the Devil's Workshop (1999) (24 page)

"What the hell..." Dr. Welsh sputtered through his surgical mask.

"Everything goes back in the body bag. Everything!" Nino demanded.

Dr. Welsh stood dumbfounded along with the others. "We're performing an autopsy here. What do you think you're after? This man is dead."

Wendell Kinney knew exactly what they were after.

Nino DeSilva walked toward Dr. Welsh and slammed the butt of his MP5 into Welsh's mouth. The doctor went down like cut lumber. Blood started to seep out from under his plastic nose mask.

For some reason that Gary Iverson would never understand, he was considering trying to grab the gun out of the hand of the man nearest him. Gary had never been in a fight in his life. He was the last one to try to be a hero, but the armed man standing directly in front of him was paying no attention. Gary saw the gun dangling from his right hand. It looked tantalizingly easy.

Without knowing why, or even debating the odds, he made a grab for the weapon. The commando sensed the motion behind him, and with lightning reflexes, he spun, grabbed Gary Iverson's arm, and hurled him across the room toward the autopsy table and the cut-open body of Michael Brazil. Gary threw his hands out in front of him to block his crash, but one of Michael's freshly sawn ribs went through the rubber glove on his right hand, puncturing him. He screamed in pain and scrambled away from the table. Four machine pistols were now trained on him. He was seconds fro
m d
eath. "I'm sorry, I'm sorryPlease," he whimpered. "I'
m s
orry, don't shoot me."

"Bag this body!" Nino yelled at the Torn Victor commandos.

They took Michael's heart, which was already safely inside a plastic container, and set it in the body bag. Then two of them put on heavy rubber gloves and slid Hollywood Mike into a double
-
zip bio-containment bag they had with them. They closed it up, carried him out of Autopsy Room C, and flopped the bag down on the rolling gurney.

Nino DeSilva pulled the phone out of the wall and turned to face them. "One of us is going to hold a position outside this door for five minutes. Anybody sticks his head out before then is gonna eat it." Then he backed out of the room and was gone.

Gary stood there, blood dripping from the puncture wound in his hand. Dr. Welsh was conscious, but still bleeding beneath his mask. They watched the clock on the wall, like obedient schoolchildren waiting for recess. Nobody said anything.

When three slow minutes had passed, Dr. Welsh grew impatient. He got off the autopsy room floor and exited the room. One by one, they all followed. Wendell Kinney was the last to leave the room. He looked around and saw Dr. Welsh's autopsy scalpel still lying on the table. Wendell reached over and got an organ bag, then carefully retrieved the bloodied instrument, dropped it in the bag, and sealed it. Then he slipped the bag into his pocket, and he too exited the room.

The hall outside was empty except for a lab assistant tied up behind the counter. Dr. Welsh cut the plastic cuffs and released her, then dialed the police.

Gary Iverson made his way up one level to where Buddy was waiting.

"Is it over?" Buddy asked. "Does he still look okay? 'Cause I wanna do this right. The rabbi says the body has to be buried within twenty-four hours."

"Let's get the fuck outta here," Gary hissed, entering the elevator.

"Did they find out what killed him? Do they know yet why he died?"

"Let's go," Gary said, and pulled Buddy into the elevator, stabbing at the button for the ground level.

As they rode down, Buddy saw the blood seeping from Gary's palm and dripping off the end of his fingers. "What the hell happened to your hand?" he asked.

Chapter
21

DON'T GIVE UP ON THE MASKED RODENT

Augie, the ceramic raccoon, lay on the floor in at least fifty pieces. Stacy kneeled and started to gather him up. "Shit," she said. "How did this happen?"

Cris Cunningham was standing behind her. "Maybe the earthquake," he volunteered. "We had a four point one, day before yesterday."

She hadn't even heard about an earthquake. She had been in Badwater and missed it. She suddenly felt tears coming to her eyes as she looked at poor broken Augie. Carefully, she started putting the pieces of him on the table in the dining room.

Cris looked at the shattered ceramic raccoon, and at the silent tears coming down Stacy's cheeks. "Get all the little ones," he said. "I can fix him if you've got glue."

She looked up. "That's okay," she answered, and then unexpectedly changed her mind. "I've got nail glue."

"Get it. I did all of the dish and vase repairs at my house, growing up. I have a knack for this."

She left to go into the bathroom to look for the nail glue, and as Cris picked up the remaining pieces, he took a look around the living room. There was evidence of a man's presence in the apartment: a football leaning against the TV; a rowing machine in the corner with a Stanford boxing sweatshirt draped over the seat; a punching bag visible through the bedroom door. He looked at the bookshelf. Several of the books were by Dr. Maximilian Richardson. Cris wondered if that was her father, or brother, or if Stacy was married. He saw a bar set up in the living room and moved over to look, studying the bottles: Kahlua, Drambuie, Grand Marnier ... all liqueurs. It was a damn candy counter. Then he saw a bottle of sherry, and poured himself a glass.

At the emergency room at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, both he and Stacy had given blood and skin scrapings. Stacy said that Dr. Kinney would collect samples from the hospital tomorrow for study at the USC lab. Cris realized when they weighed him that he had lost fifteen pounds.

He had decided to get his father's car and drive her back to her apartment. He wanted to talk to Wendell and find out what had really happened to Hollywood Mike. They had cabbed to his father's house; Cris had gone inside for a coat while Stacy waited in the car. On the way out, he stopped at his father's bar and took a hit of vodka straight from the bottle. That had been an hour ago. Now he knocked back the shot of sherry, feeling its warmth. He quickly poured another and took it back to the project on the dining-room table. Like most alcoholics, he was an expert at "riding the buzz." He could drink just enough to stay loose, but not so much he became a fall-down. Mornings brought hangovers, but he would quickly flush them away with a shooter.

