Quarantined (18 page)

“Oh yeah, he’s a charmer all right.”

I looked around the kitchen. There were about a hundred wrecked limes all over the place and the linoleum floor was sticky.

I said, “Are you guys going to be okay in here? I’m going to check on Lynn.”

“We’ll be fine,” Gloria said, then bit her lip and moved her shoulders back and forth as she looked up into Chunk’s face.

“Great,” I said, and left them to it.

I found Lynn in the hall bathroom, passed out in the corner between the bathtub and the toilet. I helped her to her feet.

“You feeling okay, sweetie?” I said.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Why don’t we go check on your husband?”

“Good idea,” she said, then hiccupped. “Let’s go see the boys.”

With Lynn’s left arm around my shoulder and my right arm around her waist, I carried her down the hall, through the living room, through the kitchen, and into the dining room.

Billy was there, a bleary-eyed look of victory in his eyes.

Avery sat in the chair next to him, passed out. His hands were in his lap and his head was tilted all the way back so that the little dollop of shaving cream pointed out at us like some kind of bony finger.

“Billy,” I said, “I think it’s time we helped the Camerons home. What do you think?”

Billy slapped his thighs with his palms and smiled. “Yep, I reckon so.”

“Fantastic, cowboy.”

He winked at me, then stood up to help Avery to his feet.

“Wait,” said Chunk. He was behind me, coming into the room. “One second. This has been bugging me all night.”

He went over to Avery and flicked the hardened shaving cream off of Avery’s chin with a snap of his fingers.

Gloria slapped Chunk’s bicep when he went back to stand by her. “Bad boy,” she said. “So bad.”

We got the Camerons to their feet, out the door, and pointed them toward their house. Meanwhile, Gloria picked up June and carried her outside.

“I should be getting home too,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Chunk asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, yes.” She shrugged with June in her hands. “Got to get her to bed. You got my number though, right?”

“I could walk you home,” he said.

“Another night,” she said, and worked her eyelashes up and down to let him know she meant it. “Call me, okay?”

“Okay. I’ll call you.”

“Cool.”

Just like that, the party was over.

I put Connie to bed while Chunk and Billy cleaned up the piles of limes in the kitchen.

“She get to bed okay?” Billy asked.

“Yeah,” I said, and kissed him.

“It was a good party,” Chunk said. “Lots of interesting people.”

I threw a wad of paper towel’s into the bag he was holding and said, “Mmm hmmm.”

After most of the mess was cleaned up, Chunk said, “So when do you think it’ll be ready?”

Billy said, “Soon. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. It’ll have to be soon. Before the patrols discover the hole.”

“So, day after tomorrow then? Around sunset?”

We all looked at each other, the air around us thick with the mood of conspiracy.

“Sounds good,” Billy said.

He looked at me. I nodded.

“Okay then,” Billy said. “Day after tomorrow. We meet here right after nightfall.”

The next morning, shortly after dawn, Chunk and I checked out a light green Chevy Malibu with a banged up front right fender from the Scar’s fleet yard and headed to the shallow west side to see Treanor. We were both hung over and glassy-eyed, neither of us prepared for the lingering chaos that still shrouded the area where the riot had been at its worst.

At the corner of Bandera and Woodlawn, a pair of baby-faced patrolmen waved us down and checked our IDs.

“We’re only passing people who live in the area or who are part of emergency agencies,” one of the patrolmen said. It sounded like he was apologizing.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and waved us through.

We passed the checkpoint and were greeted by the sounds of still crackling fires, the slapping of high-pressure hoses spraying water onto smoldering buildings, and shouting policemen and fire fighters.

Behind us, morning broke over downtown, backlighting the skyline with a vague glowing line of pink and green and gold. It was beautiful, not anything like the streets ahead of us. My first thought was it looked like a hurricane had rolled through.

Demolished police cars had been abandoned in the street, and everywhere columns of gray and black smoke rose into the air. Not a single window anywhere had been left intact. Broken glass glinted like coins on the sidewalks and in the street. The weapons of choice of most of the rioters had been stones and bricks, and great heaps of both were everywhere. As we crept down the street, never getting faster than ten or fifteen miles per hour because of all the obstructions, glass crunched beneath our tires.

