answer.

Lace sighed. “I told you he wouldn’t be home.”

“Glad to hear it.” I pulled out another of the items requisitioned that morning and knelt by the door: The lock was a standard piece-of-crap deadbolt, five tumblers. Into its keyhole I sprayed some graphite, which is the same gray stuff that gets on your fingers if you fiddle with the end of a pencil, and does the same thing to locks that Bahamalama-Dingdongs do to repressed memories—lubricates them. Two of the tumblers rolled over as my pick slid in. Easy-peasy.

“Dude,” Lace whispered, “shouldn’t you get a warrant or something?”

I was ready for this one. “Doesn’t matter. You only need a warrant if you want the evidence to stand up in court. But I’m not taking anyone to court.” Another tumbler rolled over. “This isn’t a criminal investigation.”

“But you can’t just break into people’s apartments!”

“I’m not breaking. Just looking.”

“Still!”

“Look, Lace, maybe this isn’t strictly legal. But if people in my job didn’t cut a few corners every now and then, everyone in this city would be infected, okay?”

She paused for a moment, but the ring of truth had filled my words. I’ve seen simulations of what would happen if the parasite were to spread unchecked, and believe me, it’s not pretty. Zombie Apocalypse, we call it.