Stacy returned from the bathroom with the glue and sat down across from him. Cris started to separate the slivers and chips by color. "The trick is to start with the small ones. The big pieces are easy."

She watched him sort. "I wonder where Wendell is," she said, looking at her watch. "It's eleven-thirty. The autopsy should be over. He should be here by now."

"It probably took longer than you thought."

She nodded, and started to help him sort. Her eye fell on the glass of sherry at his elbow. She decided not to comment. "I saw the picture in your father's den"

He didn't answer, just kept looking down at the broken pieces of Augie.

"You were the UCLA quarterback?"

"And you were almost a doctor of microbiology," he answered.

"Don't want to talk about the good ol' days?"

"Same as you," he said, taking another slug of sherry. "Gimme the glue."

She handed him the nail glue, and he uncapped it, put a few dabs on a white sliver, then stuck the sliver on the edge of what would soon be Augie's reconstructed left ear. "This is gonna take me a while."

"Don't give up on the masked rodent," she said, and her voice caught as she said it. He heard her sob once, and looked up.

"Who's Maximilian?" he asked bluntly.

"He was my perfect fit," she said after a few seconds. "He made me complete. Before Max, I was doing everything for the wrong reason. Max showed me what I could be. He wanted things just for me. I'd never had that before."

"Where is he now?" he asked.

She bit her lip and pushed some brown chips over at him. "Work on finding a home for these."

"Stacy," he said slowly, "back at the restaurant, you said something about Gulf War Syndrome showing up in the eighties. I'd like to read those articles about Huntsville, Texas, if you have them around."

His long fingers were turning a broken piece of Augie's hindquarters. He put it aside and picked up another piece, turning it
,
looking for a match in the pile of chips. "Do you still have the articles? Could you loan them to me?"

"Yeah, somewhere in my files in there." She stood and moved into her pantry office and started to rummage around in drawers. "Nobody will ever be able to prove Gulf War Syndrome was our concoction, first designed and tested in Huntsville, Texas," she said. "It's just a theory supported by some very strange occurrences."

"That's okay," he said, knocking back the rest of his sherry. "I want to read it anyway."

"The only reason I mentioned Huntsville was because it so closely resembles Vanishing Lake." She returned, carrying a folder, and dropped it beside him on the table. "Here."

He was holding a piece of Augie's broken nose in place, while the glue dried.

"There was something called 'TRIES' at Huntsville," she continued. "It stands for the Texas Regional Institute for Environmental Studies, and I found out that same outfit was funding the bio-research at Vanishing Lake. The Huntsville operation got its money through Sam Houston University. When you trace the cash back, it comes from a Washington think tank that's funded by the Pentagon Special Projects Division, which at the time was run by Admiral Zoll." She watched as he found another piece and glued it on, but his face had suddenly hardened.

"One of the people who got the disease in '85 was a woman named Julie Medely," she continued. "There's an article in there about it. Her husband, Clayton, was a food worker at the prison in Huntsville, and they think he passed it to her. The left side of her body started wasting away like polio. The story of the strange illness started getting into the press: 'Mystery Disease,' stuff like that. Some TV station in West Texas picked it up. Several other civilians with ties to the prison came down with the same symptoms. The doctors at Huntsville took blood samples and claimed to have isolated a strange unknown microorganism, which was sent to Walter Reed Hospital to be studied. Somebody there leaked the result."

"Which was...?"

"The microplasma found in Julie's blood had a very unusual DNA sequence, indicating that the microorganism was probably genetically engineered. Seven years later that identical DNA sequence turned up in the blood of veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome."

Cris looked up at her, his eyes intense now, anger glinting, as he held two pieces of Augie's hindquarters in his hands while the glue set.

"So Gulf War Syndrome might never have come back in our troops if we hadn't shipped it to Iraq first, back in the eighties," he said.

She nodded, and there was a knock at the door. When Stacy opened it, Wendell was standing in the corridor, looking tired and even more rumpled than usual.

"What happened?" Stacy asked. "You're two hours late."

"I've been at the Santa Monica Police Department," he growled as he entered the apartment and flopped into Max's old club chair. "Four guys with HEPA masks and guns broke into the autopsy room and stole the body."

"You're kidding!" Stacy said.

"Whoever they were, they know Mike died of Prion disease. They stole the body to keep that fact from getting out."

Stacy's mind was racing. "Maybe they were from the Devil's Workshop ... ?" she said.

"God help us," Wendell Kinney sighed. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, never mentioning Dr. Welsh's autopsy knife that he had stolen.

Chapter
22

It was almost one A
. M
., Monday morning.

Cris drove his father's new Lincoln Continental slowly. He made deliberate stops at all intersections. He made sure he used his blinker. He knew that he had enough unprocessed alcohol in his blood to "pin the needle," and he didn't want to get busted for DUI.

He was back on the Nickel (Fifth Street), driving past remembered alleys. The old thirties buildings of downtown L
. A
. loomed incongruously, leaning against the new glass skyline like shabby relatives at a posh wedding. Old crates and boxes were pushed up against chipped brick; annex dwellings of the homeless. Deep in narrow alleyways trash-can fires burned like hunger.

The Midnight Mission was on Fifth, a block south of Wilshire. Cris found a parking space across the street from the Salvation Army church. He fiddled with the Lincoln's expensive alarm until it chirped at him, then moved across the street and disappeared inside the "sally," where two years before he had spent many nights on a hard cot, curled around a hangover or a bad dream.

"Clancy around?" he asked an old man, who looked up from a broom. They had never seen each other before, but traded the instant recognition of men who had once found the bottom and been content to rest there.

"Upstairs in the cafeteria," he said, and as Cris headed off, added, "Hey, we're full up, and we got a sign-up sheet now."