In the end it had taken a little more than three hundred officers to contain the riot, and now an eerie calm had prevailed over a roughly twenty block area. Every street, every alley, was blocked by orange and white-striped sawhorse barricades and watched by officers still wearing parts of their riot gear.

Strangely, the only things that remained untouched were the hundreds of orange warning notices that the Metropolitan Health District people had posted on walls and poles and fences. Here and there they rustled in the warm, sluggish morning breeze.

Many of the officers we passed looked tired and bored. They leaned against their cars, most of which were damaged by rocks, while others leaned against barricades. They eyed our Malibu closely as we drove through the debris.

The line of stores in the one-storey building in front of Treanor’s office was a gutted and charred mess. Fire from gas cocktails and pipe bombs had torn it open from the inside out, like a body on the autopsy table. Still smoldering pieces of the frame poked up from the debris like blackened ribs. Already, at the end of the block, Public Works off-loaded bobcats and earth movers to clear away the mess. Chunk gave the building a sideways glance and said, “Your friend was nice.”

“Which one? The one that wanted to take naked pictures of you or the one who just wanted to take you naked?”

Chunk grunted. “Your next door neighbors are nuts, you know that?”

“They’re good to Connie. And they’re sweet in their own way.”

He grunted again.

Treanor’s office, nestled behind the row of burned stores, had managed to escape being damaged. I figured that was probably because it didn’t look like what it really was. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was an abandoned adult bookstore. There were no windows on the bottom floor, no signs saying what was inside. Just a single faded green metal door in a pinkish-white granite-walled building.

We parked along the north side of the building.

“You know he’s gonna chew our asses off, don’t you?” Chunk said.

“Probably.” But I didn’t really care. In my mind, I was already gone, floating down the river, out of plague town.

“Okay, just so as you know.”

I patted his shoulder and we went inside.

Little Hitler was at his desk, writing up duty rosters for all the posts that had to be manned on a twenty-four hour basis until further notice.

He barely glanced up at us when we came in.

“Sit down,” he said, motioning to the empty chairs across from his desk.

He went on writing names down on his rosters, occasionally consulting a map, then quickly wrote down more names. After about two minutes of that he put his pen down, cracked his knuckles, and leaned back in his chair so he could look down his nose at us.

I got ready for the yelling, but to my surprise, he didn’t yell. When he spoke, his voice was calm and even cheery.

“I thought you might want to know that the woman and the little girl you two saved are both doing fine. They were, anyway, as of yesterday. They were released after being treated for minor scrapes and bruises. The woman took a good sap on the head, but she should be fine.”

Chunk and I tried to avoid looking at each other in shock. I was wondering if I was in the right office.

“That’s good to know, sir,” I said.

If you can imagine what a cat must feel like walking through a yard full of sleeping pit bulls, that’s what I felt like just then, waiting for all hell to break loose.

“Look,” he said, and he was looking straight at me, “I know we got off to a rough start. Things were said. Tempers flared. I just want you to know I’m willing to forget about that.”

Had I not been so bowled over by surprise, I would have told him to sit on his thumb. I wasn’t the one, after all, who had made me look like an idiot in front of the whole damn neighborhood in that suicide’s front yard so many years ago.

As it was, I just sat there with my mouth hanging open a little. I said, “Um, that would be, um, okay.”

“Good,” he said.

He leaned back more in his chair and folded his hands together over his chest.

“So, tell me, how’s the case going?”

“We’re closing in on it, sir,” Chunk said.

“That’s not an answer. Tell me where you’re at now that your number one suspect is off the hook.”

I almost said: “I thought we were going to forget about that,” but didn’t. There was something about knowing that I wouldn’t have to listen to his shit much longer that made me more tolerant.

Instead, I told him about our trip into the GZ, about meeting Dr. Cole and fighting with the looters and about the missing equipment from Bradley’s van. I also ran down the short list of suspects, Cole, Hernandez, and the looters.

The only thing I didn’t tell him about was the old woman. I hadn’t even told Chunk about her. As far as I was concerned, that was a private thing, for me only.

“You’ve stopped looking at Myers and Laurent?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said. “They’re still on the list.”

“You haven’t figured out why they lied to you about not knowing where Bradley was working?”

“No, sir,” I said. “That’s why they’re still on the list.”

“And Bradley’s journal wasn’t any help?”

“Not really. It actually confused things more than it helped.”

“What do you think she meant by that bit about us all being goners?”

“You want to know what I think? I think she found proof to support Dr. Cole’s theory.”

He turned in his chair and watched an orange cat run along a burned out section of fence below his window. Then it climbed into a trashcan.

“You’re suggesting a conspiracy,” he said.

“If that’s what she meant by that bit about us being goners, then yeah, I think a conspiracy pretty well covers it.”

“I don’t buy that. Why would Laurent send her star player out into the GZ to spy on Cole, then try to cover it up when something happens to her? Seems to me that would be the perfect opportunity to turn the situation against Cole. Discredit him by making him seem crazy. That woman is a noisy, annoying bitch, but she’s not stupid. She wouldn’t miss an opportunity like that. And for that matter, why go to all the trouble to spy on him anyway? Why not just bring Cole into the mix, share the research?”

“Pride, I guess. I don’t think Laurent and her people think very highly of the
MHD
.”

“No, probably not.”

He drummed his fingers on his chest and thought.

He said, “Well, it definitely sounds like Cole is the front runner.”

“Yes, sir. Trouble is, we can’t put him and Bradley together, and we can’t get around the fact that Wade’s killer beat him to death. Cole wouldn’t have been able to do that, not at his age.”

Treanor frowned. “How do you figure?”

“Cole is seventy-two. And Wade was, well, in pretty good condition. Plus he knew how to fight. There’s no way Cole could have—”

Treanor waved his hand impatiently. “Not that,” he said. “I know all that. What do you mean you can’t put Cole and Bradley together? They were working on the same theory, in the same little corner of the GZ, and Wade himself even called in a meeting with Cole.”

Chunk and I glanced at each other. “He did what now, sir?”

Treanor looked at both of us and said, “Ah shit, tell me this isn’t news to you guys.”

He looked at both of us again and shook his head.

“When did this happen, sir?”

“About a week ago. He got me on the radio and said they’d just run into Cole in the GZ. He wanted to know if Cole had authorization from the
MHD
to be out in the GZ. I told him he was on the level. His clearance checked out.”

I took a second to absorb that.

“How in the hell did you guys miss that?” he said.

“We interviewed Cole,” I said, “and he told us he didn’t know Bradley was working in the GZ. He said he hadn’t seen her outside of Arsenal.”

Treanor said, “That sounds like a man who needs to be looked at again.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

Security around the Arsenal Morgue had been beefed up after the riot, but inside it was still business as usual. The bodies came in, the bodies went out, in a relentless tide of death that never stopped, day or night.

We found Myers and Laurent inside the
WHO
office and went into Laurent’s office to talk, closing the door behind us.

Chunk and I sat in the chairs across the desk from Laurent. Myers stood at Laurent’s elbow. The two of them looked at us over their face masks with narrow, angry eyes. They disliked us being there, but tolerated us, I think, as some kind of necessary evil.

“I don’t suppose you found the hard drives from Dr. Bradley’s computers?” Myers said, his English accent haughty and sarcastic.

“Not yet,” I said. “We’re still working on that.”

“I see.”

Laurent, a.k.a. Hippo Woman, wheezed as she said, “What about Dr. Bradley’s killer? Are you any closer to finding out who is responsible for her death?”

“We’re closing in on that, actually. In fact, that’s why we came to speak with you?”

“Oh?” Laurent’s eyes narrowed further.

“Yeah. We’re going to be conducting an interview this afternoon with our top suspect. But before we do that, we need some information.”